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Pro-Palestinian students and faculty further embarrass MIT management over military-related research for Israel

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21 January 2025

As the excellent Intercept article reproduced below details, MIT’s management is struggling to suppress publicity of its involvement in Israel’s genocidal assault on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, but faculty and student activists have thoroughly exposed its complicity.

MIT Shuts Down Internal Grant Database After It Was Used to Research School’s Israel Ties

A new report from MIT Coalition for Palestine details Israeli-funded research into everything from drone swarms to underwater surveillance.

Akela Lacy

January 16 2025, 4:27 p.m.Share

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators face of with a line of police outside the Stata Center at MIT, Thursday, May 9, 2024, in Cambridge, Mass. Police detained at least three members of a group of close to 100 demonstrators who held signs criticizing MIT for research they claim was being conducted for Israeli military drones. (AP Photo/Josh Reynolds)

Pro-Palestine demonstrators face off against police at MIT on May 9, 2024, in Cambridge, Mass. Photo: Josh Reynolds/AP

The Israeli Ministry of Defense has poured more than $3.7 million into developing warfare technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 2015, according to a recent report from students and faculty organizing against the war in Gaza.

The findings come as MIT administrators are under growing pressure for censuring student publications criticizing MIT’s research and advocating for Palestinian human rights. The school has also faced criticism for barring student protesters from campus.

The report was published last month by the MIT Coalition for Palestine, which represents 19 student and faculty groups on campus, including MIT Divest, MIT Jews for Collective Liberation, and MIT Faculty and Staff for Palestine.

Coalition members used the university’s internal grant-tracking software to obtain granular new details about projects that have received Israeli military funding. Among the projects were partnerships to research underwater surveillance, missile detection, and drone algorithms.

“MIT has engaged in a sustained and organized campaign of disinformation and propaganda.”

After the student organizers began further probing grant information, the school took away access to the grant software used for the coalition’s research, said Rich Solomon, a member and MIT graduate student who worked on the report.

“MIT has engaged in a sustained and organized campaign of disinformation and propaganda in order to silence and suppress this information,” Solomon told The Intercept.

The new report also details the extent of MIT’s partnerships with Israeli military contractors like Elbit Systems, which supplies 85 percent of Israel’s killer drones, and Maersk, one of the world’s largest shipping companies, that has sent millions of pounds of military goods to Israel since the start of the war on Gaza. The Israeli military also sponsored several of the MIT projects with funds provided by the U.S. Defense Department.

MIT spokesperson Sarah McDonnell did not respond to specific questions about the report but pointed to statements from the school’s president, provost, and chancellor condemning “harassment, intimidation and targeting” of specific professors and their research.

“We respect that there are a range of views across that group on any number of topics, and as a general practice our office does not comment to the media about the individually held and freely expressed views of particular students or alumni,” McDonnell said in a statement to The Intercept. “MIT and its leadership are committed to promoting student well-being, protecting free speech, and responding to policy violations as appropriate.”Read our complete coverageIsrael’s War on Gaza

Protests against the war on Gaza started on MIT’s campus in late 2023 — part of the wave of nationwide campus demonstrations about Israel’s assault. MIT leadership has since resisted overwhelming calls from students and faculty to divest from research that supports what critics say is Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

At least 10 MIT students were arrested after protests in May, and several others were suspended and barred from campus, losing access to housing and campus meal plans. In October, the school banned the distribution of a student-run zine supporting Palestine.

In responses to frequently asked questions posted in May, the office of MIT Chancellor Melissa Nobles said only three contracts with the Israeli military are currently active, totaling $180,000.

Solomon, the graduate student, said MIT administrators have tried to suppress the coalition’s new findings.

A campus newspaper retracted an article about the report earlier this month; its op-ed section has since been suspended until further notice. The paper’s editorial team said it had retracted the article — an examination of MIT professor Daniela Rus’s Israeli-funded research that was originally published on November 7 — after deliberation with its executive committee and faculty advisers.

McDonnell, the MIT spokesperson, said that the publication, The Tech, is editorially and financially independent from the school and that MIT had no role in the decision to temporarily suspend the publication’s opinion page or remove the article. Rus did not respond to a request for comment.

“Our decision was made in light of increasing hostile rhetoric and action against Professor Daniela Rus and her laboratory,” publisher Ellie Montemayor wrote in an addendum to the article December 9.

“Our piece detailed how Prof. Daniela Rus, director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, uses Israeli Ministry of Defense money to develop algorithms with applications in ‘multirobot security defense and surveillance,’” the authors wrote in a post on the news site Mondoweiss. “Rather than engage with these publicly verifiable facts, the Tech’s editorial board (under consultation with Prof. Rus) retracted our op-ed.”

Israeli-Funded Research

“Autonomous Robotic Swarms: Distributed Coordination and Perception” and “Terahertz Quantum-Cascade Lasers and Imaging” — these are just two of the projects funded by the Israeli military at MIT research labs cited in the new report.

MIT’s research ties to Israel have been a focus of campus protests over the last two years. But the new report underscores the extent of the school’s collaboration with major military contractors like Maersk and Elbit, as well as the potential applications of the school’s research to Israel’s most recent military operations in Gaza.

One lab explored underwater monitoring and autonomous docking technologies that could help Israel police its sea blockade of the coastal Gaza Strip. Then there was the MIT project focused on drone swarms, including armed quadcopters powered by artificial intelligence, which can mimic the sounds of women and children in distress. Israel has reportedly used the technology to lure and kill people in Gaza.

“An ethical scientist and an ethical institution pursue scientific avenues that affirm life, that help repair the world, and that refuse to allow abusive militaries to launder their reputations while they commit mass murder,” the report’s authors wrote.

MIT also has partnerships with multinational corporations whose work helps supply Israel with weapons and equipment to carry out its occupation of Palestine — firms like Elbit Systems, Maersk, Lockheed Martin, Caterpillar, and others. Raytheon, which started at MIT and has an active partnership with the school to place students at the company, supplies Israel with missiles and bombs. MIT also partners with other major U.S. companies that supply the Israeli military with weapons, research, and cloud computing services like Boeing, Aurora Flight Sciences, Google, and Amazon.

“These collaborations grant genocide profiteers privileged access to MIT talent and expertise,” the authors wrote.

Cutting off research partnerships with Israel emerged as a core demand of campus protests this spring. In March, 63 percent of undergraduate students voted for a referendum calling on the student union to advocate for a ceasefire in Gaza — one of the highest-turnout elections in the school’s history. In April, members of the MIT Graduate Student Union, UE Local 256, overwhelmingly adopted a resolution calling for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and demanding that the university cut all research ties with the Israeli military.

The MIT Chancellor Office said that negotiations with students fell short because they hinged on the demand that MIT cut funding ties with the Israeli military. “There are a number of compelling reasons not to unilaterally terminate active research agreements made by individual PIs” — principle investigators — “in compliance with law and policy,” the chancellor’s office explained in the FAQ section on student protest

MIT has cut ties with other international actors in cases where there are concerns that the university’s research could legitimize or exacerbate abuses of human and civil rights. The school ended partnerships with Saudi Aramco in 2020, for instance, after the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. MIT also conducts elevated risk assessments for projects funded by people or organizations in Saudi Arabia and China to address concerns about legitimizing or furthering violations of human and civil rights.

A 2022 report on the university’s engagement with China recommended that MIT not enter into “collaborations that might contribute to human rights abuses by foreign governments against their own citizens.” The report listed circumstances that would disqualify a Chinese company from partnering with MIT, including any direct involvement in government intelligence activities, armed forces, or other services with military applications.

“MIT’s research ties with the Israeli government similarly contribute to elevating the latter’s reputation despite its ongoing crimes against humanity,” the report said. “Why should MIT engage in research sponsorships with the Israeli government at all given the scale of its human rights abuses in Palestine?”

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