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<\/a><\/p>\nAfter Hila Ben David finished performing John Lennon\u2019s \u201cImagine\u201d at Tel Aviv University\u2019s doctoral graduation ceremony on July 16, the stage was handed over to Brig. Gen. (res.) Dr. Danny Gold, head of the Defense Ministry\u2019s Directorate of Defense Research and Development. Gold, a TAU alum who earned all his academic degrees there, had returned to his alma mater to address the graduating class.<\/p>\n
In a lecture titled \u201cTurning Vision into Security,\u201d<\/a> Gold showcased Israeli weapons systems alongside footage of missile launchers, air-defense interceptions, and Israeli airstrikes on trucks in the heart of Tehran. Slides promoting major Israeli defense contractors Elbit Systems and Rafael, as well as smaller private firms like SMART (\u201cLethality and precision for fighters\u201d) and UNIQAI (\u201cAI for mission planning\u201d) flashed across the screen.<\/p>\n About seven minutes into the presentation, the ceremony was interrupted by indistinct shouting, scattered applause, and booing. Several graduates and family members walked out, among them Dr. Jad Ka\u2019dan, who had just received his doctorate in cultural studies and was one of 17 Palestinian students awarded doctoral degrees by the university that year.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWhen [the university] brings in Dr. Gold and you\u2019re suddenly seeing videos of missile launches, air raid sirens, and the bombing of Tehran, you realize they\u2019re treating you with contempt \u2014 they\u2019re trying to humiliate you,\u201d he told +972 Magazine and Local Call.<\/p>\n Ka\u2019dan, who completed his postdoctoral fellowship in California, found the celebration of Israel\u2019s defense industry particularly dizzying. \u201c[Across the world] people are talking about BDS, and you\u2019re showing us videos like this? I am ashamed to say that this is what they show here,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \t Brig. Gen. (res.) Danny Gold, head of the Israeli Defense Ministry\u2019s Directorate of Defense Research and Development, addresses Tel Aviv University graduates, July 16, 2026. (Tel Aviv University\/YouTube, screenshot)<\/p>\n The protests did not just come from Palestinian students. According to Ka\u2019dan, when the mother of one of his friends approached the stage and began shouting, \u201cShame!\u201d roughly a quarter of the audience joined in. \u201cHalf the people in the hall have PTSD from the war [with Iran],\u201d said Ka\u2019dan, \u201cand then you show them videos of explosions?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s really fitting,\u201d he added. \u201cFirst \u2018Imagine\u2019 \u2014 about there being no countries, and nothing to kill and be killed for \u2014 and then an army officer.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Moments after Gold concluded his remarks, a visibly uneasy university rector, Prof. Noga Kronfeld-Schor, took the stage and apologized if the lecture \u201chad hurt some of the people [in the audience].\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Faculty members affiliated with Academia For Equality<\/a> soon circulated a letter arguing that the problem went beyond an insensitive graduation speech. The address had been delivered, they wrote, to \u201cJewish and Palestinian students whose bodies and minds have been scarred by the seemingly endless war of the past three years\u201d and who had come \u201cto celebrate their academic achievements, not to watch a propaganda spectacle.\u201d The event, they argued, constituted \u201cyet another step in the growing militarization of our university over recent years.\u201d<\/p>\n Days later, the administration issued a more detailed apology to senior faculty members, acknowledging that inviting Gold had been \u201ca mistake\u201d because the presentation had distressed audience members, including children, bereaved families, and soldiers traumatized by the war. But it categorically rejected Academia For Equality\u2019s broader conclusion that the university is undergoing a process of militarization.\u00a0<\/p>\n In their response, university president Ariel Porat and rector Noga Kronfeld-Schor called the allegation \u201ca lie and a fabrication \u2014 a veritable smear campaign\u201d that strengthened the case of \u201cthose seeking to boycott Israeli academia [by] presenting it as an agent of the military.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet an investigation by +972 and Local Call calls the administration\u2019s rebuke into question. Interviews and documents point to a university that has, in recent years, increasingly made space for Israel\u2019s military and security establishment in campus life \u2014 from partnerships with the army to efforts to recruit students into the Shin Bet, Israel\u2019s domestic security service.<\/p>\n Headhunting on campus<\/p>\n About a month before Gold\u2019s controversial appearance at the graduation ceremony, TAU\u2019s Career Development Center invited students in the departments of Middle Eastern and African History and Arabic and Islamic Studies to a \u201ccareer-focused\u201d meeting with a Shin Bet representative.<\/p>\n \t A Shin Bet booth at a Tel Aviv University career fair, in 2023. (Nissi Peli)<\/p>\n The June email, sent by Humanities Career Advisor Sivan Tivoni and obtained by +972 and Local Call, said the security service had approached the university to organize an event specifically for students in the two departments.<\/p>\n \u201cAs part of the event,\u201d the invitation read, \u201ca former senior official from the Shin Bet will be our guest for an inspirational session and an open discussion on covert operations, the challenges of intelligence and security, and the importance of knowledge of the Arabic language and familiarity with the Arab and Islamic worlds in meaningful professional work.\u201d Students would also hear \u201cstories and insights from these fields (subject to [security] classification restrictions), and take part in direct discussion with the guests.\u201d<\/p>\n Muhammad Masarwa, a master\u2019s student in Arabic and Islamic Studies and a political activist, said the invitation reflected a broader tendency to view the study of Arabic primarily through a security lens. \u201cIt\u2019s very sad to frame the study of Islam and familiarity with the Arab world from the perspective of \u2018knowing the enemy,\u2019\u201d he said. The invitation, he added, conveys the message that \u201cyou can become part of a system that can harm others through your knowledge of their culture and language.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Masarwa said he never received the email, nor did any of the Palestinian students he knew in the two departments. He learned about the event only after a Palestinian friend forwarded him the invitation, which other Jewish students had shared with that friend. (TAU did not respond to +972 and Local Call\u2019s question about whether the invitation was sent exclusively to Jewish students.)<\/p>\n Within the department, Masarwa said, the invitation generated little discussion. But he did not believe the outreach was accidental. \u201cAmong Jewish students \u2014 not all of them \u2014 there is a noticeable aspiration to find work with the Shin Bet, to join the security establishment,\u201d he said. \u201c[They don\u2019t come to Arabic studies] out of a love for the language and culture.\u201d<\/p>\n \t Students at Tel Aviv University campus, May 15, 2025. (Yossi Aloni\/Flash90)<\/p>\n Department officials who spoke with +972 and Local Call distanced themselves from the initiative.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI must admit I didn\u2019t know about this,\u201d said Dr. Avner Wishnitzer, chair of the Department of Middle Eastern and African History. \u201cI understand that the event was organized by the university\u2019s Career Development Center. I didn\u2019t know that the department\u2019s secretariat had sent out the invitation. It didn\u2019t go through me. Bottom line: We have no connection to the Shin Bet, and we do not organize events of this kind.\u201d<\/p>\n The university offered a similar explanation. Career development events are intended to expose students to employment opportunities across the public, private, and social sectors, spokesperson Tomer Walner said.\u00a0<\/p>\n Employers \u201coperating in accordance with the law are invited to present to students fields of work and job openings relevant to their training,\u201d he added, stressing that such events are organized by the center and \u201cunder no circumstances form part of the academic curriculum.\u201d<\/p>\n In the end, the event, scheduled for June 15, did not take place because too few students registered, according to a university source. Still, such \u201cheadhunting\u201d \u2013 proactive recruitment of people with specialized skills \u2014 by Israel\u2019s security agencies on university campuses is nothing new.\u00a0<\/p>\n A 2025 report by the anti-militarist organization New Profile<\/a> documented years of recruitment events involving the Shin Bet and Mossad at Israeli universities, including a 2017 \u201ccareer session with the Shin Bet<\/a>\u201d hosted by TAU\u2019s Faculty of Social Sciences and an event at the Technion titled \u201cTechnology in the Service of the General Security Service [Shin Bet].\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \t Students in Israeli army uniform. at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, January 8, 2019. (Hadas Parush\/Flash90)<\/p>\n More recently, in May, TAU\u2019s Career Development Center invited students in the social sciences and humanities to an event titled \u201cCareers in Security Organizations<\/a>,\u201d featuring representatives from the Mossad, Shin Bet, Defense Ministry, and Israel Prison Service. \u201cDid you know,\u201d the invitation asked, \u201cthat the knowledge and skills you\u2019ve acquired in the social sciences and humanities can give you a real advantage in a career at the heart of Israel\u2019s security apparatus?\u201d<\/p>\n What distinguished the June invitation, according to Dr. Outi Bat-El, a TAU linguist and member of Academia for Equality, was not that the Shin Bet was recruiting on campus, but that it was looking for students from particular fields. \u201cThe invitation is unusual in that it is aimed specifically at these two departments,\u201d Bat-El said. \u201cThis isn\u2019t a job fair where anyone can come and go as they please. It\u2019s targeted.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The promise that students would hear \u201cstories and insights\u201d about Shin Bet operations, she noted, \u201csounds like Disneyland. This is recruitment for something terrible. It\u2019s full cooperation between the university and the Shin Bet.\u201d<\/p>\n A history of symbiosis<\/p>\n The relationship between Arabic and Middle East studies in Israeli academia and the country\u2019s security establishment dates back to the state\u2019s early days, and perhaps even earlier. At TAU, it was institutionalized in the mid-1960s, when the university agreed to incorporate the Shiloah Institute \u2014 a Defense Ministry research body that later became the Moshe Dayan Center<\/a> \u2014 into its Department of Middle Eastern Studies and African History.<\/p>\n \t Then-U.S. Ambassador to Israel Daniel Shapiro visits the Moshe Dayan Center, Tel Aviv University, March 26, 2012. (U.S. Embassy Tel Aviv\/Wikicommons)<\/p>\n The decision was not without controversy. In a recent Haaretz article<\/a>, former TAU president Itamar Rabinovich, who headed the Dayan Center before chairing the Department of Middle Eastern and African History, recalled that the Hebrew University of Jerusalem had rejected a Defense Ministry proposal to absorb the institute.<\/p>\n TAU took a different approach. At the time, the fledgling institution was trying to recruit Shimon Shamir, then a junior scholar who would later head the department and serve as Israel\u2019s ambassador to Egypt and Jordan. Shamir made his appointment conditional on the university accepting the Shiloah Institute.<\/p>\n The resulting \u201csymbiosis\u201d between the institute and the new department, Rabinovitch wrote, \u201cgave Tel Aviv University a unique status\u201d within Israeli academia.\u00a0<\/p>\n Dr. Yonatan Mendel, head of the Department of Middle Eastern studies at Ben-Gurion University \u2014 whose research concerns the securitization of Arabic studies<\/a> from the pre-state Jewish Yishuv in Palestine onward \u2014 agreed that the relationship was unusual. \u201cSuch a direct and open connection, linking the study of Arabic in academia with the Shin Bet and national security, is quite rare,\u201d he told +972 and Local Call.\u00a0<\/p>\n Still, he added, \u201cThe entry of intelligence agencies and security considerations into academia is certainly not a new phenomenon. These are processes that predate the establishment of Israel and gained momentum in the 1960s and 1970s.\u201d<\/p>\n \t David Ben-Gurion addresses members of the Shiloah Institute, which later became the Moshe Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University. Date unknown. (Wikicommons)<\/p>\n In the decades that followed, Mendel said, such relationships were largely maintained under a veil of secrecy. Since October 7, however, they have regained momentum and become increasingly explicit. \u201cPerhaps this is because supporting security needs is suddenly seen as the order of the day,\u201d he suggested.<\/p>\n Mendel said his own department at Ben-Gurion University had never received a comparable direct request. Institutional culture may partly explain the difference: In his Haaretz article, Rabinovich described Ben-Gurion\u2019s Department of Middle Eastern Studies as \u201crebellious, going against the establishment\u2019s spirit.\u201d<\/p>\n In her 2024 book \u201cTowers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Freedom to Palestinians,\u201d Israeli scholar Maya Wind argues that Israeli universities have long helped produce knowledge that sustains Israel\u2019s rule over Palestinians while presenting themselves as liberal, democratic institutions.\u00a0<\/p>\n Amid an increase in academic partnerships between U.S. and Israeli universities, Wind told +972<\/a> last August that the latter \u201care in fact deeply implicated in Israeli settler colonialism and now in genocide\u201d \u2014 not least because entire academic disciplines \u201csubordinate their knowledge production to the needs of the Israeli state.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n For Mendel, this historical proximity between Middle Eastern Studies and the security establishment helps explain why the field \u201csometimes falls into the trap of Orientalism\u201d and why many Palestinian citizens of Israel have struggled to see it as truly their own.\u00a0<\/p>\n \t Palestinian students take part in a rally marking Nakba Day, at Tel Aviv University, May 13, 2026. (Jamal Awad\/Flash90)<\/p>\n Yet he also pointed to a countervailing trend: In recent years, lecturers and researchers across Israeli academia have pushed their disciplines in more civilian and critical directions. \u201cThis is the trend we must strengthen \u2014 independent and critical research, as far removed from a security-centric approach as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n Militarization in plain sight<\/p>\n Yet even as some scholars have turned a critical eye toward the relationship between academia and the security establishment, TAU\u2019s institutional ties with the military have grown significantly stronger in recent years.\u00a0<\/p>\n Beginning in October 2023, before the October 7 attack, the university launched the \u201cErez\u201d program<\/a>, under which approximately 200 candidates for combat officer positions complete bachelor\u2019s degrees in the humanities and social sciences before beginning officers\u2019 training. TAU is reportedly set to receive approximately NIS 15 million (almost $5 million) for the program.<\/p>\n Although the university initially promised that participants in the program would not carry weapons on campus, armed soldiers in uniform began regularly attending classes after the outbreak of the war. Their numbers have since declined, but faculty members say they remain a familiar presence.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re on campus, and 50 soldiers in uniform, carrying weapons, are moving from building to building,\u201d Bat-El said. \u201cI don\u2019t feel comfortable. Imagine how Palestinian students feel.\u201d<\/p>\n The university\u2019s ties to the security establishment also extend into the technology sector. Since 2018, TAU Ventures \u2014 a venture-capital fund founded by the university \u2014 has jointly operated \u201cthe Xcelerator<\/a>\u201d with the Shin Bet. The program provides selected startups with a $50,000 grant from the security agency itself<\/a>, along with office space and business support, and advertises what it calls an \u201cexclusive opportunity for validation and proofs of concept with Shabak [the Shin Bet].\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n For its most recent cohort, the program said it was seeking technologies in fields including AI and data, cyber, drone threats and UAV, unmanned platforms, sensors, and web intelligence that could \u201cimpact the battlefield\u201d and strengthen Israel\u2019s \u201clong-term security capabilities.\u201d<\/p>\n Beginning in the next academic year, TAU will also host the prestigious \u201cHavatzalot\u201d program, which trains outstanding Intelligence Corps recruits while they complete their university studies. The program has operated at the Hebrew University since 2019 despite opposition<\/a> from students and faculty, who argued that it amounted to \u201cthe expropriation of the academic sphere and its transfer to military control.\u201d After TAU won the bid to host the program, the Hebrew University petitioned the court to challenge the decision.<\/p>\n A recent incident suggests that TAU\u2019s ties to the defense establishment go beyond recruitment drives and training programs. In May 2025, after the university administration suspected a Palestinian student of spray-painting slogans opposing Israel\u2019s war on Gaza on Shin Bet and Elbit booths at a campus career fair, it provided the Shin Bet<\/a> with his personal details. Shortly afterward, the student received a call from a man who identified himself as a Shin Bet representative and ordered him to report to a police station for a \u201cconversation.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n While the process was soon halted after intervention by the university\u2019s disciplinary officer, the incident showed how easily the university\u2019s cooperation with the security establishment could spill over into the surveillance and intimidation of students.<\/p>\n It was against this backdrop that the university administration dismissed as an \u201coutright fabrication\u201d the claim that TAU was becoming an extension of Israel\u2019s security establishment.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cFor several years now, Israeli academia has been struggling against various forces that seek to destroy it and threaten its freedom, both within Israel and abroad,\u201d they wrote in the email sent to faculty following Gold\u2019s graduation speech. \u201cIt is very sad to see how detractors emerge from within our ranks who use a single mistake \u2014 however regrettable it may be \u2014 to pass judgment without any basis.\u201d<\/p>\n +972 and Local Call asked TAU whether it maintains close ties with the Shin Bet, as indicated in the email sent by its Career Development Center, and whether it is aware of international accusations that Israeli academia is part of the Israeli security apparatus. The university declined to answer.\u00a0<\/p>\n A version of this article was first published in Hebrew on Local Call. Read it here<\/a>.<\/p>\n![\"Brig.](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Screenshot-2026-07-30-at-17.41.14.png\" "\\"Brig.")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/ISA-stand-in-Tel-Aviv-University-Nissi-Peli-e1785422180889.jpg\" "\\"A")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Students](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/F250515YA040.jpg\" "\\"Students")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Students](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/F190108HP10.jpg\" "\\"Students")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Then-U.S.](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Dan_Shapiro_visit_to_TAU_054_6875300118.jpg\" "\\"Then-U.S.")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"David](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/David_Ben-Gurion_ReuvenShiloah.jpg\" "\\"David")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Palestinian](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/F260513JA02.jpg\" "\\"Palestinian")
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