Daniel sent us this one, and honestly, it's the kind of question that makes you step back and look at a much bigger picture. He's pointing out that Ireland has been on this strange, obsessive campaign to harm Israel's interests through whatever limited levers it can pull — and it's formed this odd coalition with Slovenia and Spain to try to sever Israel from the European Union. We've talked before about the Horizon Europe programme and academic cooperation as one of the battlegrounds. But what Daniel really wants to explore is how this flies in the face of everything we know about how humanity flourishes when scientists cooperate across borders, including the outsized contributions Israel has made to scientific advancement. And then the deeper question: what can we actually learn from the mechanisms the scientific world has developed for international cooperation, even between countries with totally opposing worldviews?
There's so much to dig into here. And by the way, before we get rolling — DeepSeek V four Pro is writing our script today, so if anything comes out particularly sharp, credit where it's due.
Alright, let's start with the Ireland piece, because the Horizon Europe situation is the clearest example of what Daniel's describing. For listeners who haven't followed this closely, what exactly has Ireland been doing?
Horizon Europe is the EU's flagship research and innovation funding programme — we're talking about a ninety-five billion euro budget over seven years, running from twenty twenty-one to twenty twenty-seven. It funds collaborative research across member states and associated countries. Israel has been an associated country since the nineties, which means Israeli researchers can lead projects, receive funding, and collaborate on equal footing with EU counterparts. And the track record is extraordinary. Israel has consistently punched far above its weight — contributing to fields from cybersecurity to medical devices to agricultural technology. The European Commission's own data shows that for every euro Israel puts into the programme, it generates something like one point three euros in collaborative value back to the EU.
Ireland's position has been what, exactly?
Ireland, along with Slovenia and Spain, has been pushing to exclude Israel from Horizon Europe entirely. Their argument, framed publicly, is about human rights concerns and compliance with EU foreign policy. But when you look at the actual mechanisms they're trying to use, it's not about specific violations or legal findings — it's about using the association agreement's political clauses to sever scientific cooperation. The Irish government has been particularly vocal. In late twenty twenty-four, then-Taoiseach Simon Harris made statements explicitly linking Horizon participation to what he called Israel's conduct, and Ireland's foreign ministry has been coordinating with Slovenia and Spain to build a blocking coalition within the European Council.
What's striking is the selectivity. The EU has association agreements with plenty of countries that have questionable human rights records, and Ireland isn't pushing to exclude them. This is targeted.
And the Horizon Europe statute doesn't actually have a mechanism for expelling an associated country based on political disagreements. It's a scientific cooperation framework. What Ireland has been trying to do is use the general political dialogue mechanisms to pressure the Commission into not renewing or suspending the association. It's a legal stretch, and the Commission's own legal service has reportedly been skeptical. But the political pressure is real.
This is the "determined and obsessive" part Daniel's talking about. It's not just a policy disagreement — it's using whatever lever is available, even if it means undermining the entire logic of scientific internationalism.
That's where this gets genuinely interesting, because the history of scientific cooperation across hostile borders is one of the most underappreciated success stories of the modern world. Let me give you a concrete example. During the Cold War, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis — I. — was founded in nineteen seventy-two, explicitly as a bridge between Eastern and Western bloc scientists. It was initiated by the US and the Soviet Union, with the specific goal of creating a space where researchers from both sides could work together on problems that didn't care about ideology — climate modelling, resource management, systems analysis. And it worked. Soviet and American mathematicians, ecologists, and computer scientists sat in the same rooms in Laxenburg, Austria, sharing data and methods, while their governments were pointing missiles at each other.
The mechanism there is interesting, because it wasn't naive. Nobody pretended the political differences didn't exist. The structure was designed to acknowledge them and then bypass them.
model was built on what they called "non-political scientific cooperation." The charter explicitly stated that the institute would not engage in military research or political advocacy. The scientists were there as scientists, not as representatives of their governments. And this created a fascinating dynamic where Soviet researchers who would never be allowed to travel freely could come to Austria, work with Western colleagues, and then go home with new knowledge — and often with a more nuanced view of the world. It was a kind of intellectual diplomacy that operated below the political radar.
That model has been replicated. CERN is probably the most famous example — founded in nineteen fifty-four, bringing together European nations that had been bombing each other a decade earlier, around particle physics. But there are lesser-known ones too. SESAME, the synchrotron light source in Jordan, is a direct descendant of the CERN model, and it's got something that should make Ireland's position look particularly shortsighted.
Oh, SESAME is the perfect counterexample. So SESAME stands for Synchrotron-light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East. It's a particle accelerator in Allan, Jordan, modelled directly on CERN's governance structure. And here's the remarkable thing: it has Iran, Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Turkey, Cyprus, Egypt, Jordan, and Pakistan all sitting on the same council. Iranian and Israeli scientists working side by side on beamlines. The director for several years was an Israeli physicist, Eliezer Rabinovici, and the current council president is from Iran, and they make it work. They have formal mechanisms for managing political tensions — the council operates by consensus, scientific merit governs beam time allocation, and the facility itself is explicitly neutral ground.
This isn't some theoretical exercise. They're producing real science. What kind of work comes out of SESAME?
Everything from analysing ancient manuscripts to developing new materials for solar cells to studying protein structures for drug development. In twenty twenty-three, a team including researchers from Iran, Israel, and Egypt published a paper on using synchrotron radiation to analyse pollutants in agricultural soil — a practical problem that affects all their countries. The science doesn't care about the politics. And the mechanism that makes this work is what I find so elegant. They use what's called a "scientific passport" approach — researchers are admitted based on their proposals, not their nationalities, and the host country provides visa facilitation specifically for the facility. It's a carve-out from normal political relations.
The structure essentially says: we acknowledge the political reality, we're not trying to solve it, but we're creating a parallel space where the normal rules of engagement between these countries are suspended for a specific purpose.
And it's not just the Middle East. Look at the Arctic Council. Russia, the US, Canada, the Nordic countries — all sitting together on Arctic research, even through periods of extreme tension. The Antarctic Treaty System, which was signed in nineteen fifty-nine at the height of the Cold War, explicitly set aside territorial claims and military activity to create a continent dedicated to peaceful scientific research. It's still functioning. It survived the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, everything. The mechanism there was radical for its time: all territorial claims are frozen, all military activity is banned, and scientific data must be shared freely. Countries that couldn't agree on anything else agreed on that.
The Antarctic Treaty is interesting because it created a norm that then became self-reinforcing. Once you've got scientists from opposing countries working together in extreme conditions, relying on each other for survival and data, the political hostility starts to look absurd to the people actually doing the work. There's a social dimension to these mechanisms that matters.
That's a crucial point. The social infrastructure of science is underappreciated. Conferences, peer review, joint publications, lab exchanges — these create personal relationships that cross political boundaries. When a researcher in Tehran has co-authored with a researcher in Tel Aviv, even if they've never met in person, they've engaged in a collaborative intellectual process that builds mutual respect. And those relationships create constituencies for continued cooperation. When politicians try to sever those ties, they face pushback from their own scientific communities.
Which is exactly what happened with the Horizon Europe situation, right? The pushback wasn't just from Israel.
When Ireland and Slovenia started pushing harder on excluding Israel, there was significant pushback from European research universities, from individual scientists, from research councils. The League of European Research Universities issued statements. Individual Nobel laureates wrote open letters. The argument was simple: you don't advance human rights by destroying the mechanisms that produce shared knowledge. If anything, you undermine the long-term capacity for understanding between peoples.
There's an irony here that I think Daniel's question is pointing toward. Ireland presents itself as a champion of international law and human rights, but by trying to sever scientific cooperation, it's actually working against one of the most proven mechanisms for building the conditions in which human rights can flourish. Science collaboration doesn't just produce papers — it produces networks of trust, shared norms, and mutual dependence that make conflict costlier.
There's a specific historical case that illustrates this beautifully. The Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. Founded in nineteen fifty-seven by Joseph Rotblat and Bertrand Russell. Rotblat was a physicist who had worked on the Manhattan Project — he was the only scientist to leave the project on moral grounds once it became clear that Nazi Germany wasn't building a bomb. And he spent the rest of his life building bridges between scientists on opposite sides of the Cold War. Pugwash brought together Soviet and American nuclear physicists, often in unofficial capacities, to discuss arms control. And the impact was real. The Partial Test Ban Treaty of nineteen sixty-three, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of nineteen seventy-two — Pugwash discussions directly informed the technical groundwork for those agreements. Rotblat and Pugwash won the Nobel Peace Prize in nineteen ninety-five.
The Pugwash model is interesting because it was deliberately unofficial. These weren't government representatives negotiating. They were scientists speaking as individuals, which gave them freedom to explore ideas that diplomats couldn't touch. It's a different mechanism from the formal intergovernmental ones like CERN or SESAME, but it serves the same function: creating channels of communication that survive political breakdowns.
That model has been adapted repeatedly. The InterAcademy Partnership, which brings together science academies from over a hundred and forty countries, operates on similar principles. When official diplomatic channels freeze, academy-to-academy communication often continues. During the worst periods of US-Iran tensions, the respective science academies maintained contact and ran joint workshops on water management and public health. These aren't headline-grabbing activities, but they're the kind of steady, beneath-the-radar cooperation that builds resilience into the international system.
Let's pull this back to Daniel's core question. What are the better lessons? If Ireland's approach — using political disagreements to sever scientific ties — is counterproductive and flies in the face of historical evidence about how cooperation produces human flourishing, what should countries be doing instead?
I think there are at least three clear lessons from the historical record. First, separate the scientific from the political. This doesn't mean pretending politics doesn't exist. It means creating institutional firewalls. CERN's convention explicitly forbids military research. charter separates the scientific programme from political oversight. SESAME's beam time is allocated purely on scientific merit. These are structural decisions, not wishful thinking.
Second, invest in the social infrastructure. The personal relationships between scientists across borders are the shock absorbers of international relations. When governments want to escalate, they have to overcome the resistance of their own researchers who have colleagues, collaborators, and friends on the other side. That's not a bug — it's a feature. It's a constituency for peace that operates below the level of grand strategy.
Third, focus on shared problems. The most successful examples of cross-border scientific cooperation — the Antarctic Treaty, the Arctic Council, the international climate research programmes — all centre on problems that no single country can solve alone. Climate change, pandemic preparedness, food security, water management. These are problems where the cost of non-cooperation is demonstrably higher than the cost of cooperation, even for adversaries. And the science makes that visible in a way that political rhetoric can't easily obscure.
There's something else here that connects to what Daniel mentioned about Israel's outsized scientific contributions. Because part of what makes Ireland's position so self-defeating is that Israel isn't just any scientific partner — it's one of the most productive research nations per capita in the world.
The numbers on this are staggering. Israel spends about five point six percent of G. on research and development — the highest proportion of any country in the world. South Korea is second at around four point eight percent. average is about two point seven. Israel has more startups per capita than any other country, and more companies listed on NASDAQ than any country except the US and China. In terms of scientific publications per capita, Israel consistently ranks in the top five globally. And in certain fields — computer science, molecular biology, agricultural technology — the per-capita output is extraordinary.
This isn't just about quantity. There are specific Israeli innovations that have had massive global impact. The USB flash drive was developed at an Israeli company. The PillCam, the ingestible camera for gastrointestinal imaging, was developed by Given Imaging. The Iron Dome missile defence system has saved countless lives. Drip irrigation technology from Netafim has transformed agriculture in water-scarce regions worldwide. These aren't just Israeli achievements — they're contributions to global welfare.
The Horizon Europe relationship has been a two-way street. Israeli researchers have led or co-led projects that advanced European science in significant ways. The European Research Council has funded dozens of Israeli-led projects. The Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions have supported hundreds of Israeli researchers and brought European researchers to Israeli institutions. When you sever that relationship, you're not just punishing Israel — you're depriving European science of a vital contributor.
Which brings us back to the Ireland-Slovenia-Spain axis. What's the state of play right now? Has their push gained traction?
It's been a mixed picture. In early twenty twenty-five, there was a concerted push by these three countries to add conditions to Israel's Horizon Europe association renewal, which was up for review. They wanted human rights conditionality clauses inserted. The Commission resisted, arguing that the association agreement is a scientific instrument, not a foreign policy tool, and that introducing political conditionality would set a precedent that could destabilise the entire associated country framework — which includes countries like Ukraine, Turkey, and others with complex political situations.
The Council dynamics?
The blocking coalition never reached critical mass. Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, and several Central European countries pushed back. The association was renewed, though with some additional reporting requirements that were acceptable to both sides. But Ireland has continued to press the issue through other channels — trade agreements, diplomatic statements, and most recently through the Occupied Territories Bill, which has been working its way through the Irish parliament and would restrict trade with Israeli settlements.
That bill is interesting because it's another example of the "whatever limited means" approach Daniel described. Ireland can't shift EU policy on its own, so it's using every lever it has — trade restrictions, diplomatic pressure, the Horizon programme, public statements. It's a systematic campaign.
It's worth noting that Ireland's trade with Israel is relatively small — about one point five billion euros annually in bilateral trade, mostly in tech and pharmaceuticals. So the economic cost to Ireland of restricting that trade is manageable from their perspective. But the symbolic and diplomatic cost is significant, and it's creating friction with other EU member states who see it as Ireland freelancing on foreign policy.
There's an interesting question underneath all of this about what actually drives scientific progress. Daniel's prompt points to the evidence that humanity flourishes when scientists cooperate across borders. But there's a counter-narrative that competition drives innovation — the Space Race, for example. How do we reconcile those?
It's not either-or. The historical record shows that both competition and cooperation drive progress, but they operate at different scales and through different mechanisms. The Space Race was undeniably productive — it produced massive technological advances in rocketry, materials science, computing, and telecommunications. But it was productive precisely because it was bounded. It was competition within a framework of shared scientific norms. Soviet and American scientists still read each other's papers, attended the same conferences, and built on each other's work. The competition was about who got to the Moon first, not about whether orbital mechanics or thermodynamics were correct.
The shared epistemic foundation is what makes even competitive science productive.
And that shared foundation — peer review, replicability, open publication, citation — is itself a product of centuries of international cooperation. The first scientific journals in the seventeenth century were explicitly international in scope. The Royal Society's motto, "Nullius in verba" — take nobody's word for it — was a commitment to evidence over authority, and it was understood from the beginning that evidence doesn't have a nationality.
When you start severing those ties for political reasons, you're not just losing the cooperative benefits — you're weakening the epistemic foundation that makes all science, competitive or cooperative, function properly. If Israeli researchers can't access European supercomputing infrastructure, or European researchers can't collaborate with Israeli teams on quantum computing, the frontier of knowledge moves more slowly for everyone.
There's a specific example that I think crystallises this. The COVID-nineteen pandemic. Within weeks of the genome being sequenced, it was shared globally. Researchers in China, the US, Europe, Israel, and elsewhere were building on each other's work in real time. The mRNA vaccines that ultimately proved most effective were the product of decades of international fundamental research — Hungarian-born scientist Katalin Karikó did her key work in the US, building on discoveries from labs around the world. If any country had tried to wall off its COVID research for political reasons, the global response would have been slower and more people would have died. The science worked precisely because the cooperation mechanisms were robust enough to survive even in a crisis.
Israel was a significant contributor to the COVID response. Israeli researchers published extensively on epidemiology, vaccine effectiveness, and treatment protocols. The country's digitised health records system enabled real-world studies of vaccine effectiveness that informed global policy. If Ireland's approach had been applied during the pandemic — severing scientific ties with Israel over political disagreements — it would have literally cost lives.
That's the starkest way to put it. And it's why the scientific community has been so resistant to political interference in research cooperation. It's not just about abstract principles of academic freedom — though those matter. It's about the concrete consequences of slowing down the production of knowledge that saves lives, feeds people, and solves problems.
Let's get practical. Daniel's asking what mechanisms the scientific world has pioneered for international cooperation. We've touched on several — CERN, SESAME, I. , Pugwash, the Antarctic Treaty, the InterAcademy Partnership. Are there principles we can extract that apply beyond science?
I think there are at least five. First, create neutral spaces. Every successful example involves a physical or institutional space where normal political dynamics are suspended. The CERN campus, the SESAME facility in Jordan, the Antarctic research stations. These spaces have their own governance, their own norms, and their own entry criteria that are based on scientific merit rather than political alignment.
Second has to be about shared goals. You mentioned this earlier — problems that no single country can solve.
And the key is that the goal has to be concrete enough that progress can be measured, and compelling enough that the cost of non-cooperation is obvious. Climate modelling, pandemic surveillance, food security — these are areas where even adversaries can agree that cooperation beats going it alone.
The scientific programme has to be insulated from political interference. This means independent funding, merit-based access to resources, and governance structures that include scientists from all participating countries on equal footing. When politicians can pull the funding plug whenever they're unhappy, the cooperation collapses. CERN's budget is committed on multi-year cycles. SESAME's council operates by consensus, not by political weight.
Personal relationships as infrastructure. The exchanges, the conferences, the joint PhD programmes — these aren't just nice-to-haves. They're the load-bearing beams of the whole structure. When you've got a network of researchers who have worked together, published together, and trust each other, you've created a constituency for continued cooperation that can withstand political shocks.
Norms of reciprocity and transparency. All the successful examples require data sharing, open publication, and mutual access. You can't participate in CERN experiments without sharing your data. The Antarctic Treaty requires that scientific observations and results be exchanged and made freely available. This creates a virtuous cycle — the more you share, the more you benefit, and the harder it becomes for any single country to justify pulling out.
These are all mechanisms that Ireland's approach actively undermines. By trying to sever Israel from Horizon Europe, Ireland isn't just targeting Israel — it's weakening the institutional firewalls, the personal networks, and the norms of reciprocity that make the whole system work. It's a kind of vandalism dressed up as moral clarity.
Irish researchers participate heavily in Horizon Europe. Irish universities collaborate internationally. Ireland's tech sector, which is a huge part of its economy, depends on the free flow of scientific talent and knowledge across borders. If the precedent were set that political disagreements justify severing scientific ties, Ireland would eventually find itself on the receiving end of the same logic.
There's a deeper point here about the relationship between science and human flourishing that I think Daniel's question is getting at. The historical evidence is overwhelming — the societies that have participated in international scientific networks have advanced faster and improved human welfare more than those that have isolated themselves. This isn't just about GDP growth. It's about life expectancy, child mortality, food security, disease eradication. The Green Revolution, which saved something like a billion people from starvation, was a product of international agricultural research cooperation. The eradication of smallpox was a global effort coordinated by the World Health Organisation. The development of antiretroviral drugs for HIV was accelerated by international clinical trials and data sharing.
Israel's role in this story is disproportionate. Israeli innovations in drip irrigation have helped farmers in Africa, India, and Latin America grow food in conditions that would otherwise be impossible. Israeli medical devices are used in hospitals worldwide. Israeli cybersecurity research protects digital infrastructure globally. When you try to isolate Israel from international science, you're not just harming Israel — you're harming everyone who benefits from Israeli research, which is effectively everyone.
What's the better lesson? If Ireland cares about human rights and human flourishing — and I think it's fair to assume that at least some of the people pushing these policies do — what should they be doing instead of trying to sever scientific ties?
They should be doing the opposite. They should be investing in more scientific cooperation, not less. They should be creating more channels for Israeli and Palestinian researchers to work together on shared problems — water management, public health, environmental monitoring. They should be funding joint research programmes, not defunding them. If you believe that human contact and mutual understanding reduce conflict — and the evidence strongly suggests they do — then the policy prescription is more contact, more understanding, more cooperation.
There's a specific mechanism that's been proven to work in exactly this context. The Middle East Regional Cooperation programme, MERC, which was funded by the US Agency for International Development for decades, explicitly funded joint research between Israeli and Arab scientists. It produced real scientific outputs and real relationships. It wasn't a solution to the conflict, but it was a contribution to the conditions in which solutions become possible.
MERC is a great example. It funded something like a thousand joint projects over its lifetime, in areas like agricultural biotechnology, water resources, and marine science. Egyptian, Jordanian, Palestinian, and Israeli researchers all participated. And the programme survived multiple political crises because the scientific outcomes were demonstrably valuable to all parties. That's the model. Not severing ties, but building them.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
The average cumulus cloud weighs about five hundred thousand kilograms — roughly the same as one hundred elephants. And yet it floats, because the weight is distributed across millions of tiny water droplets spread over a vast volume of air.
If listeners take one thing from this episode, it's that the mechanisms of scientific cooperation aren't just nice ideas — they're proven infrastructure for human progress. And the countries that try to dismantle that infrastructure, whatever their stated motives, are working against the long-term interests of everyone, including their own citizens.
The practical takeaway for anyone who cares about this issue is to pay attention to the institutional details. When you hear about a country trying to sever scientific ties, look at what's actually being targeted. Is it a specific programme? A funding mechanism? A visa regime? The battles over science cooperation are often fought in obscure committees and technical agreements, but the stakes are enormous. Support organisations that defend scientific internationalism — the professional societies, the academy networks, the research organisations that maintain cross-border collaboration even when governments are hostile.
There's also a personal dimension. If you're a scientist or a student, seek out international collaborations. Apply for exchange programmes. Co-author with researchers from countries your government doesn't like. These individual actions might seem small, but they're the micro-foundations of the whole system. Every personal relationship across a political divide is a small bulwark against the kind of severing that Ireland is trying to achieve.
If you're a citizen in a democracy, let your representatives know that you value international scientific cooperation. The pushback against Ireland's Horizon Europe campaign came partly from scientists, but also from citizens who understood what was at stake. Political pressure works in both directions.
One thing I keep coming back to is how short-sighted this all is. The problems humanity faces over the next fifty years — climate change, pandemic preparedness, food and water security, artificial intelligence governance — none of them respect national boundaries. None of them can be solved by any single country, no matter how powerful. The countries that thrive will be the ones that are most deeply embedded in international knowledge networks. The countries that sever those ties, or try to sever others' ties, are choosing ideological satisfaction over practical benefit.
That's the tragedy of Ireland's position. Ireland is a small country that has benefited enormously from international openness — from EU membership, from foreign investment, from the free movement of talent and ideas. For it to now try to deny those same benefits to others, based on a political grudge, is not just hypocritical — it's self-harming in the long run. The scientific community has a long memory, and the countries that try to politicise research cooperation tend to find themselves less trusted, less included, and less influential over time.
Alright, one forward-looking thought before we wrap. The next major test of these principles is probably going to be around artificial intelligence governance. AI development is inherently international — the research is published globally, the supply chains span continents, and the impacts don't stop at borders. The countries that are currently trying to wall off their AI ecosystems from each other are going to discover, sooner or later, that the science doesn't work that way. The question is whether we'll figure that out before or after we've done real damage to the pace of progress.
That's a whole episode in itself. Thanks to Hilbert Flumingtop for producing, as always. This has been My Weird Prompts. You can find every episode at myweirdprompts.com or wherever you get your podcasts. If you've got thoughts on this one, we'd love to hear them — drop us a review or find us on Telegram.
Until next time.
