Across Europe, university campuses remain key battlegrounds in the struggle for Palestinian liberation. This is particularly true of German universities, where a new movement is emerging from the growing wave of solidarity with Palestine to reshape the political landscape of academic responsibility. The Academic Boycott Campaign Deutschland (ABC DE) brings together students, researchers, academics, workers and staff to redefine accountability and solidarity in higher education, and forms a nationwide coalition for a long-term academic boycott of Israeli academia and institutional complicity at German universities and institutions.
Exposing academic complicity
Israeli universities are embedded in the Israeli state’s military-industrial complex and actively contribute to the occupation of Palestinian land and the apartheid and genocide of Palestinian life. German universities and academic institutions serve as strategic partners in the Israeli colonial apparatus. Through access to research, funding, infrastructure, and scientific and political legitimacy—including programs such as the German-Israeli Project Cooperation of the DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft or German Research Foundation, a publicly funded organization with an annual budget of over 3.3 billion Euros, which offers significant support to research in science, engineering, and the humanities) —hundreds of collaborations link German academia to Israeli institutions.
German higher education is thus directly embedded into the political economy of growing militarisation and the material reproduction of Israeli apartheid. Beyond simply buttressing Israeli research initiatives, these partnerships normalise the ongoing occupation and genocide of Palestinians. Advocating for Palestine and challenging institutional complicity within German academia is not a simple matter of “freedom of expression” but of moral and ethical responsibility. As state-funded institutions, German universities are not neutral: they are instruments of state policy that require close scrutiny, especially amid genocide.
Why academic boycott?
The Academic Boycott Campaign targets the intellectual infrastructure that sustains Israeli apartheid and occupation. ABC DE’s objective is to confront these institutions’ complicity directly and to raise political questions universities can no longer ignore: how is public money being used? Which research agendas does it serve? What moral responsibility accompanies academic freedom?
Aligned with PACBI (Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel), ABC DE acts on Palestinian civil society’s call to boycott, sanction, and divest from entities enabling the apartheid state of Israel.
In particular, ABC DE calls on universities to:
- Disclose, review, and terminate complicit cooperation agreements with Israeli state institutions embedded in the military‑industrial complex.
- Acknowledge the genocide of Palestinians and uphold international law.
- Adopt boycott measures through democratic structures led by students and academics.
- Build real and lasting partnerships with Palestinian scholars and universities.
- Guarantee free discussion about Palestine without police repression on campus.
- Cease all forms of military research.
Universities must be spaces of critical research and learning, not partners in genocidal warfare or militarised violence. Academic boycott is an act of material solidarity with Palestinian self-determination and a direct challenge to the ways public and research funds enable war crimes.
The Academic Boycott Now Conference in Berlin, January 23-25, 2026
The campaign was launched at the Academic Boycott Now Conference in Berlin, which was held between January 23-25, 2026. The conference featured three days of lectures, workshops, and other collaborative events which analysed the role of Israeli and German academia in maintaining the ongoing occupation, apartheid, and genocide. Outside of these events, representatives from collectives at 35 universities and institutions around Germany met to develop and ratify a framework for a coordinated, nationwide academic boycott campaign.
Over the course of the weekend, seven speaker panels probed the realities of academic complicity; the growing militarisation of universities in Germany and abroad; the imbrication of academia with settler-colonial modes of extraction and exploitation; and the possibilities for solidarity and coalition-building in the struggle for Palestinian liberation. Collectives also participated in workshops hosted by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), as well as in skill-sharing sessions. These events allowed organisers from across Germany to exchange experiences and strategies for fighting academic repression, conducting research into academic complicity, and developing media campaigns.
Of particular note was the conference’s keynote lecture by Dr. Maya Wind, author of Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom and postdoctoral researcher at the University of California-Riverside; and Dr. Mezna Qato, director of the Margaret Anstee Centre for Global Studies at Cambridge University. Drs. Wind and Qato outlined the continued urgency of a boycott of Israeli academia, emphasising the ways in which Israeli universities remain integral to the settler-colonial project of the Israeli apartheid state. Through specialised training programmes, weapons development, and various forms of knowledge production, Israeli institutions are not only complicit in state violence—they actively enable and sustain the ongoing genocide of Palestinians.
The necessity for a nationwide academic boycott
In July 2025, UN Special Rapporteur Francesa Albanese published her report “From economy of occupation to economy of genocide” (A/HRC/59/23), detailing how corporations and public institutions—including German universities—profit off of the genocide in Gaza. Germany’s highest-ranked university, the Technical University of Munich (TUM), was explicitly named as a direct collaborator with Israeli weapons technology development.
According to the report, TUM and Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) received more than $868,000 to co-develop green hydrogen aerial refuelling technology, which is directly relevant to IAI military drones used in Gaza. Beyond this specific partnership, countless similar collaborations have been detailed in thoroughly researched reports and investigations by the collective Academics for Justice Munich.
Similar patterns can be seen at numerous other German institutions: A report by the collective Not In Our Name TU exposed how the Technical University in Berlin coordinated the MedWater project between 2017 and 2021, under Germany’s Federal Ministry of Education and Research. Calling the project “Water as a Global Resource,” TU Berlin partnered with Israel’s state water company, Mekorot, the backbone of what Al Haq and other groups have called “water apartheid.” The project materially supported Israel’s apartheid water regime and violated international and German law, using 1.8 million € of public funds.
Beyond the campus
Universities have always been political spaces. During apartheid rule in South Africa, students led the boycott movement in Germany and in other states in the so-called Global North, which in turn put significant economic and material pressure on governments to disavow the Apartheid government. ABC DE continues this legacy of student activism in its current campaign. Today, the struggle unfolds in a context where basic conditions for dissent are under attack. Irene Khan, the UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of Expression and Opinion, warned during her visit to Germany in late January and early February that freedom of expression in the country is clearly threatened. This is especially true in the context of pro-Palestine organising in academic, cultural, and artistic spaces, through criminalization and surveillance.
Yet the amplified repression of pro-Palestinian voices on university campuses must be understood alongside other affronts to German civil society. In Bavaria, a planned amendment to the Higher Education Innovation Act would introduce uniform expulsion and ban re-enrolment for students found to be repeatedly “disrupting university peace” through protests and other forms of activism. The same amendment sets provision for similarly penalising students who violate the Bavarian state’s ban on “gender-inclusive language,” such as using an asterisk, colon, or other grammatical forms to indicate gender neutrality. In this way, attacks on pro-Palestinian activism must be understood as a litmus test for the repression of all marginalised groups in Germany. By reasserting German universities as sites of struggle, the academic boycott seeks not only to expose institutional complicity in the ongoing genocide and apartheid, but also to redefine academic labour as collective struggle.
What’s next?
The signatories of ABC DE’s campaign resolution represent student, faculty, and academic staff collectives from over 40 groups at universities and institutions around Germany. Since the formal initiation of the campaign in late January, ABC DE has continued to cultivate networks and working groups which allow these collectives to coordinate nationally, and has developed relationships with organisations working to end academic and institutional complicity abroad.
One major initiative of ABC DE is to support the PACBI-led campaign to exclude Israel and complicit universities from Horizon Europe, the European Union’s “key funding programme for research and innovation.” Between 2021 and 2024, Israeli universities and academics received over €1.1 billion in funding through Horizon Europe. These funds have directly supported the development of weapons technologies used in the ongoing genocide: for example, €50 million in Horizon Europe funding underwrote the development of the Skylord drone system, which has been deployed by the IDF in Gaza.
On average, Israel has received more funds through this programme than any European country. However, since 2025, Horizon support to Israel has dropped by nearly 70%—a strong indication that targeted organising and activism against institutional complicity is effective. While ending the Horizon Europe programme would require unanimous support from all 27 EU member states, a simple majority vote could suspend the funding programme in order to encourage a formal review of Israeli academia’s role in the ongoing genocide. ABC DE assists PACBI’s mobilisation in multiple ways, including developing thorough research reports of complicit Horizon Europe partnerships on German university campuses, and assisting collectives in communicating with faculty and university administrators.
Between April 20 and 26, 2026, ABC DE will coordinate the first-ever Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) at institutions across Germany. First held at the University of Toronto in 2005, IAW is an annual week-long initiative on university campuses which seeks to highlight the Israeli apartheid regime’s human rights violations while celebrating Palestinian culture and resistance. Universities across Germany will host events including lectures, panels, workshops, film screenings, info stands, teach-ins, poetry readings, research sessions, and more. Information about publicly accessible events will be shared on ABC DE’s Instagram account (@academicboycottnow).
Conclusion
At a time of deep repression on German university campuses, as Palestinian voices are systematically silenced, an intellectual and institutional boycott campaign is not merely a symbolic gesture. It is a deliberate, organised strategy grounded in the fundamental principle that no institution can claim moral legitimacy while enabling genocide and apartheid.
