A demonstration of the group Europe Palestine to demand the boycott of Israel, in Paris, France on May 15, 2022. Photo: Xose Bouzas / Hans Lucas via Reuters Connect

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 support or collaborate with boycott campaigns — either out of genuine conviction that Israel is committing crimes in Gaza, 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.

The hostility escalated at the IFMSA international conference in Finland, when the IFMSA decided to vote to suspend Israel. Before Schwimmer could speak against the suspension, attendees were warned that 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 participated 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 and 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 strategize with students in Europe who are fighting to cut ties with Israel.”

There are also Israeli academics who sign petitions accusing the Jewish State of war crimes, including the deliberate starvation of civilians.

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.

Dalla Torre refers to the academics in the third category 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.”

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 actors, 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, their statements against the Jewish State 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.

Shahar Grufy is a member of CAMERA’s Israel office.