Universities Worldwide Sever Ties with Israeli Academia, Netherlands to Boycott Eurovision
EDUCATION, 15 Sep 2025
The Cradle - TRANSCEND Media Service
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Expanding boycotts and funding cuts over the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza threaten Israel’s research sector, raising fears of a brain drain and loss of EU-backed grants.
13 Sep 2025 – Universities and scholarly associations across Europe and South America have announced suspensions of cooperation with Israeli institutions, citing their role in aiding the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, The Guardian reported on 13 September.
Trinity College Dublin announced this summer that it was ending collaboration with Israeli partners. Meanwhile, the Federal University of Ceará in Brazil had already canceled a planned innovation summit with an Israeli university last year.
Similar actions were announced by institutions in Norway, Belgium, and Spain.
The University of Amsterdam confirmed it was terminating its student exchange with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The European Association of Social Anthropologists also said it would refuse cooperation with Israeli bodies and called on its members to follow the same path.
Stephanie Adam of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel said Israeli academic institutions are complicit in “Israel’s decades-long regime of military occupation, settler colonial apartheid and now genocide,” adding there is “a moral and legal obligation for universities to end ties with complicit Israeli universities.”
Israeli historian Ilan Pappé has disputed claims that many academics are sympathetic to Palestinians.
“If it were so, I would have seen them among the few hundreds [of] brave Israelis who demonstrate against the war because it is a genocide, not because it fails to bring back the hostages … They provide courses and degrees to the secret service, police and are agencies of the government that are oppressing daily the Palestinians,” he added.
Nobel laureate and former president of the Royal Society, Venki Ramakrishnan, said he has “mixed feelings about boycotts.”
“On the one hand, the Israeli government’s approach to Gaza has been hugely disproportionate, harming civilians, including young children, in the thousands,” he told The Guardian.
In the UK, France, and Germany, few institutions have taken action.
A spokesperson for Universities UK said: “As a representative body, Universities UK has a longstanding public position of being committed to the free exchange of ideas, regardless of nationality or location. As such we do not endorse blanket academic boycotts, as this would represent an infringement of academic freedom.”
There are concerns in Tel Aviv that researchers will leave Israel, potentially never to return, fuelling a “brain drain” that is already a concern in medicine.
Ghassan Soleiman Abu Sittah, a British-Palestinian surgeon and rector of the University of Glasgow, said that students and academics across the UK have pushed for academic boycotts of Israel, but are being blocked by governing bodies.
“The moral outrage about what the Israelis are doing is leading more and more academics to take personal decisions, not to have joint projects with Israelis,” he said.
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