Website maps out university ties with Israel

The website academiccomplicity.nl aims to map out the "complicity" of universities in the war against Palestinians. The activists say there is a genocide going on and are calling for a boycott of Israeli institutions.

On the map of the Netherlands, visitors can click on university names. A list then appears of all Israeli (or Israel-affiliated) companies, universities and institutions. 

One of the owners of the website is the pro-Palestinian human rights organisation The Rights Forum, which takes universities to court to gain access to their Israeli and pro-Israeli contacts. The action group Stop Wapenhandel (Stop Arms Trade) and the pro-Palestinian European Legal Support Centre are also participating.

European
The lists include many European-funded research projects which can have military applications. Delft University of Technology, for instance, has joined thirty other parties in a consortium that develops wings for short-distance flights. The project is led by Airbus Defence and Space and an Israeli aerospace company is among the participants. 

However, some of the research projects listed have nothing to do with war, such as one VU Amsterdam is part of. The university is researching non-invasive cancer treatments together with 28 other universities, companies and institutions. Multinational corporation Philips is coordinating the research project and its Israeli branch is also involved. 

At the end of the day, it all results in complicity in genocide, the website's makers assert. They understand that this may raise a few eyebrows, so they state the following: “Some of the companies listed are not obviously complicit in the violation of Palestinian rights, but all of them are part of an economy based in Palestinian dispossession.”

NIAS
Meanwhile, the call for a boycott has been answered in some places. The Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies (NIAS), part of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), has decided that employees may no longer travel to Israel for work. NIAS also boycotts events sponsored by the state of Israel. 

But NIAS isn’t leaving international networks in which the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies (IIAS) participates. On the IIAS website, there’s a clock counting the days, hours and minutes since the attacks by Hamas on 7 October, plus a call to free the hostages: “Bring them home now.” The website doesn’t pay any attention to the Palestinian casualties.

The NIAS policy will be upheld until the situation changes, with one caveat: the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences may decide on a different course that NIAS will have to follow. The government may also get involved. 

Damage
The protests by higher education students are far from over, even though tent camps and occupations are generally cleared out. Last week, the police ended a protest in Nijmegen. Occupiers had ravaged one of the buildings. 

Protests like these cost a lot of money. The damage at Erasmus University Rotterdam amounts to 125,000 euros, Erasmus Magazine reports. Most of the damage concerns graffiti and a partially broken LED screen. The university has pressed charges and is looking into recovering the costs of the damage from the protesters.