Tilburg University partially suspends collaboration with two Israeli universities

After much deliberation, the Executive Board of Tilburg University has decided to suspend the collaboration with two Israeli universities. This means that the university will no longer send students and staff to Israel. Ongoing research with Israeli partners will continue.

After more than a year of protests on campus and six months after the advice to suspend ties with Israeli universities, the university has made a decision. The institutional collaboration with Bar-Ilan University and Reichman University will be suspended. Before doing this, Rector Magnificus Wim van de Donk first wanted to enter into a conversation with those partners. That was not successful with these universities.

The suspension only concerns ‘institutional cooperation’, which means that the university no longer sends students and staff to Israel. This was already not happening due to the negative travel advisory. Research projects involving collaboration between Tilburg scientists and Israeli partners are not affected by the suspension.

Research continues

‘There are no indications that research projects on aging and work and non-invasive methods for screening for colon cancer pose a risk to human rights,’ writes Tilburg University With this, the university deviates from the position of the Advisory Committee on Partnerships.

For the committee, it does not matter whether joint activities can be directly linked to human rights violations, because it weighs heavily on the fact that ‘the Israeli partner institutions investigated are insufficiently critical of human rights violations in Gaza.’

Constructive dialogue

The suspension of the exchange is unilateral: students and scientists from Israel remain welcome in Tilburg. The advice of the committee is followed in this respect: ‘We want to continue to offer them access to an academic environment in which they can freely discuss the complexity and the wide range of ideas and opinions that they may encounter, especially now that this does not always seem to be possible within Israeli partner institutions.’

TiU is still in talks with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. ‘A constructive dialogue’, the press release states, and that is why the lines of communication with that institution remain open, ‘in the hope of being able to exert influence’.  Nevertheless, the board wants to make a decision about the future of that collaboration as soon as possible, preferably before the summer.