Israel “Disappearing to the Margins” of Horizon due to Academic Boycotts: Let’s Escalate the Exclusion from Below!

After 20 months of Israel’s ongoing livestreamed genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, BDS pressure from the broad Palestine solidarity movement across European higher education is finally succeeding. In particular, academic boycott and divestment mobilizations by student and university staff have pushed Israel to the margins of the European Union (EU)’s Horizon research program–the world’s largest research program.

Following the Horizon program’s 2020 renewal, Israel received €1.1 billion in grant funds between 2021 and 2024, but to date in 2025, approval rates for Horizon projects with one or more Israeli research partners have dropped by 68.5%. This drastic decline can be credited to inspiring student solidarity mobilizations, years-long campaigning by progressive academics and university staff (including trade unions in some cases) heeding calls from the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) and the broader BDS movement. 

They have all exposed and resisted the complicity of Western universities, and the EU writ large, in enabling Israel’s decades-old regime of settler-colonialism, military occupation, apartheid and now genocide, holding these institutions accountable to international law and to the EU’s own language in Article 2 of its EU-Israel Association Agreement that respect for human rights and democratic principles is an “essential element” of the 1995 free trade agreement. This agreement forms the basis for other EU-Israel economic agreements, including Israel’s inclusion in European Research Council (ERC) grants. Public opinion across the EU has shifted dramatically of late, with overwhelming majorities, including 77% of Germans and 89% of Italians, backing the suspension of the EU-Israel Association Agreement over Israel’s grave human rights violations.

Representing a near consensus among heads of Palestinian universities, all Palestinian academic unions, student movements, and civil society at large, PACBI, a key part of the Palestinian leadership of the global BDS movement, has called for boycotting all Israeli academic institutions due to their deep complicity in Israel’s atrocity crimes and grave human rights violations. The fast growing worldwide academic boycott network follows PACBI’s Guidelines for the International Academic Boycott of Israel. 

Despite Israel’s relatively small size and the fact that none of its major universities are among the top 200 international, Western-ranked academic institutions, Israel has received more Horizon funds for its complicit universities on average than any European country, including Germany, France, and the Netherlands, according to a recent Israeli media report titled, “Horizon is the oxygen pipeline, removal could collapse Israeli academia.” The colonial West’s investment in and partnership with Israel’s regime of colonial oppression are almost as massive in academia as they are in military trade and overall preferential economic agreements. 

Though canceling the EU-Israel Association Agreement requires unanimous support of the 27 EU states, suspending Israel from the Horizon program requires a qualified majority of 55% of the countries that constitute at least 65% of the EU population. Given the dogmatic support for apartheid Israel among Europe’s rising far-right and fascist parties, especially in Germany, Italy, Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, among others, achieving this majority is quite difficult. But the dramatic increase in the number of Europe-based scholars and even universities (see BACKGROUND section below) that have refused to participate in any Horizon project involving Israel, is achieving a “silent” albeit gradual exclusion of Israel from the entire Horizon program. 

Since the 2013 approval of Horizon 2020, when 15 former senior European officials and 500 academics urged the EU to hold firm on its illegal settlement guidelines and exclude Israel from participation in the program, the EU has been on notice that Israel’s participation in the program constitutes a violation of international law. Horizon research partners have since steadily and increasingly responded to calls by academics and civil society to drop collaboration with Israeli partners - in Portugal in 2016, in Spain in 2023, in Ireland in 2024, in Belgium in both 2024 and 2025, and in the Netherlands in 2025.

Most recently, in May of this year, in response to pressure from over 20 universities worldwide now partially or fully boycotting Israel, the Netherlands passed a motion, supported by a majority of 17 out of 27 EU foreign ministers, to review the EU-Israel Association Agreement, which includes the Horizon program. But a mere review is clearly not enough, not after over a decade of warnings that the Agreement and Israel’s participation in the Horizon program violate international law, and not after many months into Israel’s genocide in Gaza. For years, academics have recognized what, to date, the EU refuses to admit: that Israel’s regime of colonial oppression is inherently incompatible with respect for human rights under international law, and therefore, Israel must be excluded from association agreements and research programs, especially Horizon, apartheid Israel’s “academic oxygen.” 

The President of Israel's Academy of Arts and Sciences has lamented that exclusion from Horizon would be a “death sentence for Israeli science,” but it is Israeli universities that have, since their founding, been a pillar of Israel’s 77-year settler-colonial apartheid regime oppressing all Palestinians, as has been well documented by many scholars, including Israeli critical anthropologist Dr. Maya Wind, the world's leading expert on the role of Israeli universities in Israel's violations of Palestinian rights .

Critically, Israel is “by far the largest non-European recipient” of Horizon funding related to the security sector in particular. While the EU’s own treaties technically prohibit the use of EU funds, including those of Horizon, to be used for “military or defence implications,” loopholes allowing for “dual-use” technologies, which can be used for both civilian and military purposes, and for cross sector research and security collaborations have allowed companies such as Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), Israel’s top aerospace and aviation company and a major supplier of the Israeli military, to receive €640 million between 2023 and 2024 in Horizon funding. 

Technologies such as the Skylord drone system have previously been developed using Horizon funding via a 2019-2020 grant to Israeli start-up Xtend for €50 million, and only a few years later have been deployed by the Israeli military in the Gaza Strip. Lawtrain, a project which brings together the Israeli Ministry for Public Security and the Israeli National Police with their counterparts from Belgium, Portugal, and Spain to develop common police interrogation methods, received €5 million in funding under Horizon. It was protested across Europe throughout 2016, but ultimately allowed to retain funding, in spite of extensive documented human rights abuses against Palestinians in Israeli detention by the Israeli National Police.

But the dual-use loophole conveniently allowing for EU research funds to fuel the development of military technologies in Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people is not the only way the EU is disregarding international law. Since 2016, the BDS movement has condemned the EU’s admission of Israel into the program as hypocritical, since Israel’s Ministry of Science and Technology is based on an illegal settlement in occupied Jerusalem, and is at odds with the EU policy that Israel’s colonization of the 1967 occupied Palestinian territory is illegal under international law. Several Israeli universities are also built partially or fully on illegally occupied Palestinian land, and have deep ties with Israel’s arms industry, with some even hosting military bases on campus. Yet, they still enjoy the Horizon funding largesse as part of a pattern of the EU continually “bending” the rules on its obligations under the ICJ’s 2024 advisory opinion to maintain economic ties with entities operating on illegal settlements. The treatment of its legal obligations as “optional” in this manner has been condemned by Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories as “legally flawed, politically damaging, and morally compromised.” 

An increasing number of universities across Europe and beyond are recognizing this deep, structural, decades-old complicity and are severing ties with Israeli universities accordingly. In July 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that Israel’s entire presence in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, is illegal, must be brought to an end, and amounts to apartheid. Dozens of UN human rights experts have stated that in order for all States, including in Europe, to meet their obligations triggered by this historic ICJ ruling, they must “cancel or suspend economic relationships, trade agreements, and academic relations with Israel that may contribute to its unlawful presence and apartheid regime in the occupied Palestinian territory” [Emphasis added]. 

The BDS movement applauds the principled academics who have, to date, committed to an academic boycott of Israel, and who have called on the EU, including in a recent petition with 2150 signatures and counting, to abide by its stated commitments to international law. We also salute the student-led encampments and other peaceful disruptions of business-as-usual on complicit Western campuses demanding an academic boycott of Israel and divestment from all corporations implicated in its gross human rights violations against Palestinians. The time is now to further escalate pressure against complicit Israeli institutions, to exclude them from the Horizon program, and to end the EU-Israel Association Agreement. 

As Palestinians in Gaza are starved to death by Israel’s total blockade on aid, it is high time for the EU to finally apply the human rights clause and cancel the EU‑Israel Association Agreement, thus excluding Israel and its complicit institutions from Horizon research funding. Until the EU ends its criminal complicity in Israeli apartheid and genocide, we call on students, university staff, and trade unions to:

1. Escalate grassroots pressure to conscientiously object to any project involving apartheid Israel and/or its complicit institutions, and 
2. Pressure their universities to comply with international law by severing all bilateral and multilateral (especially Horizon) academic ties with Israel and its complicit institutions and to divest and exclude from procurement all corporations that are implicated in Israel’s atrocity crimes and grave human rights violations. 

Ending complicity in international crimes is a legal and ethical obligation.

Background:

Following the ICJ’s ruling about the illegality of Israel’s entire occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and affirming the deep complicity of Israeli universities, international law experts at the University of Antwerp in Belgium published a legal opinion in August 2024, calling on universities and research institutions in Belgium and beyond to meet their legal obligations by ending “all collaborations with [Israeli] academic and other institutions directly or indirectly implicated in the violations of international law.”

Highlights of European universities calling for excluding Israel from Horizon:

1. In May 2024, the ten Belgian universities called for the suspension of the EU-Israel Association Agreement to facilitate excluding Israel from Horizon projects. 
2. In June 2025, the University of Amsterdam “decided not to enter into any new HorizonEurope collaborations with Israeli organisations for the time being, pending the results of an EU investigation into compliance with the association agreement with Israel.”
3. In May 2024, the University of Barcelona demanded that the EU exclude complicit Israeli universities from research programs and decided to refuse to participate in events within EU funded research projects involving complicit Israeli institutions until the EU excludes Israel.
4. In July 2024, the University College Cork (Ireland) agreed to student encampment demands to divest from companies complicit in Israel’s violations of Palestinian rights and to establish an ethical/human rights framework to govern all partnerships, including in Horizon projects. 
5. In June 2024, the University of Valencia (Spain) decided to cut ties with complicit Israeli universities and urged the EU to exclude Israel from its research programs, including Horizon. 
6. In May 2024, the Free University of Brussels (VUB) decided to withdraw from a Horizon project involving two complicit Israeli institutions and to review all Horizon projects with complicit Israeli entities.
7. In May 2024, Ghent University (Belgium) committed to cutting ties with all Israeli universities and to leading pressure on the EU to exclude Israel from EU research funding programs including Horizon.