Billionaire donor using British Council to combat Israel boycott
The boycott, divestment and sanctions movement is supported by an increasing proportion of the British public.
Polaris
The revelations about the government-funded program come as the UK attempts to ban local government from boycotting companies complicit in Israeli human rights abuses.
The Electronic Intifada has also discovered that Nathan Kirsh, a billionaire businessman profiting directly fromIsrael’s wall in the occupied West Bank, is a donor to the British Council’s little-known anti-boycott project BIRAX: the Britain Israel Research and Academic Exchange Partnership.
Facts on the ground
The British Council is a quasi-governmental body which describes itself as making an important “contribution to UK soft power.” It gets approximately 20 percent of its funding from the UK Foreign Office. It administers educational and “cultural relations” projects in more than 100 countries around the world.
In 2008 its Israel office instigated BIRAX jointly with the British Embassy in Israel and private pro-Israel donors.
As the original proposal, published below, states explicitly, BIRAX sought to offer “a practical response to recent calls in the UK for an academic boycott of Israel” — a reference to one of the first major boycott victories in a British trade union, the 2007 vote by the University and College Union which caused international alarm in the Zionist camp.
In response, BIRAX was launched by the prime ministers of Israel and the UK with the aim to “deepen institutional links” between British and Israeli universities. Only later, in 2011, was it decided that BIRAX should focus on regenerative medicine, a scientific emphasis which played neatly into Israel’s public relations strategy to promote itself as a hub of technological innovation.
Through BIRAX, the British Council has so far arranged 15 research collaborations between Israeli and UK universities. With a total value of at least £7 million ($9.9 million), these function as facts on the ground, undermining the campaign to boycott Israeli academic institutions by their very existence.
The third round of calls is currently open, offering £3 million ($4.2 million) of additional research funding.
