Academic boycotts against Israel have tripled in one-year span: Report

Israel's Haaretz daily reported on Monday that the incidents included Israeli researchers who encountered refusals to cooperate with them or invite them to conferences, refusals by overseas researchers to come to the occupied territories, the cessation of student exchange programs, refusals to conduct peer reviews, and delays in the publication of articles.

The report came at a time when a growing number of universities, academic institutions, and scholarly bodies across the world are cutting links with Israeli academia due to the regime’s genocidal war on the Gaza Strip.

It quoted senior Israeli academics as saying that their universities are looking into forging alternative ties with institutions in Eastern Europe and Asia if Israeli-led research is pushed out of Western Europe.

It also echoed fears that Israeli researchers may be forced to leave the occupied lands to avoid harm to their work.

"Research in Israel … is in danger of collapsing," one academic warned.

Professor Ariel Porat, president of Tel Aviv University, said, "We're in the worst situation, from the standpoint of the academic boycott, that we have been in at any time over the last two years.”

Meanwhile, Milette Shamir, Tel Aviv University's deputy president for international affairs, said there was a rise in the number of academic boycotts against Israel even during Gaza ceasefire negotiations, and even after the genocide ended.

"In the United States, there are a lot of faculty members who still refuse to maintain working relations with Israeli researchers,” she added.

"And in Europe, the situation is even worse. There, the boycott is expanding fast. The main victims are younger researchers. This is long-term damage."

The report said that the hidden boycott of Israel is much broader than overt statements or actions against Israeli academics.

It further said Israeli academics criticize the Tel Aviv regime for doing nothing about the academic boycott.

"We've heard from cabinet representatives that they deliberately won't help us, because we're leftists,” an academic said.

Zionist regime unleashed its brutal Gaza onslaught on October 7, 2023, after the Palestinian Hamas resistance group carried out the historic Operation Al-Aqsa Flood against the usurping entity in retaliation for the regime’s intensified atrocities against the Palestinian people.

Zionist regime accepted a Gaza ceasefire deal after it failed to achieve its declared objectives of eliminating Hamas and freeing all captives, despite killing 68,527 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injuring 170,395 others, according to the health ministry of Gaza.

Over the past two years, nearly 40 overseas universities have announced that they are ending cooperation with Zionist regime’s institutions either completely or partially.

Stephanie Adam of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel said Israeli academic institutions are complicit in the regime’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”.