The University of Cape Town (UCT), once one of South Africa’s most widely-respected academic institutions, has decided to preserve its boycott of Israeli universities despite losing nearly two-thirds of donor funding since doing so.
UCT adopted an anti-Israel boycott in June 2024 when its governing council voted to approve two resolutions on the Gaza war, which together amounted to a boycott of Israeli academic institutions.
One resolution, for example, provided that “no UCT academic may enter into relations, or continue relations with, any research group and/or network whose author affiliations are with the Israeli Defence Force, and/or the broader Israeli military establishment.” The vast majority of Israelis are drafted into the Israeli Defense Force (IDF), and many university students and professors continue to serve as reservists after their compulsory service.
Moreover, Israeli universities work with the military, meaning that UCT had effectively boycotted its Israeli counterparts.
As reported by the university itself at the time, these resolutions did not condemn Hamas or the terror attack of October 7, 2023; nor did they call for the release of Israeli hostages.
The university’s fundraising chief, Trevor Norwitz, had already resigned over UCT’s earlier anti-Israel statements.
After the boycott resolutions were adopted, UCT was sued by the head of its own history department, who later claimed in court that the boycott could cost the university some 200 million rand (about $10 million) in funding.
In the past few weeks, UCT has been hit by the Trump administration’s cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
But the financial damage has been far broader, as individual donors have abandoned UCT.
On Saturday, UCT’s council held a meeting to consider a resolution to rescind the earlier boycott resolutions.
One speaker reported:
We need every cent that we can get. No amount of donor funding is ever going to replace what we have lost from USAID, from the federal government, from NIH [U.S. National Institutes of Health]. We need every cent that we can get. The VC’s [vice-chancellor’s] reports reflects a catastrophic and significant drop in individual donor funding in the last year, dropping 50 million Rand, from 77 million to 28 million. That’s in the VC’s report. We are chasing away money at the very time that we need it. The damage that we are doing, some insist can’t be avoided, but some of it is self-inflicted.
The council was also informed that hundreds of academic jobs would have to be cut due to recent losses in funding.
After a lengthy debate, the UCT council voted narrowly against rescinding its boycott of Israeli institutions, with 13 votes in favor of rescinding the boycott and 14 votes in favor of preserving it, despite the cost.
The UCT council vote demonstrates the intensity of the hostility to Israel — and the United States — among South African elites, to the point of self-destruction.
That hostility could pose a challenge to relations with the U.S., one of South Africa’s most significant trade partners, as the two countries confront a widening diplomatic gulf.
The Trump administration has cut off aid to South Africa over its recent expropriation legislation, and over its “aggressive positions towards the United States and its allies, including accusing Israel, not Hamas, of genocide in the International Court of Justice, and reinvigorating its relations with Iran to develop commercial, military, and nuclear arrangements.”
On Friday, the U.S. expelled South Africa’s ambassador, Ebrahim Rasool, for saying that President Donald Trump was the leader of a global white supremacist movement.
South Africa’s Sunday Times reported that the South African government acknowledged, unofficially, that Rasool’s expulsion had been justified, saying he had “crossed a line that we can’t defend.”
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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