No academia as usual during Israeli occupation, apartheid and genocide in Palestine
- Faculty and staff in European higher education and research call on their academic leaders to end bilateral agreements with Israeli institutions and companies complicit in grave violations of international law (jus cogens), including illegal occupation, segregation and apartheid, genocide and the violation of the right to self-determination of the Palestinian people.
- We call on the European Union to uphold its own legal obligations and immediately end the EU-Israel Association agreement in view of Israel’s breach of Article 2. Under the Agreement, the European Commission has granted over €2.12 billion in European research funding to Israeli institutions, including institutions complicit in grave violations of international law (notably the Israeli Ministry of Defence).
- In the absence of principled action as outlined above, we declare our conscientious objection to collaboration with Israeli institutions and companies complicit in grave violations of international law and we pledge our support for the right of the Palestinian people to life, dignity, and self-determination.
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Sign the European Declaration here ↓
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We, the undersigned faculty and staff working in European higher education and research, are outraged by Israel’s systematic destruction of the Palestinian people and denial of their right to self-determination. By mid-September 2025, Israeli forces had killed over 65,000 Palestinians in Gaza, including 18,430 children. However, medical experts suggest that traumatic injury mortality has been vastly underreported. An independent UN commission of inquiry now concludes that Israel has committed four of the five genocidal acts defined under the 1948 Genocide Convention, with the ‘intent to destroy the Palestinians in Gaza.’ The Israeli prime minister himself clarified the objective of the punitive military campaign in Gaza as ‘destroying more and more homes’ and leaving Palestinians ‘nowhere to return to’: a mass expulsion backed by some 82% of Jewish Israelis. In late July 2025, the Knesset’s non-binding resolution to annex the West Bank announced its criminal intent to the world. But Israel has already enacted a de facto annexation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem through the acceleration of state-sponsored settler violence and jurisdictional expansion, with the knowing complicity of European financiers that include the European Commission.
As the legal interpretation offered by the University of Antwerp has stated, these and other on-going crimes against the Palestinian people violate the very foundations, or peremptory norms, of the international legal order, including the prohibition of genocide, crimes against humanity, racial discrimination and apartheid, and the right to self-determination. Israel leads the world for the second straight year in all metrics of violence against children, accounting for more child amputees in Gaza than anywhere in the world. Placing more than 86 % of the Gaza Strip under shoot-to-kill notice by July 2025, Israel made killing fields of food-distribution sites under fire from snipers, tanks, and gunships and enforced a ‘silent massacre’ of famine and malnutrition deaths in a doctrine of extermination that has broad support in Israeli society.
This is only the latest chapter in a litany of crimes that all 27 EU member states, party to the Rome Statute, were obligated to prevent, and which should have triggered the termination of the EU-Israel Association under Article 2 of the agreement, predicated on upholding international law. After an EU review concluded that Israel is in breach of fundamental human rights, EU member states nevertheless voted against sanctioning Israel, instead prioritizing the EU’s commitment ‘not to punish Israel.’ However, the UN Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People (A/79/363, IX), senior UN human rights experts and numerous human rights organisations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and the International Association of Genocide Scholars have all determined that Israel’s actions in Gaza meet the criteria for the definition of genocide. Israel is currently being investigated for the crime of genocide by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the principal judicial organ of the United Nations, and Israeli leaders are wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including the crime of extermination and the crime of starvation. In July 2024, the ICJ declared that Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories is illegal, amounts to annexation, constitutes a continued aggression and violates the prohibition against segregation and apartheid. UN human rights experts have clarified that, in order for UN member states to meet their obligations as triggered by the ICJ ruling, they must ‘[c]ancel 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.’
Furthermore, by obliterating the entire sector of education and cultural heritage in Gaza, Israel’s actions seek to systematically destroy the past and future of the Palestinian people. What UN experts labelled a ‘scholasticide’ already in April 2024, following Karma Nabulsi, is coupled with the complicity of Israeli universities on the other side of the barrier encircling Gaza. All disciplines at Israeli universities have long been major accomplices in Israel’s matrix of military occupation, settler violence, apartheid, and now genocide. They have played an active role in developing weapon systems and military and legal doctrines used to maintain the illegal occupation of Palestine, justifying unlawful colonisation and annexation of occupied lands, rationalising ethnic cleansing and extra-judicial killings of indigenous Palestinians, and participating in other explicit violations of human rights and international law; they have also been systematically discriminating against ‘non-Jewish’ students and staff (Wind 2024).
The EU’s failure to act in the face of such brazen criminality is also the failure of all public institutions in Europe, including universities, bound by association to prevent such crimes as genocide. The EU’s Horizon Europe programme has played an active role in abetting these crimes, facilitating collaboration with complicit Israeli universities and funnelling €2.12 billion into Israeli entities, including the Israeli Ministry of Defence, since 2014. The European Commission provided Israeli institutions more than €238 million in the first year of the genocide alone. Despite repeated ethical and legal concerns raised at EU parliament, the European Commission has continued to fund research for Israeli drone, cluster bomb and chemical weapons manufacturers like Israeli Aerospace Industries and Elbit Systems. Such financial support for the Israeli military has established a damning track record of complicity in what the ICJ has recognised as the criminal occupation of the Palestinian territories and plausibly also in Israel’s on-going genocide in Gaza.
Even so, we are not without leadership and hope. Guided by our Palestinian colleagues in Gaza we, the undersigned, pledge to support the Palestinian struggle for a dignified life, for freedom, equality and security in their own homeland, and for the right to education. Already in 2004, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) called for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions to build non-violent pressure on Israel to comply with international law. In line with the internationally accepted definition of freedom of expression as adopted by the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (UNESCR), PACBI’s guidelines call for:
- Refusing any form of academic and cultural cooperation with Israeli institutions;
- Advocating a comprehensive boycott of complicit Israeli institutions;
- Promoting divestment from Israel by international academic institutions;
- Working toward institutional condemnation of Israeli policies;
- Supporting Palestinian academic and cultural institutions directly without requiring them to partner with Israeli counterparts.
As the EU and most of its higher education sector continue to shirk their obligations in respect of international law, some universities in Ireland, Belgium and the Netherlands as well as all Spanish and most Norwegian universities have taken concrete steps to distance themselves from Israeli institutions and companies complicit in criminal activity. Meanwhile, eight countries of the Hague Group announced sanctions against Israel in compliance with their obligations to an international legal system that the EU has betrayed.
As we begin another academic year witness to live-streamed genocide, we declare that we will not take part in any collaborations with complicit Israeli institutions of higher education and research, and that we will work to dismantle Europe’s complicity in the destruction of Palestine. We commit to cutting ties with all complicit Israeli institutions, representatives of those institutions and individuals who participate in Israel’s efforts to normalize or ‘rebrand’ its criminality. In line with the PACBI Guidelines for the International Academic Boycott of Israel, we boycott complicity, not identity, and we reject on principle boycotts based on citizenship, race, gender, or religion. At the same time, we commit to promoting new partnerships with Palestinian institutions to combat the systematic isolation of Palestinian education and research.
We declare that we will henceforth abide by the following three principles:
- We will not contribute to any collaborations with complicit Israeli institutions, and we will not publicise, promote, or encourage such collaborations;
- We will not contribute to any exchanges of students and/or staff with complicit Israeli institutions, and we will not publicise, promote, or encourage such exchanges;
- We will not participate in any activities organised by or involving complicit Israeli institutions, and we will not publicise, promote or encourage participation in such activities.
Furthermore, the undersigned are committed to international law and human rights and as such we call on researchers in Europe to collaborate only with principled partners who recognize the rulings of international courts and UN Resolution 194 (III), which enshrines the right of return for Palestinian refugees and their descendants. We will not rest until they are able to go home.
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Sign the European Declaration here ↓
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This statement was written by a collective of researchers in Europe and finalized on September 17, 2025. It is inspired by the Uppsala Declaration of Conscientious Objection. Finalized in Uppsala, Sweden on May 8, 2025, the Declaration was signed by over 2,400 faculty and staff representing every higher education and research institution in the country. A similar declaration has since been signed by 400 academics in Germany, with another to follow soon in Spain.
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Further resources
- Learn more about the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) on the website of the international BDS movement.
- Learn more about EU-funded Horizon Europe research projects linked to Israeli crimes in Palestine since October 2023 in the petition by European Scholars for Human Rights.
- Learn more about academic complicity in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and Sweden.
- Join the Stop Funding Genocide campaign to break the Association Agreement between Israel and the European Union.
- Read the Open Letter co-signed by 209 former EU Member State Ambassadors and Senior Staff calling for immediate implementation of EU measures against Israel’s unlawful actions in Gaza and the West Bank.
- Read the Urgent Appeal by Belgian universities to the leaders of the European Union and the Member States to immediately suspend the Association Agreement between Israel and the European Union.
- Read the petition to end the EU-Israel Agreement by ECCP (Europe), AFP (Ireland), AURDIP (France), BA4P (Belgium), BRICUP (UK), Dutch Scholars for Palestine (Netherlands) and RUXP (Spain), signed by 75 organizations and 4,500+ university staff and students.
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Sign the European Declaration!
Faculty and staff (including PhD students, non-research staff, and emeriti) formally associated with any EU/EEA, Swiss or UK institution of higher education and research are welcome to sign the Declaration. Please sign using your university/institutional email address. If your email address is not accepted below, please contact uppsaladeclaration@protonmail.com.