Documents Show U.S. Universities Ran at Least 70 Military Research Projects for Israel's Defense Ministry

More than a thousand pages of internal university and military documents describe a research pipeline running from at least 30 U.S. campuses into the Israeli Ministry of Defense, according to reporting by Responsible Statecraft based on public records obtained from 13 universities.

The documents identify at least 70 IMoD-sponsored research projects dating back to at least 2009, at schools including Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, UC San Diego, the University of Maryland, Brown, Columbia and UC Berkeley. The outlet's findings echo recent reporting from Dropsite News, The Nation, and the Anti-War Initiative, which separately traced Israeli military money into American schools.

The funding does not arrive as a conventional research grant. Records show it is procured as "defense articles and services" through the Foreign Military Financing program, the same U.S. arms export mechanism Israel uses to buy F-35 fighter jets. At least 11 of the contracts paid to send American scientists to Israel to meet IMoD officials and present findings in person.

What the projects built

At Carnegie Mellon, Prof. Sarah Bergbreiter developed cockroach-like surveillance robots with the Israeli military; she also built "inchworm-like" crawlers with an IMoD scientist at the University of Maryland, according to the documents. At Brown and Maryland, professors built micro-drones modeled on hummingbirds and bats, designed to search caves and demolished buildings. At Columbia, Prof. Hod Lipson built a backflipping quadrupedal robot called the Flexipod.

Other projects targeted software rather than hardware. In 2017, Boston University's Kate Saenko received $120,000 from the IMoD for AI research generating automated video descriptions, work her group later presented at a Tel Aviv conference under the title "Learning To Detect Every Thing." At UC Berkeley, neuroscientist Robert Knight tested brain-computer-interface electrodes for what his internal IMoD proposal described as "cognitive enhancement" for rapid visual recognition tasks. That proposal, unlike his published study, named a specific application.

Knight's internal proposal to the IMoD, but not his published study, discusses applications like "detecting 'suspicious' activity."

At the University of Maryland, Prof. V.S. Subrahmanian received IMoD funding for research titled "Targeting of Terror Networks" and "Massive Social Networks," aimed at identifying "weak points for the destabilization of terrorist networks." Other IMoD-funded work, the documents show, explicitly built border-monitoring sensor networks tuned to Palestinian border terrain to flag what one project description called "potential terrorist activity."

Why it matters

Responsible Statecraft frames the pattern as one in which university research often does not disclose its Israeli military funding source, a claim the outlet supports by contrasting internal IMoD proposal language with published academic papers that omit military applications. The full scope of the 70 projects, and how many followed this pattern, has not been independently audited beyond the documents reviewed for this reporting.