On October 7, as Israel began its latest war on Gaza following Hamas’s incursion into southern Israel, the European Union’s position was immediately clear.
“Israel has a right to defend itself – today and in the days to come,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen posted on X, alongside an image of her office’s headquarters lit up with Israel’s flag. “The European Union stands with Israel.”
Israel has since been placed on trial for genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at The Hague and its leaders – as well as a top Hamas commander – have been indicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC). Yet the EU continues to partner with Israeli institutions under its “Horizon” scheme, a programme that funds research and innovation.
Data collected by the European Commission and analysed by Al Jazeera shows that since October 7, the EU has awarded Israeli institutions more than 238 million euros ($250m), including 640,000 euros ($674,000) to Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), a top aerospace and aviation manufacturer supplying the Israeli army.
While guidelines regulating the Horizon framework require funded projects to be “exclusively focused on civil applications”, they acknowledge that a “considerable number of technologies and products are generic and can address the needs of both civil and military users”.
Technology that can serve both civil and military uses – so-called “dual use” – may qualify for EU funding as long as the stated objective is civil.
But in July, when about 40,000 people had been killed in Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, more than 2,000 European academics and 45 organisations petitioned the EU to end all funding to Israeli institutions, saying the Horizon framework had played “a critical role in the advancement of Israeli military technology” by transferring knowledge to the defence industry.
“These funding schemes directly support projects developing Israeli military and weapons capabilities,” the petition said. “Given the scale, duration and nature of human rights violations by the Israeli government, Israeli institutions’ participation in European research and education programs must be suspended.”
That call went unanswered.
Funding Israel’s military apparatus
The EU’s support for Israel has been a fixture of its foreign policy since long before the Hamas attack, during which 1,139 people were killed and more than 200 Israelis were taken captive.
The bloc has channelled vast sums of public money since 1996 to Israel through research and innovation programmes. Israel is not an EU member, but participates as an associated country in funding initiatives.
Under the Horizon 2020 framework programme that ran between 2014 and 2020, Israeli organisations received a total EU contribution of 1.28bn euros ($1.35bn). Since Horizon Europe was launched in 2021, it has so far been granted over 747 million euros ($786m).
IAI, which exports weapons systems worldwide, received 2.7 million euros ($2.8m) under Horizon Europe and over 10.7 million euros ($11.2m) under Horizon 2020, European Commission data shows.
Elbit Systems, the Israel-based military company whose biggest single customer is the Israeli Ministry of Defence, was awarded grants for five projects under Horizon 2020 for a total 2.2 million euros ($2.3m).
All funded projects have a stated “civilian” theme – such as border protection, disaster control and maritime surveillance – and are subject to ethics assessments to review their compliance with EU values.
But there is no EU mechanism that forbids the use of cutting-edge technology acquired with the funds for military applications in parallel or at a later stage.
IAI was granted 1.4 million euros ($1.47m) under the ResponDrone project launched in 2019 to develop 3D mapping for drone technology to “provide accurate location information to first responders”.
Under a scheme named COPAC, launched in 2017, Elbit Systems and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem received over one million euros ($1.05m) for work on engineered quantum dots, technology that centres around ultrafast computers performing tasks such as breaking, disrupting or eavesdropping on present-day security systems.
Al Jazeera filed a freedom of information request seeking the results of ethics assessments of projects involving Israel. The European Commission denied the request, saying their disclosure would “seriously undermine the Commission’s functioning and internal decision-making process”.
In March, the Commission responded to The Left group in the European Parliament, which asked why the grants were signed off for IAI amid the war in Gaza.
The bloc maintained that it “does not fund actions for the development of products and technologies prohibited by applicable international law”.
The office of Iliana Ivanova, the European Commissioner for Innovation responsible for the implementation of the Horizon programme, did not respond to Al Jazeera’s requests for comment.
‘Dual-use technologies’: From civil to military applications
Al Jazeera approached a dozen researchers who worked with Israeli institutions under Horizon. Most declined to be interviewed but underscored the civil intent of their projects.
Fabrizio Calderoni, professor at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, Italy, participated in the ROXANNE project that concluded in 2022. It aimed to develop “new speech technologies, face recognition and network analysis to facilitate the identification of criminals”.
Israel’s Ministry of Public Security – which oversees bodies including the police and prison service – was among the participants with a grant of nearly 135,000 euros ($142,145).
Calderoni said research involving law enforcement – as opposed to the military – is considered “civil” in nature under EU parameters.
He added that the project focused “on a network of anonymous people who had committed burglaries, with the aim of finding patterns to identify the perpetrators of these crimes”.
Asked if the results could have been used to inform Israel’s military action in Gaza or the occupied West Bank, he told Al Jazeera, “We do not have any proof that these tools have been used for a purpose other than that stated in the project.”
While it may be impossible to establish how the expertise gained through EU-funded projects is used by Israeli partners, critics argue that the possibility of it enabling systematic human rights violations should be sufficient to call off collaboration.
Fabrizio Sebastiani, director of research at the National Council for Research in Italy (CNR), has been using machine learning – a subset of artificial intelligence (AI) – to establish the authorship of unattributed medieval texts.
“While this topic might seem innocuous, I was horrified to learn that the very same machine learning techniques are also at the basis of the recently documented Lavender system” employed by the Israeli military for use in Gaza, he told Al Jazeera.
Several media outlets have reported on Israel’s use of “Lavender”, an AI-driven system that generates kill lists by analysing surveillance data.
Similarly employed in Gaza is a tool reportedly called “Where’s Daddy?”, which tracks and links individuals to specific locations and sends an alert when they return, and “The Gospel”, which Israel’s army boasts can “produce targets at a fast pace”.
United Nations human rights experts say Israel’s use of AI in Gaza has taken an “unprecedented toll” on civilians. Human Rights Watch has warned that the tools risk violating international humanitarian law.
“These are technologies that need to maximise an objective, and the objective can be changed,” Sebastiani said. An algorithm devised to analyse the recurring use of punctuation and terminology in an unattributed text, for instance, can be tweaked to pick up cues deemed indicators of a potential threat and flag it as a military target, he explained.
Sebastiani was recently approached by an Israeli institution to collaborate on a project outside of Horizon. He refused.
Al Jazeera has found that Horizon Europe is funding Israeli institutions to take part in AI-based research similar to Sebastiani’s work.
In January, Reichman University, in Israel’s coastal city of Herzliya, was awarded nearly 3 million euros ($3.16m) as part of a project studying Sanskrit and Tibetan Buddhist texts to develop “cutting-edge computational tools to revolutionise the study of this material”.
Israeli institutions also partnered in schemes to develop “surveillance and security tools” for “counterterrorism”.
Under Horizon 2020, Bar-Ilan University and the Israeli Ministry of Public Security received 1.3 million euros ($1.37m) and 267,000 euros ($281,000) respectively to develop an interrogation training simulator.
Since January, Israel’s International Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT) and its home institution, Reichman University, have participated in the EU-GLOCTER project to promote “scientific excellence and technological innovation in counter-terrorism”. The project’s description offers few details, but its website features an image of soldiers in camouflage raiding a dishevelled brick house.
Dublin City University, which coordinates the project, told Al Jazeera the funds initially allocated to the Israeli partners were suspended earlier this year. It did not elaborate on the reasons behind the decision, but the move followed a student-led campaign in Ireland against Israel’s involvement in the project.
The European Commission’s database still lists Reichman and ICT as partners in EU-GLOCTER.
Israeli universities’ links to the military
The largest share of EU Horizon funds awarded to Israeli entities is allocated to academic institutions.
While universities are often seen as bastions of civil freedoms, Israeli scholar Maya Wind said the Israeli academia was the backbone of the country’s military industry.
“Israeli universities are pillars of Israeli racial rule, they are central to the infrastructure of Israeli settler colonialism and of apartheid and now they are also actively servicing this genocide and making it possible to sustain [the war in Gaza] for over 13 months,” Wind said.
In her book, Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom, she describes how Hebrew University was the first to be established by the Zionist movement in 1918, followed by the Technion Israel Institute of Technology in 1925 and the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1934.
These institutions became central in the development and manufacture of weapons used to forcibly displace Palestinians in the lead-up to the formation of the State of Israel in 1948.
The Weizmann Institute and the Technion later led the development of Israel’s military industries.
In 1954, Technion founded an aeronautical engineering department and its students spearheaded the development IAI, the aerospace company. The state-owned defence technology company Rafael was also birthed in their premises.
“Collaboration of any kind with an Israeli university is coming at the direct expense of Palestinian liberation,” said Wind.
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