At this point, it’s an open secret that U of T has financial and institutional ties to Israel.  

Israel is a settler-state that has been committing genocide in Gaza for over two years, while continuing to enforce its illegal occupation and apartheid oppression of Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank. To resist this oppression, Palestinians have called on the world to support the movement for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) on Israel. 

U of T does not have a policy that prohibits its endowment from being invested in weapons companies, whose products have been used in Gaza to bomb universities and murder thousands of students. Additionally, U of T continues to partner with Israeli universities and institutions deeply complicit in colonial violence and human rights violations. 

Beyond investments, U of T has extensive ties and partnerships to Israeli institutions and universities, including Tel Aviv University, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, and, worst of all, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, otherwise known as HUJI. 

I believe that cutting U of T’s institutional ties to Israeli universities is key to pressuring Israel to comply with international law. Israeli security leaders are on record stating that an academic boycott of Israeli universities is a threat of the highest order. So much so that universities like HUJI outline specific propaganda strategies against academic boycotts. 

HUJI’s complicity

Israeli universities are key to the Israeli settler colonial project and military structure. Founded in 1918, before the state of Israel was even established, HUJI has a long history of supporting Israel’s settler colonial project. HUJI’s main campus, Mount Scopus, is located in East Jerusalem, which is illegally occupied under International and Canadian law.  

HUJI hosts military training programs and is deeply integrated with the Israeli military. HUJI is not just a university; it is actively an Israeli military recruitment site and base for the Israel Defence Force (IDF).  

HUJI hosts the Havatzalot program, which trains IDF intelligence officers. The program includes a military base on campus and heavy surveillance technology.

The Havatzalot IDF program was at the University of Haifa, but was later moved to HUJI in October 2019. This isn’t isolated to HUJI either; getting the military base and the investments that came with it was a competitive process between multiple Israeli universities. 

HUJI has deep ties to military tech companies supplying the IDF, such as Oraqon Labs, a stealth-mode Israeli defence-tech startup.

Additionally, students who have completed military service are entitled to a 90 per cent discount on their first-year tuition fees.

HUJI and other Israeli academic institutions have a long history of suppressing academic freedom. In 2024, Palestinian HUJI professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian was pressured to resign because she called Israel’s operation in Gaza a genocide. The HUJI president wrote a letter denying that Israel is committing genocide and claiming that Professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s statement is “not very far from crimes of incitement & sedition,” and asked her to resign. This statement is a clear and blatant violation of academic freedom, targeted towards Palestinian scholarship. 

U of T’s ties to HUJI

According to a 2020 article published by the university, U of T has raised $5 million and is attempting to raise $14 million more for HUJI’s Research Alliance, as part of their Defy Gravity campaign. U of T engages in a number of student exchange programs with HUJI, Tel-Aviv University, and Technion University. Between 2018–2022, 50 students have gone on exchange to HUJI. 

These practices may be particularly egregious at HUJI, but in my opinion, all Israeli academic institutions serve as the technical backbone and training ground for the Israeli military and Israel’s apartheid system, occupation of Palestine, and genocide in Gaza. 

Shamefully, U of T has institutional ties with HUJI and many other Israeli academic institutions, but not a single partnership or program with any Palestinian university. As scholasticide takes place in Gaza, U of T continues to build on its ties with Israeli universities that make that very destruction of the Palestinian education system possible. 

Beyond implementing a divestment policy that prohibits U of T from having investments in weapons manufacturing (as it does for fossil fuel companies), U of T must cut all institutional ties with Israeli academic institutions like HUJI. To be clear, this does not mean a boycott of individual professors or research fellows simply because they work at HUJI. However, the institutions that participate in and are essential for the continued maintenance of apartheid and genocide in Palestine must be confronted. 

Academic boycotts were part of the successful isolation of the South African apartheid regime and contributed to the democratic transition in South Africa. U of T must learn from this history and cut ties with HUJI and every Israeli university. 

Enzo Fouquet is a third-year undergraduate student studying geography with a focus in planning and political science at U of T. He organizes and works with Climate Justice U of T, Geography Student Union, U of T NDP, and Campus Co-op.