My university, Trinity College Dublin, decided not to renew institutional links or sign new research contracts with Israeli partners earlier this month. The decision was attacked by Israel’s supporters, concerned that the country is being cold-shouldered by international academia. Some worry that Israel will eventually be excluded from European Union research funding programmes. This, according to a spokesperson for the Council for Higher Education in Israel, “would risk isolating us like Russia and collapsing the foundation of Israeli research.”
These fears have a basis in reality. The same week that Trinity cut ties, so did the University of Geneva, with Queen’s University Belfast announcing that it would divest from Israel. We join a host of other European universities in drawing away from Israel – Ghent, Rotterdam, Tilburg, Utrecht, all Spanish and most Norwegian universities. As worrying for Israeli universities is the so-called “grey boycott” – phone calls unanswered, contracts unrenewed for ostensibly “non-political” reasons, faraway doors politely shutting.
There is no mystery behind this isolation of Israeli academia. The reasons are the unrelenting genocide and the international student protests against it. Universities have cited the ICJ and ICC rulings on genocide, occupation and war crimes to explain their decisions.
But often the reasons are more immediate. Many academics have been viscerally affected by Israel’s destruction of universities in Gaza. There is an image I retain – an Israeli soldier pretending to read while behind him a bookshelf blazes. This book-burning selfie was taken in the library of Al-Aqsa University in Gaza and went viral at the time of the student encampments last year.
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We now routinely speak of “scholasticide”, the systematic destruction of an education system. The messages in our inboxes from colleagues from Gaza, the displaced Palestinian students on our campuses have been the driving force for many of us.
It is often said that Israeli universities are centres of enlightened opinion, separate from the government and army. Sadly, this is untrue. Israeli universities have been active and enthusiastic participants in the war. Maya Wind’s recent book, Towers of Ivory and Steel, has been cited repeatedly in campus discussions on Israel. Wind, an Israeli herself, exhaustively documents not only the close ties between Israeli universities and the military, but how academia provides vital support to the occupation and to the apartheid system in Israel itself.
We don’t need to read books to become aware of this, we can visit the websites of Israeli universities. Take the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, from which both Trinity and the University of Geneva cut ties recently. Its website proudly details the university’s participation in the war effort, how it runs propaganda exercises for, and gives logistics and equipment to, the army in Gaza. It boasts of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) training programmes it offers at a military base on its campus, which is itself partly located in the Occupied Territories.
And it is not just Hebrew University. Many university students are soldiers in Gaza (30 per cent of students last year served in the IDF) and their participation is supported by their institutions through a web of grants and other incentives. Some universities even offer students academic credits for serving in Gaza – academic recognition for burning books, so to speak.
These universities have become increasingly repressive. Israeli human rights organisations have documented hundreds of cases of students and academics being expelled and disciplined for expressing even mild criticism of the war. One example feels personal to us in TCD.
Back in 2013, leading human rights scholar Prof Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian of Hebrew University delivered several dazzling lectures to our sociology department in Trinity. A warm and generous scholar, she spoke movingly about the politics of surveillance and fear in Jerusalem. Ten years on, she was the target of this surveillance. When the attack on Gaza started, she was publicly attacked by the rector and president of her university for circulating an anti-war petition. They announced they were ashamed she worked in their university and told her to quit. She said at the time she was less fearful about being forced from her job – which happened the following year – than the many death threats she received. In April 2024 she was arrested and interrogated by Israeli police for her anti-war comments. Her university offered her no support.
Trinity and other universities have discovered that accusations of anti-Semitism invariably follow the cutting of ties with Israel. These accusers have ignored the many Jews (myself included) who support boycott, and have instead railed against anti-Semitic straw men. Without doubt, if universities ever enacted policies to stop Jews from studying or banned Jewish academics, that would be anti-Semitic. But that isn’t what the academic boycott campaign, focused on Israeli institutions, is or ever will be. A misreading of the academic boycott, whether negligent or cynical, may fuel the outrage of critics, but it doesn’t help their arguments.
A more serious issue is academic freedom and the right of individual academics to pursue their research and foster contacts in whatever directions they wish. This was an important consideration in the Trinity debate. But academic freedom is in part constituted by the responsibility to act ethically and within the bounds of international law. A distinction can be made between the academic freedom of individuals to foster individual contacts – which they still can – and institutional agreements and contracts which render universities complicit in the operations of the Israeli state.
Donald Trump’s attack on universities in the United States has been a wake-up call for academics. It has shown us how vital institutional autonomy is for the protection of academic freedom. Moves by European universities to cut ties with Israel are important expressions of this autonomy, without which academic freedom perishes. They also express the potential of universities to be a force for good. In time, Trinity’s position on Israel will be seen in the same light as its equally historic commitment to cut ties with apartheid South Africa in the 1980s.
Dr David Landy is director of MPhil in race ethnicity and conflict in the department of sociology at Trinity College Dublin
