The committee found “considerable proof” that Israel “is committing serious violations of human rights, including war crimes, crimes against humanity, and potential acts of genocide”. Because the Hebrew University is directly involved in training Israeli armed forces, the committee finds it indirectly contributed to those crimes, and so the committee’s advice was to end the partnership at an institutional level until the Hebrew University alters course, said Shaw, who is also an associate professor at FHML.
Why did it take so long for advice to be issued? Other universities had already taken decisions about ties to Israeli institutions.
“The difference here is that the Board decided not merely to react to the situation in Gaza, but to create a system that could also be used for other countries. In developing the Human Rights Due Diligence Framework (a framework used to assess sensitive collaborations with UM, ed.), the university wanted to involve the wider UM community, to allow everyone to have a say. The framework subsequently had to be approved by the University Council (which happened in February 2025, ed.). That process took the most time. Our committee was formed in April of this year, and the members have been working on this a day a week since, alongside their normal jobs, and then there was also the summer break. We did it as quickly as we could.”
Why is collaboration still permitted between individual researchers, for example, or within Horizon projects financed by Europe?
“Those don’t fall under the HRDD framework. We assess long-term partnerships between universities, institutions, or departments with strategic aims. We are aware of the concerns regarding academic freedom and want to steer well clear of telling individual researchers who they can and can’t work with. The HRDD pilot, which also looked at collaborations with Sudan and Turkey, will be evaluated at the end of the year. We will also be investigating whether the scope of the framework should be expanded.”
Have you not simply unnecessarily repeated the work of committees at other universities?
“Of course, we knew that other decisions had already been taken and we did read the reports from similar committees elsewhere. But due diligence is not the same as simply copying and pasting work done by others. We wanted to examine the evidence ourselves. Besides, the situation in Gaza is constantly changing and more evidence has come to light since a number of those reports were issued.”
Was the committee unanimous in its findings?
“There was, of course, a discussion about the evidence, how to interpret it and what our advice should look like. In the end, everybody who was involved in finalising the advice agreed that the institutional collaboration with the Hebrew University could not continue in its current form, which was our most important advice. At the request of a minority of the committee, the advice does contain an option to allow the exchange programme to continue in a diminished form: to allow students from there to come here, but not the other way round. My problem with that is that a one-sided exchange isn’t really a proper exchange. The Board has also chosen not to implement that option.”
Are you happy with the outcome?
“No, that is too strong a word for it, although I am glad that the Board has accepted our advice. It is a difficult situation, because the Psychology department in particular seems to be quite active when it comes to protesting the war. The chair is also conducting research into how you can reconcile groups, and they are not actively involved in training armed forces. In that sense, it is a shame that we had to issue the advice to end the exchange programme. But when you assess a strategic partnership, you have to look at the university as a whole.”