Italian universities shut down debates on the "Stop Technion" academic boycott campaign

In late January 2016, several hundred scholars from some fifty Italian universities launched a call to suspend cooperation with the Technion, the Haifa-based Israel Institute of Technology, citing its close ties to the Israeli military and arms manufacturers such as Elbit Systems and Rafael. At least eight Italian universities, including the Polytechnics of Milan and Turin and the universities of Cagliari, Florence, Perugia, Rome and Turin, have agreements with the Technion. In line with the guidelines of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), signatories also pledged to refuse institutional cooperation with Israeli universities while continuing to work with Israeli colleagues individually. In the weeks that followed, attempts to discuss the campaign on Italian campuses ran into refusals from university authorities.

At the University of Catania, in Sicily, the Italian Society for Middle Eastern Studies (SeSaMO) was due to hold its annual congress in mid-March 2016, including a panel on the implications of academic and cultural boycott campaigns against Israel. Coordinated by independent researcher Enrico Bartolomei, the panel was billed as the first time an Italian academic association would openly debate the BDS and PACBI campaigns. By early March, however, it did not appear in the official conference programme, raising fears that it had been dropped.

On 7 March 2016, Academics for Palestine in Ireland published a letter of solidarity with the signatories of the "Stop Technion" call and the organisers of the cancelled events at Cagliari, Turin, Rome and Catania. The group stated that discussion of the academic boycott had become highly securitised on Italian campuses, and placed these cases alongside earlier ones, including the withdrawal of a venue for Ilan Pappé at Roma Tre in 2015. It urged Italian university authorities to reverse the cancellations, allow the debates to take place on campus and put an end to political interference so that universities remain spaces for free academic debate.