On October 7, as Israel started its newest warfare on Gaza following Hamas’s incursion into southern Israel, the European Union’s place was instantly clear.
“Israel has a proper to defend itself – right now and within the days to return,” European Fee President Ursula von der Leyen posted on X, alongside a picture of her workplace’s headquarters lit up with Israel’s flag. “The European Union stands with Israel.”
Israel has since been positioned on trial for genocide on the Worldwide Court docket of Justice (ICJ) at The Hague and its leaders – in addition to a prime Hamas commander – have been indicted by the Worldwide Legal Court docket (ICC). But the EU continues to associate with Israeli establishments below its “Horizon” scheme, a programme that funds analysis and innovation.
Information collected by the European Fee and analysed by Al Jazeera reveals that since October 7, the EU has awarded Israeli establishments greater than 238 million euros ($250m), together with 640,000 euros ($674,000) to Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), a prime aerospace and aviation producer supplying the Israeli military.
Whereas tips regulating the Horizon framework require funded initiatives to be “solely targeted on civil functions”, they acknowledge {that a} “appreciable variety of applied sciences and merchandise are generic and might tackle the wants of each civil and navy customers”.
Expertise that may serve each civil and navy makes use of – so-called “twin use” – might qualify for EU funding so long as the said goal is civil.
However in July, when about 40,000 individuals had been killed in Israel’s genocide in opposition to Palestinians in Gaza, greater than 2,000 European lecturers and 45 organisations petitioned the EU to finish all funding to Israeli establishments, saying the Horizon framework had performed “a essential position within the development of Israeli navy expertise” by transferring information to the defence business.
“These funding schemes immediately help initiatives creating Israeli navy and weapons capabilities,” the petition stated. “Given the dimensions, period and nature of human rights violations by the Israeli authorities, Israeli establishments’ participation in European analysis and education schemes should be suspended.”
That decision went unanswered.
Funding Israel’s navy equipment
The EU’s help for Israel has been a fixture of its international coverage since lengthy earlier than the Hamas assault, throughout which 1,139 individuals had been killed and greater than 200 Israelis had been taken captive.
The bloc has channelled huge sums of public cash since 1996 to Israel by means of analysis and innovation programmes. Israel shouldn’t be an EU member, however participates as an related nation in funding initiatives.
Underneath the Horizon 2020 framework programme that ran between 2014 and 2020, Israeli organisations acquired a complete EU contribution of 1.28bn euros ($1.35bn). Since Horizon Europe was launched in 2021, it has thus far been granted over 747 million euros ($786m).
IAI, which exports weapons techniques worldwide, acquired 2.7 million euros ($2.8m) below Horizon Europe and over 10.7 million euros ($11.2m) below Horizon 2020, European Fee information reveals.
Elbit Techniques, the Israel-based navy firm whose greatest single buyer is the Israeli Ministry of Defence, was awarded grants for 5 initiatives below Horizon 2020 for a complete 2.2 million euros ($2.3m).
All funded initiatives have a said “civilian” theme – comparable to border safety, catastrophe management and maritime surveillance – and are topic to ethics assessments to overview their compliance with EU values.
However there isn’t any EU mechanism that forbids the usage of cutting-edge expertise acquired with the funds for navy functions in parallel or at a later stage.
IAI was granted 1.4 million euros ($1.47m) below the ResponDrone undertaking launched in 2019 to develop 3D mapping for drone expertise to “present correct location info to first responders”.
Underneath a scheme named COPAC, launched in 2017, Elbit Techniques and the Hebrew College of Jerusalem acquired over a million euros ($1.05m) for work on engineered quantum dots, expertise that centres round ultrafast computer systems performing duties comparable to breaking, disrupting or eavesdropping on present-day safety techniques.
Al Jazeera filed a freedom of data request searching for the outcomes of ethics assessments of initiatives involving Israel. The European Fee denied the request, saying their disclosure would “severely undermine the Fee’s functioning and inside decision-making course of”.
In March, the Fee responded to The Left group within the European Parliament, which requested why the grants had been signed off for IAI amid the warfare in Gaza.
The bloc maintained that it “doesn’t fund actions for the event of merchandise and applied sciences prohibited by relevant worldwide legislation”.
The workplace of Iliana Ivanova, the European Commissioner for Innovation answerable for the implementation of the Horizon programme, didn’t reply to Al Jazeera’s requests for remark.
‘Twin-use applied sciences’: From civil to navy functions
Al Jazeera approached a dozen researchers who labored with Israeli establishments below Horizon. Most declined to be interviewed however underscored the civil intent of their initiatives.
Fabrizio Calderoni, professor on the Catholic College of the Sacred Coronary heart in Milan, Italy, participated within the ROXANNE undertaking that concluded in 2022. It aimed to develop “new speech applied sciences, face recognition and community evaluation to facilitate the identification of criminals”.
Israel’s Ministry of Public Safety – which oversees our bodies together with the police and jail service – was among the many contributors with a grant of practically 135,000 euros ($142,145).
Calderoni stated analysis involving legislation enforcement – versus the navy – is taken into account “civil” in nature below EU parameters.
He added that the undertaking targeted “on a community of nameless individuals who had dedicated burglaries, with the goal of discovering patterns to determine the perpetrators of those crimes”.
Requested if the outcomes may have been used to tell Israel’s navy motion in Gaza or the occupied West Financial institution, he instructed Al Jazeera, “We don’t have any proof that these instruments have been used for a goal aside from that said within the undertaking.”
Whereas it could be unattainable to ascertain how the experience gained by means of EU-funded initiatives is utilized by Israeli companions, critics argue that the opportunity of it enabling systematic human rights violations ought to be ample to name off collaboration.
Fabrizio Sebastiani, director of analysis on the Nationwide Council for Analysis in Italy (CNR), has been utilizing machine studying – a subset of synthetic intelligence (AI) – to ascertain the authorship of unattributed medieval texts.
“Whereas this subject may appear innocuous, I used to be horrified to be taught that the exact same machine studying methods are additionally on the foundation of the not too long ago documented Lavender system” employed by the Israeli navy to be used in Gaza, he instructed Al Jazeera.
A number of media shops have reported on Israel’s use of “Lavender”, an AI-driven system that generates kill lists by analysing surveillance information.
Equally employed in Gaza is a software reportedly known as “The place’s Daddy?”, which tracks and hyperlinks people to particular areas and sends an alert after they return, and “The Gospel”, which Israel’s military boasts can “produce targets at a quick tempo”.
United Nations human rights consultants say Israel’s use of AI in Gaza has taken an “unprecedented toll” on civilians. Human Rights Watch has warned that the instruments threat violating worldwide humanitarian legislation.
“These are applied sciences that must maximise an goal, and the target may be modified,” Sebastiani stated. An algorithm devised to analyse the recurring use of punctuation and terminology in an unattributed textual content, as an example, may be tweaked to choose up cues deemed indicators of a possible risk and flag it as a navy goal, he defined.
Sebastiani was not too long ago approached by an Israeli establishment to collaborate on a undertaking exterior of Horizon. He refused.
Al Jazeera has discovered that Horizon Europe is funding Israeli establishments to participate in AI-based analysis just like Sebastiani’s work.
In January, Reichman College, in Israel’s coastal metropolis of Herzliya, was awarded practically 3 million euros ($3.16m) as a part of a undertaking finding out Sanskrit and Tibetan Buddhist texts to develop “cutting-edge computational instruments to revolutionise the examine of this materials”.
Israeli establishments additionally partnered in schemes to develop “surveillance and safety instruments” for “counterterrorism”.
Underneath Horizon 2020, Bar-Ilan College and the Israeli Ministry of Public Safety acquired 1.3 million euros ($1.37m) and 267,000 euros ($281,000) respectively to develop an interrogation coaching simulator.
Since January, Israel’s Worldwide Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT) and its residence establishment, Reichman College, have participated within the EU-GLOCTER undertaking to advertise “scientific excellence and technological innovation in counter-terrorism”. The undertaking’s description provides few particulars, however its web site options a picture of troopers in camouflage raiding a dishevelled brick home.
Dublin Metropolis College, which coordinates the undertaking, instructed Al Jazeera the funds initially allotted to the Israeli companions had been suspended earlier this 12 months. It didn’t elaborate on the explanations behind the choice, however the transfer adopted a student-led marketing campaign in Eire in opposition to Israel’s involvement within the undertaking.
The European Fee’s database nonetheless lists Reichman and ICT as companions in EU-GLOCTER.
Israeli universities’ hyperlinks to the navy
The most important share of EU Horizon funds awarded to Israeli entities is allotted to tutorial establishments.
Whereas universities are sometimes seen as bastions of civil freedoms, Israeli scholar Maya Wind stated the Israeli academia was the spine of the nation’s navy business.
“Israeli universities are pillars of Israeli racial rule, they’re central to the infrastructure of Israeli settler colonialism and of apartheid and now they’re additionally actively servicing this genocide and making it potential to maintain [the war in Gaza] for over 13 months,” Wind stated.
In her guide, Towers of Ivory and Metal: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom, she describes how Hebrew College was the primary to be established by the Zionist motion in 1918, adopted by the Technion Israel Institute of Expertise in 1925 and the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1934.
These establishments grew to become central within the growth and manufacture of weapons used to forcibly displace Palestinians within the lead-up to the formation of the State of Israel in 1948.
The Weizmann Institute and the Technion later led the event of Israel’s navy industries.
In 1954, Technion based an aeronautical engineering division and its college students spearheaded the event IAI, the aerospace firm. The state-owned defence expertise firm Rafael was additionally birthed of their premises.
“Collaboration of any sort with an Israeli college is coming on the direct expense of Palestinian liberation,” stated Wind.
