ISRAEL’S Ministry of Defence and its weapons manufacturers have channelled millions of dollars into weapons research at dozens of American universities over the past two decades, much of it never appearing in the federal databases meant to track foreign money flowing into US higher education, an investigation published this week has found.
An analysis of state and university audits, foreign-funding disclosures and other institutional records, building on findings compiled by the Antiwar Initiative, an academic research group documenting links between universities and the global arms industry, identified more than $15 million in unreported or inconsistently reported entries tied to the Israeli ministry or to Israeli arms firms.
The records run from 2004 to 2025.
The true scale is impossible to establish from public sources.
Much of the funding does not appear in the filings that mandate disclosure of foreign gifts, and was found only by cross-referencing public and internal databases, audit records and the acknowledgements printed at the end of academic papers.
Some projects listed in university materials as sponsored by the Israeli ministry or by defence companies carry no figure at all, or appear in audit databases with contradictory entries.
The schools named in the records include Columbia, Cornell, Princeton, Harvard, Northwestern, Georgia Tech, Texas Tech, the University of Connecticut, the University of Tennessee, the University of Maryland, the University of Florida, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Rhode Island, the University of New Mexico, Washington University in St Louis and the State University of New York.
The contracts are time-bound and the records do not show whether the relationships continue. Alongside the ministry and Elbit Systems, the manufacturers Rafael and Israel Aerospace Industries also appear as sponsors of individual military technology projects.
The research fields being funded are the ones Israeli forces have drawn on throughout the genocide in Gaza and in wars in Lebanon, Iran, Syria and Yemen.
Drones, automated intelligence tools, persistent aerial surveillance, precision-guided projectiles and large-scale data analysis all rest on work in video surveillance, human activity recognition, autonomous flight, network analysis, target identification, magnetic sensing and projectile impact modelling.
‘For relatively small sums, like the price of funding a single PhD, Israel has gained major new capabilities that have bolstered its capacity to commit genocide in Gaza, carry out a brutal occupation of Lebanon, and spark a war with Iran that has escalated to a region wide conflict,’ said William Hartung, a political scientist and specialist on the American arms industry and Pentagon budgets.
At the University of Connecticut, annual federal award schedules record $668,456 across nine fiscal years between 2013 and 2023 for a project titled ‘Impact Point Prediction Research for Short & Medium Range Thrusting Projectiles’, with Israel’s Ministry of Defence listed as the funder.
A second ministry-linked project at the school, ‘High Sensitivity SQUIDs for Magnetic Field Detection’, took $251,336 over the same period.
The Education Department’s most recent public disclosure of foreign gifts contains no Israel-attributed entry for the university at all, even though the funding shows up in other databases and in audit documentation.
Columbia’s annual audits name two ministry-linked projects and record $799,190 in grants. ‘Direct 3D Printing of Integrated Electro Mechanical Systems’ accounted for $469,999 from 2016 to 2021, and ‘Optimizing Micro Resonators Based Sensor’ for $329,191 from 2021 to 2024.
Columbia’s fiscal 2024 audit lists the second under the US Department of Defence, with the Israeli ministry named as the pass-through, and records $25,327.
The Research Foundation for the State University of New York shows five ministry-linked projects totalling $949,915 between 2010 and 2021.
Florida’s statewide audits record $1,195,795 passed through the ministry from 2012 to 2021 without identifying every recipient school, though campus records connect some awards to the University of Central Florida and the University of Florida.
A University of Florida engineering publication names a ministry-sponsored project on ultra-high-performance concrete beginning in 2012, listing it under sponsored research but giving no sum.
Princeton records place the physicist Michael Romalis on a $600,000 contract called ‘Pulsed Scalar Atomic Magnetometer’, with the university’s fiscal 2018 sponsored awards report naming both the Israeli ministry and the Pentagon’s Defence Security Cooperation Agency as sponsors, over a contract period from July 2015 to June 2019.
At Maryland, the aerospace engineer Inderjit Chopra’s research page lists $150,000 for ‘Autonomous Operation of Micro-Helicopters’ from 2011 to 2012 and $300,000 for ‘Aeromechanics of Rotorcraft in High Speed Flight’ from 2014 to 2016.
Texas Tech engineering newsletters list a $400,000 ministry award for a ‘Sealed Vircator HPM System’, naming James Dickens, John Mankowski and Andreas Neuber, with the same figure and title appearing in both the January 2014 and April 2015 editions.
The university’s Centre for Pulsed Power and Power Electronics describes vircators as compact, high-power microwave sources, and says its work includes coordinating vehicle-mounted emitters with GPS timing to place a microwave hot spot at a chosen location, an application with obvious use against drone swarms.
A curriculum vitae filed in a separate patent office proceeding lists ministry funding of $150,000 for ‘Functional Targeting of Terror Networks: A Big Data Approach’, running from February 2017 to December 2018, and $153,520 for work on group betweenness centrality in massive social networks.
At the University of Texas at Austin, the fiscal 2013 financial report identifies $58,992 in expenditures under an Israeli ministry purchase order, with statewide audit schedules showing the same order recurring from 2010 to 2014 for a total of $299,952.
Further entries appear for Northwestern, Washington University in St Louis, and repeatedly in audits for the state of Virginia.
Elbit’s American subsidiary paid the University of Tennessee $514,500 across 2023, 2024 and 2025. The public documentation does not say which programmes or researchers the money supported, describing its purpose only as tuition payments for various students.
At the University of Central Florida, researchers have taken Elbit money to develop algorithms recognising human activity and detecting objects in video, including a $200,000 grant in 2020 to Mubarak Shah and Abhijit Mahalanobis, with a further $60,000 to Mahalanobis.
At the University of Texas at Dallas, Haoran Wei and Nasser Kehtarnavaz produced a video surveillance system in a study their published paper said was funded by Elbit Systems of America through a contract with the university, without stating the amount.
The company also supplied far-field video clips for their target recognition work. The researchers did not respond to requests for comment.
Much of the money moves through Washington rather than from Tel Aviv. Many ministry awards are classified as US Department of Defence expenditures with the Israeli ministry named as the pass-through entity administering the grant. MIT has said the money for its ministry-funded projects originated with the Pentagon.
Some audit records name the Defence Security Cooperation Agency, which administers American security assistance and weapons transfers, as the primary funding agency.
The United States provides an estimated $3.8 billion in annual military aid to Israel on top of other assistance.
The public documents do not establish, for any given project, how much came from Israel’s own treasury and how much from American aid placed under Israeli procurement authority.
Section 117 of the Higher Education Act requires federally assisted universities to report foreign gifts and contracts of $250,000 or more, including multi-year contracts reaching that value over their duration. Anything below stays outside the system, which makes it straightforward for a foreign state to keep individual awards under the line while still funding substantial research.
The Education Department’s inspector general warned in February 2025 that oversight was weak and controls insufficient to ensure the requirements were being met.
In the summer of 2025 the MIT professor Markus Buehler withdrew from an Israeli ministry grant after a student-led campaign publicised the project, following more than a year of protest over the university’s defence ties with Israel. MIT puts the value of those ministry-linked projects at $4 million between fiscal 2015 and 2024, with a further $290,000 in fiscal 2025.
Asked about a $150,000 contract beginning in March 2015 naming the Israeli ministry, a UC Berkeley spokesperson said the university ‘complies with all of the statues and regulations that apply to contracts and gifts from foreign sources’, that it conducts only fundamental research, and that ‘every government, every researcher, every person in the world is able to read the results of our research in freely available scientific publications’.
Congress is now moving to convert this scattered pipeline into formal policy. The fiscal 2026 National Defence Authorization Act directed the Pentagon to set up a US-Israel Defence Industrial Base Working Group to consider integrating Israel into the American National Technology and Industrial Base.
A proposal advanced by the House Armed Services Committee for the fiscal 2027 act would go further, creating a United States-Israel Defence Technology Cooperation Initiative to expand joint research, development, testing, weapons production and industrial cooperation.
Should it pass, the funding connections buried in university audit trails would become part of the architecture of the American military-industrial base.
‘No self-respecting university should accept funding from Israel, given its destabilising, destructive, and inhumane use of US weapons,’ Hartung said.
