Fiona Sharpe, of Sussex Friends of Israel, has urged Israel supporters to write to the AHRC, which provides around £98 million from the government every year to support research in the arts and humanities.
The conference would be biased and one-sided, she believed.
The director of the university’s European Centre for Palestine Studies, the anti-Zionist Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, is listed as one of the speakers.
A statement from the council said it had decided to fund the conference based on “academic grounds”.
