US Press
Responsible Statecraft maps Israeli military money inside American universities
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
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Israel's Ministry of Defense has funded more than seventy research projects at over thirty American universities since at least 2009, from cockroach-sized surveillance robots at Carnegie Mellon to "terror network" mapping at the University of Maryland, according to an investigation published on Thursday by Responsible Statecraft.
Mila Halgren and Alex Rewegan, the authors, worked from the ministry's US mission records and from the gap between what researchers proposed to the Israeli military and what they later published.
The projects they list include micro-drones for searching caves and buildings at Maryland and Brown, quadrotor swarm trajectories at MIT under a title that names missile guidance, brain-computer interfaces for visual recognition at Berkeley, and buried-explosives detection at the University of Illinois Chicago with the Technion.
Whose money#
The route matters for American readers as much as the research. Christian Sorensen of the Eisenhower Media Network explained it to the authors: US taxpayers fund the US government, which sends billions to Israel in military financing; Israel then buys "goods and services from US war corporations and research from US academic institutions" with it, and "there's not a strict accounting."
One documented grant was 120,000 dollars to Boston University's Kate Saenko for research on describing video in natural language. A university administrator described the funding arrangement to the authors as "a departure from standard process."
An ex-Israeli intelligence officer quoted in the piece said of AI-generated targets that "a human eye will go over them before each attack, but it need not spend a lot of time on them."
What the outlet is#
Responsible Statecraft is published by the Quincy Institute, a Washington think tank that argues for restraint in US foreign policy and against unconditional military support for Israel; its reporting on this subject is adversarial by design. The universities named did not respond in the piece, and the Israeli ministry's US mission was not quoted.
The investigation landed on the day the House voted to penalise universities that boycott Israel, which this paper reports separately. The two stories describe the same campuses from opposite directions: one measures what Israel's army buys there, the other what Congress will punish them for refusing to sell.
