Global Universities Sever Israeli Ties Over Apartheid

Date: 13 September 2025 - 22:02

News ID: ۱۴۳۴۸۰

LONDON (Dispatches) -- A growing wave of academic institutions across the world is cutting ties with Israeli universities over their documented complicity in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.
As the death toll in the besieged Palestinian territory climbs past 64,800, according to Gaza’s health ministry, and with the UN warning of a man-made famine, calls for accountability are intensifying — and the academic world is responding.
From Latin America to Europe, universities and scholarly bodies are taking unprecedented action, severing decades-long collaborations with Israeli institutions.
Brazil’s Federal University of Ceará was among the first to act, cancelling an innovation summit with an Israeli partner. Since then, universities in Norway, Belgium, and Spain have followed suit. Trinity College Dublin joined them this summer, while the University of Amsterdam suspended its exchange program with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
The European Association of Social Anthropologists went further, declaring a complete halt to collaborations with Israeli academic institutions and urging its members to do the same.
While some of these actions stop short of supporting a full academic boycott, the momentum reflects growing alarm over the deep entanglement between Israeli academia, the military, and the Zionist regime — a relationship critics say has long helped sustain the Israeli regime’s brutal oppression of Palestinians.
Stephanie Adam of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) said that Israeli universities are far from neutral entities. “They are complicit in Israel’s decades-long regime of military occupation, settler colonialism, apartheid — and now genocide. There is both a moral and legal obligation for universities around the world to cut ties with complicit Israeli institutions.”
This complicity is not theoretical. Israeli universities have deep institutional links to the military-industrial complex. Many offer degrees and specialized training to the military, intelligence, and police, supporting the same regime machinery responsible for crimes against Palestinians.
Renowned Israeli historian Ilan Pappé challenged the myth of Israeli academic innocence. “If most Israeli academics truly opposed the genocide, we would see them among the few hundreds protesting in the streets — a protest movement that is increasingly criminalized in Israel,” he said. “Instead, these institutions educate and train those enforcing occupation and apartheid.”
Pappé emphasized that the boycott is not about punishing individuals, but about confronting institutions that serve as “an organic part of an oppressive system.” He called the academic boycott a “harsh but necessary conversation,” one that is long overdue after 77 years of dispossession and dehumanization of Palestinians.
In the UK, student and academic movements calling for similar boycotts have been met with repression. Liberty Investigates and Sky News revealed that at least 28 UK universities launched disciplinary actions against staff and students over their Palestine activism since October 2023. The University of Glasgow’s rector, British-Palestinian surgeon Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah, said that this suppression has forced academics to act individually.
“The moral outrage about what the Israelis are doing is leading more and more researchers to refuse collaborations with Israeli institutions,” he said.
Despite attempts to silence dissent, the boycott movement appears to be gaining traction. In May 2024, the Israeli regime allocated €22 million specifically to counter the academic and cultural boycott — a sign that the pressure is being felt. Israel’s share of EU research funding is also declining. Just 10 Israeli researchers were selected in the latest round of European Research Council starting grants, compared with 30 the previous year.
There is growing concern within the settler communities about a potential “brain drain” as researchers, particularly in medicine and technology, consider leaving the Israeli occupied territories. This comes amid fears that Israel could be excluded from future EU research frameworks, such as the successor to Horizon

Europe, which has been a vital source of scientific funding.

Hundreds of Israeli academics themselves have begun to speak out. In a powerful open letter in May, the Black Flag Action Group — a collective of Israeli scholars — condemned their own institutions for silence and complicity. “This is a horrifying litany of war crimes and crimes against humanity,” they wrote. “We cannot claim that we did not know.”