A slightly edited version appeared in the Algemeiner
While foreign activist groups drive much of the global push to isolate Israeli universities, some of the movement’s legitimacy is supplied from within. A segment of Israeli academics actively supports or collaborates with boycott campaigns either out of genuine conviction that Israel is committing war crimes, or from a calculated belief that distancing the academy from the government will shield it from international sanctions. Both approaches risk backfiring by handing boycott advocates the very moral and political ammunition they need to target Israel’s academic community.
A recent report documented 500 cases of academic boycotts, ranging from restricted access to funding to demands that Israeli scholars condemn their own country before being allowed to participate in conferences.
One of the most high-profile incidents occurred in August 2024, when the International Federation of Medical Student Associations (IFMSA) suspended the Federation of Israel Medical Students (FIMS). over the war in Gaza. According to Federation chairwoman Miri Schwimmer, hostility toward the Israeli delegation had already been on display months earlier at the European District Conference in Malta.
“When we put up the collage of the abductees and spoke about the abduction of the late Carmel Gat, the cousin of medical student Shay Dickman, almost half of the hall left,” Schwimmer recalled. During a panel discussion, a Swedish student “stood on a chair” and accused Israel of “murdering children, raping women, and bombing hospitals.” The comments drew “enthusiastic applause,” even from acquaintances of the Israeli delegation. Organizers refused to let Schwimmer respond. One team member was so distressed by the incident that “he cried and didn’t get out of bed for two days.”
The hostility escalated at the IFMSA international conference in Finland later that month. The IFMSA decided to vote to suspend Israel and before Schwimmer could speak against the suspension, attendees were warned they could leave if they did not want to hear the position of the Israeli representative. Nearly half the room, including most of the executive committee and the federation’s president, walked out. They returned only after her remarks and voted without hearing Israel’s position.
Working with Israel’s Health and Foreign Affairs ministries, allied medical students, and groups such as the World Medical Association and the American Jewish Medical Association, Schwimmer engaged in months of direct talks with IFMSA leadership. In March 2025, the federation overturned its decision.
But the threat is not limited to medicine. In June 2024, the World Society of Sociology suspended the Israeli Association for refusing to condemn Israel’s actions in Gaza. Troublingly, a growing number of Israeli academics וותכנית המלגות student groups have been supporting boycotts of their own universities along with anti-Israel activists. An activist organization called Academy for Equality hosted a webinar with UN Special Rapporteur and anti-Israel ideologue, Francesca Albanese, where an Israeli participant asked whether there were “ ways that Academy for Equality and our students in Israel can strategies with students in Europe who are fighting to cut ties with Israel.”
There are also Israeli academics who sign petitions accusing the state of war crimes, including the deliberate starvation of civilians. For example, more than 100 members of another protest group, Black flag in Academia, signed a letter of support for Social Democratic Party of Germany calling for “immediate political consequences if the Israeli government continues to ignore international law,” accusedIsrael of committing “ethnic cleansing,” and uses “hunger as a weapon of war.” These academics are essentially tokenizing themselves in order to legitimize libelous accusations against their own country and people.
Professor Emmanuel Dalla Torre of Bar-Ilan University, a member of its committee against academic boycotts, sees three main motivations.
Israeli academics who sign these sorts of petitions consist of either those who genuinely believe the allegations, those who fear of being ostracized by their international peers, and those who think that they are actually protecting Israeli academia by trying to distance themselves from the actions of their government.
There’s not much that can be done about the first two groups. The delusionals and the bigots will always be tokenized by ideologues abroad, and the academics who abandon truth for professional acceptance likely won’t change course until global discourse softens. But the academics in the third category are a different story.
Dalla Torre refers to them as taking “a naive approach,” warning that “letters like this simply bring weapons to those who want to boycott the State of Israel. They don’t make the distinction between the academy, the Israeli economy, and the government.” Boycotters do not understand that Israeli professors have no control over the policy decisions of the government. The fact that they don’t renounce their citizenship and call for Israel’s destruction with every breath is beyond the pale for them.
His view is echoed by Professor Alessandra Veronese of the University of Pisa in Italy, who fought her university’s decision to cut ties with Reichman University and the Hebrew University. Veronese insists that such letters and petitions are useless because “these [Italian] professors don’t know anything about Israel… what they think is that in Israel, the entire population is happy about the war.”
Further, Professor Veronese explained that the level of antisemitism in Italian academia as “very very dangerous” and described her university’s animosity as hypocritical. This heavily suggests that all efforts to appease these anti-Israel professors and societies are made in vain.
Israeli academia is clearly under serious threat of isolation. While antisemitism and the war in Gaza are key drivers, internal actions, born of either conviction or strategic calculation are emboldening those who seek to delegitimize and exclude Israel from the global academic community.
And therein lies the irony: the very voices within Israel that believe they are shielding the academy from harm may be among the forces making it more vulnerable. In the hands of boycott advocates, these statements become proof that the academy itself accepts the accusations against Israel, erasing the intended distinction between Israeli scholarship and Israeli policy and helping to justify the case for its isolation.
