The Silent Boycott

While the world has become increasingly familiar with the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement targeting Israel — from calls to stop buying Israeli products, pressure on companies to cut ties with Israel, or campaigns urging musicians and artists not to perform in the country — another form of boycott is taking place largely out of public view: the academic boycott of Israelis.

Much of the academic boycott happens quietly: an invitation is withdrawn, a name disappears from a conference program, a research collaboration is suspended, a lecture is canceled or an Israeli researcher is excluded from an international project.

There is no reliable way to know how many lectures Israeli academics were never invited to give, how many collaborations never materialized, how many papers or projects were lost, or how many young researchers missed opportunities because their Israeli affiliation became a liability.

But the numbers that can be measured are striking, according to a recent report by the Israeli Association of University Heads, or, Va’ad Rashei HaUniversita’ot, known by its Hebrew acronym, VERA, which monitors academic boycotts against Israel. Its latest report found that the campaign has continued, including a dramatic increase in efforts to exclude Israel from Horizon Europe, the European Union’s flagship research and innovation program.

The impact can also be seen in Israel’s participation in the program. Israeli researchers received 5.4% of Horizon Europe grants in 2022. By 2025, their share had fallen to 2.5%, a decline of more than half. At the same time, VERA reported a 150% increase in efforts to exclude Israel from Horizon Europe, with nearly a quarter of recent academic-boycott reports involving the program.

The numbers tell only part of the story. A grant lost can be counted. A canceled lecture can sometimes be documented. But there is no statistic for the Israeli scientist who stopped applying to a European conference because colleagues warned that Israelis were no longer welcome, or the researcher who never received an invitation in the first place. The most consequential part of the boycott may therefore be the part that never appears in a report.

For Israeli scientists, professors and researchers, the message can be delivered without an official declaration of boycott: their nationality can suddenly become relevant to whether they are invited, published, funded or welcomed into an international academic community. In some cases, the discrimination is explicit. In others, it is hidden behind concerns about protests, institutional policy or “security.” Either way, the result can be professional isolation — not because of the quality of their research, but because they are Israeli.

For Israeli scientists, professors and researchers, the message can be delivered without an official declaration of boycott: their nationality can suddenly become relevant to whether they are invited, published, funded or welcomed into an international academic community.

The academic boycott of Israel did not begin after Hamas’ attack on Israel. Its roots in Europe go back more than two decades. The first major coordinated effort emerged in 2002, when British academics Steven and Hilary Rose published an open letter in The Guardian calling for a moratorium on European cultural and research ties with Israel. They argued that Israel’s access to European Union research funding should be suspended until its government complied with U.N. resolutions and resumed serious peace negotiations. The campaign attracted several hundred signatures and was followed by controversial actions, including the removal of two Israeli academics from the editorial boards of journals at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, prompting an institutional inquiry.

Similar initiatives emerged in France that year, including a proposal at the Pierre and Marie Curie campus of Paris 6 (now part of Sorbonne University) opposing the renewal of the EU-Israel association agreement, though it was withdrawn following strong political and public opposition. Over the following years, boycott efforts were often less visible, with individual academics declining to collaborate with or review the work of Israeli researchers. The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), established in 2004, subsequently developed guidelines calling for boycotts of Israeli academic institutions it viewed as complicit in violations of Palestinian rights. The events of Oct. 7, 2023, and the war that followed, marked a significant escalation, rather than the beginning, of the movement.

Professor Roni Stern, a political scientist at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, encountered this climate firsthand when he was invited to speak at an AI conference in Bologna, Italy. But after a post appeared on social media announcing plans to disrupt the Israeli speaker, the organizers contacted Stern and told him they would need to remove his name from the website to avoid interference.

Stern reluctantly agreed. But the organizers called him again.

“This time they said that after deliberating about the issue they decided not to invite me because they are afraid of disruptions,” Stern said in a phone interview with The Journal.

He contacted the head of the conference and asked whether it was a policy not to invite Israeli speakers. “He said no, but they don’t want the event to be ruined because of one lecturer and asked if I had a solution to the problem,” Stern recalled.

Stern, hurt by the decision, told several senior researchers what had happened. They, in turn, let the organizers know how upset they were about the decision. One of them, a senior Jewish researcher, decided to take a stand. “She said, ‘If you’re not going, I’m not going either,’” Stern recalled.

The pressure apparently worked. The organizers ultimately reversed their decision and agreed to let Stern attend and give his lecture, but with one condition: his participation would not be publicly advertised in advance. His name would not appear on the conference website or in the official program. They agreed to post his lecture online only after it had taken place.

The organizers also took security precautions, including police presence, undercover officers and security dogs.

Stern believes that what happened to him may reflect a broader phenomenon affecting Israeli academics. “I think quite a few Israeli lecturers probably have a story or two similar to mine,” he said, noting that he has already heard similar accounts from several colleagues.

Stern said he can understand, at least from the perspective of the institutions involved, why an Israeli academic might be perceived as a potential problem. If someone is organizing a conference, he said, they may think: Why invite an Israeli and risk protests, disruptions or controversy when there are plenty of qualified researchers from other countries who would not create the same concerns? In that calculation, choosing another scholar may seem like the easier and safer option.

It is precisely this kind of thinking, Stern believes, that could make the consequences of the academic boycott extend beyond individual conferences. Israeli academics routinely leave the country for two or three years of postdoctoral research, and later seek academic positions, visiting appointments and sabbaticals abroad. Stern suspects that these opportunities may already be becoming more difficult for Israelis to obtain.

The result is a form of exclusion that can be difficult to identify without an explicit declaration of a boycott. If institutions simply choose another researcher to avoid potential backlash, the outcome may be the same while leaving no clear evidence that the decision was motivated by the scholar’s Israeli identity.

The pressure on Israeli academics does not stop at invitations, positions or research opportunities. In some cases, even the work itself can come under scrutiny in ways that explicitly invoke the researcher’s Israeli identity. That was the experience of 37-year-old Israeli economist and researcher Rotem Zelingher.

Zelingher’s research on food insecurity and food prices in Gaza and the West Bank became the subject of an ethics complaint at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), one of Austria’s leading research institutions.

Zelingher examined food-price trends in Gaza and the West Bank, including the period before the war. Shortly after the policy brief was published, a group of IIASA researchers filed a complaint with the institute’s ethics committee, questioning Zelingher’s independence and suggesting that her Israeli nationality was relevant to assessing the credibility of her work. The complaint pointed specifically to statements in the paper about Hamas and the misuse of aid, arguing that claims made by an Israeli researcher needed to be scrutinized for possible political bias. It also raised concerns about her funding, the composition of the research team and the sources she cited.

The researchers also raised substantive questions about the methodology and conclusions, including whether the period studied was appropriate and whether some of the paper’s claims were sufficiently supported. But notably, the complaint did not allege that Zelingher’s underlying data or numbers were false.

Following the controversy, the policy brief was removed from IIASA’s website and an ethics investigation was launched. Six months later, the ethics committee concluded that it had found no violation of good scientific practice. It also concluded that Zelingher’s background had not influenced the study design and that treating her Israeli nationality as evidence that she was biased violated principles of academic fairness. The committee did identify a problem with one graphic and said the study had limitations in explaining the broader dimensions of food security in Gaza, but those were presented as scientific limitations, not evidence of ethical misconduct.

Yet the policy brief remains offline.

Zelingher was unable to comment on the case because proceedings related to the IIASA affair are still ongoing, with a federal commission expected to publish its report or decision in the coming weeks. She provided a statement from the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists (IJL), which said the case raises concerns about Israeli nationality being used as a basis for additional scrutiny. IJL stressed that it was not weighing in on the scientific merits of Zelingher’s work. But it said the record suggested that her Israeli identity had been invoked in questioning her independence and the credibility of her research, including a reference to her as an “Israeli Zionist” and suggestions that her conclusions required additional substantiation so they would not be perceived as Israeli government propaganda.

Zelingher’s case comes amid a broader campaign that has continued to intensify since the war began. VERA’s latest report, covering October 2025 through April 2026, recorded more than 1,100 boycott complaints during the period and found a particularly sharp increase in efforts to exclude Israel from Horizon Europe. VERA reported a 150% increase in such efforts.

The pressure is not limited to individual Israeli researchers. Some European academic institutions have moved to restrict or suspend institutional cooperation with Israeli universities. For example, the University of Amsterdam announced in October 2025 that it would not enter new institutional collaborations in education and research with Israeli partners and would explore the possibility of withdrawing from existing Horizon collaborations. The report says efforts to exclude Israeli researchers and professional associations from international academic organizations are continuing, as are moves to sever academic ties at both the individual and institutional levels.

The growing academic boycott campaign has prompted a response from prominent Israeli and Israeli-American scientists in the United States. One scientist who decided to take a stand was Professor Judea Pearl, a UCLA computer scientist and pioneer in artificial intelligence and probabilistic reasoning.

Pearl said his initiative was partly motivated by a report in The Algemeiner about the damaging effect European boycotts have on the careers of young Israeli researchers. “This is what shook me,” he said. “I felt an obligation to do something.”

He then teamed with two colleagues, Professor David Harel, a computer scientist and president of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and Professor Moshe Vardi, a computer science professor at Rice University for the past 33 years. Together, they issued the following statement, which quickly gathered over 65 signatures from members of the American National Academies, including 10 Nobel Laureates:

“In solidarity with our Israeli peers, we declare our unwavering professional and academic alignment with Israel’s scientific community and state our wish to be treated in the exact same manner as all our colleagues residing in Israel – subject to the very same restrictions, institutional barriers and consequences that such discriminatory practices entail.”

Pearl, like many other Academy members, receives dozens of invitations a year from universities and academic institutions in Europe and the United States. Instead of ignoring them or politely declining the invitation, he decided to take the opportunity to make his position clear. He now responds with what he calls a “conditional acceptance”: he is happy to consider the invitation, but only if assured that the institution does not participate in a boycott of Israeli scholars.

Pearl believes the message can be particularly effective. A conference organizer needs to attract prominent scientists to make an event a success. Receiving a response like his, he said, can prompt organizers to start asking questions within their own institutions: Are we involved in a boycott? Does our university have a policy excluding Israeli academics? Who made that decision, and who pushed for it? “Universities that participate in academic boycotts often do so behind the scenes,” he said, “without facing an immediate reputational cost.”

But if prominent academics begin making their participation conditional on the institution’s treatment of Israeli scholars, Pearl believes universities will become more aware that their policies are being watched and that they may lose prestigious speakers and damage their reputations as a result.

“The moment the questions start piling up, they have to ask themselves, ‘Are we involved in a boycott?’” he said. “They know that people are watching.”

Vardi, who has lived in Houston, Texas, for more than 40 years, offered a revealing example of how universities sometimes struggle to deal with the tensions surrounding Israeli academics — with solutions that can at times become almost surreal. In the spring of 2024, during the height of the campus protests, he was awarded an honorary degree in Calabria, southern Italy. A week before his trip, he wrote to the head of the computer science department, warning him that it would take “30 seconds” to discover that he was Israeli and asking him to take that into account. The department head replied simply: “We’ll take care of it.”

When Vardi landed in Calabria, a driver was waiting for him with a sign bearing his name. The driver took his luggage, put it in the car and sped off at nearly 100 miles per hour. Looking behind him, Vardi noticed a flashing blue light.

“A police car is following you,” he warned the driver.

The driver smiled. “It’s not following me,” he replied. “It’s following you.”

Vardi soon discovered that the university had arranged for the Carabinieri, Italy’s national military police force, to accompany him. His hotel room was checked, and security personnel remained nearby while he slept. He said he felt like a rock star.

Vardi said the story illustrates an important distinction: sometimes the issue is not that a university opposes Israeli academics, but that it fears the consequences of inviting one. But in his view, that does not excuse universities from giving in to those pressures and allowing opponents of Israeli academics to determine who can participate in academic life.

Some people, Vardi said, had questioned whether their decision amounted to a “reverse boycott.” He strongly disagrees. He believes it is about taking a stand and showing solidarity with Israeli colleagues.

“If I go to a restaurant with a Black friend and they tell us, ‘We don’t accept Black people here,’ I would say, ‘Then I’m not dining here either,’” Vardi said. “We simply want to show our Israeli colleagues that we stand with them. We want universities to understand that if you boycott Israelis, then Israeli and Israeli-American academics will not collaborate with you either.”

The Change.org Petition ‘Against Academic Boycotts’

Go to https://c.org/dT8bmgqjSS to sign the petition. 

We, the undersigned, Israeli American and Israeli members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS), National Academy of Engineering (NAE), and National Academy of Medicine (NAM), hereby express our profound concern regarding recent attempts by certain European institutions to boycott Israeli scientists. We view academic boycotts, in all their manifestations, as fundamentally antithetical to the essence of scientific exploration, carrying harmful consequences to the global scientific community, to the junior scholars whose careers are derailed, to the boycotting institutions themselves and to society at large. The boycott issue is quite separate from whatever views one has regarding Israel’s government and its actions.

In solidarity with our Israeli peers, we declare our unwavering professional and academic alignment with Israel’s scientific community, and state our wish to be treated in the exact same manner as all our colleagues residing in Israel – subject to the very same restrictions, institutional barriers, and consequences that such discriminatory practices entail.

Accordingly, while we remain committed to constructive engagement with the academic and scientific community worldwide, we will decline invitations from any institution that imposes restrictions, whether implicit or explicit, on Israel’s academic and scientific community.

We invite others to co-sign this statement to show their support.

Israeli American and Israeli members of the US National Academies:

Oded Abramsky, Lia Addadi, Dorit Aharonov, Yakir Aharonov , Michael Aizenman, Joshua Angrist, Robert Aumann, Regina Barzilay, Yoav Benjamini, Judith Berman. Joseph Bernstein, Dan Boneh, Andrei Broder, Howard Cedar, Aaron Ciechanover, Leemore Dafny, Amir Dembo, Hillel Furstenberg, Zvi Galil, Alon Gany, Shimon Glick, Daniel Gold, Shafi Goldwasser, David Harel, Sergiu Hart, Moti Heiblum, Elhanan Helpman, Avram Hershko, Ehud Isacoff, Joshua Jortner, Paul Kantyshev, Anna Karlin, David Kazhdan, Daphne Koller, Roger Kornberg, Joseph Kost, Raphael David Levine, Michael Levitt, Alexander Levitzki, Michal Lipson, David Milstein,  Eviatar Nevo, Abraham Nitzan, Ruth Nussinov, Moshe Oren, Judea Pearl, Dan Peer, Mordechai Regev, Ronitt Rubinfeld, Nathan Seiberg, Amnon Shashua, Shlomo Shamai, Adi Shamir, Dan Shechtman, Moti Segev, Yosef Shiloh, Moshe Shoham, Barry Simon, Rotem Sorek, Moshe Vardi, Daniel Weihs, Benjamin Weiss, Avi Wigderson, Meir Wilchek, Arieh Warshell, Ada Yonath, Moti Yung, Dani Zamir, Ofer Zeitouni