The University of Cape Town (UCT) has lost 250 million rand ($15.2m) in donor funding after adopting two resolutions on Israel’s war on Gaza. Vice-Chancellor Mosa Moshabela disclosed the losses to Parliament in June, explaining that the Donald Gordon Foundation had withdrawn the remaining funding under a 200 million rand ($12.1m), 10-year commitment to a neuroscience institute. Other benefactors withheld another 50 million rand ($3m), including 15 million rand ($910,000) annually for bursaries.

This blow lands in a country ranked by the World Bank as the world’s most unequal. UCT’s student debt exceeded one billion rand ($60.7m) by December 2025, while approximately 1,400 students still faced registration holds in February 2026.

At UCT and across South Africa, poor Black families depend on public assistance and private bursaries because apartheid denied them the land, income, schooling and inherited assets that continue to ease white access to higher learning.

As a graduate of UCT, I understand what the institution’s resources and principles mean to students who enter it carrying the weight of these inequalities. But nothing in its progressive resolutions justifies such harsh and callous retaliation.

The first of the contentious resolutions demanded a ceasefire, humanitarian assistance, the return of captives and the reconstruction of Gaza’s shattered education system. Equally principled, the second barred UCT academics from relations with any research group or network whose authors were affiliated with the Israeli military or the broader Israeli military establishment.

Crucially, neither measure targeted Israeli or Jewish scholars because of their identity, and UCT has not even implemented the restriction on military-linked research.

Court filings indicate that the Donald Gordon Foundation made its support conditional on UCT adopting the definition of anti-Semitism issued in 2016 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), an intergovernmental body promoting Holocaust education.

Seven of the IHRA definition’s 11 illustrative examples concern Israel, creating a framework that conflates opposition to Zionism or Israeli policy with anti-Jewish hatred.

UCT instead endorsed the Jerusalem Declaration, developed by scholars in 2021 and now signed by more than 400 academics. It condemns anti-Semitism while protecting criticism of Israel and advocacy for Palestinian rights.

The foundation’s insistence that UCT adopt the........

© Al Jazeera