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20-12-2024
BRUSSELS: On October 7, as Israel began its latest war on Gaza following Hamas’s incursion into southern Israel, the European Union’s position was immediately clear.
“Israel has a right to defend itself today and in the days to come,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen posted on X, alongside an image of her office’s headquarters lit up with Israel’s flag. “The European Union stands with Israel.”
Israel has since been placed on trial for genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at The Hague and its leaders as well as a top Hamas commander have been indicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC). Yet the EU continues to partner with Israeli institutions under its “Horizon” scheme, a program that funds research and innovation.
Data collected by the European Commission and analyzed by media shows that since October 7, the EU has awarded Israeli institutions more than 238 million euros ($250m), including 640,000 euros ($674,000) to Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), a top aerospace and aviation manufacturer supplying the Israeli army.
While guidelines regulating the Horizon framework require funded projects to be “exclusively focused on civil applications”, they acknowledge that a “considerable number of technologies and products are generic and can address the needs of both civil and military users”.
Technology that can serve both civil and military uses so-called “dual use” may qualify for EU funding as long as the stated objective is civil.
But in July, when about 40,000 people had been killed in Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, more than 2,000 European academics and 45 organizations petitioned the EU to end all funding to Israeli institutions, saying the Horizon framework had played “a critical role in the advancement of Israeli military technology” by transferring knowledge to the defence industry.
“These funding schemes directly support projects developing Israeli military and weapons capabilities,” the petition said. “Given the scale, duration and nature of human rights violations by the Israeli government, Israeli institutions’ participation in European research and education programs must be suspended.”
That call went unanswered.
The EU’s support for Israel has been a fixture of its foreign policy since long before the Hamas attack, during which 1,139 people were killed and more than 200 Israelis were taken captive.
The bloc has channeled vast sums of public money since 1996 to Israel through research and innovation programs. Israel is not an EU member but participates as an associated country in funding initiatives.
Under the Horizon 2020 framework program that ran between 2014 and 2020, Israeli organizations received a total EU contribution of 1.28bn euros ($1.35bn). Since Horizon Europe was launched in 2021, it has so far been granted over 747 million euros ($786m).
IAI, which exports weapons systems worldwide, received 2.7 million euros ($2.8m) under Horizon Europe and over 10.7 million euros ($11.2m) under Horizon 2020, European Commission data shows.
Elbit Systems, the Israel-based military company whose biggest single customer is the Israeli Ministry of Defence, was awarded grants for five projects under Horizon 2020 for a total 2.2 million euros ($2.3m).
All funded projects have a stated “civilian” theme such as border protection, disaster control and maritime surveillance and are subject to ethics assessments to review their compliance with EU values. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
