The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) was created as a cold war institution to further détente through scientific diplomacy. It is primarily funded by the USA and has many international members that still include Russia, Iran, Israel, etc. It appears that Israel is a late addition, it joined in 2023 – most likely as part of a right-wing government’s attempts at international academic normalization.
The IIASA’s Israeli partner is Tel Aviv University’s Archimedes Center. One of the leaders of the May 16 seminar, Vered Blass, comes from Archimedes. She was a member of a research team whose work led to an article entitled “Ensuring the Resilience of the Food Supply Chains in Israel During Emergencies,” which was published under the auspices of Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) in December 2023. (https://www.inss.org.il/publication/food-supply-chains/ ) The content of the article is clearly war related. The research team leader and co-author of the article, Galit Cohen, is the Director of the Program on Climate Change at the INSS.
According to Wikipedia, the INSS “is an independent think tank affiliated with Tel Aviv University in Israel that conducts research and analysis of national security matters such as military and strategic affairs, terrorism and low intensity conflict, military balance in the Middle East, and cyber warfare. It is considered Israel's leading security think tank and one of the top defense and national security think tanks in the world.”
Tel Aviv University appears to be the most important university in Israel, and as such is surely deeply implicated in the political, legal, and military institutions of the state. Israel is a leader in the development of cybertechnologies that are used to maintain the occupation and prosecute wars (drones, AI, etc.) [1]. The university is almost certainly involved in these areas. It is eveident that both the law [2] and philosophy[3] faculties are at least in part a revolving door between the military and academia.
[1] The use of drones to survey and kill in the Gaza war are common knowledge, and reportedly, AI was used to automatically select targets in the assault on Gaza.
[2] “Moving directly from overseeing the 2008-9 offensive on the Gaza Strip, [Colonel] Sharvit Baruch was hired to teach a course on international law the following semester [by Tel Aviv U.” During the 2008 war, Baruch approved ” a targeted Israeli airstrike [that] killed 89 Palestinian police cadets during their graduation ceremony in the Gaza Strip. Baruch is still active at Tel Aviv U. and part of a group working on developing legal justifications of Israel’s violations of international law. https://dawnmena.org/how-israeli-universities-and-legal-scholars-collaborate-with-israels-military/
[3] 0p. cit. “Ethicists from philosophy departments [are] theorizing and providing moral justification for Israeli policies and military operations (...) leading this endeavor is Tel Aviv University professor and Israel's distinguished ethicist Asa Kasher. Kasher established himself as an academic in the service of the state in 1994, when he collaborated with the Israeli military to write its code of ethics (...) Kasher and Yadlin lay philosophical foundations for the legitimacy of disproportionate killing. They argue that Israel can ethically and legally justify greater "collateral damage" of Palestinian civilian casualties than has been previously allowed under international law.”
Peter Unterweger