Anti-Israel demonstration supporting the BDS movement, Paris France, June 8, 2024. Photo: Claire Serie / Hans Lucas via Reuters Connect

Advocates of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel have intensified efforts to sever ties between the European Union and Israeli academic institutions, according to a new bombshell report published on Thursday.

Israel’s Association of University Heads (VERA) Task Force to Combat Academic Boycotts said it has documented a surge in “academic BDS” activity across Europe and other Western countries, including the United States, since the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel.

VERA warned that mounting political pressure against Israel’s participation in the European Union’s Horizon Europe research initiative could increasingly influence the continent’s approach to academic cooperation with the Jewish state. The report went so far as to call Brussels’ stance on BDS “closer to establishing itself as an official foreign policy.”

Founded in 2021 as a seven-year EU project, Horizon Europe funds research related to sustainability, climate change, medicine, and emerging technologies. Israel’s participation in the multi-billion-euro initiative has long reflected both the country’s scientific reputation and its integration into major European research networks.

In recent years, however, several member states and activist groups have challenged Israel’s participation in the program, while the share of Horizon funding awarded to Israeli researchers has declined sharply.

According to VERA’s report, which covered the period from October 2025 to April 2026, there has been a 150 percent increase in efforts to exclude Israel from Horizon Europe.

In 2022, Israeli researchers received 5.4 percent of all Horizon grants. By 2025, that figure had fallen
to 2.5 percent — a decline of more than 50 percent.

“Israel’s participation in the ‘Horizon Europe’ association agreements is a strategic objective and
national goal of the State of Israel. For adversaries in this arena, this represents a major vulnerability
for Israel,” the report said.

It seems for this reason anti-Israel activists have specifically targeted the program. Indeed, VERA found that nearly 25 percent of all recent boycott reports were associated with Horizon Europe.

“Participation in the Horizon program provides not only an irreplaceable boost of valuable funding, but also enables Israeli researchers to establish research partnerships, maintain interactions with researchers from European countries and from countries outside Europe, and influence from within the scientific-academic agenda of Europe,” the report explained.

“This is the most prestigious and largest scientific club in the world,” VERA added. “Israel has earned a place within it, and every effort must be made to remain there in order to preserve scientific leadership and maintain our status as the ‘Start-Up Nation.'”

However, the BDS movement and other efforts to weaken Israel’s international standing create “a significant threat to Israel’s continued participation in the existing Horizon agreements,” VERA warned, “and a serious danger to its inclusion in the next Horizon agreements that will be signed during 2027 and implemented in 2028 for the years ahead.”

The report described the BDS movement’s string of victories as posing a “clear and immediate danger” to Israeli scientific and academic interests, while calling for a broader effort to improve public perceptions of Israel and its military operations in the Middle East.

VERA previously documented about 500 incidents of academic boycotts were reported just during the half-year through February 2025, a 66 percent increase compared to the six months following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack.

Since then, the onslaught has continued, although at a slower rate.

“There has been a relatively moderate increase in the number of reports concerning new academic
boycotts of all types, whether at the level of the individual researcher, the academic institution, or
professional associations. This is most likely the result of the fact that anyone who wished to boycott
Israeli researchers and institutions has already acted in this direction over the past two years, and
therefore, there are now fewer new participants in such boycotts,” VERA found.

“At the same time, there has been no decline in the scope or quantity of the existing boycotts. The
meaning is that the broad academic boycott trend continues, and there is clearly a pattern of
gradual strengthening,” the report added.

The initiatives included efforts to exclude Israeli academics from conferences, research collaborations, publications, and other forms of scholarly exchange.

In May 2024, for example, Ghent University in Belgium banned partnerships with Israeli universities altogether.

The exact number of academic boycotts remains unclear. According to the Israeli news outlet Ynet, which first reported on VERA’s latest findings, 1,120 boycott complaints were recorded during the period examined in the report. However, Daniel Chamovitz — president of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, a member of VERA — wrote that nearly 1,000 academic boycotts against Israeli universities have been recorded since the Oct. 7 attack, and a quarter of them came last summer.

“Academic boycotts do not pressure governments,” he posted on LinkedIn. “They isolate scientists. They sever the collaborations that science depends on, and they send a message to a generation of young researchers that their work is unwelcome. Not because of its quality, but because of their passport. That is not a political position. It is a betrayal of what science is for.”

The VERA report argued that the rise in academic boycott campaigns reflected a broader surge in antisemitism and anti-Zionist activism across Europe following the Oct. 7 attacks and the ensuing war in Gaza.

As previously reported by The Algemeiner, an overwhelming majority of 2,030 EU teachers surveyed in a study released in January said antisemitic incidents occur daily in classrooms and workplaces. Seventy-eight percent “encountered at least one antisemitic incident between students,” and 27 percent “witnessed nine or more such incidents.” Another 61 percent saw students promoting Holocaust denialism, while others reported students drawing or wearing Nazi symbols. Forty-two percent said they had witnessed “other teachers being antisemitic.”

Amid the academic boycott campaign, Europe has seen a relentless wave of antisemitic incidents on campuses across the continent.

At the University of Strasbourg, a group of Jewish students was assaulted by an individual shouting “Zionist fascists,” while the University of Vienna hosted an “Intifada Camp,” a pro-Hamas encampment.

At the Free University of Brussels campus in Solbosch, a pro-Hamas group illegally occupied an administrative building and renamed it after a terrorist. Elsewhere, anti-Zionist demonstrators damaged property to the tune of hundreds of thousands of Euros, desecrated Jewish religious symbols, graffitied Jewish students’ dormitories with swastikas, and assaulted Jewish student leaders.

Antisemitic violence in the streets of Europe’s major cities is perpetrated regularly, too. In July 2025, a group wielding knives attacked Jews walking home from an event on the Greek island of Rhodes. In Davos, Switzerland, a man spat on, attacked, and verbally abused a Jewish couple — behavior he reportedly repeated multiple times against other Jewish individuals.

Jewish communities across the West continue to face similar threats and require stronger governmental protections for their civil and human rights, the Special Envoys and Coordinators Combatting Antisemitism (SECCA) group proclaimed on Tuesday after convening in Geneva.

“Antisemitism is a threat to Jews — and that alone would be reason enough to fight it,” the group said.

“But it also erodes the very foundations of democratic societies: human rights, dignity, equality, and the rule of law. A society in which Jews cannot live openly and safely is one in which fundamental rights are under threat for everyone.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.