Israel’s Universities Are Slipping to the Margins. It’s Time to Reach Back

A boycott rarely announces itself. It does not arrive as a headline or a formal decree. It arrives as an email that never comes, the collaboration invitation that used to be routine and now quietly goes to someone else. It arrives as a grant proposal that scores just below the line, again. It arrives as a colleague in Amsterdam or Oslo who still answers your calls warmly in private but no longer wants their name next to yours on a consortium application. This is what our researchers are living through right now, and the numbers have finally caught up with what they have felt for two years.

The scale is no longer anecdotal. Israeli participation in the European Union’s flagship research programme, Horizon Europe, halved in a single year — from roughly €209 million in 2024 to about €106 million in 2025. Grants from the European Research Council, long a point of national pride, collapsed from a high of 116 in 2023 to 59 in 2025, with the number of Israeli-led ERC projects falling from 118 in 2022 to just 42. In 2025, approval rates for Horizon projects that included even a single Israeli partner dropped by more than 68 percent compared with previous years. This is not a rounding error. It is a structural disconnection.

The silent boycott is real, and it compounds

Officials will tell you the causes are complicated, and they are right. An ERC spokesperson has suggested Israeli proposals were simply weaker last year. Reservists were pulled from their labs. Flights were disrupted, making it harder to build the international consortia that EU funding rewards. The United Kingdom and Switzerland rejoined the programme, sharpening the competition. All true. But a Professor from the Weizmann Institute, who sits on ERC review committees, has said plainly what many suspect: this is a silent boycott, confirmed in quiet conversations with colleagues abroad. Whatever the exact mix of causes, the effect is the same, and it feeds on itself.

The danger of the silent boycott is precisely that it needs no policy to spread. It is not primarily driven by university senates passing resolutions, though those are multiplying too,  institutions in Norway, Belgium, Spain and the Netherlands have severed or frozen ties, and TU Eindhoven suspended cooperation with the Technion in 2025. The deeper damage is subtler. A research group that would gladly have worked with an Israeli lab now hesitates, not out of conviction but out of caution: why risk a partnership that a reviewer might penalise, that might complicate their own next grant? The rational, self-protective choice of each individual group, multiplied thousands of times, becomes a wall. And walls, once built, are far harder to take down than they were to raise.

What we stand to lose is not small

It is worth stating clearly what is being cut off, because the world is at risk of forgetting it. Israel spends more on research and development as a share of its economy than any other country, around 4.4 percent of GDP. A nation of roughly nine million people has produced a remarkable run of Nobel laureates, most of them in chemistry. Our universities are the engine rooms of the “Start-up Nation”: the place where quantum research, medical breakthroughs, agricultural science and computing advances are born before they ever reach a company. When the world isolates Israeli academia, it is not punishing an abstraction. It is starving itself of discoveries it would otherwise have shared.

That argument matters, but we should be honest with ourselves: being right has never been enough. The merit of Israeli science is not in dispute among those who know it. The problem is reach, the growing number of people who make decisions about collaboration and funding and who no longer encounter that science or encounter it only through the distorting lens of a boycott campaign that is well organised, digitally fluent and relentless.

A complex problem that still comes down to people…

Let me not pretend the solution is simple, because it is not. Reversing this trend requires action on many fronts at once. It requires the government and the Council for Higher Education to defend Israel’s standing in Horizon Europe at the diplomatic level. It requires legal pushback where boycotts breach the rules of programs that are meant to be merit-based. It requires funding bridges so that a lab starved of European money is not simply lost. It requires our universities to keep producing work so undeniable that ignoring it carries a cost. This is a campaign measured in years, fought by many hands.

But strip away the institutional language and every one of those fronts terminates in the same place: a person. A programme officer deciding how to read the rules. A department chair deciding whether to sign a joint application. A principal investigator deciding whether to answer the email. A journal editor, a conference organiser, a foundation director. Systems do not collaborate; people do. And people can be reached, informed, and persuaded if we are deliberate about how we do it. This is the part of the problem I have spent my career inside, and it is the part where I believe Israeli academia is leaving its greatest opportunity untouched.

Two decades of reaching decision-makers — and what works…

For over 20 years, I have built systems whose entire purpose is to create access to global figures and decision-makers, the people who are hard to reach precisely because everyone wants to reach them. Over that time, the channels that work have changed completely. The cold call is dead. The unsolicited email is filtered before it is read. What replaced them, and what has proven far more effective in the past decade, is social media, and for professional, credibility-driven outreach, LinkedIn above all.

I do not say this as a matter of fashion. I say it because I have watched it happen, again and again. I have seen hundreds of initiatives, partnerships, research collaborations, funding relationships, entire ventures begin with a single well-placed connection on a professional network, between two people who would otherwise never have crossed paths. The mechanism is not mysterious. LinkedIn connections are built on professional relevance, so the person on the other end already understands your field. A substantive post can travel from your desk to the exact reviewer, editor or PI you needed to reach, carried there by people who found it worth passing along. Research shared openly online attracts citations, requests and, crucially, new collaborators. This is documented, not merely hoped for.

For Israeli academia, this is the lever that is currently underused. The boycott’s power lies in the Israeli researcher who becomes invisible, whose work is no longer in front of the people who decide. The antidote to invisibility is not indignation. It is presence: showing up, consistently and professionally, in the feeds and networks where our would-be collaborators already spend their working attention. Every Israeli lab that goes quiet online cedes that ground to a boycott campaign that never goes quiet.

Why the age of AI changes the equation

If professional social media was the breakthrough of the last decade, artificial intelligence is the multiplier of this one. The old limitation of outreach was always precision at scale: you could reach many people generically, or a few people well, but rarely both. That constraint is dissolving. It is now possible to identify, with real accuracy, exactly which research groups work on adjacent problems, which decision-makers sit at the relevant funding bodies, which individuals are most likely to be receptive and to engage each of them with a message that is genuinely relevant to their work rather than a mass broadcast.

This is not about automation for its own sake, and it is certainly not about spam, which would do our cause active harm. It is about doing well, at scale, what a gifted relationship-builder does one conversation at a time: understanding who someone is, what they care about, and why a connection with an Israeli researcher would be valuable to them specifically. Used with care, these tools let a single research communications office punch far above its weight mapping the global landscape of potential collaborators and reaching them with a precision that simply was not available even a few years ago.

What Israeli university leaders should do now

So, I want to make this concrete, because op-eds that end in sentiment change nothing. The leaders of our universities – presidents, rectors, deans, heads of research authorities – hold levers here that they are not yet pulling, and the cost of pulling them is small relative to almost everything else on the table.

Treat visibility as infrastructure, not vanity. A university’s presence in the professional networks where science is discussed is now as much a part of its research infrastructure as its libraries and its labs. It deserves budget, staff and strategy, not an intern and an afterthought.

Equip your researchers, don’t just exhort them. Most brilliant scientists are not natural self-promoters, and they should not have to be. Give them the support training, communications help, and modern tools — to keep their work visible to the right international audience without stealing time from the work itself.

Target decision-makers deliberately. Map the specific people whose choices matter to your institution: funders, collaborators, editors, conference chairs and build genuine, sustained professional relationships with them. This is a discipline, and it can be resourced like one.

Make the case to individuals, not just to institutions. Institutional boycotts are hard to reverse from the top. But the individual researcher who quietly decides your lab is worth working with, boycott or no boycott, is reachable and every such decision chips at the wall.

Presence is a choice we can still make

The picture is genuinely difficult, and I will not insult anyone’s intelligence by suggesting a network strategy alone will undo a geopolitical predicament. It will not. The diplomatic, legal and financial fronts all matter, and they demand people far above my pay grade. But of all the fronts in this fight, the one closest to hand the one our universities can act on this quarter, with resources they already have is the human one: getting our science and our scientists back in front of the people who decide.

Boycotts feed on silence and distance. They work by making Israeli researchers fade from view until working with them feels like an anomaly rather than an obvious good. The most powerful thing we can do in response is to refuse to disappear to make the case for the extraordinary work being done in this country directly to the individuals with the power to engage with it, patiently and person by person, until enough of them remember what they already know: that Israeli science is worth being connected to. The tools to do this have never been better. What remains is the decision to use them.