The Pasteur Institute under the test of the Palestinian genocide
It is 2026, and the horror of the war crimes committed by the Israeli state no longer needs to be demonstrated: genocide, multiple ethnic cleansings, no fewer than three ongoing wars, bombing of civilians, violent colonization, destruction of universities, kidnapping of foreign nationals in international waters, violation of ceasefires, apartheid, torture, obstruction of humanitarian aid, etc. etc. etc.
The long list of atrocities committed by the fascist regime of the Israeli government has become a dull litany in the media ---when it is not simply erased from the record.
We, the employees of the Institut Pasteur, refuse to allow our Institute's humanist reputation to be tarnished by the blood of a people being slaughtered by a fascist regime. The direction congratulate itself for ending ties with the Iranian Pasteur Institute or for "fighting" for a science that serves humanity? We say our Institute can and must oppose this horror by publicly revoke its partnerships with institutions implicated in the Palestinian genocide and in Israel's ongoing wars.
Crimes against civilians
We must face head-on the reality of what is happening in and around Israel. Even if the actions of its fascist government were initially presented as a response to the horrific Hamas attack on Israel and its 1,200 deaths 29; three years later, it is no longer possible to believe that this "response" ---which has killed 73,000 Palestinians, 4,000 Lebanese 28, and 2,600 Iranians 38--- is in any way "proportionate", assuming that fighting evil with evil makes any sense from a humanist perspective.
Does the idea that our Institute is collaborating with the Israeli state under these conditions trouble you? It troubles us too.
Israel continuously violates the Gaza ceasefire
Since the ceasefire came into effect in October 2025, more than 700 Palestinians have been assassinated by Israeli forces 1. Bombings and incursions target civilian areas and displacement camps every day. Entire families, barely settled, are once again driven out. No humanitarian pause ---a war of attrition, slow, continuous, merciless.
Israel now controls 53% of the Gaza Strip
The annexation of Gaza is proceeding methodically. 53% of the Gaza Strip's territory is already under Israeli control, as satellite images show: earthworks, berms, a "yellow line" cutting the Strip in two [2,3][2,3]. Annexed areas are systematically razed, and anyone approaching them is shot by the Israeli army.
Winter kills: cold, floods, epidemics
Winter is agravating a situation that's already critical. Eleven children have died of cold in tents that the Israeli blockade prevents from being repaired or replaced with caravans 4. Rain flood the camps. Due to the lack of essential materials and infrastructure, diseases are spreading through the camps: respiratory infections, scabies, diarrhea, ticks, and lice 5. Furthermore, the Palestinian Ministry of Health warns of the risks of leptospirosis, salmonella, and plague 6.
A total blockade: humanitarian aid is a farce
For 19 years, Israel has been tightening its blockade on Gaza. Tents, cement, metal poles ---every essential material is blocked, making reconstruction impossible. The aid that does get in is derisory ---a few trucks per day for two million people--- and is mostly commercial, sold at exorbitant prices rather than distributed for free 7. UN agencies are obstructed: access denied, visas blocked, equipment forbidden, missions cancelled [8,9][8,9]. As for the Rafah crossing, it is either closed or subject to humiliation: searches, confiscations, endless waits, arbitrary refusals [10,11][10,11].
An apartheid law to execute Palestinians
In late March 2026, the Israeli Parliament passed a law instituting the death penalty by hanging for any Palestinian found guilty of a "terrorist act" by a military court, with no right to clemency, and execution within 90 days 22. This text applies only to Palestinians, never to Israelis who commit similar acts of violence, who are prosecuted in civil courts [22,23][22,23]. This judicial discrimination is fully embedded in the apartheid system that Israel applies against Palestinians ---a regime of racial domination documented by Amnesty International 24, Human Rights Watch 25, and confirmed by the advisory opinions of the International Court of Justice [26,27][26,27].
Meanwhile, in the occupied West Bank: deadly escalation, settler attacks, and systematic annexation
In March 2026, the occupied West Bank experienced a dramatic escalation of Israeli violence, marked by military repression, racist settlers attacks, and an acceleration of colonization.
Settlers have carried out organized and deadly attacks: six Palestinians were killed in March, including two brothers shot dead in Qaryout 12, and a man killed near Hebron 13, while dozens of armed settlers attacked Khirbet Abu Falah, leaving three dead 14. These attacks are carried out in coordination with the army to push Palestinians off their land and colonize it 15.
Meanwhile, colonization is accelerating: nearly 500 olive trees uprooted, hundreds of hectares confiscated, and Minister Smotrich calls for "erasing" the Oslo Accords to annex the entire West Bank [16,17,18][16,17,18]. Since October 2023, approximately 22,000 Palestinians have been kidnapped 19, and the UN counts more than 36,000 forcibly displaced between November 2024 and October 2025 20 ---an ongoing ethnic cleansing, in total impunity despite European condemnations 21.
Lebanon: 2 years of bombings despite the ceasefire
Israel has been bombing Lebanon for 2 years despite the ceasefire. On March 1, 2026, following a US-Israeli attack on Iran, Hezbollah retaliated. Israel launched a ground operation in southern Lebanon and bombed Beirut.
The toll in one month: 1.3 million displaced (20% of the population), more than 1,400 dead (mostly civilians), annexation of 8% of Lebanese territory, destruction of bridges, probable use of white phosphorus, herbicides on agricultural land, assassinations of peacekeepers, healthcare workers, and journalists.
The Lebanese government has taken measures against Hezbollah, but Israel refuses to negotiate. The real objective: to annex southern Lebanon as a "protection zone". The evidence is clear: on March 31, 2026, the Israeli Defense Minister promised to destroy border villages, "using the same methods as for Rafah and Beit Hanoun in Gaza".
Crimes against scientists
The Israeli state does not limit itself to war objectives, as we have just seen, but is indeed carrying out a systematic destruction of anything that even remotely resembles a free Palestine. Among these genocidal atrocities, attacks on the education system and scientific research feature prominently.
A systematic destruction of education in Gaza
In Gaza, the destruction of educational infrastructure is total. According to the Education Cluster, 93.3% of schools are impacted 30 and require at least major repairs before they can resume operations. These destructions are not collateral damage --- they strike at the heart of Palestinian society, with 459 buildings directly targeted.
In September 2025, the Pasteur director herself assured the unions that the Institute would use the PAUSE program ---which allows providing refuge for displaced students and scientists--- specifically for Palestinians. Unfortunately, the "excellence" criteria required for this type of program are completely disconnected from the reality of a population subjected to a protracted genocide for years. How can one be excellent when all educational infrastructure has been destroyed and mere survival is a primary concern?
Obstruction against Palestinian refugees
Refugee aid organizations say it plainly: Palestinians are victims of an organized system of obstruction at every level, as highlighted in the report by "Academics for Gaza" 31.
This situation stands in stark contrast to the political responsiveness deployed regarding the war in Ukraine. While for Ukrainian refugees, the French State and the Institut Pasteur established clear, active support mechanisms, we are now witnessing systemic and institutional obstruction regarding the hosting of Palestinians.
Yet these bureaucratic delays amount to nothing less than an intangible extension of the physical blockade completing, legally and politically, the obstruction to mobility that Israeli authorities have already put in place on the ground.
The era when the research and education sector was a vehicle for humanism and resistance seems very distant, as we witness a contraction of the space for scientific debate under the effect of growing censorship. The Collège de France cancels its conference "Palestine and Europe", the "Yadan law" seeks to criminalize any denunciation of atrocities committed by the state of Israel...
Despite the cries for help from numerous associations and the positive precedents set by the war in Ukraine, the result is dismal: for lack of political support, no Palestinian student has been able to be evacuated to France, and only 52 PAUSE laureates (artists and researchers) have been hosted. Notably, among them, 21 PAUSE laureates were not even evacuated, including Ahmed Shamia (architect), assassinated on May 7, 2025, by the Israeli army 31. Compare this to the 105,000 Ukrainians who were thankfully hosted 31.
Since then, the PAUSE program has been defunded, its steering committee has rejected more than 82% of Palestinian applications that had been approved by its scientific council, and the government has finally suspended the program outright... but only for Palestinians 33.
Bombings of scientific institutes
Far from limiting itself to Gaza, the Israeli state has also launched a war against its Iranian neighbor. In June 2025, Israel had already launched a massive attack on Iran, triggering a 12-day war. On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel, two military powers possessing nuclear weapons, again massively bombed Iran, in the midst of diplomatic negotiations, without any prior declaration of war.
To date, thirty universities have been attacked, and several professors and university scientists have been the victims of targeted assassinations. Notable among these are the April 3 attack on Shahid Beheshti University, and three attacks on March 28, 29, and 30, 2026, against Isfahan University of Technology, Iran University of Science and Technology, and Amirkabir University of Technology in Tehran. More than 750 schools, over 300 health centers, and more than 90,000 homes have been affected. According to the Iranian Red Crescent, the United States and Israel have destroyed or damaged over 115,000 civilian structures, leaving behind a system of chaos in which hospitals, schools, water treatment plants, and civilian roads have been destroyed or rendered unusable. The US bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls' primary school in Minab on February 28, which killed at least 175 people, including many schoolgirls, is particularly heinous 34.
The war has also targeted the Institut Pasteur of Iran, located in Tehran, one of the oldest public research centers in Iran and the Middle East, founded in 1920 and independent since 1946. The Institut Pasteur of Tehran was part of the Pasteur Network, until the Paris Institute cut ties with it --- due to its links with an authoritarian regime. However, it is unclear what the actual situation is, as the Iranian Institute is still listed as a member of the Pasteur Network...
Institutes associated to the genocide
An Israeli university system coupled with the military apparatus
Numerous sources (including Israeli and/or Jewish academics) document how Israeli universities actively collaborate with state institutions, particularly the military. The work of Uri Yacobi Keller 54, Nick Riemer 55, and Neve Gordon 56 demonstrates the extent of their involvement.
In her 2024 book, "Towers of Ivory and Steel --- How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom" 36, anthropologist Maya Wind meticulously demonstrates how Israeli academic institutions were created to serve the colonization of Palestine and feed the Israeli military-industrial complex. The encroachment of politics upon academic freedoms is the classic way authoritarian governments interfere in the lives of professors and students. For Maya Wind (herself Israeli 37), the difference is that in Israel, this pressure is not an external threat but is built into the system. Her systematic analysis, history, and solid data demonstrate that boycotting Israeli academic institutions is necessary. Her analysis is unequivocal: "Israeli universities are not independent of the Israeli security state, but rather serve as an extension of its violence" (p. 13).
In her book, we learn that the Hebrew University, the Technion, and the Weizmann Institute, from their very founding, participated in the "Science Corps" of the Haganah (the main Zionist paramilitary militia at the time of Israel's creation, later integrated into the Ministry of Defense), and thus in the production of weapons and biological weapons on their campuses. All Israeli universities have also annexed Palestinian territories, including Haifa, Ben-Gurion, Bar-Ilan, Ariel (the newest university), and Tel Aviv, which explicitly prevented the return of Palestinian refugees after the adoption of UN Resolution 194.
The collusion between the state and academia manifests itself today in the creation of programs such as the Hebrew University's Havatzalot intelligence program. The university hosted "a massive Israeli military takeover of the program's curriculum, organization, personnel, and physical infrastructure on campus" (p. 53). Palestinian students obviously protested against this program, but their actions resulted in sanctions.
The treatment of Palestinian students occupies a significant part of Wind's book, because for the universities, "Palestinian identity itself has always been conceived as a 'security threat'" (p. 146). According to Wind's research, "no Israeli university president or senior administrator has offered to intervene" on behalf of Palestinian professors or students facing Israeli military invasions of their campuses. As Wind meticulously describes, a deafening silence reigns in the corridors of Israeli academia in the face of any violation of a Palestinian's right to education.
Wind's analysis is clear: "Israeli universities not only continue to actively participate in the Israeli state's violence against Palestinians, but also contribute through their resources, research, and studies to maintaining, defending, and justifying this oppression" (p. 178).
Ineffective partnerships
The call for academic boycott did not emerge with the genocidal war in the Gaza Strip. It was launched over twenty years ago by Palestinians themselves, through the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI 43). Alas, the initiative foundered in the face of the guilty blindness of most European institutions, which now go so far as to deny the genocide (as if that erased everything else), supported in this by political pressures that violate academic freedom 44.
Here again, the East/West double standard is glaring when comparing with the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, which was immediately followed by suspensions of collaborations. If there's a war in the West, that's enough; in the East, several wars with ethnic cleansing, including two years of genocide... still not enough. One dreads to know what the limit is before these people finally decide to act.
The excuse is always the same: "to transmit our values through partnerships rather than by withdrawing from them" 44. But after 20 years of intensifying Israeli colonization, which has pushed its atrocities to the worst of the worst, it is time to draw the inevitable conclusion: influence through partnerships does not work.
Those who genuinely care about preserving critical spaces within centers of knowledge must realize that there is no real academic freedom in Israel as long as universities are so deeply tied to the state apparatus. Nor will there be academic freedom as long as the apartheid regime exists, where Palestinian students do not have the same rights as Israeli students 45.
It must be said: there is a deeply racist logic 45 in weighing Palestinian lives against the loss of a grant for an Israeli researcher. On one side, thousands of Palestinian students have been assassinated, all of Gaza's universities have been destroyed. On the other, Israeli academics would simply lose... access to European funding?
Partnerships are illegal
These partnerships between French and Israeli institutions are even contrary to international law, violating the principle of the obligation to prevent genocide under the 1948 Convention. This international convention ---to which France is a party--- should lead states and their administrations to ensure that they do not in any way legitimize the crimes committed by the Israeli state, already identified by the International Court of Justice.
After two years of unsuccessful attempts to bring these partnerships to an end, student and professional organizations and associations have decided to take legal action. In total, twenty-one organizations (including Solidaires, the French Jewish Union for Peace, and the CGT) have filed an appeal demanding the application of international law, before the Council of State and administrative courts.
A risk to reputation
Not everyone in the research community is turning a deaf ear. Some universities recognize that their collaborations with Israeli institutions give them real political leverage. In a world where science has become a state-controlled political battleground, official partnerships are also diplomatic tools.
The Israeli government itself is under no illusion, and today spends more than $730 million on propaganda (four times more than the previous year) 39. Despite these efforts, Israel has become the most hated state in the world 40.
It has become genuinely risky, in terms of public image, to support the Israeli state, even indirectly. Academic partnerships with complicit institutions will not escape the judgment of history.
According to Le Monde, as early as the end of last year, Israeli universities were facing "an unprecedented wave of boycotts" 42.
Institutions that are disengaging from their partnerships
To give an example: after months of protests (late 2024), the University of Ghent (Belgium) began a process of disengaging from projects involving Israeli partners "implicated in human rights violations". It is therefore possible for institutions to acknowledge this simple fact and respond to it. UGent specifically disengaged from five "major" European projects 41; an admittedly cumbersome process, yet one that is clearly feasible and requires nothing more than a bit of political will. The Belgian university rectors, joined by 4,500 European academics, have called for an end to funding for Israeli research projects when the institutions involved have ties to the military 46.
Alongside them, many universities across Europe and around the world are pursuing the same policy: Paris-Saclay University (via its ethics council 53), the University of Lausanne (UNIL), the University of Geneva 47, the Free University of Brussels (ULB), the University of Helsinki 49, the Federal University of Ceará, the University of Amsterdam, Trinity College Dublin 50, the University of Sydney 51, the University of the Witwatersrand, the University of Cape Town, the University of Pretoria, the University of KwaZulu-Natal, the University of Stellenbosch, Rhodes University, Nelson Mandela University, the Durban University of Technology 52, etc.
Refusing inaction
An institutional boycott is necessary
Israeli universities play an active role in developing weapons systems and military, legal, and diplomatic doctrines to justify colonization and the illegal annexation of occupied lands, to rationalize ethnic cleansing and extrajudicial executions of Indigenous Palestinians, and to develop tools for armament, cyberattacks, surveillance, intelligence, and propaganda 53. There is therefore a proven chasm between the practices and behaviors of Israeli universities and the humanistic ethical principles of academia.
Philippe Stamenkovic (philosopher of science at the University of Uppsala) called as early as the summer of 2024 57 for breaking ties with Israeli universities that actively collaborate with the country's state institutions, while allowing individual collaborations with critical academic voices within Israeli society:
"Israeli universities also represent part of the solution. They often host the rare critical voices within Israeli society (even though the University of Jerusalem fired the Palestinian professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, who had called for a ceasefire, before reinstating her). Nevertheless, these positive contributions remain scattered and individual --- a stark contrast to the institutional backing of war and occupation. Israeli universities also represent places where Jewish and Arab students live together. Alas, these positive contributions do not seem to outweigh the negative ones, and they have no influence on the war and colonization, which continue relentlessly.
Israeli universities thus appear to play an overall negative role, supporting the crimes committed by the State of Israel. What is to be done, then? The argument that science has no social responsibility, as asserted by the president of Bar-Ilan University, does not hold. Like anyone else, academics have the moral responsibility not to cause harm to others, including through their work and its applications, which encompasses their collaborations. The academic boycott of Israeli universities is a simple way to do this. The truly institutional dimension of their support for the State of Israel justifies that this boycott be carried out at the institutional level of programs, departments, faculties, or even entire institutions.
It is important to clarify that this institutional boycott respects academic freedom, as it in no way prejudges individual collaborations, which can be maintained if they are beneficial. Ideally, each university should audit its collaborations with Israeli universities ---as has been done for many of them regarding their collaborations with Russian institutions--- and suspend any that risk contributing to Israel's crimes. In case of doubt, or if resources are lacking to conduct such an audit, it is better to boycott than not to boycott, because the consequences of an erroneous boycott seem far less serious than those of a boycott that should have been carried out but was not."
The Institut Pasteur must act
We call on all Pasteur Institute workers to join us in demanding concrete action from the Institut Pasteur:
- End the East/West double standard in how international partnerships are evaluated and maintained.
- Conduct a full audit of all ongoing partnerships with Israeli institutions, within every scientific unit, and make the results publicly available.
- Sever all partnerships with Israeli institutions.