A boycott rarely announces itself. It does not arrive as a headline or a formal decree. It arrives as an email that never comes, the collaboration invitation that used to be routine and now quietly goes to someone else. It arrives as a grant proposal that scores just below the line, again. It arrives as a colleague in Amsterdam or Oslo who still answers your calls warmly in private but no longer wants their name next to yours on a consortium application. This is what our researchers are living through right now, and the numbers have finally caught up with what they have felt for two years.

The scale is no longer anecdotal. Israeli participation in the European Union’s flagship research programme, Horizon Europe, halved in a single year — from roughly €209 million in 2024 to about €106 million in 2025. Grants from the European Research Council, long a point of national pride, collapsed from a high of 116 in 2023 to 59 in 2025, with the number of Israeli-led ERC projects falling from 118 in 2022 to just 42. In 2025, approval rates for Horizon projects that included even a single Israeli partner dropped by more than 68 percent compared with previous years. This is not a rounding error. It is a structural disconnection.

The silent boycott is real, and it compounds

Officials will tell you the causes are complicated, and they are right. An ERC spokesperson has suggested Israeli proposals were simply weaker last year. Reservists were pulled from their labs. Flights were disrupted, making it harder to build the international consortia that EU funding rewards. The United Kingdom and Switzerland rejoined the programme, sharpening the competition. All true. But a Professor from the Weizmann Institute, who sits on ERC review committees, has said plainly what many suspect: this is a silent boycott, confirmed in quiet conversations with colleagues abroad. Whatever the exact mix of causes, the effect is the same, and it feeds on itself.

The danger of the silent boycott is precisely that it needs no policy to spread. It is not primarily driven by university senates passing resolutions, though those are multiplying too,  institutions in Norway, Belgium, Spain and the Netherlands have severed or frozen ties, and TU Eindhoven suspended cooperation with the Technion in 2025. The deeper damage is subtler. A research group that would gladly have worked with an Israeli lab now hesitates, not out of conviction but out of caution: why risk a partnership that a reviewer might penalise, that might complicate their own next grant? The rational, self-protective choice of each individual group, multiplied thousands of times, becomes a wall. And walls, once built, are far harder to take down than they were to raise.

What we stand to lose is not........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)