This is a follow-up to PACBI’s 2025 statement “Israel “Disappearing to the Margins” of Horizon due to Academic Boycotts: Let’s Escalate the Exclusion from Below!”:
Three years into Israel’s ongoing livestreamed genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza, academic boycott and BDS mobilizations across European higher education to exclude Israel from below have grown. Nearly 55 universities are now calling on the European Commission to suspend the EU-Israel Association Agreement that allows Israel to participate in Europe’s flagship research funding program, Horizon. Boycott efforts have cut Israel’s share of approved Horizon grants by more than half, from 5.4% to 2.5%. A 2026 report by Israel’s Association of University Heads (VERA) notes that academic boycott efforts create, “a significant threat to Israel’s continued participation in the current Horizon agreements and poses a serious danger regarding Israel’s inclusion in the next Horizon agreements, which are expected to be signed during 2027 and implemented beginning in 2028.” The latest data also shows Israel continues to lose its share in another key grant category. A CTech September 2026 report shows that Israeli researchers, who in the past consistently averaged around 30 early-career European Research Council (ERC) grants per year through 2024, received just 10 ERC grants in 2025 and 11 in 2026.
Israeli scientific leaders have acknowledged the impact. Professor David Harel, president of the Israeli Academy of Sciences and Humanities, said: “As the overt and covert academic boycott of Israel expands, so does its weight in harming the grants, achievements, and international collaborations of Israeli researchers.” Ben-Gurion University’s vice president for global engagement, Professor Michal Bar-Asher, described Horizon as “the [Israeli] academy’s oxygen pipeline” and said exclusion would be “a matter of life and death for Israeli academia.”
Israel’s Association of University Heads (VERA) has documented a surge in “academic BDS” activity. A six-month investigation by Investigate Europe and Reporters United noted that VERA admitted during a session in the Israeli parliament in September 2025 that it had spent $800,000 (€687,000) on legal work over the past two years in an effort to safeguard Israeli involvement in research initiatives. Israel’s Council for Higher Education allocated a further €1.7 million in 2026 to a new effort to combat the academic boycott. VERA has called the fight to keep Israel in Horizon a “national mission.”
Yet, in spite of ongoing repression of supporters of Palestinian rights, on and off campus, the academic boycott and grassroots campaigns to exclude complicit Israeli entities from Horizon – an exclusion from below – have continued to escalate. This has shown that universities can and must act without waiting for the EU, and they have begun to do so.
In March 2026, Ghent University in Belgium withdrew from the OSTEONET Horizon project involving Tel Aviv University and began withdrawal procedures for five more projects with Israeli partners. This marked the first publicly announced withdrawal from a Horizon project that included complicit Israeli entities achieved without economic penalty to the withdrawing institution.
In September 2026, the University of the Basque Country (EHU) announced that it had declined research projects worth a combined €247 million over links to complicit Israeli entities, implementing its April 2024 commitment to end such ties. EHU’s rector also called on the European Commission and Spain’s government to exclude complicit Israeli universities from research, academic, and cultural funding.
Most recently, in October 2026, Utrecht University also withdrew from a Horizon Europe project involving Israel’s Ministry of Health. The university said the withdrawal, effective 1 October 2026, aligned with its policy on no new collaborations with Israeli institutions, making good on its prior commitments to adhere to the academic boycott.
Students and staff are successfully compelling universities to end complicity as EU institutions fail to act. It’s now time to escalate our efforts. The stakes are rising, as the EU is set to vote on the next Horizon framework covering 2028–2034. In addition, the new Horizon framework explicitly includes support for dual-use and defence-related applications. A European Commission spokesperson told EUobserver: “It cannot be ruled out that results from a given project, although initially intended and funded solely for civil applications, could later be further developed into technologies with dual-use applications.”
As of May 2026, academiccomplicity.eu has tracked 387 active Horizon projects with Israeli universities. The top countries for collaboration are currently Germany (203), Italy (148), the Netherlands (121), Spain (118), and the UK (109).
Israel’s academic institutions are deeply complicit in Israel’s genocide, apartheid, illegal military occupation and other atrocity crimes and grave human rights violations against Palestinians. Ending institutional ties is not merely symbolic. It is part of ending the international support that enables these crimes. The EU must end its complicity, exclude Israel and its complicit institutions from Horizon, and cancel the EU-Israel Association Agreement. Until then, we need exclusion from below.
PACBI calls on students, university staff and trade unions to escalate pressure.
- Demand exclusion. Pressure governments and the EU to end the EU-Israel Association Agreement and exclude Israel from Horizon—including the 2028–2034 framework. Demand that universities pledge not to join projects with Israel and its complicit institutions, even if the EU fails to act. Students, alumni, and staff can sign onto a new pledge here from Universities for Justice, launched in October 2026, to pressure their university rectors to follow the lead of the now 55 universities calling on the European Commission to suspend the EU-Israel Association Agreement. Rectors can sign on their universities here.
- Make universities honor their commitments. Demand an end to bilateral and multilateral ties, especially Horizon collaborations. Pressure the 34 universities in Spain, the Netherlands, Italy, and Belgium who have been found to have joined new Horizon projects with Israeli entities despite earlier commitments to cut ties to uphold international law. Demand divestment and procurement exclusions for corporations implicated in Israel’s atrocity crimes and grave human rights violations against Palestinians.
- Refuse complicity. Conscientiously object by pledging to withdraw your labor from projects involving Israel and its complicit institutions - graduate students and staff can sign the Swedish Uppsala Declaration of Conscientious Objection, the German Declaration of Conscientious Objection, or the European Declaration of Conscientious Objection and commit to individually honoring the academic boycott. Students, staff, and higher-education unions can use academiccomplicity.eu to find active Horizon projects involving Israeli universities at their institutions and organize to withdraw from ongoing projects and exclude complicit Israeli institutions from future projects.