Revealed: Inside the Israeli campaign to derail European university boycotts
Ghent University is leading a movement among European institutions to sever research ties with Israeli universities over human rights concerns in Gaza. Legal firms representing Israeli institutions are actively challenging these exclusions, arguing they lack ethical or legal grounds.
Why it matters
This conflict highlights the growing tension between academic freedom, international research collaboration, and institutional responses to geopolitical human rights crises.
A little over a year after the outbreak of the Israel-Gaza conflict, an official in the European Commission’s research agency was sent a letter from a legal firm in Brussels.
Specialists in European law and with offices a short distance from the Palais de Justice, the firm, Kesher, was representing Tel Aviv University and the Weizmann Institute of Science, two of Israel’s leading academic institutions.
“There are no grounds to exclude Israeli research institutions on the basis of the ethics of the specific action being funded or… human rights principles,” Kesher founder Yohan Benizri wrote on 12 November 2024.
The 14-page letter, shared with Investigate Europe , was a riposte to Ghent University’s attempts to exclude the pair from Horizon Europe, the bloc’s €95bn research programme.
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