Sciences Po Strasbourg ends its partnership with Reichman University after a student campaign

In June 2026, the Institut d'études politiques (IEP) of Strasbourg allowed its long-standing partnership with Reichman University in Tel Aviv to lapse without renewal. The outcome followed years of campaigning by students organised in the school's Comité Palestine, and was welcomed as a victory by the BDS France campaign, which described Reichman as complicit in the war in Gaza and noted that the institution had hosted former Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant despite the International Criminal Court arrest warrant issued against him in November 2024. Critics of the partnership point to the financial and ideological ties Israeli universities maintain with the army, and to Reichman's role in state messaging: online pro-Israeli advocacy units and lecture series featuring senior Israeli political and military figures, backed by arms manufacturers including Elbit, IAI, Boeing, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin.

The sequence of events is what makes the case notable. In June 2024, student representatives on the governing board tabled a motion calling for the partnership to be suspended, and the board voted in favour. The motion carried no administrative force on its own, but when the result became public that October it drew intense media attention, heavily amplified by the far right, and prompted comments from both the minister for higher education and the minister for foreign affairs. Under that pressure the school's director convened an extraordinary board meeting to have the vote annulled. The move shocked much of the institution: teaching staff and students, whatever their position on the partnership itself, jointly denounced it as a denial of democracy.

Three months of blockades followed. A student interviewed under a pseudonym by Agence Média Palestine described phases in which the mobilisation was almost invisible because teaching had shifted online, and others in which severe police violence made it highly visible and drew broad support, with as many as 150 people on the blockade at times. He said the administration sent police to the site every morning and that the normalisation of remote teaching isolated the protesters. Exhausted, they negotiated an agreement with the management: an internal committee of staff and students would be elected to examine the partnership. The committee heard specialists and reviewed studies over several hours a day for two weeks, and concluded that suspension was warranted. Despite the administration's commitment to follow the recommendations, the board chose to disregard them and keep the partnership. Two further weeks of blockade followed before the campus closed for exams and the year ended, an outcome the students experienced as a defeat.

At the start of the following academic year, the director told a general assembly that the partnership was nearly over and would not be renewed, asking students to stop campaigning on it and presenting the matter as settled and almost incidental. The students accepted the tacit arrangement and kept a low profile on the issue, turning to other mobilisations, including support for the Gaza flotilla and opposition to the Yadan law. The partnership duly expired in June, with no announcement from the administration. The students reject the leadership's implication that their campaign was irrelevant to the outcome. They also stress that the win was not theirs alone: students from the University of Strasbourg, on which the IEP depends, joined the occupation and provided logistical and political support, alongside local associations, student unions and elected officials whose presence at the blockade deterred some police violence.

The Comité Palestine regards the non-renewal as a stage rather than an endpoint. Research partnerships with Israeli universities remain, and new ones could be signed. The group is now pressing for an ethics committee to vet partnerships against criteria including respect for human rights and the absence of links to a government accused of genocide or to compromised funders.