Meron Rapoport & Aharon Porath
+972 Magazine / July 30, 2026
From Shin Bet recruitment to military training programs, Israel’s defense establishment is becoming increasingly embedded in academic life.
After Hila Ben David finished performing John Lennon’s “Imagine” at Tel Aviv University’s doctoral graduation ceremony on July 16, the stage was handed over to Brig. Gen. (res.) Dr. Danny Gold, head of the Defense Ministry’s 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.
In a lecture titled “Turning Vision into Security,” 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 (“Lethality and precision for fighters”) and UNIQAI (“AI for mission planning”) flashed across the screen.
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’dan, who had just received his doctorate in cultural studies and was one of 17 Palestinian students awarded doctoral degrees by the university that year.
“When [the university] brings in Dr. Gold and you’re suddenly seeing videos of missile launches, air raid sirens, and the bombing of Tehran, you realize they’re treating you with contempt — they’re trying to humiliate you,” he told +972 Magazine.
Ka’dan, who completed his postdoctoral fellowship in California, found the celebration of Israel’s defense industry particularly dizzying. “[Across the world] people are talking about BDS, and you’re showing us videos like this? I am ashamed to say that this is what they show here,” he said.
The protests did not just come from Palestinian students. According to Ka’dan, when the mother of one of his friends approached the stage and began shouting, “Shame!” roughly a quarter of the audience joined in. “Half the people in the hall have PTSD from the war [with Iran],” said Ka’dan, “and then you show them videos of explosions?”
“It’s really fitting,” he added. “First ‘Imagine’ — about there being no countries, and nothing to kill and be killed for — and then an army officer.”
Moments after Gold concluded his remarks, a visibly uneasy university rector, Prof. Noga Kronfeld-Schor, took the stage and apologized if the lecture “had hurt some of the people [in the audience].”
Faculty members affiliated with Academia For Equality soon circulated a letter arguing that the problem went beyond an insensitive graduation speech. The address had been delivered, they wrote, to “Jewish and Palestinian students whose bodies and minds have been scarred by the seemingly endless war of the past three years” and who had come “to celebrate their academic achievements, not to watch a propaganda spectacle.” The event, they argued, constituted “yet another step in the growing militarization of our university over recent years.”
Days later, the administration issued a more detailed apology to senior faculty members, acknowledging that inviting Gold had been “a mistake” because the presentation had distressed audience members, including children, bereaved families, and soldiers traumatized by the war. But it categorically rejected Academia For Equality’s broader conclusion that the university is undergoing a process of militarization.
In their response, university president Ariel Porat and rector Noga Kronfeld-Schor called the allegation “a lie and a fabrication — a veritable smear campaign” that strengthened the case of “those seeking to boycott Israeli academia [by] presenting it as an agent of the military.”
Yet an investigation by +972 Magazine calls the administration’s rebuke into question. Interviews and documents point to a university that has, in recent years, increasingly made space for Israel’s military and security establishment in campus life — from partnerships with the army to efforts to recruit students into the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security service.
Headhunting on campus
About a month before Gold’s controversial appearance at the graduation ceremony, TAU’s Career Development Center invited students in the departments of Middle Eastern and African History and Arabic and Islamic Studies to a “career-focused” meeting with a Shin Bet representative.
The June email, sent by Humanities Career Advisor Sivan Tivoni and obtained by +972 Magazine, said the security service had approached the university to organize an event specifically for students in the two departments.
“As part of the event,” the invitation read, “a 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.” Students would also hear “stories and insights from these fields (subject to [security] classification restrictions), and take part in direct discussion with the guests.”
Muhammad Masarwa, a master’s 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. “It’s very sad to frame the study of Islam and familiarity with the Arab world from the perspective of ‘knowing the enemy,’” he said. The invitation, he added, conveys the message that “you can become part of a system that can harm others through your knowledge of their culture and language.”
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 Magazine’s question about whether the invitation was sent exclusively to Jewish students.)
Within the department, Masarwa said, the invitation generated little discussion. But he did not believe the outreach was accidental. “Among Jewish students — not all of them — there is a noticeable aspiration to find work with the Shin Bet, to join the security establishment,” he said. “[They don’t come to Arabic studies] out of a love for the language and culture.”
Department officials who spoke with +972 Magazine distanced themselves from the initiative.
“I must admit I didn’t know about this,” said Dr. Avner Wishnitzer, chair of the Department of Middle Eastern and African History. “I understand that the event was organized by the university’s Career Development Center. I didn’t know that the department’s secretariat had sent out the invitation. It didn’t go through me. Bottom line: We have no connection to the Shin Bet, and we do not organize events of this kind.”
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.
Employers “operating in accordance with the law are invited to present to students fields of work and job openings relevant to their training,” he added, stressing that such events are organized by the center and “under no circumstances form part of the academic curriculum.”
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 “headhunting” – proactive recruitment of people with specialized skills — by Israel’s security agencies on university campuses is nothing new.
A 2025 report by the anti-militarist organization New Profile documented years of recruitment events involving the Shin Bet and Mossad at Israeli universities, including a 2017 “career session with the Shin Bet” hosted by TAU’s Faculty of Social Sciences and an event at the Technion titled “Technology in the Service of the General Security Service [Shin Bet].”
More recently, in May, TAU’s Career Development Center invited students in the social sciences and humanities to an event titled “Careers in Security Organizations,” featuring representatives from the Mossad, Shin Bet, Defense Ministry, and Israel Prison Service. “Did you know,” the invitation asked, “that the knowledge and skills you’ve acquired in the social sciences and humanities can give you a real advantage in a career at the heart of Israel’s security apparatus?”
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. “The invitation is unusual in that it is aimed specifically at these two departments,” Bat-El said. “This isn’t a job fair where anyone can come and go as they please. It’s targeted.”
The promise that students would hear “stories and insights” about Shin Bet operations, she noted, “sounds like Disneyland. This is recruitment for something terrible. It’s full cooperation between the university and the Shin Bet.”
A history of symbiosis
The relationship between Arabic and Middle East studies in Israeli academia and the country’s security establishment dates back to the state’s early days, and perhaps even earlier. At TAU, it was institutionalized in the mid-1960s, when the university agreed to incorporate the Shiloah Institute — a Defense Ministry research body that later became the Moshe Dayan Center — into its Department of Middle Eastern Studies and African History.
The decision was not without controversy. In a recent Haaretz article, 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.
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’s ambassador to Egypt and Jordan. Shamir made his appointment conditional on the university accepting the Shiloah Institute.
The resulting “symbiosis” between the institute and the new department, Rabinovitch wrote, “gave Tel Aviv University a unique status” within Israeli academia.
Dr. Yonatan Mendel, head of the Department of Middle Eastern studies at Ben-Gurion University — whose research concerns the securitization of Arabic studies from the pre-state Jewish Yishuv in Palestine onward — agreed that the relationship was unusual. “Such a direct and open connection, linking the study of Arabic in academia with the Shin Bet and national security, is quite rare,” he told +972 Magazine.
Still, he added, “The 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.”
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. “Perhaps this is because supporting security needs is suddenly seen as the order of the day,” he suggested.
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’s Department of Middle Eastern Studies as “rebellious, going against the establishment’s spirit.”
In her 2024 book “Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Freedom to Palestinians,” Israeli scholar Maya Wind argues that Israeli universities have long helped produce knowledge that sustains Israel’s rule over Palestinians while presenting themselves as liberal, democratic institutions.
Amid an increase in academic partnerships between U.S. and Israeli universities, Wind told +972 Magazine last August that the latter “are in fact deeply implicated in Israeli settler colonialism and now in genocide” — not least because entire academic disciplines “subordinate their knowledge production to the needs of the Israeli state.”
For Mendel, this historical proximity between Middle Eastern Studies and the security establishment helps explain why the field “sometimes falls into the trap of Orientalism” and why many Palestinian citizens of Israel have struggled to see it as truly their own.
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. “This is the trend we must strengthen — independent and critical research, as far removed from a security-centric approach as possible.”
Militarization in plain sight
Yet even as some scholars have turned a critical eye toward the relationship between academia and the security establishment, TAU’s institutional ties with the military have grown significantly stronger in recent years.
Beginning in October 2023, before the October 7 attack, the university launched the “Erez” program, under which approximately 200 candidates for combat officer positions complete bachelor’s degrees in the humanities and social sciences before beginning officers’ training. TAU is reportedly set to receive approximately NIS 15 million (almost $5 million) for the program.
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.
“You’re on campus, and 50 soldiers in uniform, carrying weapons, are moving from building to building,” Bat-El said. “I don’t feel comfortable. Imagine how Palestinian students feel.”
The university’s ties to the security establishment also extend into the technology sector. Since 2018, TAU Ventures — a venture-capital fund founded by the university — has jointly operated “the Xcelerator” with the Shin Bet. The program provides selected startups with a $50,000 grant from the security agency itself, along with office space and business support, and advertises what it calls an “exclusive opportunity for validation and proofs of concept with Shabak [the Shin Bet].”
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 “impact the battlefield” and strengthen Israel’s “long-term security capabilities.”
Beginning in the next academic year, TAU will also host the prestigious “Havatzalot” 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 from students and faculty, who argued that it amounted to “the expropriation of the academic sphere and its transfer to military control.” After TAU won the bid to host the program, the Hebrew University petitioned the court to challenge the decision.
A recent incident suggests that TAU’s 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’s war on Gaza on Shin Bet and Elbit booths at a campus career fair, it provided the Shin Bet 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 “conversation.”
While the process was soon halted after intervention by the university’s disciplinary officer, the incident showed how easily the university’s cooperation with the security establishment could spill over into the surveillance and intimidation of students.
It was against this backdrop that the university administration dismissed as an “outright fabrication” the claim that TAU was becoming an extension of Israel’s security establishment.
“For 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,” they wrote in the email sent to faculty following Gold’s graduation speech. “It is very sad to see how detractors emerge from within our ranks who use a single mistake — however regrettable it may be — to pass judgment without any basis.”
+972 Magazine 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.
Meron Rapoport is an editor at Local Call (Tel Aviv)
Aharon Porath is a journalist and researcher focusing on economics and technology from a human rights perspective
