On October 7, as Hamas invaded southern Israel and Israel began its latest war against Gaza, the EU’s position was immediately clear.

“Israel has the right to defend itself – today and in the future,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen posted on X, along with a photo of her office’s headquarters, draped in an Israeli flag. “The EU stands with Israel.”

Israel has since been placed genocide trial The International Court of Justice (ICJ) and its leaders in The Hague, as well as senior Hamas commanders Indicted by the International Criminal Court (International Chamber of Commerce). However, the EU continues to cooperate with Israeli institutions under its Horizon programme, which aims to fund research and innovation.

Data collected by the European Commission and analyzed by Al Jazeera show that the EU has awarded more than 238 million euros ($250 million) to Israeli institutions since October 7, including to top aerospace industry company Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) €640,000 ($674,000). and an aerospace manufacturer that supplies the Israeli military.

While the guidelines governing the Horizon Framework require funded projects to be “focused exclusively on civilian applications,” they acknowledge that “a considerable number of technologies and products are generic and can meet the needs of both civilian and military users.”

Technology that has both civilian and military uses (so-called “dual use”) may be eligible for EU funding as long as its stated purpose is civilian.

But in July this year, Israel carried out genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza, killing about 40,000 people and more than 2,000 European scholars and 45 organizations. petition The EU ended all funding to Israeli institutions, saying the Horizon framework “played a key role in the advancement of Israeli military technology” through the transfer of knowledge to the defense industry.

“These funding programs directly support projects that develop Israel’s military and weapons capabilities,” the petition states. “Given the scale, duration, and nature of the Israeli government’s human rights violations, Israeli institutions must suspend their participation in European research and education projects.”

That call went unanswered.

Funding the Israeli military establishment

The EU’s support for Israel has been part of its foreign policy long before the Hamas attacks. Hamas attacks killed 1,139 people and captured more than 200 Israelis.

Since 1996, the EU has channeled significant public funds to Israel through research and innovation projects. Israel is not a member of the EU but participates in the funding program as an associated country.

Under the Horizon 2020 framework program implemented from 2014 to 2020, Israeli organizations received a total of 1.28 billion euros ($1.35 billion) in contributions from the EU. Since Horizon Europe launched in 2021, it has received more than €747 million ($786 million) in funding to date.

European Commission data shows that IAI exports weapons systems around the world, earning 2.7 million euros ($2.8 million) under the Horizon Europe program and more than 10.7 million euros ($11.2 million under the Horizon 2020 program) ) income.

Israeli military company Elbit Systems, whose largest single customer is the Israeli Ministry of Defense, received grants for five projects under Horizon 2020, totaling €2.2 million ($2.3 million).

All funded projects have a clear “civilian” theme – such as border protection, disaster control and maritime surveillance – and are subject to an ethical assessment to review whether they are consistent with EU values.

But there is no EU mechanism to prohibit cutting-edge technology acquired through this funding from being used for military applications either simultaneously or at a later stage.

IAI received €1.4 million ($1.47 million) under the ResponDrone project launched in 2019 to develop 3D mapping drone technology to “provide accurate location information to first responders.”

Under a program called COPAC launched in 2017, Elbit Systems and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem were awarded more than 1 million euros ($1.05 million) to work on engineered quantum dots, a technology powered by ultrafast computers. Center, performing tasks such as sabotage, disruption, or eavesdropping. Today’s security systems.

Al Jazeera filed a freedom of information request seeking the results of an ethics assessment of the project involving Israel. The European Commission rejected the request, saying disclosure would “seriously undermine the Commission’s operations and internal decision-making processes”.

In March, the European Commission responded to a left-wing group in the European Parliament who asked why grants were signed for IAI during the Gaza war.

The group insists it “does not finance product and technology development actions prohibited by applicable international law”.

The office of EU Innovation Commissioner Illyana Ivanova, who is responsible for implementing the Horizon programme, did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.

“Dual-use technology”: from civilian to military applications

Al Jazeera contacted a dozen researchers working with Israeli institutions on Under the Horizon. Most declined to be interviewed but emphasized the civic intent of their projects.

Fabrizio Calderoni, a professor at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, Italy, participated in the ROXANNE project that will end in 2022. The project aims to develop “new voice technology, facial recognition and network analysis to facilitate the identification of criminals”.

Israel’s Ministry of Public Security – which oversees agencies such as the police and prison services – was one of the participants to receive a grant of nearly 135,000 euros ($142,145).

Calderoni said that under EU standards, research involving law enforcement rather than the military is considered “civilian” in nature.

He added that the project focuses on “the Anonymous network that commits burglaries, with the aim of finding patterns to identify the perpetrators of these crimes”.

Asked whether the results could be used to inform Israeli military operations in Gaza or the occupied West Bank, he told Al Jazeera, “We don’t have any evidence that these tools have been used for anything other than what was stated in the project. Other purposes.”

While it may not be possible to determine how the expertise gained through EU-funded projects is used by Israeli partners, critics argue that it could lead to systemic human rights violations that would be enough to cancel the collaboration.

Fabrizio Sebastiani, director of research at Italy’s National Research Council (CNR), has been using machine learning, a subset of artificial intelligence (AI), to determine the authorship of unattributed medieval texts identity.

“While the topic may seem innocuous, I was surprised to discover that the same machine learning techniques also underlie recent records Lavender He told Al Jazeera the “system” used by the Israeli military in Gaza.

Multiple media outlets have reported on Israel’s use of “Lavender,” an artificial intelligence-driven system that generates kill lists by analyzing surveillance data.

A similar tool was reportedly used in Gaza “Where is daddy?”track and link individuals to specific locations and send alerts when they return, and “Gospel”The Israeli military boasts that it can “quickly create targets.”

UN human rights experts say Israel’s use of artificial intelligence in Gaza is causing “unprecedented toll” on civilians. Human Rights Watch warned that these tools risked violating international humanitarian law.

“These techniques need to maximize the target, and the target can change,” Sebastiani said. For example, he explained, an algorithm designed to analyze repeated use of punctuation and terminology in unattributed text could be tuned to pick up clues seen as indicators of potential threats and flag them as military targets.

Recently, Sebastiani was approached by an Israeli agency looking to collaborate on a project outside of Horizon. He refused.

Al Jazeera found that Horizon Europe is funding Israeli institutions involved in AI-based research similar to Sebastiani’s work.

In January, Reichmann University in the Israeli coastal city of Herzliya received nearly 3 million euros ($3.16 million) as part of a project to study Sanskrit and Tibetan Buddhist texts to develop “cutting-edge computing tools to revolutionize Research on this material”.

Israeli agencies are also collaborating to develop “surveillance and security tools” for “counter-terrorism”.

Under the Horizon 2020 program, Bar-Ilan University and the Israeli Ministry of Public Security received €1.3 million ($1.37 million) and €267,000 ($281,000) respectively to develop interrogation training simulators.

Since January, Israel’s International Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT) and its alma mater Reichmann University have participated in the EU-GLOCTER project to promote “scientific excellence and technological innovation in the field of counter-terrorism.” A description of the project offers few details, but its website includes an image of soldiers in camouflage uniforms raiding a cluttered brick building.

Dublin City University, which is coordinating the project, told Al Jazeera that funding initially allocated to the Israeli partners had been suspended earlier this year. It did not elaborate on the reasons behind the decision, but the move follows a campaign by Irish students against Israel’s involvement in the project.

The European Commission’s database still lists Reichman and ICT as EU-GLOCTER partners.

Israeli university-military ties

The largest share of EU Horizon funds awarded to Israeli entities is allocated to academic institutions.

While universities are often seen as bastions of civil liberties, Israeli academic Maya Winder says Israeli academia is the backbone of the country’s military industry.

“Israeli universities are the backbone of Israeli racial rule, they are the core of Israel’s infrastructure of settler colonialism and apartheid, and now they are also actively serving this genocide and making it possible for the[Gaza war]to last for more than 13 months ,” Feng said.

In her book Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Denied Palestinian Freedom, she describes how Hebrew University became the first university established by the Zionist movement in 1918, followed by the Israel Institute of Technology in 1925 and Weizmann Institute of Technology. Science in 1934.

These institutions played a central role in the development and manufacture of weapons used to forcibly expel Palestinians before the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948.

The Weizmann Institute and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology later led the development of Israel’s military industry.

In 1954, the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology established the Department of Aeronautical Engineering, whose students spearheaded the development of the aerospace company IAI. The state-owned defense technology company Rafael was also born on their site.

“Any form of collaboration with Israeli universities comes at a direct cost to Palestinian liberation,” Wind said.