The current situation in Palestine demands action. The Israeli state’s destructive actions in Gaza since October 2023, in which more than 68,000 Palestinians have been killed, have been recognized as a genocide by the UN Human Rights Council’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, as well recognized as a plausible genocide by the International Court of Justice and has resulted in war crimes charges from the International Criminal Court. It has also been condemned as a genocide by leading international civil society organizations from Amnesty International to B’Tselum to the International Association of Genocide Scholars. The current ‘ceasefire’ has not ended the killing, and starvation due to the Israeli refusals to allow aid to enter Gaza continues. More broadly, the longstanding patterns of colonization, occupation, dispossession, blockade, and apartheid that preceded the genocide in Gaza continue across the Palestinian territories, including within the1948 borders of the Israeli state where Palestinian citizens face political repression and ‘second-class’ citizenship status.
In such conditions, research and higher education cannot continue as normal. All universities in Gaza have been destroyed, and many academics and students have been killed. Palestinian universities and academics in the West Bank operate under repression, surveillance, forced closures, restricted mobility, and military raids, and Palestinian students and academics within the state of Israel’s 1948 borders face unequal treatment and the risk of imprisonment when speaking out.Israeli universities are tightly woven into the Israeli state’s settler colonial project, including through research on military and dual use technologies, the development of legal and technical expertise needed for state projects, the training of military personnel, the production of ideological justifications and rationales, and the policing of dissent, especially by Palestinian students and academics.¹
In response, Palestinian civil society, including scholarly associations and trade unions, have called for international solidarity, especially in the form of boycotts and disinvestment campaigns that would pressure the Israeli state to end its colonial and genocidal actions and create the conditions in which genocide, occupation, blockade, and apartheid would end, political prisoners would be set free, and Palestinian refugees would be able to return to their land as full political equals.
In this statement, Tatte joins the call for an academic boycott of complicit Israeli universities and urges Tampere University to end cooperation with complicit Israeli academic institutions, incorporate human rights criteria into its institutional partnership decisions, take a stand against the inclusion of Israeli institutions in EU-funded initiatives, and to divest from companies complicit in human rights violations. In joining this call, we are following the important leadership of so many students and academic colleagues here in Tampere and around Finland who have been demanding a response to the genocide in Gaza. We join with our Tieteentekijät colleagues at the Helsinki University Association of Researchers and Teachers (HUART) who took an important stand earlier this fall, as well as the calls for the academic boycott within the student union organizations, including by the National Union of University Students in Finland (SYL), the Student Union of the University of Helsinki (HYY), and the Student Union of Tampere University (TREY). We also join academic unions around the world who have taken similar stands, such as the Teachers Union of Ireland, NTL at the University of Oslo, UCU Cambridge, and the National Tertiary Education Union in Australia.
Specifically, we call on Tampere University to:
- Incorporate substantive human rights criteria into the due diligence process for all institutional partnership decisions, and, accordingly, to refrain from establishing any institutional partnerships with Israeli universities and other complicit organizations.
- Cease institutional research cooperation with Israeli universities, including by suspending cooperation in future projects. There should be clear guidelines discouraging institutional research cooperation, and no new Horizon Europe projects that include Israeli academic institutions should be started. Following the example of Ghent University, any such ongoing projects should be reviewed with a priority to discontinue the cooperation with the complicit Israeli institutions, i.e., restructuring cooperation, rather than ending or leaving the project if possible. Tampere University should ensure a fair transition and take responsibility for any costs involved in changing the projects and compensate for researchers’ losses.
- Advocate that the European Commission exclude Israeli partners from European Union-funded programmes and projects. We hope that Tampere University will follow the example of the University of Helsinki and endorse the Belgian universities’ call for the suspension of the Association Agreement between Israel and the European Union. The call to move towards a full suspension of the State of Israel from the research programmes of the Horizon Europe framework programme has already been supported by the European Council of Doctoral Candidates and Junior Researchers – Eurodoc and by SYL.
- Create clear guidelines banning investments in companies that are complicit in human rights violations (in Palestine, as well as in any other territory or conflict). These guidelines should also cover indirect investments made through equity funds.
- Facilitate and advocate for the freedom of movement and the continued study and research of Palestinian students and academics, including through encouraging cooperation with Palestinian institutions, enabling mobility to Tampere University, and developing substantive and accessible online learning opportunities. Also, we urge the university to consider offering tuition fee scholarships or waivers for students of Palestinian universities and further supporting and developing the protection actions of programs like Scholars at Risk.
Our call focuses on institutions, not individuals. Nothing in this call should be interpreted to prevent individual-level scientific cooperation with academics who are based at Israeli institutions, unless those individuals hold positions officially representing the institution, such as a Dean or Rector.
This call aligns with Tampere University’s own values, and taking these steps could strengthen the university’s credibility as it pursues its strategic goals of building “a sustainable world” and “developing solutions to improve human health and wellbeing, societal resilience, and environmental sustainability” (Strategy of Tampere University 2030), as well as its aim “to address global challenges, such as the ecological crisis and threats to democracy” (Tampere University’s International strategy 2030). In our view, upholding the university’s stated values of societal responsibility and courage to tackle the world’s vicious problems has to mean advocating for human rights and refusing complicity in the colonial and genocidal actions of the Israeli state that are attacking the fundamental conditions of Palestinian life and of Palestinian research and higher education.
In making this call, Tatte also commits to taking the following steps:
- Undertake a review of our investments to ensure we are not currently investing money in companies that are complicit in human rights violations, including especially those companies that are complicit in illegal Israeli settlement activity in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, as listed in the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights database. We have no direct investments in such companies, and the review will focus on indirect investments.
- Create guidelines for the investment of our funds that prohibit investment in companies complicit in human rights violations and support ethical and sustainable investment.
- Explore further possibilities for solidarity and direct support for Palestinian scholars and academics, as well as support for Palestinian-led initiatives in strengthening the conditions for academic research and higher education.
- Encourage other unions and local associations to undertake similar processes with their own actions and investments.
Approved by Tatte’s 2025 Autumn Assembly, November 20
¹For a detailed account, see Maya Wind (2024) Towers of Ivory and Steel. Verso.