The Olam has just finished an audit of 2,844 faculty members across eight of Israel's leading universities, and the number we found should stop every Jew who cares about Israel mid-signature: 50.4% of them, 1,434 professors, publicly signed a letter declaring that Israel's own war in Gaza amounted to "a horrifying litany of war crimes and even crimes against humanity."
Half of the faculty members we audited signed
The Black Flag Letter "An Urgent Call to the Heads of Academia in Israel," released in May 2025 and addressed to the Association of University Heads in Israel, Israel's academic leadership. It asked those leaders to "mobilize the full weight of Israeli academia to stop the Israeli war in Gaza."
Of the 1,434 professors who signed any petition in our sample, 96.9% signed this one letter accusing the IDF of war crimes, a single document adopted by a majority of the faculty at institution after institution.
These institutions are the schools whose names sit on buildings their families funded, whose research their foundations underwrite, whose graduate fellowships their federations sponsor. Technion, the Haifa-based engineering powerhouse that trains much of Israel's tech and defense talent, signed at 77%, the highest rate of any university we audited. Hebrew University came in at 67%. Tel Aviv University, Ben-Gurion University, the University of Haifa, the Weizmann Institute and the Open University all cleared 40%. Only Bar-Ilan, at 30%, sat meaningfully below the pack, and even there, nearly a third of faculty signed.
Donors have spent decades being told, that Israeli academia is a crown jewel of the country's soft power, a magnet for global talent, a driver of the innovation economy diaspora philanthropy takes justified pride in.
Yet the results appear to show that significant parts of that academia have moved far outside Israel's political mainstream.
The disciplinary breakdown matters as much as the topline number. Middle Eastern Studies faculty signed at 82%, sociology at 70%, anthropology and philosophy at 66%, political science at 59%. Engineering, by contrast, signed at 15%, biology at 19%, chemistry at 23%, physics at 27%. The gap between humanities and STEM disciplines held at every single one of the eight universities we audited.
This Israeli faculty study follows an earlier audit we ran at 313 US universities, which found 51.9% of Jewish studies professors publicly on record against Israel, using boycott endorsements, "settler colonialism" framing, apartheid characterizations, or genocide accusations as its criteria. The Israeli rate, using a narrower single-letter standard, landed at 50.4%.
The spread between Technion's 77% and Bar-Ilan's 30%, a 47-point gap, is itself worth a donor's attention. Bar-Ilan is a national-religious university, and its faculty still signed at nearly double the rate of any Israeli political party's actual platform, since no major party in the Knesset, coalition or opposition, endorses the Black Flag letter's framing.
Israeli universities remain engines of the defense technology, medical research and economic dynamism of the Jewish state.
But half of the faculty we audited at Israel's most prestigious research universities put their name to a document accusing Israel's own military of war crimes and crimes against humanity, during a war that began with the deadliest single massacre of Jews since the Holocaust
These are the people teaching the next generation of Israeli and Jewish students. Students, donors, parents, and boards of governors have the information in front of them.
Ronn Torossian is an Israeli-American entrepreneur.