More than 150 academics call on EU to stop funding Israeli universities
European Commission told to ‘use its leverage’ and ban Israeli universities from receiving funds from an EU programme worth over $100bn
A group of 160 academics representing 21 countries has urged the European Commission to “use its leverage” and ban Israeli universities from receiving funds from a European Union (EU) programme worth over $100bn.
In a letter sent to the Commission, the group commended the EU’s existing “principled position” in its funding guidelines for Horizon 2020 by prohibiting the allocation of funds to Israeli entities situated in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
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But the academics called on the body to go further and exclude all Israeli academic institutions, which is charged with “complicity in Israel’s regime of military occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid”.
“The complicity of Israeli academic institutions in Israel’s structural violence perpetrated against Palestinians across historic Palestine has been broadly and systematically documented,” the letter read.
The funding programme – known as Horizon Europe – is the EU’s biggest research and innovation programme. It has a budget of around $112bn.
“Given the emerging consensus among some of the most prominent human rights organizations, the crux of the problem goes beyond the Occupied Palestinian Territory,” the letter said.
More than 150 academics call on EU to stop funding Israeli universities
“It would be important to extend the prohibition of European research funds to include Israeli institutions complicit in Israel’s violations of Palestinian human rights, regardless of where they are situated.”
The letter’s signatories were all current or prior recipients of EU research funding and included faculty at institutions including UCL, the University of Edinburgh, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Oxford, the Paris Nanterre University and the University of Westminster.
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