Two years into the genocide in Gaza, universities across the United States are still exposing their role as collaborators in state violence. Among the most complicit is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). As documented in the 83 page report MIT Science for Genocide, MIT aids and abets genocide in Gaza through its engagements with the Israeli military and its arms suppliers. At least $3.7 million have flowed into MIT through these channels, and MIT corporate partners include the Israeli state-owned weapons giant Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI).

The MIT community and global public have challenged MIT on its complicity, notching victories over the Institute’s ties to Israeli arms makers and forcing MIT professors to cancel Israeli military grants. These efforts build on our history and broad popular support. But our work is not finished.

We call on people of conscience everywhere to challenge MIT over its unethical research. Click here to send an email to MIT officials or grab the copy from here.

IMOD AND GENOCIDAL APPLICATIONS

The Israeli government enters the MIT research funding structure through the Institute’s historic war nexus. From 2017 to 2021, 60% of MIT revenue came from the federal government, and 17.4% came from the now re-named Department of War. The department provides Israel with billions of US tax dollars in the form of yearly Foreign Military Financing grants. The Israeli Ministry of Defense (IMOD) then uses these funds to sponsor laboratory research at MIT of interest to its affiliates and their military objectives. MIT has accepted some $3.7 million through this channel since 2015. According to MIT audit files, the connection extends back to 2008 at least, and MIT approves the contracts on an ongoing basis. In a July 2025 report to the UN Human Rights Council, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese named MIT a “sustaining Israel’s settler-colonial project” through its IDF-funded research.

What kind of research does the Israeli military sponsor? **One example is Daniela Rus, director of MIT’s Computer Science and AI laboratory. She led a recent project “Coreset Compression Algorithms,” which received $425,000 in direct sponsorship from the Israeli government since 2021, according to MIT’s annual reports tracking the flow of external funds into MIT. Rus’ research program develops AI algorithms for applications like “city-scale observation systems” and “surveillance and vigilance”. **The goal is to teach drones to track and pursue targets with increased autonomy.

Another example is Christopher Voigt’s lab in the MIT department of Biological Engineering. Voigt programs “sentinel bacteria” to respond to human DNA sequences. The Israeli Ministry of Defense funds his lab and provides soil samples for testing. In another of Voigt’s papers, sentinel bacteria are “used to detect diverse signals in the environment,” including landmine detection. Between two grants labeled “Field-Capable Bacterial Biosensors” and “Effects of Oxidizing Environments on Carbon-Based Materials”, Voigt has taken over $850,000 in IMOD-sponsored contracts. This technology (if it ever works) is poised to enable the Israeli military to clear land for settlements or invade ‘hostile territory’.

MIT’S PARTNERSHIPS WITH MERCHANTS OF DEATH

Firms that sell and transport weapons to Israel also recruit from MIT and enter institutional collaborations with the university – Lockheed Martin, Maersk, Boeing, BAE Systems, Northrop Grumman, Caterpillar, General Dynamics, and L3Harris. One firm, Liquid AI, co-founded by an MIT professor sponsored by the Israeli military, attempts to build autonomous fighter jets. Together, these firms recruit MIT researchers into genocidal activity and bias scientific research agendas toward belligerent instead of life-affirming applications.

MIT also goes beyond ordinary corporate relations to pursue institutional commitments with the Israeli arms industry itself. An egregious example is Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), a corporation owned wholly by the Israeli government. IAI makes weapons used in the Gaza genocide. **According to the CEO, their Heron drone has played “a pivotal role” in the war on Gaza. The state-owned company also makes the Harop suicide drone, used to bomb refugee tents, as well as autonomous armored bulldozers. In the past two years, **IAI missile systems have bombed Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and Iran.

After October 2023, MIT began a new institutional engagement with IAI through its CSAIL Alliances and Quantum Science and Engineering Consortium (QSEC). In June 2025, as the Israeli government starved Gaza, MIT welcomed IAI executives to campus in order to deepen institutional collaboration in quantum computing and artificial intelligence. Guests included IAI North America’s CTO, CEOs, and an Israeli missile factory director. These partnerships give IAI access to MIT scientists, influence on research projects, and a recruitment pipeline.

ENDING TIES TO ELBIT SYSTEMS

**Our movement has made some progress against companies at MIT. **Elbit Systems, for instance, is one of Israel’s largest weapons manufacturers, supplying an estimated 85% of Israel’s drone arsenal. It is also a central provider of white phosphorus, cluster munitions, and flechette projectiles to Israel. We know Elbit Hermes 450 drones were used in the 2024 World Central Kitchen massacre in Gaza. Elbit also abets oppressive regimes globally, selling weapons to assist the Azerbaijani occupation of Nagorno Karabakh, as well as the Indian occupation of Kashmir and Bastar.

Despite its direct, material support for human rights abuses, Elbit was a member of the MIT Industrial Liaison Program (ILP) from 2017 until late 2024. Through this program, Elbit monitored MIT research developments, advised on research sponsorship and technology licensing opportunities, and linked with MIT-connected startups. In 2021, Elbit Systems and Elbit’s medical subsidiary KMC announced a new “innovation center” in Cambridge that hoped to recruit MIT and Harvard graduates into the company.

Through an organized pressure campaign, this did not come to fruition. **In August 2024, following protests from Boston-area community activists in BDS Boston, Elbit Systems vacated its Cambridge office. Then BDS Boston and MIT activists turned attention to MIT’s Industrial Liaison Program. In spring 2025, MIT and BDSB announced that the ILP program had ended its engagement with Elbit Systems after global pressure. **We need a similar campaign to succeed in ending MIT’s ties with IAI.

DIVESTMENT IS TRIED AND TESTED

The wins against Elbit highlight that although divestment is sometimes framed as a political taboo, it has a long history at MIT. The school’s Fluid Mechanics Laboratory shifted to civilian research and funding in 1966 under pressure from the anti-war movement. In May 1970, MIT activists pushed the Institute to acknowledge atrocities committed by US forces in Vietnam and divest its Draper Laboratory, which worked on guidance systems for the Poseidon missile. MIT also ended a Taiwan Program in 1976 following concerns over ballistic missile proliferation. In the 1980s American student movements, including the original MIT Coalition Against Apartheid, led divestment campaigns against South African apartheid.

The MIT Coalition for Palestine builds on this legacy as well as a recent history of divestment. In 2007, MIT declared the Darfur Genocide “abhorrent” and pledged to divest its endowment. The MIT Energy Initiative cut ties with Saudi Aramco in 2021 following the state murder of a Saudi journalist. In 2022, MIT ended its Skoltech collaborations in Russia following the invasion of Ukraine. Following mass protests in solidarity with Palestine, Lockheed Martin left a program managed by MISTI-Israel and chose to not renew it. An MIT professor recently cancelled an Israeli military grant after student pressure.

When invoking our past, MIT activists draw on a wellspring of moral tradition. As MIT students in 1937 wrote in a petition against the Institute sending a delegate to the Nazi festival in Göttingen, MIT’s participation would “condone the acts and practices of the forces now controlling Germany”. Similarly, MIT’s contracts with the Israeli military condone the acts and practices of Israeli forces. Academic freedom does not protect such ties. As the anti-war student leader Ira Rubenzahl told our student newspaper in 1969 during the Vietnam War: “One doesn’t have the right to build gas chambers to kill people.”

CONCEALMENT AND CALL TO ACTION

In defiance of the mandate handed to them by the public, MIT officials conceal and misdirect over the institution’s complicity. In summer 2025, MIT revoked access to tools for the MIT community to understand its research funding sources, such as the annual Brown Books, which track the flow of external funds into MIT. It also barred us from using the university’s Kuali Coeus grant-tracking website, which MIT researchers use to better understand our external grants. They have further engaged in a campaign of persecution against student activists, as detailed by a May 2025 letter of UN rapporteurs to the MIT President.

**MIT’s actions are antithetical to the Institute’s supposed motto “Mind and Hand” for the “betterment of humankind.” **Instead, MIT’s minds and hands are engineering for genocide — a damning moral stain on the Institute. Majorities of MIT students demand that the Institute cut ties with the Israeli military, as confirmed by three separate campus votes in 2024 and 2025 as well as our Scientists Against Genocide encampment in spring 2024.

We call on people of conscience to challenge MIT to end its unethical science.\

Send an email here to MIT officials or grab the copy from here.