Rights and Accountability 18 February 2025
Ariel University is located in the occupied West Bank.
APA imagesA group that includes an Israeli college in the occupied West Bank is still receiving support from the European Union 12 years after Brussels officials undertook to reject funding bids by firms and institutions located within illegal settlements.
The Inter-University Computation Center (IUCC) has been awarded more than $2.7 million in EU research grants since 2007. One EU-financed project involving this Israeli group kicked off as recently as last month.
Among the members of the IUCC is Ariel University, which is based in the West Bank.
Back in 2013, the Brussels bureaucracy drew up guidelines on support for Israel. They stated that “only Israeli entities having their place of establishment within Israel’s pre-1967 borders will be considered eligible” for EU grants.
The guidelines supposedly hit Israel like an “earthquake,” according to media coverage in July 2013.
The unwillingness of Brussels officials to enforce the guidelines strictly – by, for example, barring groups which include Ariel University from funding – indicates that their impact was superficial rather than seismic.
As well as being part of a group that has received EU funding, Ariel University has participated in EU-funded research projects on breast cancer and earth observation over recent years, making a mockery of the 2013 guidelines.
By tacitly embracing Ariel University, the European Union is aiding Israel’s colonization of Palestinian land in the West Bank. The failure or – perhaps more accurately – refusal to ostracize Ariel calls into question whether the EU is really serious when it issues statements opposing Israel’s settlement of land it has occupied from June 1967 onwards.
While I was always skeptical of the 2013 guidelines, I accept that some of the officials who drafted the four-page paper containing them may have been well-intentioned. The very fact that such a paper was drafted was a small victory for the Palestine solidarity movement, which had raised objections to how Israel’s settlements were benefiting from EU subsidies.
After the Israeli government – then, as now, with Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister – began portraying the guidelines as an existential threat, the EU promised that they would be implemented in “flexible ways.” Diplomatic dexterity was considered preferable to taking a principled stance against war crimes – for that is what the construction and maintenance of Israel’s settlements entail.
Unconditional love
The EU’s support for Israel and embrace of the pro-Israel lobby is more extreme today than it was in 2013.
This support comes from the top down.
Sometimes, it is in plain sight – such as when Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, endorsed Israel’s genocidal war against Gaza.
Other times, it takes a little sleuthing to find out about things that happen in a low-key manner.
Hélène Le Gal, formerly the French ambassador to Israel and Morocco, now heads the Middle East department in the EU’s diplomatic service. Last year, she accepted invitations to at least two events organized by the pro-Israel group known as the European Leadership Network (Elnet), as I have established via freedom of information requests.
Le Gal’s colleague Philip Holzapfel accepted at least one such invitation. At the time, Holzapfel was an adviser to Josep Borrell, then the EU’s foreign policy chief.
Holzapfel’s apparently friendly relations with the pro-Israel lobby should raise questions. The agenda of an Elnet event – billed as a “strategic dialogue” – from April last lists Holzapfel as a speaker.
A few weeks prior, the same organization had vilified Borrell – Holzapfel’s boss – for stating that Israel was using starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza.
Of all the EU’s senior representatives, Borrell was the most outspoken – although patently not outspoken enough – against Israel over the past 16 months. Members of his inner circle such as Holzapfel were nonetheless prepared to continue strategizing with a lobby group that conveyed the impression that Borrell was its arch enemy.
Spain’s Borrell has subsequently been replaced by Estonia’s Kaja Kallas as foreign policy chief. Elnet regards the changeover as an opportunity to “reset” EU-Israel relations.
It is not hard to work out what kind of “reset” the group covets – one in which the EU loves Israel unconditionally.
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