Academic boycotts are frequently discussed in the context of Israel, focusing on whether Israeli universities should be isolated, whether collaborating with them implies complicity and where criticism of Israeli policy transitions into discrimination.
However, the implications of such boycotts are broader. When nationality and political affiliation dictate whose research is funded or accepted, academic boycotts shift from being a protest against policy to posing a threat to the fundamental principles of academic life.
That tension was at the center of the conference “Israeli Academia Under Challenge: Academic Freedom, Boycott and Institutional Responsibility,” held at Bar-Ilan University on May 26. Organized by the university’s Senate Committee on Academic Boycott in combination with CAMERA, the conference examined how the anti-Israel academic boycott campaign has intensified since Oct. 7, 2023, and how Israeli researchers are responding.
Supporters of the academic boycott present their cause as a principled response to Israeli policy. Yet the conference showed that this distinction is becoming harder to maintain. As Israeli scholars are excluded from lectures, grants, conferences and collaborations, regardless of their field or views, the boycott’s political justification gives way to a clearer reality: the collective treatment of Israelis is academically suspect.
Boycott advocates often justify academic boycotts by portraying Israeli universities as “militarized,” pointing to cooperation with defense industries and accommodations provided to reservists in the Israeli Defense Forces.
Bar-Ilan University vice rector Arie Reich rejected the idea that accommodations for reservists amount to support for military policy. “We do not grant them accommodations as a reward for their service,” the professor said, “but rather to enable them to study, succeed in their degrees and acquire an excellent education.”
Professor Emanuele Dalla Torre noted that reservists are legally required to serve and that universities also accommodate parents, first responders and Muslim students during religious holidays. She also stated that, while critics portray defense industry cooperation as proof that Israeli academia participates directly in warfare, academic research often produces internationally accepted dual-use technologies.
Several cases show how quickly objections to Israeli policy can give way to exclusion based on affiliation with Israel.
Last September, Bar-Ilan social-sciences dean Galit Nahari was invited to lecture at the University of Salamanca in Spain on forensic psychology and criminology. Two days before her arrival, the university canceled her talks after a student organization circulated her photograph beneath the words “Zionists Out.” No other reason was given.
A smear campaign followed. Spanish media and academics accused Nahari of supporting genocide and claimed that a content analysis tool she developed was intended for the “torture of Palestinians.”
In response, a confidential seminar was arranged. Nahari entered through a back door, and the atmosphere became so threatening that she removed her Star of David necklace. She later filed a hate-crime complaint, but the university’s decision was never overturned.
Scholars are being excluded from lectures, grants and conferences, regardless of their field or views.
The same pattern can be harder to identify when it happens behind closed doors.
In late 2023, Bar-Ilan researcher Hanan Herzig Sheinfux submitted a research proposal to the European Research Council. The proposal passed the first stages and received positive reviews. When he submitted the same text again in 2024, however, it was rejected with several highly negative evaluations and not a single positive assessment.
A senior physicist later told Sheinfux that the physicist had submitted a favorable evaluation, but the committee appeared to ignore it. The research had not changed. The international political climate had.
Reich encountered similar pressure last February at the European University Institute in Florence, where protests prompted an attempt to cancel his lecture on investment screening on security grounds.
He told the university president that canceling a lecture by a Jewish professor and son of an Auschwitz survivor because of his origin constituted “pure antisemitism.” The decision was overturned, but attendance was restricted, and two EUI doctoral students were removed as respondents to avoid “harming their careers.” Apparently, merely interacting with Israeli academics now carries a cost heavy enough to scare institutions into submission.
Academic exclusion does not always arrive with a boycott resolution attached. Sometimes, it is public and explicit. Sometimes, it disappears into peer review, institutional caution or professional self-preservation. Israeli affiliation becomes a liability before scholarship is considered.
This undermines boycott activists’ central claim that they target institutions and policies, not people. As Dalla Torre said, the boycott “makes no distinction between a Jewish and an Arab Israeli, nor between a right-winger and a left-winger.”
One researcher described a paper coauthored with a Muslim doctoral student being rejected by 10 journals as “out of scope” or receiving no answer at all. How much research has never reached publication because anti-Zionist exclusion can be disguised as ordinary academic judgment?
Bar-Ilan has not retreated. Israeli scholars have begun building informal “academic matchmaking” networks to connect themselves with European researchers who still want to collaborate, including academics who fear becoming targets themselves if those relationships become public.
The need for such networks is revealing. International academia is supposed to make collaboration possible across borders and to bridge political disagreements. Israeli researchers are now building parallel channels to preserve that ordinary form of intellectual exchange.
The question facing universities is larger than whether they support or oppose Israel. It is whether political pressure will be allowed to determine who can participate in academic life. If scholars must hide collaborations, enter lectures through back doors or wonder whether their nationality explains a rejection, then the boycott has already moved far beyond criticism of Israeli policy. It has begun changing the rules of academia itself.
