Notably the EU issued a partial suspension of the involvement of Israeli based institutions in July in response to the situation in Gaza. You can read more about it through the above link.
Israel has paid EUR 1.7 Billion since 2021 to participate in Horizon Zero Europe, the UK pays EUR 2.6 Billion per year for HZE and the copernicus space programme.
The portal that someone else linked to shows they get "in the same ballpark" but indeed in absolute numbers it looked as if they're getting smaller amount.
Its a program which non-EU members pay into to be treated like EU members and then get paid back. This is NOT support or aid. Its money investing in research and startups.
If you go to each project you can also find a breakdown of all the involved institutions and exactly how much they recieved. The EU is very transparent about this.
Because they can now collaborate better with other European research institutions.
Imagine Israel is trying to create a new medicine against cancer. It's now more easily possible to collaborate with researchers in Germany who are already working on it. You can collaborate with French researchers for the producing of the drug. And with researchers from the Netherlands you work together to test it.
It basically allows for an more effective collaboration and sharing of knowledge to advance everyone.
Except that it's not, these projects involve dozens of institutions across multiple counties, without a common framework Norway wouldn't have access to the expertise these other institutions bring so the money would not go as far.
Yes, that is what the other answer said. But nothing in yours said anything about cooperation. It might just be a misunderstanding though, no hard feelings.
I could very well be wrong, but my guess is because they have innovative project proposals, and when funded they might be giving some rights to the investors as well, so it's like an investment?
Would be nice if someone knowledgeable explained what's going on and if there are precautions taken against usage of the funds and funded tech in military applications.
I work in the EU. Horizon Europe and other EU research and innovation programmes are 100% civil, in the sense that they do not find any military, defence or even dual use technologies. They're used for things like researching cures against diseases, fighting climate change, medical and materials sciences, etc.
There are different programs which fund defence and military research, but only EU member states can participate in these. The EU also provides far less funding for these, as defence is still primarily considered a national prerogative.
All participants (even non-EU) to these R&D programs need to pay into the common pot of funding. The participants agree how big they want the funding pot to be, and costs are shared equally (as a % of GDP typically, but there are different formulas used). Many programs include a basic minimum to pay in as well as optional programmes that individual countries can opt to fund, and how much. So for example for a programme funding space research, there could be an optional programmes to find launch vehicles, and any country who thinks this is worth investing in can put extra money specifically to be used for rockets.
Some funding programs have what is called a "geographic return" principle, meaning that if you invest say €100 into the pot, you are guaranteed to win about €100 worth of projects / contracts. This is fairer but the downside is that you sometimes get suboptimal results (the best project doesn't necessarily win). The vast majority of EU R&D programmes don't have this principle, meaning that all proposals are judged based on merit. As such, some countries with better science or research institutes naturally win more than they put in. Israel happens to punch way above its weight.
Hope that helps! I can answer more questions if needed.
Thank you - i'll have to take your credentials for granted, as i can't be arsed to skim through thousands of pages that all EU programs inevitably produce.
My general question is: to what extent separation from military/dual-use is enforced?
Are research institutes (both as specific institutes aswell as the universities they may be part of) allowed to work on military or dual-use tech, when receiving funding from that program or during any sensible grace period after?
Are military personnel allowed to work on these programs?
Are researchers working on these programs allowed to work at the same time or during any sensible grace period on military or dual-use programs?
Are any/all of these safeguards actually enforced and validated to sufficient degree, or is largely declaration of recipient state taken for granted with token supervision only?
Are programs that are/can be employed by illegal settlement or counter-insurgent actions by Israel considered military or dual-use?
Not OP, but I wrote a few proposals for Horizon (mostly comp-sci) for a public university and worked on some as well.
The idea for these projects is that the proposal doesn't just say "Am scientist, need funds". You need to have a clear plan of what you want to achieve, what kinda research is necessary to get there, and who will participate in the project. And, since this is the EU, you have to document everything, from ownership declarations of your organization to disclosing who you plan to share your work with. This is both before, during, and after the funding period.
I have yet to see (or hear of) any EU supervisor coming down to our lab and wanting to look around - as long as the documentation is formally correct and believable, noone will call it into question.
But regarding the specifics of military/dual-use/civilian research: Our rule-of-thumb when hashing out the details of a project was always to simply not work with military industrial partners. If we build some nice vehicle-networking framework with BMW, sure, it might be that Thales or Rheinmetall or whoever will find a use for it in tanks as well, but we know for sure that it's primarily gonna end up in BMWs production pipeline, so in the civilian market.
If there is a military application for something we build, those interested in that use-case will have to get the results of our research from the publications, like everyone else that's not involved in the project. From memory, a project becomes classified as dual-use when a military organization sits at the table and gets to give input and voice expectations... but in our day-to-day, that has just never been something worth looking up in detail, and the EU never followed up on our "100% civilian, no military uses" claims.
But it makes a lot of sense to me while typing this out: In my experience, civilian/public-funding researchers simply don't interact with military organizations when doing any kind of project. Instead, you have two almost completely air-gapped scientific communities, because they work very, very differently.
Militaries want their research to be secret by nature, whereas public institutions need their research to be published as a proof-of-work (since payroll bureaucrats are by definition NOT rocket engineers, they will trust the peer review process to tell them if the investment into an institute was good or not). Where military research often needs security clearances and non-disclosure assurances and all that, public research (read: a university) runs on hiring students for busy work, avoiding any kind of bureaucracy, and letting their staff work independently (as long as noone gets hurt). This makes the overlap between the two pretty small.
In short: If a research organisation does military technology, they are most likely not one that seeks funding from the EU, and the EU knows that, so the safeguards are rather lax. What happens after a project is done, and who uses the gained, publicly available knowledge afterwards is a different matter.
I appreciate your explanation, but I doubt Germany's university and research community is universally modeled in other countries. I know in Poland military institutes do cooperate with civilian sector and vice versa.
If we build some nice vehicle-networking framework with BMW, sure, it might be that Thales or Rheinmetall or whoever will find a use for it in tanks as well, but we know for sure that it's primarily gonna end up in BMWs production pipeline, so in the civilian market.
It's funny you use Thales as your example, because I worked on a Horizon 2020 project that was very much dual use technology and where Thales was our primary industry partner.
I think you've over-generalised a bit based on your own experience. I've also never heard of a Horizon project with a primarily defence use case, but dual use? Definitely, even when the defence application is stated explicitly and when defence companies are directly involved. The project just has to comply with the relevant EU and national guidelines on research on dual use technologies.
I think your picture of how universities interact with the defence sector is also a little off. In some fields (like mine - semiconductor security) people work with defence companies and governments all the time. There's no air gap, and militaries and similar fund research for publication all the time. The only difference is that they usually have a veto on publication, but I've rarely seen it exercised.
There are NDAs involved sometimes, but that's no different than with a lot of companies. Security clearance is not that big a deal, even for PhD students. It's mostly a bother for hiring (restrictions on nationality). Information is a bit more siloed but security researchers instinctively do that anyway, it's a career where a degree of paranoia is not uncommon.
Oh, that's really interesting! I can imagine that there's more overlap/cooperation in hardware security, just genuinely didn't think of it. Kinda fascinating, tbh - this civilian/military divide always seemed really, really wide to me. But I can see that I might have spent too much time in machine learning and medical engineering to talk about all other sectors.
It probably comes down a lot to your specific discipline and the research culture of the country you are working in.
And your perspective is, I think, broadly true on average. There is a fringe of stuff that is both dual use and which the EU regularly funds (advanced cryptography for example) so it is not forbidden - but it's also a very small minority in the grand scheme of things. You're correct to say most stuff like that is funded at the national level or directly by defence companies, not by the EU.
The Palestinian society support and at best tolerate Hamas as their ruler. They do not have the right to fight against Israel which is manifesting its right to eradicate Hamas.
Imagine supporting the killing of millions innocence for the last few Hamas members. Absolute abhorent moral code.
I agree with fighting Hamas, I agree with self defense, I agree that Israël had the right to do many of the things they did. But it has become absolutely clear Israëls goal is far from destroying Hamas. Their goal clearly shifted to getting rid of any Palestine presence in the region. You're defending ethnic cleansing in the name of destroying Hamas, you're either complicit or being fooled.
Israel has no inviolate right to eradicate Hamas or anyone else. Israel is a criminal state that is violating the UN Charter and international humanitarian law. By rights it should be kicked out of the UN and sanctioned until it complies with international law and ends the illegal occupation of Palestine. It certainly shouldn't be coddled by Europeans as if it is the apple of our eye and not a genocidal Apartheid state.
Israel was brutally attacked by Hamas and Israel has an inviolable right to defend itself. If Hamas continues its genocidal terrorist attacks, then Israel has no other way to defend itself than to eradicate Hamas. We should all support them in this.
Maybe blame Palestinians for a second? The bulk of their society cheered for the 2023 terrorist attack. The bulk of their society supports Hamas even until this day... Their own actions have caused this, not Israel.
So Israel is not at fault for secretly supporting Hamas behind the scenes and helping them gain ground in Gaza and supporting Quatar in giving them money.Guess Israel should be thrown into the sea for supporting terrorists.
They are, because investing in research projects in Israel is how Europeans innovate since innovation itself is lacking inside Europe. Israel is a global leader in research and development across multiple fields, and European capital wants a stake in it.
If Europeans don’t like it then they need their own competitive innovation triangles.
Last year, Weizmann struck a deal with the Israeli military contractor Elbit Systems to develop “groundbreaking bio-inspired materials for defence applications.”
Some Weizmann researchers do work on things like protecting drones from eavesdropping attacks, for example. But much of its focus is on health, medicine and biology.
yeah because 25y of eu messy and confusing spending and return on investment is easy to browse and only take 10min, and not at all a group of journalist several month
In terms of start-ups, Israel performs as one of the best countries in the world. Relatively far more unicorns than any European country, highest R&D spend as percentage of GDP in the world, massive infrastructure in place to promote innovation and start-ups.
The EU has close ties to Israel and also gets to benefit from funding Israeli innovation that aligns with its interests.
There are only few countries that are similar in terms of their level of innovation and start-ups, primarily the US, and they have got massive funding on their own.
There is a reason why e.g. Intel, Nvidia, and many other prominent companies have very large research centers (with large expansion plans like Nvidia) in Israel instead of random European countries.
There is a reason why e.g. Intel, Nvidia, and many other prominent companies have very large research centers (with large expansion plans like Nvidia) in Israel instead of random European countries.
Yes, that reason is: USA. Also mentioning Intel in same breath as nVidia is (sadly) laughable.
Edit: u/Timey16 can't even reply to people that replied to me, because sunshine above blocked me.
No, we most likely would have all of these - either invented by someone else or equivalent. These are not kind of inventions done on a spur of a brilliant mind in a basement, but products of monotonous research, trial and error.
So the US objectively does not sponsor these companies to set up research centers in Israel and in fact does give tax incentives to do so in the US.
How come this is because of the US? Do you have any evidence, or is that yet again pure speculation?
The simple good argument is that these companies can simply appreciate the extremely strong start-up culture in Israel. It is a country that especially per Capita obliterated any EU country or the UK in e.g. unicorns. That is not even up for debate, it is a simple fact
Also mentioning Intel in same breath as nVidia is (sadly) laughable.
It doesn't matter. What matters is that you won't see these companies rushing to set up massive research centers in Italy, but do so in Israel, along with massive investment in Israeli start-ups.
US for decades has supported Israel through investments, direct military assistance, political pressure and direct money grants.
Intel is a pretty much bankrupt company, in more way than one. It's not a good poster for Israel researchers - it'd be 20~ years ago (afaik it was Israeli center that pushed for Core architecture continuing Pentium III legacy and allowed them to ditch Pentium 4 dead end), but now i'm sure there are much better examples.
edit: since sunshine above blocked me i can't respond to /u/Mhabi2502 below
I'm very fine with existence of each and every country in the world and all ethnic and cultural groups that will it have their distinct or collective state representation. What i'm not okay with, are regimes engaged in genocide. I'm glad there are people in Israel that are also not okay with that. And i spit in the face of all dregs that try to whitewash genocide covering behind "he just hates xyz". Murdering innocent people is bad, persecuting civilians is bad, genocide is bad. Rot in hell, you pos.
US for decades has supported Israel through investments, direct military assistance, political pressure and direct money grants.
So nothing here that would prove that giant corporates like Nvidia or Intel in 2025 prioritize investment in Israel above many other places.
For example, nothing of the military aid supports this. As for investments, that's just part and parcel of having sound economic relations.
The biggest source of capital for all investments is from the US. Let's thank economic development in all of Europe on the US if having good economic relations is the standard for this
It's not a good poster for Israel researchers -
You know what is an even worse poster? Not getting this investment by giant corporates like Intel
Without Israeli innovations in IT you wouldn't even be on Reddit. Their innovations are core parts of the modern computer infrastructure...
like the microchip with the Intel 8808 which was a MASSIVE leap in computer manufacturing and made PCs even possible to begin with.
Or the network firewall... there was literally ZERO network security prior.
Or the USB thumb drive.
Like, if someone wanted to do a complete boycott of things Israel has ever been involved with, then you have to effectively become Amish and reject nearly all modern technology.
There's plenty of countries working on very cool technology. Why i don't see any: Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Switzerland or USA on the list? Switzerland would make much more sense, if it's anything EU related, since at least it's a part of EFTA. And Switzerland is not currently engaged in genocide with a government run a by a guy pushing for war to stay in office.
Well, you're not. What I said is about that the mindset to develop a start-up is tied to the military, not that the innovation or funds is tied to the military.
If the military promotes a certain mindset that will promote development of start-ups, that is not something to cut investments to innovation that has nothing to do with the military.
Also, the EIB can easily evaluate what these companies are doing before deciding to invest. That is a necessary part of the process
Intertwined with military, is intertwined with military. Not sure what you're backtracking from.
I'm not backtracking. You just have a perverse interpretation of what I said and pretend that I agree with that.
It is very difficult to argue that start-ups that have absolutely nothing to do with the military found by someone 10 years out of the military is intertwined with the military, yet that is what you are doing
Buddy, Israel could be most developed country in the world - it changes nothing about the fact it is not in Europe and thus shouldn't be allocated such a massive share of European funds.
According to Neil DeGrasse Tyson there are two natural borders you can see from space. One is North Korea and South Korea (South Korea have a lot more economic activity so a lot more lights). The is Israel and its neighbours, because it's much greener from their irrigation technology compared to the surrounding countries. If this tech was so easy, they would have already adopted it!
Israel's strong start-up culture is much more tied to the role of the military, e.g. cyber units, and massive promotion from the Israeli government than a few hundred million in funding from the EU. In the grand scheme of things, a few hundred million isn't much.
And that is what Israel excels in - innovation, not buying European tech.
The companies don't necessarily create tech for the military. Moreover, the EIB of course decided which companies and for what tech they get funding.
However, Israel's start-up culture is fostered partially within the military by how it is set up. For example, some cyber units in the IDF form a very resilient path into big tech (like Nvidia) or start-ups
That are actually part of EU, provide massive benefits to other member states through shared market and don't engage into genocide. Just a slight distinction.
The Innovation Fund is one of the world’s largest funding programmes for the deployment of innovative net-zero and low-carbon technologies. Established by Article 10a (8) of Directive 2003/87/EC to support innovation across all EEA Member States, it is one of the key tools of the European Green Deal Industrial Plan.
Financed by revenues from auctioning allowances from the European Union Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) and with an estimated revenue of approximately €40 billion between 2020 and 2030, the Innovation Fund aims to help businesses invest in clean energy and bring technologies to market that can decarbonise European industry, while fostering its competitiveness.
So literally no reason whatsoever for Israel to be involved. They aren't an EEA member, they aren't European and they have little involvement in EU industry that justifies their involvement over say, Turkey, or the US.
Due to a referendum on restricting free circulation and other negative action against EU citizens the Swiss lost their right to participate in a number of EU initiatives.
I mean Im completely in favour of a total embargo (not only military material which should be in place for decades now) and going after a genocidal state. Just telling the reason for Swiss exclusion of Horizon Europe.
We might also note that the Likoud also entered the European Parlement as a observer member of Le Pen and Orban's party. It was the first time ever for a foreign country to have an observer member, and of course it comes from the europhobic party.
What news? they don't allow any Press in gaza. and don't call it war, it's Gencoide, one side slaughterhouse. take your lying shit elsewhere. you ain't foolin anybody. Nowhere else are kids starved to death deliberately, not even in Africa.
The UK isn't freeloading here though. It's part of a reciprocal agreement as of January 2024 when the UK became an associated member of Horizon Europe. The UK innovation fund also fund EU scientists. I assume Norway might also have a similar agreement.
There's strength unity. Collaboration results in better outcome.
Norway is a EEA member, it follows most EU rules and pays dues. It stays out of the EU proper to not have to follow several rules, I think on fishing in particular.
Norway is a member of the EEA, and through that and the Norway grants, Norway contributes a bit less than €400m to the EU anually. In addition to that Norway contributes to many eu programs like Horizon, Erasmus, galileo and similar for another €450m annually.
I know that by working on the space industry. And the European Space Agency has to spend the amount of money Norway gives to it (or the EU) back on Norwegian companies.
These are usually very strict with: money must be spend within the EU (+Norway,…)
Yeah, i know. I just wished they'd embrace, like most of Europe, ditching the genocide & attacking health workers and journalists parts. Unless they want to be part of that "other Europe" - then they should be treated the same.
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u/eloyend Żubrza 🌲🦬🌳 Knieja 2d ago
I understand Norway and UK - what Israel is even doing here, though?