United States–Israel Binational Science Foundation

The BSF is an independent institution based in Israel and governed by five American and five Israeli board members. It supports collaborative research by investigators at institutions in both countries, with grants selected through competitive scientific peer review.[5] Its traditional program is financed from interest on a jointly contributed endowment, while newer partnerships with agencies such as the U.S. National Science Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities use separate annual Israeli allocations for participating Israeli researchers.[7][8]

The foundation supports basic research across the sciences and selected applied and technological work. Its stated goals combine scientific excellence with substantive cooperation between American and Israeli investigators, including shared planning, complementary research, exchanges of personnel or materials, and joint publication of results.[9][10]

The agreement establishing the BSF was signed in New York and entered into force on September 27, 1972, and is identified in U.S. treaty records as TIAS 7460.[11] Then-Israeli Ambassador Yitzhak Rabin and U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Joseph Sisco are identified with the foundation's establishment.[1] A BSF historical profile says Rabin initiated the binational agreement.[12]

The 1972 agreement defines the Foundation's objective as promoting and supporting U.S.–Israel cooperation in research in science and technology "for peaceful purposes on subjects of mutual interest."[2] Cooperation was to include joint research projects involving scientists and experts from both countries; exchanges of scientists, experts, equipment, information, data, research results, and techniques; and joint conferences and seminars.[2] An Israeli government publication similarly describes the BSF's purpose as supporting cooperative scientific and technological research "for peaceful purposes and for the benefit of both countries."[13]

Under the original endowment arrangements, each government furnished $30 million in Israeli pounds, producing a $60 million starting fund deposited on October 1, 1972, in a special account at the Bank of Israel in the Foundation's name.[2] The agreement also provided for Israel to pay the United States $30 million in Israeli pounds on that date as an acceleration of payments otherwise due from 1988 to 2001.[2] In 1984, Congress appropriated an additional $20 million and Israel matched it, bringing total capitalization to $100 million—$50 million from each country.[3][4] A subsequent protocol to the original agreement was dated October 28, 2020.[11]

The BSF is governed by a Board of Governors comprising five American members and five Israeli members, with each government appointing its representatives.[3][5] The Board determines the annual number and average size of grants based on available resources, but neither the Board nor the foundation's staff intervenes in the scientific selection of individual proposals.[9]

Funding for the traditional grant program derives from annual interest on the jointly contributed endowment.[5] The endowment was last enlarged in 1984, and its purchasing power has since been eroded by inflation. One foundation account reports that it produces approximately $17 million annually.[1] Because available funds were insufficient to accept applications in every field each year, the Board instituted an alternating-year schedule beginning in 2001–02: one cycle covers health sciences, life sciences, and psychology, and the other covers exact, natural, and social sciences.[1]

Congress has not directly appropriated operational funding to the binational foundations since the mid-1980s. The Congressional Research Service describes the foundations collectively as sustaining grant-making through endowment interest and, particularly for the industrial BIRD Foundation, repayments from successful recipients; verified BSF sources identify endowment interest as the core funding source for the traditional BSF program.[4][5] In 2010, Israel's finance and industry ministers decided to increase participation in BSF, BIRD, and BARD, allocating $40 million across the three funds without specifying the share directed to BSF.[14]

The BSF supports innovative, hypothesis-driven collaborative research intended to advance academic relations between the two countries.[5] Supported areas include life sciences, natural sciences, social sciences, exact sciences, engineering, computer science, and earth sciences.[1][5] Proposals must address timely scientific questions, advance knowledge, and serve peaceful, nonprofit purposes.[5]

Grant proposals are evaluated by U.S.–Israeli scientific panels based on scientific quality and the expected collaboration between principal investigators from both countries.[9] Applications receive three to five ad-hoc reviews from referees around the world. Criteria include originality and importance, the strength and practical form of the collaboration, expected scientific or broader benefits, the investigators' qualifications and resources, and, where relevant, results from earlier BSF-funded collaborations.[9] Prior joint work is not required, but applicants must demonstrate scientific merit and genuine synergy between researchers at institutions in both countries; joint publications are considered when assessing collaboration.[10]

Applications are submitted jointly once per year, although each scientific discipline is eligible only every second year.[10] The main basic-science program receives approximately 400 applications annually, including start-up applications, and approves about 100; it reports roughly 450 active grants and annual expenditure of approximately $16 million.[10] In 2021, the foundation awarded 179 collaborative grants from 605 proposals, totaling $29.25 million, although the associated press-release headline described the total as $28 million without explaining the difference.[15] For 2019 and 2020, a foundation account reports approximately 750 applications and approximately 200 approvals.[1] The five U.S. institutions receiving the most BSF funding are the University of California system, the University of Michigan, Stanford University, the National Institutes of Health, and New York University.[1]

In 2012, the BSF signed an umbrella memorandum of understanding with the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) for joint funding of U.S.–Israeli collaborative research.[7] The joint program began operating in 2013.[16] Researchers submit proposals jointly; NSF funds participating U.S. researchers from its regular resources, while Israeli researchers receive support from annual allocations provided by Israel's Committee for Planning and Budgeting, separate from the traditional BSF endowment-funded program.[7]

The program now encompasses all NSF grant-making directorates and all or most divisions within them.[7] Its fields include exact sciences, engineering, computer science, natural and life sciences, earth and environmental sciences, economics, and psychology.[16] In 2019, Israel's Council for Higher Education earmarked approximately $56 million over five years for the program, aiming to increase the number of U.S.–Israeli projects and opportunities for Israeli researchers to work with American institutions.[16] Israeli government support has also been reported at approximately $11 million per year, with NSF expected to allocate at least $25 million annually for participating U.S. scientists. Reported reasons for the difference include lower Israeli overhead and salaries, the absence of summer salary for Israeli investigators, and the lack of Ph.D. student tuition in Israel.[1]

The Congressional Research Service records that the BSF has partnered with NSF since 2012 and reports 13,829 BSF grantees since the foundation's establishment.[4]

In 2022, the BSF and the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities signed a research-cooperation memorandum of understanding to encourage collaboration between American and Israeli humanities scholars.[8] Under the arrangement, U.S. researchers may receive support from NEH's regular resources, while participating Israeli researchers receive BSF support financed through annual allocations from Israel's Committee for Planning and Budgeting.[8]

The BSF is one of three principal binational research institutions created by the American and Israeli governments in the 1970s, alongside the Binational Industrial Research and Development Foundation (BIRD) and the Binational Agricultural Research and Development Foundation (BARD).[17][18] A Washington Institute report attributes $5 billion in direct and indirect U.S.-based production and global sales, between 18,000 and 50,000 U.S. jobs, and tax receipts sufficient to repay the U.S. government's endowment share to the three foundations collectively; it does not provide BSF-specific economic totals.[17] More than $1.4 billion had been invested through the three foundations collectively by 2020.[19]

At events marking the BSF's 50th anniversary in 2022, Israel's innovation, science and technology minister signed a separate U.S.–Israel agreement for joint quantum research. Israel was to contribute NIS 20 million and the United States twice that amount; the report did not describe the agreement as a BSF grant program.[20]

BSF-supported research has contributed to scientific and medical discoveries with lasting applications. The collaboration of Avram Hershko and Aaron Ciechanover of the Technion with Irwin Rose of UC Irvine on the ubiquitin system for protein degradation received continuous BSF support for approximately 15 years, while Hershko received uninterrupted support for 24 years.[21] The three scientists received the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery. Six of the eight Nobel laureates in science that year had received at least one BSF grant.[6][21]

BSF-supported work also helped sustain PET imaging technology at a critical stage. When development was nearly abandoned because the short-lived isotopes needed for imaging were not abundantly available, Shlomo Rozen of Tel Aviv University and Michael Welch of Washington University synthesized acetyl hypofluorite. The compound was adopted by the NIH and industry and became the most important source of fluorine-18 for 15 years, sustaining PET imaging until other sources were developed.[21]

Forty-eight researchers who received BSF grants were reported to have subsequently won Nobel Prizes or other major awards.[20] Named recipients include Dan Shechtman, Ada Yonath, Robert J. Aumann, Aaron Ciechanover, and Avraham Hershko; other grantees have received the Turing Award, Fields Medal, Wolf Prize, and Abel Prize.[20] A 2011–2012 Israeli government report stated that BSF-funded projects produced scientific, medical, and technological breakthroughs with practical applications and that 39 laureates began their relevant work with BSF support.[22]

BSF-funded research involving Technion professor Shulamit Levenberg preceded Aleph Farms' creation of what a 2022 report characterized as the world's first full-sized cultivated steak.[20] Former executive director Yair Rotstein described the foundation's changing role: "In the beginning, BSF used to be the main source of funding for Israeli scientists. Now, the world has changed. And Israeli science is really world-class. The two cooperate more as partners now than when it was the Americans aiding Israeli science."[6]

The BSF supports collaborative basic research as well as selected applied and technological research across a broad range of fields.[1] Traditional areas include physics, chemistry, medicine, computer science, earth sciences, and social sciences, with an emphasis on research that may contribute to technological breakthroughs.[3] A BSF-Energy program has funded work in biofuels, distributed power markets, photovoltaic systems, thermoelectrics, and fuel-cell materials.[22] A 2025 Israeli government report says the foundation issues a call every other year for cross-disciplinary proposals advancing climate solutions.[23]

Projects funded through the NSF-BSF program illustrate the portfolio's breadth. An active Ben-Gurion University project is developing scalable graph-neural-network methods and applying them to computations involving partial differential equations, while jointly mentoring early-career researchers and training students and postdoctoral researchers.[24] Another project measures sediment transport in desert flash floods, using Israeli and American semi-desert field sites to calibrate acoustic and seismic techniques that can monitor sediment without requiring researchers to enter the river.[25]

A seismo-acoustic project with an effective start date of January 1, 2010, built an infrasound monitoring network alongside seismic and accelerometric stations, created databases and tools for detecting and locating explosions, and used meteorological data to model infrasound propagation.[26] Climate-related examples include research on coral recruitment and calcification for future reefs; a biomimetic spider-web-like system for detecting airborne pollutants; and spin-based hydrogen technology.[23] The Ben-Gurion University research portal also lists BSF-funded projects concerning parasite community dynamics, synaptic zinc regulation, mycobacterial biology, recurrent preterm birth, and graph neural networks.[27]

The BSF's current About and main research-grant pages report more than $1 billion in awards, in today's value, to more than 6,500 research projects.[5][10] A 2025 Israeli government report instead gives more than $1 billion for over 5,500 projects, while a Jewish Virtual Library profile presents more than $700 million for more than 5,000 projects and, elsewhere on the same page, more than $1 billion and more than 5,500 grants.[1][23] The sources do not explain the differing project totals or counting methods. The Congressional Research Service separately reports 13,829 grantees since the foundation's establishment.[4]

The foundation reaches a wide cross-section of American and Israeli institutions. Grant proposals require active collaboration between American and Israeli scientists and excellent scientific merit as judged by peer review.[13] Awards have involved scientists from more than 400 U.S. institutions across 46 states, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia.[1] Supported institutions include universities, hospitals, and government research bodies in both countries.[3]

Within the broader architecture of U.S.–Israel cooperation, the BSF has been described as improving Israel's access to the global market while allowing the United States to benefit from Israeli creativity and knowledge transfer.[3] It also remains one of the established mechanisms for bilateral technological and scientific cooperation alongside BIRD and BARD.[18]

From the early 1970s until 2020, agreements governing BSF, BIRD, and BARD barred endowment-funded programs from being conducted in geographic areas that came under the administration of the Government of Israel after June 5, 1967.[4] The restrictions affected researchers at Israeli institutions in the West Bank—known by its original, indigenous Jewish name of Judea and Samaria—and the Golan Heights.[1][4]

In October 2020, the first Trump Administration announced the removal of those restrictions through amendments to the founding agreements.[4] Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman signed the relevant measures on October 28, 2020.[19] The amended BSF rules provided for participation by researchers from all Israeli academic institutions, including research conducted in areas that came under Israeli administration after June 5, 1967.[28] The change enabled participation by institutions including Ariel University, R&D Judea and Samaria, and the Shamir Institute in Katzrin.[19]

In June 2023, the Biden administration issued guidance stating that support for bilateral scientific and technological cooperation in certain areas that came under Israeli administration after 1967 and remain subject to final-status negotiations would not be consistent with U.S. foreign-policy objectives. The guidance specifically included BSF activities.[1][4] The Congressional Research Service reported that, as of May 28, 2025, the second Trump Administration had not publicly stated its position on the issue.[4]

A JNS opinion article argued that reimposing the restrictions amounted to boycotting Israeli science and harmed both countries. That characterization is the author's political argument rather than a settled description of the policy.[29]