In recent weeks, we have once again seen increased public interest in how Flemish universities are dealing with the situation in Gaza. Israel has now also launched an offensive in Iran, but the dramatic situation of the Palestinians continues. In the below interview, Rector Herwig Leirs clarifies the position of the University of Antwerp and explains, amongst other things, why it is almost impossible to stop collaborating on international research projects in which Israeli partners are involved.
A new petition is currently making the rounds at UAntwerp. What’s your take on this?
I very much understand it and share the anger and sense of powerlessness many people are feeling. What Israel is doing in the Palestinian Territories is appalling, inhumane, disproportionate and in no way justifiable, not even by Hamas’ atrocities. Sometimes there’s debate about the legal scope of the term genocide, but the war crimes we see happening in Gaza speak volumes: massive destruction of homes, schools and hospitals, tens of thousands of direct and even more indirect civilian deaths, famine, blocked aid and Israeli government members explicitly saying that the intention is to remove the Palestinians from their territory. Meanwhile, Israel is illegally expanding colonies in the West Bank and carrying out attacks in other countries. We can only strongly condemn all of this and demand that it stops.
We can only strongly condemn all of this and demand that it stops
That’s a statement we haven’t heard from the University of Antwerp before?
I’ve always expressed my personal views on Israel’s appalling violations of human rights and international law.
For the university, things are different. As an institution, we must be cautious about taking a stand; we must first and foremost provide ample space for our community members to express themselves and ensure that researchers can share their scientific findings even if they’re critical of societal developments or the university administration. This way, the university remains a bastion of criticism. University leaders do need to be able to speak out when it comes to matters that concern the university itself or matters that seriously undermine the principles on which the university was built, such as rationality, freedom, equality and human rights. In this case, both apply.
Doesn’t this mean the university should take more action?
As a university, we do what’s within our power. We coordinate our efforts as much as possible and work closely with the other Flemish universities. At UAntwerp, we reserve a number of scholarships for Palestinian students or researchers, and facilitate initiatives. We enable students and staff to speak out and, however difficult, we try to counter polarisation and provide a safe space for those with close ties to family and friends in Palestine or Israel. We’ve made online courses available for distance learning. Within VLIRUOS, we added Palestine as a partner country with its own budget allowing five research projects with Palestinian universities to start in September, and an additional budget was freed up for an ICP Connect scholarship for six Palestinian candidates. I understand that many students and colleagues feel this doesn’t go far enough, but our options are limited.
A continuous demand is the cutting of all ties with Israeli institutions.
In 2024, we stopped the bilateral, institutional collaborations and exchange projects – there weren’t that many left by then. We also reviewed our investment portfolio and adjusted the criteria to exclude investments in companies in Israel.
But no academic boycott?
No, as a matter of principle we don’t support a general academic boycott. Even in Israel, there are universities that provide space for academic freedom and critical voices, even if they’re not mainstream and are often under pressure. Moreover, international academic contacts ensure that even those who go along with Israel’s occupation policy and the war in Gaza are given the opportunity to look beyond their own bubble, as they’re confronted with foreign media coverage and the critical reflections of foreign colleagues. Besides, the effectiveness of an academic boycott to put pressure on the Israeli government is questionable.
So that’s why we’re not cutting all of our ties with students and researchers. Collaborations with individual academics remain possible, as long as they don’t violate human rights or international law. Examples include exchanging ideas, writing papers together, being part of PhD assessment panels and giving guest lectures.
What does this mean for research projects with Israeli institutes?
Things are different when it comes to collaboration with organisations that actively contribute to human rights violations. To determine whether a collaboration project is ethically acceptable, Flemish universities use the human rights test developed by the Flemish Interuniversity Council.
At UAntwerp, our Ethics Committee for Misuse, Human Rights & Security (MiHRS) makes an ethical assessment. This is a difficult task, because due to the intertwining of the military with the whole of Israeli society, all universities in Israel have ties to the military. This means there’s always a risk that a university is contributing to violations of the law, but it isn’t necessarily the case. Our MiHRS committee factors in this risk very heavily in its assessment, even if the projects themselves have a purely civilian or even humanitarian purpose, or if the researchers involved are completely disconnected from what’s happening in the Palestinian territories, or even oppose the current Israeli government.
What does UAntwerp do in case of a negative assessment?
If it’s a new project, it’s not going ahead. For ongoing projects, we first give the supervisor a chance to provide any additional information. If the final assessment is still negative, we try to stop the collaboration. In bilateral projects this is easy, but we no longer have those. In European consortium projects with many partners, things are slightly different. It’s easy for people to say that we should just drop out of the project, but that’s backwards reasoning. If an Israeli partner is actually violating human rights, it’s that partner that should be kicked out of the project, not UAntwerp that should quit. But it doesn’t seem to work that way in these European projects.
If an Israeli partner is actually violating human rights, it’s that partner that should be kicked out of the project, not UAntwerp
Why is that?
A European project always involves several partners, sometimes even more than a hundred. So in such a project, UAntwerp is one of those partners, and at least one of the other partners is an institution in Israel. In practice, of course, it concerns a collaboration between individual researchers. Sometimes the Antwerp and Israeli researchers have known each other for years and work closely together, in other projects they’re working on completely different aspects of a large project and never have any contact in practice.
All partners sign a Project Agreement with the European Commission (EC) defining the final products or results to be delivered by the consortium, and a Consortium Agreement in which the partners agree how they’ll collaborate amongst themselves. A default stipulation in these agreements is that partners must abide by human rights.
So what’s so difficult about cutting ties with the partner?
When we think that a project isn’t ethical because of the presence of a certain Israeli partner institution, we have to report this to everyone in the consortium. If they agree with us, the consortium can then decide to remove that one partner from the project. After all, it’s that partner that has broken the agreement by not (or no longer) complying with the human rights clause. So far, however, it appears that most international project partners are reluctant to exclude an Israeli partner. The willingness to factor the situation in Gaza into the continuation of a research project appears to be much smaller in a lot of European countries than it is in ours.
The EC also tends to block this procedure, unless there’s very clear evidence that the project itself is actively contributing to human rights violations. We wrote letters on behalf of Belgian universities to the previous and current EU Commissioner responsible for Research, asking whether institutes in Israel could still participate in projects given their possible involvement in human rights violations, and how to assess this matter. In both cases, the response from the EC was that the Horizon projects are only civilian in nature and that if they’re not taking place in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, there’s no reason to stop them. We also urged Flemish MEPs to ask the same question during the appointment debates in the European Parliament; they did, and received a similar answer.
To other rectors, we have sent the legal letter drafted by some UAntwerp colleagues arguing that universities are legally obliged to do everything in their power to make violations of international law stop. The Flemish Interuniversity Council has commissioned a task force to investigate whether the exclusion of Israeli universities could be enforced before the European Court of Justice. Both the council’s own lawyers and lawyers from a specialised international firm considered the chances of success very low, so that course of action was abandoned.
If we can’t cut ties with the partner in the project, wouldn’t it make sense to leave ourselves?
You’d think so, but we can’t just do that either. While some universities have announced that they’re dropping out of projects, they haven’t yet managed to actually do so. The same applies, by the way, to universities in Ireland and Spain, for instance.
Terminating contracts with the European Commission and the other partners is a difficult legal process. Moreover, there are many partners involved and if UAntwerp drops out, the project itself will continue, with the Israeli partner still onboard. So you’re not actually sanctioning that Israeli partner. On the contrary, the project budget may be redistributed and that partner may then get a piece of the budget that was originally supposed to go to UAntwerp.
There are many partners involved and if UAntwerp drops out, the project itself will continue, with the Israeli partner still onboard
And while that university in Israel isn’t harmed by our leaving, it does have consequences for us. By dropping out of the project, you’re of course no longer entitled to the project budget. For the parts you haven’t completed, you’ll have to repay the advances received, even if you’ve already incurred expenses or hired employees, whose salaries you will suddenly no longer be able to pay.
Depending on the project, there’s also a chance that other project partners will run into problems because they were supposed to continue working on the project using data or results that should have been delivered by UAntwerp. If they don’t get those, they can’t perform their tasks and so they too risk not being reimbursed by the EC for the costs they’ve already incurred. They may then try to recover the damages from UAntwerp.
Leaving also means that our researchers can’t continue their collaboration with all the other, non-Israeli partners in the project. These may be great colleagues they’ve been in close contact with for years. In other words, we’d be causing problems for our own researchers and their young project staff, without them having done anything wrong themselves. It’d be irresponsible for us, as a university administration, not to take this into account, especially when you know that what you’re doing doesn’t actually put any pressure on the Israeli partner university, let alone on the Israeli government.
So are there no other ways to put pressure on Israeli universities?
We think there are. In a joint letter, the Flemish and French-speaking rectors urged the Belgian Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs to cancel the EU-Israel Association Agreement. The letter was also published as an opinion piece in national newspaper De Morgen and received a lot of media attention. This may have contributed to the Belgian government’s stance in the discussions within the European Council, which eventually led to the decision to scrutinise the Association Agreement.
In itself, the agreement is a broad treaty on all kinds of – especially economic – collaboration. So cancelling it will have broad consequences in several areas, putting great pressure on the Israeli government to comply with human rights and international law, a condition it’s now clearly violating. It would show that the fundamental importance the EU attaches to this aspect also has real consequences.
For the universities, concrete consequence may be that Israel can no longer participate in the European Horizon programme for the time being. This would be unfortunate because we attach great importance to international collaboration, even with colleagues in countries with governments we view in a negative light here, but if this collaboration takes place within a framework of agreements on human rights and international law, we believe that these should be adhered to.
It's worth noting that not all European countries are on the same page, nor do all European universities think the same way. In fact, a good week after our open letter, the chair of the German rectors’ conference explicitly called for not cancelling the Association Agreement. So a lot of further discussion will be needed.
The chair of the German rectors’ conference explicitly called for not cancelling the Association Agreement
How do you see this developing from hereon in?
I’m especially pessimistic and increasingly outraged about the fate of Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank and Israel. With Netanyahu expanding the war, I’m also pessimistic about the fate of everyone in the Middle East.
As for the role universities can play in putting pressure on Israel, I don’t see many new possibilities. Only economic pressure and stopping arms supplies will do any good. One thing we are seeing is that there are far fewer new projects starting that involve Israeli partners across Europe.
As a university, we will have to be ready to help rebuild the teaching and research infrastructure and open our doors wide to students and researchers from the destroyed war zones. Meanwhile, I hope that we at UAntwerp can continue debating this issue while respecting each other’s opinions, however difficult that may be at times.
Now more than ever, the university is committed to creating a safe environment where we can exchange opinions with mutual respect. This is a shared responsibility. Are you confronted with racism, antisemitism, or any other form of transgressive behavior? Or are you in need of psychological support? Find out here who you can turn to. Any form of transgressive behavior has no place at our university and will not be tolerated.