There’s a university where Hamas, Hezbollah, and Houthi leaders are welcome — but Israeli academics are not. This particular ivory tower is also the largest recipient of U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) money outside the United States. Welcome to South Africa’s University of Cape Town (UCT).
The NIH announced on April 21 that it would no longer provide awards to domestic recipients that engage in discriminatory boycotts against Israel. The NIH should swiftly extend this directive to apply to foreign recipients like the University of Cape Town.
U.S. taxpayers provide $350 million annually to South Africa for medical research — 70 percent of the country’s total yearly spending for the cause. A leaked March 2025 NIH memo listed South Africa and China as “countries of concern” poised for funding cuts.
The university’s extremism dates back years. In March 2023, just months before Hamas’s October 7 atrocities against Israel, the student group UCT Palestinian Solidarity Forum (PSF) welcomed representatives from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad as well as Hezbollah spokesperson Ibrahim al-Mousawi via video conference.
Promoting another al-Mousawi event in September 2023, PSF announced, “A video message will be recorded by the participants that will be sent directly to the Palestinian resistance Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad! Come out and show South Africa’s support for the mujahedeen in Palestine!” PSF hosted al-Mousawi again in March 2024, this time alongside a Houthi representative, via Zoom.
In June 2024, with Israel desperately trying to recover its citizens held hostage in Gaza, the UCT Council, the governing body of the University of Cape Town, adopted two resolutions concerning the Gaza conflict. The first condemned Israel for its defense against Hamas and expressed solidarity with academic colleagues attacking Israel.
While the first resolution purported to champion academic freedom, bemoaning supposed attempts to silence anti-Israel academics, the second resolution did the opposite, preventing colleagues from partnering with Israelis.
The resolution declared, “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.” Given the mandatory military service requirements in Israel, this could apply to nearly every Israeli academic.
The UCT Council had the opportunity to reverse course on March 15 of this year but voted 14-13 to keep its boycott in place. A speaker at the meeting, noting the two-thirds drop in individual donor funding from $4.14 million in 2023 to $1.51 million in 2024, said, “We need every cent that we can get … We are chasing away money at the very time that we need it.”
Adam Mendelsohn, a UCT professor and director of its center for Jewish studies, sued the university, arguing that the anti-Israel boycott would harm his work and could empty the school’s coffers.
Councilor Nazeema Mohamed, according to Mendelsohn’s lawsuit, was not bothered by this prospect. For her, taking a political stand on a faraway conflict takes precedence over the fiscal health of the university. Out of 30 UCT Council members, Mohamed is one of five appointed by the African National Congress (ANC)-led government, which has preferred to insert itself in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict rather than govern South Africa.
In the suit, Mendelsohn stated that the Donald Gordon Foundation (DGF) and the Dell Foundation pulled donations in response to the boycott decision. DGF rescinded its nearly $11 million donation and did not advance its plan to build a teaching hospital worth roughly $25 million. Separately, the chair of the UCT Fund, an American charity founded to support UCT’s work, resigned over the anti-Israel hostility, further hampering UCT’s fundraising.
UCT’s self-inflicted financial woes come at a tough time for South Africa. President Donald Trump banned aid to the country in February 2025, citing Pretoria’s “aggressive positions towards the United States and its allies, including accusing Israel, not Hamas, of genocide in the International Court of Justice.” Relations have continued to deteriorate, with the United States declaring South Africa’s ambassador persona non grata in March.
Ultimately, the University of Cape Town must choose: Prioritize education and likely retain U.S. funding or martyr its future in pursuit of the destruction of the Jewish state. The best university in Africa should make the smart choice.
David May is a research manager and senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy. Follow David on X @DavidSamuelMay. Follow FDD on X @FDD.