In the early hours of 5 June, Google took down our running petition “STOP European Funding for Israeli Institutions – Stop Complicity in Genocide, Occupation and Apartheid” from its platform Google Drive, and blocked the associated account without prior notice. There was no element in our petition that violated their terms of service or stated policy.
Amidst the ongoing genocidal war Israel is waging against the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza, EU funding is still flowing into Israel including institutions and companies directly involved in the Israeli military/security industrial complex. This is in direct contradiction to Horizon Europe’s own regulation stating, “Participation of third countries is conditioned on the respect of human rights” and “Beneficiaries must commit to upholding EU values”. The cumulative funding given to Israel since 2007 amounts to over 3 billion €. Our current petition is addressed to the EU institutions, demanding:
- End all academic and research cooperation with Israeli institutions
- Revoke Israel’s Horizon Europe status
- Rebuild Palestinian academic institutions
- Investigate the human rights impact of past and future EU research funding to Israel
The petition also urges the EU to impose sanctions, including an arms embargo to end the current genocide and decades long occupation, colonization and apartheid in line with the provisional measures and advisory opinion issued by the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The EU as the top trade partner of Israel has considerable leverage to force Israel to comply with international law. The EU’s failure to act in accordance with obligations arising from the ruling of the world’s highest court contributes to the erosion of international law and betrays the core values of the EU itself, further undermining its global credibility and standing.
The petition is open to researchers, university staff and students based in Horizon eligible countries, and European researchers based in any country. Already more than 3000 people have endorsed this petition in just one week’s time. We denounce the censorship attempts of Google to silence pro-justice activism, a similar tactic to the widely denounced censorship revealed by other big-tech firms such as Meta and Microsoft.
We did not yield to this outright attempt at censorship and stifling legitimate civic activism in the public space. The petition is now available on another platform, here.
Thanks to the intervention from 7amleh, a Palestinian NGO that advocates digital rights and tracks censorship, Google has restored our account. But the damage had already been done, as it interrupted the process of collecting signatures. We demand that Google ends its online censorship.
European academic coalition for Palestine
Press contact: Nozomi Takahashi, Nozomi.takahashi@bacbi.be,