Above photo: Pro-Palestinian protesters rallying in Berlin, Germany in April 2023. Michael Kuenne/PRESSCOV via ZUMA Press Wire APA Images.
The academic boycott of Israeli institutions is the minimum that justice demands.
The Gaza genocide is nearing its final, most brutal phase, and Israeli universities are providing intellectual, logistical, and technological support.
Every university in Gaza has been reduced to rubble. Thousands of students and hundreds of educators have been killed. The genocide is nearing its final, most brutal phase. Meanwhile, Israeli universities continue to develop the weapons and ideologies that made all of it possible. And the Technical University of Berlin (TU Berlin) still refuses to sever ties, 8 months after being confronted with the undeniable proof.
The call for an academic boycott of Israeli institutions is not merely symbolic. These institutions have never been neutral bystanders to state violence. They are engineers of it, embedded in the military-industrial complex, drafting demographic warfare strategies, justifying settler expansion, and persecuting Palestinian students and faculty. They provide the intellectual, logistical, and technological infrastructure of apartheid and genocide.
Tel Aviv University’s (TAU) Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) provides strategic cover for collective punishment. Its April 2025 paper proposes using “sustained military pressure” and “voluntary emigration”, a thinly veiled ethnic cleansing proposal. This is the same institute that developed the infamous Dahiya Doctrine, advocating the use of overwhelming force to devastate civilian infrastructure as a military tactic. TAU collaborates with weapons manufacturers like Elbit Systems, and actively integrates soldiers into academic life. Students in uniform walk freely through campus while Palestinian students are surveilled, harassed, expelled, or arrested for dissent.
The Technion is deeply embedded in Israel’s arms industry. It developed unmanned bulldozers for home demolition, and surveillance drones and weapons systems used on civilians. The Technion partners directly with Elbit Systems and Rafael Defense Systems and integrates military service into academic life. Technion’s role in ethnic cleansing is a historical one. According to Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, leading academics from the university drafted a plan that explicitly described the “Jewish takeover” of the Galilee as a national priority. The document opens with:
“It is either them or us. The land problems in the Galilee proved that any territory not taken by Zionist elements is going to be coveted by non-Zionists.” (The Forgotten Palestinians, p. 257)
Ben-Gurion University operates in full partnership with elite military intelligence units, including the notorious Unit 8200, responsible for developing AI systems like Lavender and Gospel, which have been actively used in the genocide in Gaza to generate kill lists and reduce civilians to algorithmic targets.
Bar-Ilan University founded Ariel University inside an illegal Israeli settlement, and its Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies has previously openly advocated increasing “hopelessness” among Palestinians.
Hebrew University, located on occupied land in East Jerusalem, collaborates with the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency known for torture and mass surveillance.
None of this is hidden. None of it is new. And yet, the Technical University of Berlin continues to maintain official partnerships with all five of these institutions.
Eight months ago, we — a collective of students, and staff at TU Berlin — submitted an extensive report detailing the complicity of these Israeli universities in war crimes and apartheid. We asked our administration to review the evidence and sever ties with them, the same action it took immediately in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, citing violation of international law.
We have received no meaningful response. No partnerships have been suspended or even halted. No investigations launched. Not a single public statement has been made. Instead, our demands have been met with bureaucratic deflection and empty platitudes about “academic freedom” and “neutrality”. This hollow rhetoric conceals a clear political decision: to side with genocide.
Not only did TU Berlin say nothing, but it doubled down by reaffirming ties with Israeli institutions, expressing selective solidarity with Israeli academics, and denouncing attacks on Israel. But it has never once recognized the complete obliteration of Palestinian academic life.
We are told that academic freedom is sacred. But Palestinian students have no academic freedom when they are jailed for social media posts. When their schools are bombed. When their professors are assassinated. When Israeli tanks roll through campuses.
Real academic freedom demands a moral baseline. A line we do not cross. A refusal to normalize institutions that serve a settler colonial regime and enable a military that reduces children to “targets”. It is the ability to say no to complicity.
The facts are known. The evidence is overwhelming. The silence is a choice. And we are here to break it.
We call again on TU Berlin — and on universities everywhere — to sever all ties with Israeli academic institutions that participate in and enable ethnic cleansing, occupation, and genocide. Anything less is complicity.
This Boycott is not optional. In this moment, it is the minimum that justice demands.
