11 September 2025
The discussion in Research Europe reproduced below highlights the rapid growth of support in Europe for an academic boycott of Israel, despite continuing misunderstandings about the nature of the boycott call and the justification for it. The Palestine Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), the Palestinian civil society organisation that initiated the boycott in 2004, limited the boycott call to institutions, not individuals, thus leaving individual Israeli scholars and researchers to continue their activities unhindered unless they actively identified with their government’s oppression of the Palestinian community. But as the discussion indicates, this distinction is generally overlooked. Similarly, the deep implication of all Israeli universities in the state’s military oppression of the Palestinians is still not well understood. Nevertheless, so horrendous are the state’s genocidal policies that support for an academic boycott is rapidly growing. It seems highly likely that if academics and the wider public understood the boycott call better, support would grow even faster. This is the purpose of BRICUP’s revised and expanded booklet, Why Boycott Israeli Universities?, available (for a voluntary donation) on this website.
RESEARCH EUROPE
Gaza conflict: should Israel face more academic boycotts?
ISSN 3049-902X Research Professional | Pivot-RP
By Frances Jones 11/09/2025, 11:03
As Europe-Israel research links fray, scholars clash on whether boycott movement
applies meaningful pressure
As a young researcher, computer scientist David Harel saw his career thrive after he
attended international conferences, where he delivered and listened to keynote speeches. In
2008, he won a European Research Council grant, giving his research a “tremendous boost”, he tells Research Europe. Now, as president of the Israel Academy of Sciences and
Humanities, he fears young scientists in his country will miss out on these opportunities.
Since Israel launched its military campaign in Gaza—following Hamas’s October 2023 attacks
and taking of hostages—academic boycotts targeting Israel have surged across Europe and
internationally.
This month, the International Association of Genocide Scholars passed a resolution saying
Israel’s conduct meets the legal definition of genocide under the UN genocide convention.
Israel’s government said the report was based on “Hamas lies”, having previously denied
that its actions in Gaza amount to genocide.
Even before the resolution, members of the European Parliament had called for Israel to be
suspended from the EU’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme, which it
takes part in as an associated country.
So what evidence is there to weigh up the potential impact that academic boycotts could
have on Israel? And what can be learned from the example of Europe breaking academic ties
with Russia?
Boycott background
In February, the Association of University Heads (Vera) in Israel published a report on its
efforts to counter boycott pressure, in which it said academic boycotts had “intensified”,
evolving from student-led protests to “more institutionalised” activity led by university
faculty members. Israeli university complaints of boycotts went up from about 300 in the
year to October 2024 to around 500 in the six months ending in February 2025, according to
the report.
One example covered in the report is that of Ghent University, Belgium, which in November
last year chose to end ongoing institutional collaborations with certain Israeli governmental
and academic institutions, citing the “high degree of interdependence” between Israeli
academic institutions, government and military.
In response to such pressure, some Israeli academics have urged overseas researchers to
avoid boycotting them, arguing that weakening the country’s generally liberal university and
research sector would only bolster a government that includes far-right ministers, while
doing little to influence policy.
However, European supporters of academic boycotts describe them as a form of
international pressure that reflects widespread opposition in Western nations to Israeli
prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s actions in Gaza, targeting a sector—science and
innovation—that Israel holds in high regard.
International pressure and ‘acceptable norms’
Jonathan Rosenhead, an emeritus professor of operational research at the London School of
Economics, has supported academic boycotts targeting Israel for more than 20 years. He
tells Research Europe they are having a “major effect” because “Israel values itself as part of
the Western conglomeration of nations and it also values its reputation as something of an
academic powerhouse”.
He is vice-chair, formerly chair, of the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine, a
group of UK-based academics that tries to help Palestinian universities and opposes the
Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory.
Since 2004, he says, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of
Israel has supported “the kind of boycott which dictates that you should not engage in
activities within Israeli institutions, but you can engage with individual academics provided
[collaboration is] based in the other [non-Israeli] institutions”.
The Uppsala Declaration of Conscientious Objection, published in May by Swedish higher
education staff, calls for academic opposition to collaboration with Israeli institutions. Since
its release, it has been signed by more than 2,000 faculty and staff. In July, German
academics published a German version of the declaration, signed by around 400 scholars,
with the stated aim of “building non-violent pressure on Israel to comply with international
law.”
A signatory of the German declaration, Elad Lapidot, professor of Hebraic studies at the
University of Lille, France, argues that academic boycotts are “part of the international
pressure that makes Israelis realise the extent to which the politics of their governmentand
the actions of their military…are in violation of acceptable norms today worldwide, which
may prompt them to resist”.
But he adds that the concerns Israeli academics raise about consequences for liberal voices
“are real”.
Both Rosenhead and Lapidot highlight an open letter to Netanyahu, published in July, in
which five out of 10 university heads in Israel urged him to “intensify efforts to address the
severe hunger crisis currently afflicting the Gaza Strip”. The signatories also said: “We are
appalled by recent statements issued by ministers and members of the Knesset [Israeli
parliament] advocating for the intentional destruction of Gaza and the forced displacement
of its civilian population.”
Lapidot suggests that those university heads who did not sign may “represent a more
complicit institutional culture”.
Impact on Netanyahu government
But Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities’ Harel disagrees that academic boycotts will
achieve political impact in Israel, given the nature of the current government.
“Unfortunately, I don’t think they can,” he says.
“A good, solid government would be alarmed by the possibility of science and technology
declining this country,” he continues. “[But] Netanyahu and his cronies are so bent on what
they’re trying to do in Gaza and in general in Israel” that Harel sees little possibility of the
boycotts changing their actions.
Harel acknowledges that cutting off Israel’s Horizon Europe association could “cause a ripple
in Israeli politics”, but he thinks this would “not [have] a large effect”.
The Commission has already proposed removing Israel’s access to the European Innovation
Council Accelerator scheme, which funds the development and commercialisation of
breakthrough technologies, and can be used to fund projects with military potential.
But Harel warns that suspending Israel from Horizon Europe wholesale would “damage
international science” and would disproportionately harm fields such as computer science,
biology and chemistry, as these are most reliant on European funding.
Russian lessons
One recent example shows the impact on a nation when Western academia cuts off links:
Russia. Maia Chankseliani, professor of comparative and international education at the
University of Oxford, recently co-authored a paper on the impact of the Russia-Ukraine war
on Russian academia, including the “termination of international collaborations”.
She tells Research Europe that since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, “the clearest
effects on Russian academia have been disengagement and loss of access”. For example,
Cern, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, decided in 2023 to terminate its
international cooperation agreement with Russia.
Chankseliani says the boycotts have hit early career and internationally mobile researchers,
and those outside the best resourced centres, the hardest, noting that Russian researchers
are no longer attending Western academic conferences.
However, she cautions that the considerations for boycotts against Russia and Israel are
different. “The Russian case shows why comprehensive academic sanctions can be justified
when universities explicitly align themselves with state aggression,” she says. “In Israel the
picture is more complex [because] while some Israeli higher education institutions are
entangled with security structures, many academics and universities are outspoken critics of
government policy.”
What next?
Harel, who is also a professor of computer science at the Weizmann Institute of Science, has
gone as far as saying the ejection of Israel from Horizon Europe would be “a death sentence”
for Israeli science.
“Even the general reassessment of trade relations with Israel wouldn’t surprise me, but
spotlighting science is the wrong thing to do,” he says.
But Rosenhead, who tells Research Europe he would support Israel’s suspension from
Horizon Europe, says the request to review Israel’s wider association with the EU was based
on “Israel’s policy of using starvation as a war tactic”. The request, from the Netherlands
government, described Israel’s actions in Gaza as “seemingly being incompatible with
international humanitarian law and principles”. Under the association agreement, Israel is
required to comply with human rights and democratic principles.
Meanwhile, highlighting the position of Israeli university leaders and academics who criticise
government policy, Chankseliani says “blanket boycotts risk weakening those critical voices”
and that “targeted measures [aimed towards institutions] work better than blanket
disengagement”.
“Any decision to cut cooperation should be coupled with clear criteria for eventual reengagement,” she adds.
The level of funding involved in Horizon Europe, and its importance to Israeli science, are
making the z EU programme the most fiercely contested field thus far when it comes to the
arguments for and against academic boycotts of Israel. But with Israel’s actions in Gaza
drawing increasing international condemnation, the pressure on EU policymakers to give a
verdict on its continuation in the programme is mounting, too.
