September 22, 2025
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French government overrides call by faculty and students to break Israel university partnership

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11 April 2025

The Institut d’Etudes Politiques (IEP) in Strasbourg is one of a network of prestigious degree-giving colleges funded and controlled by the national Ministry of Higher Education. Its students and faculty have expressed overwhelming opposition to continuing its partnership with the Reichman University in Israel on account of Israel’s gross human rights violations in Gaza and elsewhere. Ignoring their view, the Ministry’s appointees on the IEP’s board of directors decided that the partnership must continue. AURDIP (the Association des Universitaires pour le Respect du Droit International en Palestine), BRICUP’s sister organisation in France, has issued the following statement.

IEP Strasbourg: A partnership against ethics, validated by proxy

Posted on  | AURDIP

On 8 April 2025, the Board of Directors of the Institut d’Études Politiques de Strasbourg voted to continue its partnership with the Reichman University in Herzliya, Israel. This vote, ironically, took place on the same day that Antonio Guterres, Secretary General of the UN, described Gaza as a killing field and accused Israel, by blocking all aid to Gaza’s borders, of failing in its basic obligations towards the civilian population (he was simply echoing the statements of the previous day by Minister Bezalel Smotrich, declaring that “not even a grain of wheat” would henceforth enter Gaza).

This vote is one more episode in a year of conflict that has pitted students, professors and staff of the IEP against the management of their institution. Many students are calling for an end to the partnership and respect for international law. The IEP’s leadership has remained deaf to their demands, even though Reichman University’s involvement in Israel’s genocidal policy has been documented by a precise investigation of great scientific probity carried out by the students – who also stigmatize the positions “devoid of any humanist, pacifist and critical perspective with regard to the war” of the Israeli institution.

The conflict has thus become emblematic of the two attitudes that confront each other in the West today. On the one hand, the willingness to put pressure on Israel by resorting to peaceful means to stop the massacres in Gaza and the West Bank; on the other hand, blind support for Israeli institutions that no destruction, no education, no forced displacement of the population, no massacre, no ethnic cleansing, no genocide, no matter how documented, must come into question – support that does not exclude, and even requires from time to time, a crocodile tear ostentatiously shed over the “dramatic” situation, to quote President Emmanuel Macron, of the Palestinians.

The IEP management will no doubt affirm that democracy has decided and that the vote requires the continuation of collaboration with Reichman University. She may even have the cynicism to lecture students by accusing them of a denial of democracy. But things are far from being that simple. A month ago, in fact, to break the deadlock, the IEP had set up a “review committee” of ten members elected from among teachers and students, whose mission was to give its opinion on the problematic partnership. This committee carried out a series of consultations at the national and international levels, worked internally and produced a serious and thorough report, the conclusion of which unanimously confirmed the obligation, both legal and ethical, to break the partnership with Reichman University.

It was on the basis of this report that the Board of Directors of 8 April was to make a decision. To dispel any ambiguity, the Minister of Higher Education, Mr. Philippe Baptiste [pictured], had, the day before, threatened the institution, declaring that he had decided to take the case to the administrative court in the event that the outcome of the vote did not meet his expectations. A sad textbook case where a vote by a so-called “collegial” body allows external members – carefully and previously sorted, as one suspects – to neutralize the will expressed by the real community of the institution. Indeed, the result of the vote (14 in favour, 16 against, 3 abstentions) was only obtained thanks to the proxies of 10 absent external directors, sent to support the management of the institution and to crush the claim emanating from the real collegiality of the institution.

The minister, to justify in advance what he knew to be a power grab, had pulled out of his hat the following justification: “an institution cannot decide to stop a partnership for political reasons“. As in the United States, the process, sewn with a white thread, consists of accusing students of being motivated by “political” reasons when they are only asking for compliance with the recommendations of international law (which the minister obviously does not mention). Need we recall that in its order of 26 January 2024, the International Court of Justice established the existence of a “real and imminent risk” that acts of genocide would be committed in Gaza (South Africa v. Israel, §74), while establishing the plausibility of violations of the Convention on the Prevention of Genocide? And that following the advisory opinion issued by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on 19 July 2024 – which deemed Israel’s presence in the occupied Palestinian territories illegal and demanded that Israel end this presence within 12 months (point 2) – the United Nations report of 18 September 2024 (point 6) insists on the need to give full effect to this opinion? In this case, therefore, it is the Minister of Higher Education who seems to be driven here by very political reasons: those that have made unconditional support for Israel a principle of French policy for several years.

Even sadder, by accusing the students of intolerance, excess, one-upmanship, even violence, the state apparatus makes accusations to which it, much more than the students, [guilty]. In two respects: insofar as he defends Israeli policy, whose bellicose supremacism no longer needs to be demonstrated. But also, insofar as it imports certain modus operandi into France: restriction of freedom of expression and demonstration, criminalization of certain political positions (anti-Zionism crudely equated with anti-Semitism), acquiescence to a creeping apartheid – apartheid, yes, since it is obvious that students with Arabic-sounding names will not be able, like their comrades with names from here, travel to Israel/Palestine without the risk of being harassed, turned away, or even incarcerated at the airport.

Unlike the United States, France is not a plutocracy. It is all the more sad to note that, in the absence of a board of trustees that makes [decides] the appointment and dismissal of university appointments, it is the Ministry of Higher Education itself which, by using and abusing the means at its disposal, is responsible for combating any effective – and, let us repeat, peaceful – attempt to put pressure on Israeli institutions. AURDIP can only deplore such an authoritarian evolution and send its full support to the students, teachers and staff of IEP Strasbourg who defend in adversity, with great courage, the universal values of humanity. They are the honor of this country.

Association of Academics for the Respect of International Law in Palestine (AURDIP)

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