Even late into this fall, Israeli universities are facing an unprecedented wave of academic boycotts.
According to a new report released on Nov. 24 by the Academic Boycott of Israel Monitoring Team set up by the Committee of University Presidents in Tel Aviv, the number of boycott cases against Israeli institutions has doubled to approximately 1,000 since March 2025. Instead of slowing down due to the current ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, the trend appears to be growing.
Most of the institutional boycotts are coming from Western European nations, particularly Spain, England, Belgium, Italy, and Norway. The report said that 2025 saw a drop in research grants awarded to Israeli scholars by the European Union’s Horizon Europe fund, the main source of scientific research financing for Israel.
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Such boycotts are rooted in the 2004 Palestinian Campaign for Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel and also the broader Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. However, boycotts have intensified during the current war. What drives it? Proponents hope they will pressure Israeli institutions because of their “complicity in the occupation of Palestine” and their ties with the Israeli government in military research.
This fall, I was part of an American delegation of university presidents and chancellors invited by the Israeli Consulate to visit many of its universities and research institutes. We visited Ariel University, Tel Aviv University, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Weizmann Institute of Science, and the Holon Institute of Technology. The delegation was surprised to learn of the extent of the boycotts. Such news is rarely reported by the U.S. media.
The president of HUJI, Tamir Sheafer, pointed out that “there is both a loud and a quiet BDS.” The overt boycott is seen in the drop-off of European grants, institutional cutoffs, and the suspension of student exchanges and post-doctoral partnerships. The hidden boycott often comes in the form of canceled lectures and conferences, rejected papers, frozen projects, and exclusion from international research groups or professional associations.
What was the Israeli reaction to this dramatic increase in boycotts? First, they pointed to the hypocrisy of it. Why, they ask, do these countries and institutions only boycott Israel, and not China, Russia, or other communist nations? They said there is a “strange ethics” at work in all this. They also reminded us that Israel is at war, having been attacked from many sides. Gideon Sa’ar, Israel’s foreign affairs minister, reminded our delegation that while war is terrible, Israel has a right to self-defense and survival.
The various Israeli university presidents also pointed out that the boycott is harmful to academic freedom, which rests on open inquiry, collaboration, and debate across borders. They wondered why Western countries and institutions are now restricting the free exchange of ideas, penalizing individual researchers, and hindering collaboration.
Furthermore, they pointed out that in Israel, all universities are independent of the government. Besides that, those who are behind the boycotts overlook the fact that there are Jews, Christians, and Arabs who study at these institutions. Ariel University is actually located in the central West Bank, and serves the entire area with a children’s clinic and a rehab center.
Our hosts did not really understand why so many in the West would want to cut themselves off from joint projects in science, health, and technology, where Israeli universities are on the cutting edge. Israel currently has a leading role in the development of medical devices and imaging, biotechnology and pharmaceuticals, digital health, artificial intelligence, regenerative and stem cell medicine, agricultural technology, food tech, immunology, neurobiology, cancer therapies, and computer science. Ironically, EU schools pursuing boycotts are actually harming themselves and their own disciplines.
While Western Europe has been the epicenter of the anti-Israel boycott, universities in other countries have also cut academic ties with Israel’s academic institutions, including South Africa, Canada, and Mexico. So far, support for a complete boycott has been minimal in the United States. There are student groups, faculty associations, and unions that have passed boycott or divestment resolutions. But institutional-wide academic boycotts here are rare. To date, no major U.S. university has implemented a full academic boycott of Israeli universities.
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The Trump administration has made the possibility of boycotts even more difficult by issuing executive orders and funding threats to schools, which might be tempted to go down this path. Also, states such as Florida are working to penalize or block cooperation with any institution that boycotts Israel.
What we heard from all the institutions we visited in Israel is that in spite of the current boycotts, they are eager for partnerships with new schools, including Christian universities. Like many other faith-based universities, we resolutely stand against the new normalization of antisemitism, particularly the growing academic antisemitism.
Donald Sweeting is the former president and chancellor of Colorado Christian University.
