7 June 2025

For years students, with support from faculty, have been campaigning courageously for BDS at universities across Europe, North America and beyond. Now at last the first university has acceded to their demands: Trinity College Dublin. Here is reportage from Action for Palestine (AfD) TCS and below that from The Times of Israel (Pictured is David Landy of AfD and TCD faculty.)

BREAKING: Trinity College Dublin (TCD) becomes first university in the West to comprehensively cut ties with Israel

We warmly welcome the historic and principled decision of TCD to sever institutional ties with the Israeli State and complicit universities and companies. This courageous step is a testament to the power of student-led activism and grassroots pressure, supported by staff and their trade unions. PACBI and the BDS movement salute Academia for Palestine TCD and the Trinity College Dublin Students’ Union (TCD SU) and all staff and students who made this possible.

Omar Barghouti, co-founder of PACBI, said:

“We call on universities across Ireland, Europe, and around the world to follow Trinity’s example and stand on the right side of history by cutting ties with apartheid Israel and its complicit universities, as was done against apartheid South Africa. No institution truly committed to justice and human rights can remain complicit in the crimes of a regime that systematically violates international law and human dignity.”

By choosing to divest from complicit companies, end collaborations with Israeli institutions and complicit universities, and have no contracts with complicit Israeli suppliers, Trinity has taken a meaningful stand against Israel’s ongoing and livestreamed genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza, as well as its decades-old regime of apartheid and military occupation.

TCD also commits to not participate in new research projects that include complicit Israeli institutions and to advocate for Israel’s exclusion.

TCD joins dozens of universities around the world taking steps to end complicity in Israel’s grave crimes against Palestinians.

Students everywhere know this victory was not handed down, it was won through relentless organising, strategic solidarity, and sacrifice.

✅ Organise
✅ Peacefully disrupt business-as-usual
✅ Demand academic boycott and divestment
✅ Sever ties with apartheid

Until every institution ends complicity in apartheid, the struggle continues. Your voices are powerful. Palestinians everywhere, especially in Gaza, deeply appreciate and are inspired by your meaningful solidarity.

Ireland’s Trinity College severs ties with Israel over Gaza war

University board announces divestment from Israeli firms, colleges; decision taken in step with recommendations of a task force, formed after anti-Israel students blockaded campus

By AFP4 June 2025, 9:21 pm

DUBLIN — Ireland’s prestigious Trinity College Dublin said on Wednesday that it would cut all links with Israel in protest of “ongoing violations of international and humanitarian law.”

The university’s board informed students by email on Wednesday that it had accepted the recommendations of a task force to sever “institutional links with the State of Israel, Israeli universities and companies headquartered in Israel.”

The recommendations would be “enacted for the duration of the ongoing violations of international and humanitarian law,” said the email sent by the board’s chairman Paul Farrell, and seen by AFP.

The task force was set up after part of the university’s campus in central Dublin was blockaded by students for five days last year in protest against the war in Gaza, where Israel is battling to defeat the Hamas terror group following the October 7, 2023, massacre in southern Israel.

Among the task force’s recommendations approved by the board were pledges to divest “from all companies headquartered in Israel” and to “enter into no future supply contracts with Israeli firms” and “no new commercial relationships with Israeli entities.”

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The university also said that it would “enter into no further mobility agreements with Israeli universities.”

Trinity has two current Erasmus+ exchange agreements with Israeli universities: Bar Ilan University, an agreement that ends in July 2026, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which ends in July 2025, the university told AFP in an email.

The board also said that the university “should not submit for approval or agree to participate in any new institutional research agreements involving Israeli participation.”

It “should seek to align itself with like-minded universities and bodies in an effort to influence EU policy concerning Israel’s participation in such collaborations,” it added.

Ireland has been among the most outspoken critics of Israel’s response to the October 7 onslaught, in which terrorists belonging to Hamas and other Palestinian terror groups killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took 251 hostages.

Polls since the start of the war have shown overwhelming pro-Palestinian sympathy and anti-Israel sentiment in Ireland.

Protesters at an Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign demonstration in Dublin on November 17, 2012 (Peter Muhly/AFP)

In May 2024, Dublin joined several other European countries in recognizing Palestine as a “sovereign and independent state.”

Ireland then joined South Africa’s International Court of Justice case accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza — charges angrily denied by Israel.

In December, Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar ordered the closure of the country’s embassy in Dublin, blaming Ireland’s “extreme anti-Israel policies.” Sa’ar later said that Dublin “encouraged” antisemitism under then-prime minister Simon Harris whom he accused of hating Jews.

Most recently, Ireland’s cabinet gave its formal backing last month to drafting legislation on restricting trade with Israeli communities in East Jerusalem and West Bank settlements.

While Ireland does very little trade with West Bank settlements, Irish Prime Minister Micheal Martin said it was a “symbolic move” that follows Ireland’s official recognition last year of a Palestinian state.

The bill is unlikely to be passed by parliament until later in the year.