+972 reports:

At the end of July, Harvard signaled its willingness to spend as much as half a billion dollars to settle accusations of antisemitism brought by the Trump administration. While the scandal — and the staggering sum — has drawn widespread attention, a previous concession slipped under the radar: in a failed bid to placate the administration earlier this year, Harvard agreed to establish a formal partnership with an Israeli university.

On July 28, Harvard announced two new initiatives with Israeli institutions: a study abroad program with Ben-Gurion University in the Negev and a postdoctoral fellowship for Israeli scientists at Harvard Medical School. The move comes amid a wave of U.S. universities launching or expanding partnerships with their Israeli counterparts in recent months.

In December, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) launched a program that will allow scholars at Israel’s nine public, state-accredited universities to come to MIT for collaboration and training. In March, Clemson College in South Carolina announced a partnership with Hebrew University and Sapir College to bring new agricultural technologies to Israel’s western Negev region, and Columbia University committed to expanding its academic initiatives with Tel Aviv University. And in May, the University of Utah signed an “academic cooperation” deal with Ariel University — an Israeli institution located in an illegal West Bank settlement.

Meanwhile, Harvard recently suspended its research partnership with Birzeit University, the largest Palestinian university in the West Bank, and in Gaza, all 12 universities have been destroyed by Israel’s war on the Strip. “We call it scholasticide,” said Dr. Wesam Amer, formerly the dean of the Faculty of Communication and Languages at Gaza University. “It refers to Israel’s systematic and deliberate destruction of education as a tool of domination.”

As U.S. universities deepen ties with Israeli institutions, a new comprehensive Hebrew-language report by New Profile, an Israeli anti-militarization movement, sheds light on the extent to which those institutions are embedded in the country’s military apparatus — with Israel expanding its assault on Gaza and spiraling settler and army violence throughout the West Bank.

The report identifies at least 57 military-academic programs for active-duty soldiers and conscription candidates across numerous universities and estimates that financial cooperation between the Ministry of Defense and academia for soldier study programs from 2019 to 2022 exceeded NIS 269 million (roughly $79 million). [Continue reading…]