A little over a year after the outbreak of the Israel-Gaza conflict, an official in the European Commission’s research agency was sent a letter from a legal firm in Brussels.
Specialists in European law and with offices a short distance from the Palais de Justice, the firm, Kesher, was representing Tel Aviv University and the Weizmann Institute of Science, two of Israel’s leading academic institutions.
“There are no grounds to exclude Israeli research institutions on the basis of the ethics of the specific action being funded or… human rights principles,” Kesher founder Yohan Benizri wrote on 12 November 2024.
The 14-page letter, shared with Investigate Europe, was a riposte to Ghent University’s attempts to exclude the pair from Horizon Europe, the bloc’s €95bn research programme.
Ghent has fought for years to exit Horizon projects with “problematic Israeli partners” over perceived links to the state, its army or security services. In May 2024, the Belgian university’s Committee on Human Rights Policy and Dual-Use Research advised the institution to terminate all such partnerships due to the “escalation of the war and the scale of human rights violations in Gaza”.
