Despite the new TU Delft-Israel policy, plenty of partnerships remain out of range

Sixteen. This is the current number of Israeli partnerships at TU Delft that will be subject to review. They are Horizon projects, financed through a European Union grant. The Executive Board spokesperson says that the list may be incomplete at the moment and will be updated.

Last month TU Delft announced that existing partnerships with Israeli institutions will be reviewed. New partnerships will not be entered into for the time being unless they meet strong criteria.

TU Delft took that decision upon the advice of a moral deliberation chamber (see box). The Executive Board had tasked it with looking at the degree in which TU Delft should continue its institutional partnerships with Israeli institutions. The Executive Board did not ask it to look at individual partnerships.

Moral deliberation chamber

The advice issued by the moral deliberation chamber came about from three sessions in which a group of nine highly diverse TU Delft employees met in March and April. The main question on the table was whether TU Delft should work with Israeli organisations. Each of the meetings revolved around one particular partnership, and the participants had to agree on ‘yes’ or ‘no’ in each session. One of them stepped out because of dissatisfaction about the process.

The recommendations of the moral deliberation were not only about Israel.

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Institutional

The difference between institutional and individual is related to whether the Executive Board or a dean has signed a contract. Projects that receive money from the Dutch Research Council (NWO) or its European counterpart ERC (Horizon) are always institutional as the funding is done at institutional level. Partnerships between institutions for which memoranda of understanding are signed are also institutional.

The Executive Board says that it is suspending partnerships as it is concerned about possible involvement in genocide and human rights violations. Collaboration with Israeli institutions has been under fire for a long time because of their involvement in genocidal violence and human rights violations in Gaza.

TU Delft spokesperson: ‘The minute you limit activities at individual level, you block freedom of research’

The question is not only whether the list of institutional partnerships with Israeli institutions is complete, but it also does not include individual collaborations. The spokesperson says that this is a conscious decision. “We want the people who work for TU Delft to have the freedom to arrange their work as they wish. The minute you limit activities at individual level, you block freedom of research.” He also says that doing so would discriminate individual Israelis on the basis of nationality.

Hazy information

But does this not mean that TU Delft is not looking at a large share of the partnerships with Israeli institutions? These contacts are not registered, says the spokesperson. That means TU Delft does not have a clear picture of the number of partnerships that could continue under the new policy without being reviewed. It turned out that partnerships like that happens quite a lot, Delta found out from asking Delft academics about this.

Two researchers that Delta spoke to even said that their partnerships are almost only with individuals and hardly any with institutions. Individual collaboration may arise when academics meet each other at conferences and decide to carry out research on a particular subject together.

To get a picture of the partnerships that TU Delft academics enter into individually with peers at Israeli universities, we analysed data in Web of Science, a research database which lists academic publications. While publications may not be traceable to partnerships one on one – one partnership could lead to several publications for instance – it still gives us an idea.

Before 7 October

We looked at publications from 2018 onwards in which an academic from TU Delft and a researcher from an Israeli university were involved. All the partnerships prior to the publications happened before 7 October 2023. We found 127 publications naming seven different Israeli universities: Technion, Weizmann, Tel Aviv University, Ben Gurion, Hebrew University, Bar Ilan University and the University of Haifa.

None of the Israeli universities take any distance from the violence in Gaza

All these universities have close ties with the Israeli defence industry or have degree programmes for military personnel. By way of example, Technion has a degree programme and in a ‘guide for industry partners’ writes that it develops important technology for the Israeli defence industry. None of them take any distance from the genocide and violence in Gaza which, apart from ‘a neglictible chance of dual-use’, is a criterion that TU Delft requires for collaboration.

In the case of 14 academics whose names we saw on TU Delft-Israeli publications, we asked whether the relevant partnerships had been done at institutional or individual level. Of the 10 researchers that e-mailed us back, their answers were all individual.

Without judgement

All those partnerships have now ended, but given the individual character, similar partnerships could also be entered into in 2025 without evaluation. Good to know is that not all the researchers that Delta spoke to viewed the collaboration as a partnership. In several cases the contact was minimal or the group of academics so large that they were barely aware of the fact that an academic from Israel was part of the process.

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators occupied TU Delft academic buildings several times. (Photo: Thijs van Reeuwijk)

Our analysis shows that almost one quarter of the 127 academic publications involved dual-use research, or information that can be used for both civilian and military purposes. In its analysis of dual-use, Delta adopted the definition (in Dutch) that the Universities of The Netherlands (UNL) uses.

As an example, UNL calls carbon, that is used both in wind turbine blades and in military drones, dual-use. But even the academics that do this kind of research find it a difficult term. Several of them told Delta that they do not always know where to draw the line in cases of dual-use.

Mark Voskuijl says three publications about aeroelasticity as ‘typical examples of dual-use’

‘Typical dual-use’

To find out how and if the research outcomes of the individual partnerships could be used for military purposes, Delta ran through some of them with Mark Voskuijl. He is Professor of Weapon Systems at the Ministry of Defence’s military academy in Den Helder. He calls three publications about aeroelasticity as ‘typical examples of dual-use’, that is, of interest for both civilian and military use. They cover the interaction between aerodynamic forces on aeroplane wings and the resulting warping. Voskuijl explains that from a safety perspective, this is relevant for all aeroplanes.

Including for military planes, Voskuijl says. “The articles are specifically about thin wings. This is interesting for the design of unmanned aircraft that are used for reconnaissance as they have to fly very high for a long time.”

A researcher from an Israeli university and researchers from the American or Dutch armies were involved in two publications done individually, one about autonomous drones and one on aircraft-bird collisions, researchers from the American or Dutch army were involved besides a researcher from an Israeli university.

Militarily very relevant

Of the paper referred to first, the subject is very relevant militarily, says Voskuijl, given that autonomous drones ‘are used specifically for war’. He does note that they are papers in which existing research outcomes are listed or compared. So no new methods of technologies are being designed.

Also read our previous article on the findings of Follow the Money: ‘TU Delft engaged in multiple dual-use studies with Israel’

In two other publications, both civilian and not so much militarily, we saw the involvement of research institutes that received funding from the Israeli Ministry of Defence. One of these research institutes states in a folder that it works with the Elbit Systems weapon manufacturer and expects that a ‘significant part’ of its research results will be used by ‘large industrial defence companies’.

A so-called re-evaluation framework is now being worked on for the institutional partnerships that TU Delft has with Israeli institutions. The intention is that this will also be used in the future to assess new partnerships. But it is not intended for individual partnerships.

No advice or guidelines

Will there be any guidelines for academics to assess their individual partnerships so that they can decide whether or not to proceed? No, said the spokesperson. Academics are completely free to enter into any individual collaboration they wish. TU Delft does not give any advice or guidelines. The spokesperson explains that “the risk of the undesirable legitimising of human rights violations is lower between individual partnerships than between institutional partnerships”.

Integrity officer Ibo van de Poel: ‘The minute that TU Delft is involved in a partnership as an institution, the partnership is legitimised’

Ibo van de Poel, the TU Delft Integrity Officer who was involved in the moral deliberation that issued the advice to suspend institutional partnerships, agrees. The minute that TU Delft is involved in a partnership as an institution, it legitimises the partnership, he says. “It implies TU Delft approval.” In the case of individual collaboration, he says it is the moral responsibility of the relevant researchers themselves.

So there will be no advice or guidelines issued for individual Israeli partnerships. This is surprising given that such a thing already exists for knowledge security. After Delta revealed that TU Delft was working with Chinese military institutions and that members of the Chinese military were targeting knowledge at TU Delft in 2021, TU Delft established the China tools.

Partnering tools

These tools were intended to assess potential partnerships with China against a set of criteria and help individual academics at TU Delft. They were later made country neutral and renamed to partnering tools (in Dutch). They are intended for issues about knowledge security.

When the partnering tools were created, the current ‘Gaza-Israel situation’ was not relevant yet, says the spokesperson. So at the moment, the tools are not helpful for researchers who want to collaborate with Israel. Therefore the TU does not advise researchers who wish to work with Israeli institutions to use the tools.

At the moment, no new partnerships are being entered into. There will be an assessment tool in the future to decide whether or not to start a certain institutional collaboration. But it is not clear yet what that will be like in practice, the spokesperson said. The Executive Board will have to ‘decide on this’.

Human rights

As for the individual ties, they had not been discussed before, the spokesperson says. That said, the spokesperson states that ‘whether the partnering tools could be suitable for individual still needs to be looked at’. Van de Poel imagines that the tools could be useful for collaboration with Israel, but then focused on human rights. However, there are currently no plans to do this.

Like TU Delft, most universities opt to focus their policy on institutional ties. Van de Poel also says “It is not the case that we are doing something odd here.” Thus, on plenty of universities in the Netherlands individual partnerships with Israeli institutions remain unaffected.

Journalistic accountability and research methodology

Delta believes that every student and staff member must feel safe at TU Delft. This investigation was thus not intended to cast researchers, the country of Israel, or Israeli citizens in a negative light. As the moral deliberation writes in its advisory report, individual researchers must not be blamed for the genocide in Israel.

The Israel decision that TU Delft took at the beginning of July was the reason for Delta to start this journalistic investigation. It was not clear to us from the press release about the new policy and the advisory report what the impact of the decision was based on. We saw that the suspension only related to institutional partnerships but it was not clear what was included in this. We thus wanted to get a better understanding of the partnerships that the decision does and does not cover.

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To get a better idea about individual partnerships, how they work in practice, and how they came about, Delta analysed information in the Web of Science database for academic publications. The Web of Science research results are always related to the past as there is often a long period of time between the research itself and the academic publications. We filtered the information to between 2018 and 2025 in order to get a picture of the research outcomes back to 10 years ago.

This means that all the information was dated before 7 October 2023. Some points should be noted. The individual publications do not necessarily relate to just one research partnership (one partnership may lead to several publications). Furthermore, not every publication is related to research in which new knowledge is attained. For example, in so-called state-of-the-art-papers, academics discuss the current state of a particular technology and do not develop new technology. Besides that, Delta’s Editorial Office filtered out the projects that TU Delft sees as institutional from the research results as far as it could.

We then selected dual-use publications from the filtered list. We did this as the advisory report on which the Executive Board decision is based says that the risk of dual-use must be negligible in order to work with an Israeli institution. Apart from that, we also wanted to get clarity about the degree to which TU Delft – intentionally or not – would help the Israeli army, as was the case with the Chinese institutions that had military connections.

We were able to draw on our experience with our award winning research into the research ties with China. When reading the papers, we note the research subject, the funding source, and the backgrounds of the institutions involved. Delta referred six publications to the scientist Mark Voskuijl.

Delta contacted 13 authors of the selected publications personally. We asked them if the research was indeed an individual collaboration and how it came about. Ten academics gave answers. They all said that they were indeed individual contacts. Apart from them, Delta also approached other academics to build a picture about what individual partnerships are like at TU Delft.

Delta chose to write up its Web of Science research results as untraceably as possible. That’s because TU Delft staff members who are connected to Israel or Gaza have experienced doxing or harassment in other ways. By doing our best to ensure anonymity, we hope to keep the work situations of TU Delft academics as safe as possible.