Since its establishment, Tel-Aviv University (TAU) has functioned as an arm of Israel’s settler colonial project. It provides the Israeli Occupying Force (IOF) with a recruitment base through its student body, works in close tandem with Israeli military companies, and even provides key research and infrastructure for the Israeli military. More insidiously, by forming partnerships with British universities such as the University of Manchester (UoM), TAU seeks to normalise Israeli colonialism and advance its ability to provide the intellectual innovations for the continued occupation of the Palestinian people and land. By collaborating with TAU, our academic institutions contribute to Israel’s war crimes. Now, as UoM prepares to renew its partnership with TAU, calls for divestment must continue growing louder until UoM and all other British universities cut their ties with TAU.
TAU’s role in Israeli colonialism
Underneath TAU’s foundations lie the ruins of the ethnically cleansed and demolished Palestinian village of Sheikh Mwannis, where at least 2,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced from their village during the Nakba. The homes stolen during this displacement include the green house of Abu Kheel Ibrahim, a leading figure of Sheikh Mwannis before its ethnic cleansing. Abandoned after the ethnic cleansing of Sheikh Mwannis, Abu Kheel’s house was ‘reconstructed’ into an ‘Oriental-style’ room that has ruined its character. It now functions as TAU’s faculty room under the name Marcel Gordon.
More recently, TAU has continued to facilitate the theft of even more Palestinian land through illegal excavations across East Jerusalem and the West Bank by the archaeology department. Both TAU and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJ) take part in digs at Ir David, an area within the occupied Palestinian village of Silwan. A dig in this area caused structural damage to 38 Palestinian houses, an occurrence which was used as an excuse to displace residents of these houses. Ir David is managed by the settler organisation Elad, with which both TAU and Hebrew University of Jerusalem have collaborated on joint courses, excavations and research.
Recruits and training for the Israeli military come from numerous programs in TAU. The Erez program transforms TAU into a de-facto military base, training active duty soldiers who stroll around campus in full uniform, carrying weapons. The Galim Msc program allows the IOF’s Intelligence Unit to train TAU’s electrical engineering students to become part of the technological units in the Israeli army and security forces. The Psagot program, a 4-year combined bachelor’s degree in electronic engineering and physics, is an IOF funded program that students complete before recruitment. The Arazim program places outstanding technology and mathematics research students into the army’s intelligence and cyber defense divisions. All these programs work to form a student-combatant pipeline, funnelling TAU’s students into the Israeli military immediately after graduation.
The close partnership that TAU has with Israeli weapon manufacturers makes it an integral part of Israel’s security apparatus and military-industrial complex. The three biggest weapon companies in Israel, Elbit Systems, Rafael and Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) have access to TAU’s centre for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology. Elbit in particular has full access to TAU’s innovation labs and TAU’s Bio Inspired robotics lab. TAU’s venture capital fund, TAU ventures, has the company Xtend on its portfolio; a startup whose drones essentially acted as frontline soldiers during the genocide in Gaza.
As Israel wiped out entire generations of Palestinians in Gaza after October 7 2023, TAU continued to offer military support by setting up an ‘engineering war room’ to facilitate the genocide. It developed a system to live stream footage from cameras mounted on military dogs. These dogs are linked to fatal attacks such as the one on Muhammed Bhar, a Palestinian with Down syndrome who Israeli military dogs mauled to death during a raid on his house.
These partnerships follow a long history of TAU’s status as a hub for military intelligence and innovation. TAU’s Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African studies (MDC), for example, was originally envisioned by Reuven Shiloah, the first director of Israel’s foreign intelligence service, Mossad. Founded in close collaboration with the Israeli state’s intelligence apparatus, it continues to support and justify Israeli policy, particularly the treatment and occupation of Palestinians. This includes guiding Israeli policy during the second Intifada, and more recently, publishing recommendations on how Israel can “manage” its illegal occupation.1
TAU’s Ties with British Universities
TAU’s ties to the Israeli military show there is no distinction between civilian and military institutions in the case of Israel. ‘Civilian’ institutions such as TAU are a part of the Israeli military and thus actively contribute to Israel’s war crimes. This makes their partners, such as UoM, accessories to Israel’s crimes.
Each year, UoM partners with TAU on up to eight projects, where both Universities fund a lead researcher to collaborate. Between 2021, the year of the Unity Intifada against ethnic cleansings in Sheikh Jarrah, and 2023, the year that the genocide in Gaza began, UoM continued to renew applications for these projects. Despite the atrocities committed by Israel in the last year and a half, it intends to re-open applications in March 2025.
For over 70 weeks of campaigning, we, the staff and students of the university, have seen our calls for divestment fall on deaf ears as UoM cites ‘academic neutrality.’ Yet there is no ‘neutrality’ in collaborating with TAU. The research produced by the university often goes directly to the IOF and is used by the military to strengthen and protect the occupation. This makes any collaboration with TAU a direct attack on Palestinians.
Moreover, TAU’s international ties are more than mere collaborations. They exist specifically to normalise Israeli colonialism and export the Zionist ideology behind it. This is why, for example, TAU’s 2009 Special Lecture Series at SOAS (heavily criticised by a student union motion) attempted to whitewash TAU’s colonial history and present. It is also why the sponsored researcher mobility scheme that supports UK-based researchers to travel to Israel and work with Israeli partners is part of the 2030 UK-Israel Bilateral Roadmap. This roadmap opposes the use of the word ‘Apartheid’ in relation to Israel, seeks to tackle the “singling out” of Israel by the Human Rights Council, UN and other international bodies, and encourages the adoption of the IHRA definition of antisemitism, in which criticism of Israel may be considered antisemitic. This mobility scheme has funded new research partnerships between University College London (UCL) and TAU. Through these partnerships and events, TAU seeks to rewrite history by opposing the reality of Israel as an occupying state.
Enormous effort is thus put into building bridges between British and Israeli universities, sometimes facilitated by Zionist groups such as Scottish Friends of Israel, who are set up specifically to do so. Scottish Friends of Israel, who in the past have attempted to legitimise the murder of Palestinian civilians during the Great March of Return, exists primarily to strengthen academic ties between Tel Aviv University and the University of Glasgow. Each year, they hold an annual fundraising recital and lunch with the participation of students from TAU’s Buchmann-Mehta School of Music. The annual event has been very successful in promoting fundraising for Tel Aviv University. They have also facilitated the election of leading heart disease expert Prof. Anna Dominiczak of the University of Glasgow to TAU’s prestigious Sackler Fellows Program.
These are just a few, overt examples of how TAU seeks to normalise the colonisation and ethnic cleansing that underpins and sustains not only itself, but the Israeli state. Covertly, TAU seeks to position themselves as key players in Britain’s technological and medical advancement by participating in academic research projects such as the human brain project, which operated for 10 years between 2013 and 2023, costing over 607 million Euros. The 2020 UKSPINE-Oxford-TAU translational medicine symposium is another example of this. Such projects not only foster UK-Israeli partnerships, but also create an intellectual relationship and a vested interest in the promotion of TAU’s ventures, thus providing even more incentive for Britain to continue covering for Israel’s war crimes. TAU’s partnerships with British universities do not exist only as passive albeit problematic links. As soon as these partnerships form, they become yet another tool that Israel uses to legitimise occupation and war crimes to the global community.
Cutting Ties
Calling for a boycott on Tel-Aviv-University is not an exercise in futility. Ending this partnership would mean we succeed in breaking another carefully crafted pillar that sustains Israel’s colonial narrative, its brutal military complex and its oppression of Palestinians. This will only be possible with long term, accelerated efforts and mobilisation on all fronts. Sooner or later, universities such as UoM will be faced with only two choices: cut ties or suffer reputational damage they cannot afford. It is our job to force that dilemma as soon as possible.
Notes
- Details on the output of the MDC, including during the second Intifada and “managing” the occupation, can be found in Towers of Ivory and Steel by Maya Wind. ↩︎
As a retired member of the University and College Union in the UK, I hope that current staff and students also pursue a parallel strategy of building relationships with Palestinian universities (or, sadly, what’s left of them). We tried doing this about 20 years ago but were faced with legal action from Alan Dershowitz (yes, that one). He was then at the height of his power, before his sleazy private life did for him. He was planning to use Thatcher-era legislation that would have bankrupted the UCU had we lost, so – sadly – we pulled back. High time to restart.
The ties between the University of Manchester and Tel Aviv University are threads in the fabric masking and enabling the Jewish supremacist crimes.
Certainly there must be some researchers at UoM who can discover this. But to whom will UoM administrators listen? Their own researchers of Zionist money?
TAU’s prestigious Sackler Fellows Program — is this the same Sackler family who produced, and sold (and sold and sold) Oxycontin? and who ought to be in prison?
Shlomo Sand, author of The Invention of the Jewish People inter alia, taught history at Tel Aviv University. At the end of one of his books he describes the Arab village on whose lands TAU is built. The faculty club was the home of the village’s richest man, who was also the last one to flee in 1948, because he trusted his Jewish “friends.”
I once wrote to him to ask how it would be received if he began his lectures with a Canadian-style land acknowledgement. “Not well,” he replied.