German universities maintain extensive research ties with Israeli institutions—even when those partnerships are entangled with the increasingly brutal occupation of Palestine. A new investigation by Not In Our Name at TU Berlin exposes the German-funded MedWater project and its links to Mekorot and Ariel University. Prof. Sabine Broeck spoke with members of Not In Our Name and Academic Boycott Conference Germany (ABC DE), who are active in local and nationwide campaigns against the genocide of the Palestinian people.
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etos.media: In a remarkable investigative feat, you have just published a report, “German public research money and the occupation of water in Palestine,” regarding the aiding and abetting of your university in the politics of “water apartheid” by the state of Israel. I am very impressed by your savvy, your labor, and your courage to go public with this in the face of Germany’s ongoing, unwavering Staatsräson. Could you tell us what brought you to this project? Why and how did your group decide to focus on this specific project?
Not In Our Name: We are continuously examining our university’s collaborations with Israeli institutions in order to document the extent of its complicity in the occupation, apartheid, and genocide of the Palestinian people. We began by looking for any official cooperation with Ariel University, since that alone would represent a clear breach of international law and of European and German regulations. That is how we found the MedWater project.
The moment we saw that it dealt with water resources and included areas in the West Bank, it raised immediate red flags, all the more so because it involved both the water company Mekorot and Ariel University. Mekorot is the operator of the system of water apartheid imposed on Palestinians, and Ariel University is an institution built on an illegal settlement that benefits from it.
Early on, we noticed that after the very beginning of the project, Palestine was essentially never mentioned again. The stakeholders from “both sides” became “Israeli stakeholders”, and a tool that contributes to “access to water for all” became one that “can be used by Israeli partners or easily be transferred to an Israeli web server”. It was clear that there was far more to this project than the consortium’s public claims of contributing to UN Sustainable Development Goals.That is when we turned to internal reports the consortium partners had submitted to the ministry. There we found most of the evidence for our report.
Actually, what shocked us most was realizing that all of this was already in the ministry’s hands and yet they never reacted. Not when Ariel University was presented as a partner in multiple conferences, and not even when it was confirmed that no Palestinian institution received a subcontract, even though the funding condition explicitly required the involvement of all institutions relevant to the resources.
etos.media: Not In Our Name TU Berlin had already published a report on the same project on their website around the end of 2025. Why did you decide to continue and expand the investigation, and why did you decide to publish now?
Not In Our Name: We returned to MedWater because the answers we received from the ministry through Freedom of Information requests and a closer look at other German-funded projects revealed that this is not just a simple oversight of the system—it’s exactly how the system is designed to work.
The territorial clause, agreed between the German and Israeli foreign ministries in 2014, is the only safeguard in place to keep publicly funded research from assisting the illegal occupation of Palestine. But it is insufficient. Mekorot is approved as a partner every time, because its headquarters sit in Tel Aviv—despite its extensively documented role in the water apartheid system across the West Bank. And Ariel University, an institution physically built inside a settlement and precisely what the clause should exclude, was allowed to appear as a partner anyway.
We are publishing now, because Germany is already before the ICJ, and in the hearings on 7 to 10 September, it is trying to have the case dismissed before its substance is ever heard. It is precisely for that reason that we feel it is important to show how Germany’s complicity is not limited to sending weapons, nor to this genocide alone. It has been ignoring its obligations under international law for years, and without serious reform it will continue to do so. We hope that Nicaragua v. Germany sets a precedent that makes clear that no state stands above international law, and that this applies to Western hegemonic powers too.
etos.media: How did you go about the research – given the fact that you must all have done that in the spare time left by study, work, family and other obligations? How did you organize it? I am asking because other groups interested in similar kinds of work might find a model emerging from your example.
Not In Our Name: One of our main drivers is our determination to put an end to our institutions’ complicity in Israel’s crimes against humanity. Sadly, we are under the impression that only a handful of individuals and organizations are seriously examining the profound role that German universities play in the occupation and genocide in Palestine and beyond. That gap urgently needs filling and is currently being handled mostly by students and student collectives. It is precisely that gap that keeps us going, even when the work has to be squeezed into the time between studies, jobs, and family life.
What makes this work manageable is not doing it alone. Since January, we have coordinated student efforts on German university campuses across the country through the Academic Boycott Campaign Germany (ABC DE) network and its dedicated research team, which provides direct support and training for collectives that need it, so no group has to carry the burden alone.
etos.media: What kind of obstacles did you encounter?
Not In Our Name: Our current biggest constraint is that we can only work with publicly available information. Sure, German institutions do not shy away from boasting about their collaborations with Israel, even in the midst of a genocide, and even as more and more European countries are considering cutting ties. But all that public boasting is often only enough to reveal that there is complicity, not how deep it runs.
Establishing the full extent requires internal documents, and a crucial tool for getting them has been FragDenStaat, the platform for Freedom of Information requests. Through it, we were able to submit requests to both the German Ministry of Research and to TU Berlin. For the former, it yielded some internal documents we could scrutinize. With TU Berlin, however, we ran into a wall. Under the Berlin Freedom of Information Act, TU Berlin can charge for a processing request, and it applied that provision to the maximum, telling us to expect the very top of the legal range, up to 500 euros plus a per-page charge for every copy or scan. Fees like this are effectively just a tactic to intimidate and discourage us, and to avoid answering. TU Berlin, a public institution for the pursuit of knowledge, is pricing transparency out of the reach of student groups.
etos.media: Given the overall reticence of German university colleagues to get involved in a critique of and struggle against Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and its support of anti-Palestinian terror in the occupied West Bank, I am curious to hear if you might have gotten any kind of support from TU academics which could and should be mentioned here?
Not In Our Name: As mentioned earlier, this work is being carried out predominantly by students and staff, and that holds at TU Berlin as well. There are, of course, rare exceptions with academics who understand what is at stake and are willing to stand with us, but they remain exceptions, and that reticence among academic colleagues is itself part of the problem.
With this project, however, the faculty can see plainly how its own research feeds directly into the reality of Palestinian lives and the apartheid regime that governs their access to water. We aim to make it absolutely clear that the problem is not one flawed project, but the very act of cooperating with entities that enforce and benefit from the illegal occupation, such as Mekorot. Once that is understood, the only responsible conclusion is that such cooperations must stop, and that the faculty should join us in calling for, and actively pursuing, the boycott of institutions complicit in genocide and violations of human rights and international law.
etos.media: Have you received any threats, repression, or other more or less violent responses to the publication? Or, by any chance, what have been the positive reactions so far?
Not In Our Name: In Germany, even in the highest academic spaces, criticizing Israel is commonly treated as unacceptable and as an offense far graver than participating in the oppression of an entire people. But so far, for this particular investigation, we have not faced any direct repression, probably since we’re still on semester break.
What we usually expect, and what tends to happen with investigative reports like this one, is complete silence. Our reports are built entirely on sourced evidence, which makes them far harder to dismiss, so the institution’s only real option is to keep attention off the matter and carry on with business as usual.
But they cannot avoid us indefinitely. With every new report we publish, we receive more and more messages of solidarity from students and academics, and also from larger organizations offering support for the steps we might take next.
etos.media: This project evolved in cooperation with the ABC DE campaign. Could you tell us a little bit about how the campaign has evolved since the Academic Boycott Conference in Berlin in January 2026, and what other projects along the same lines as this water investigation are currently underway at other universities?
ABC DE: The campaign has been growing continuously since we collectively founded it following the Academic Boycott Conference in January 2026. We have been able to grow to include almost 50 member collectives, including both local and Germany-wide student groups as well as collectives of academics.
Since the conference, our focus has been on sharing and expanding knowledge and resources across the network in order to strengthen local academic boycott campaigns of our member collectives. Each collective joined with different experiences, so our first goal was to make sure that no collective has to start from zero, and that any achievement made by one can be scaled up to all. An example of this is the wave of student parliaments passing resolutions to cut ties with Israeli universities.
Several collectives have already published their own complicity reports documenting the ties between their university and complicit Israeli institutions, with more currently being written. We are also beginning to examine other German-funded, water-related research projects that took place in Palestine and likewise involved Mekorot and other Israeli institutions. Our national coordination allows us to trace these ties across German universities, which often collaborate on publicly funded research projects.
etos.media: Have you received any public support by political groups or actors beyond the ABC DE campaign so far? Would you care to give us examples?
ABC DE: We have been in contact with a number of groups throughout the investigation, and are grateful for the help and guidance we received from them. We remain in touch with them as we prepare our next steps. For now, though, we are not in a position to speak about them publicly.
etos.media: Are you planning to expand your research? If you have capacities, are there any projects that you could name at this point—without endangering them, of course?
ABC DE: Our call to boycott arises from international law itself—from the duty of all third states not to render aid or assistance in maintaining the illegal situation in Palestine, and to do everything in their power to bring the genocide to an end. This report has shown that German institutions abandon their own stated ethical and moral values, and disregard international law when it comes to working with Israel. Much like with the state and its Staatsräson, there seem to be no red lines they are unwilling to cross before they finally reckon with their direct role in the oppression of the Palestinian people.
So yes, we are expanding this work. Beyond other German-funded water projects, we are on our way to mapping the full range of cooperation between German academia and Israel. And we can already say there is far more to uncover than has ever been made public. What we come to see is the following: Complicity this deep cannot be reformed away one clause at a time. It needs a complete overhaul, one that finally understands the importance of boycotting, divesting, and sanctioning institutions that insist on taking part in systems of oppression, genocide, and ethnic cleansing.
etos.media: Thank you for this interview.
