Technion faculty signed the Black Flag letter at a 77% rate, the highest of eight Israeli universities, and the roster includes a sitting Knesset-party leader and three Nobel laureates who didn't sign.
Technion faculty signed the Black Flag letter calling Gaza a war crime at a 77% rate, the highest of eight Israeli universities Olam audited. The Technion also employs Yosef Jabareen, the sitting leader of the Hadash-Ta'al party, and three Nobel laureates who did not sign.
Who Is Yosef Jabareen, the Technion Professor Who Leads a Knesset Party?
Yosef Jabareen is a professor of urban and regional planning at the Technion and, as of 2026, the chairman of Hadash-Ta'al, one of the parties that has run under the Joint List banner. He served as a member of Knesset for Hadash and the Joint List from 2015 to 2021, according to his Knesset biography and continuing coverage in the Jerusalem Post. He returned to lead Hadash-Ta'al's list for the October 27, 2026 election after replacing longtime leader Ayman Odeh in primaries held in May.
Jabareen's Technion faculty profile lists him as a signer of the Black Flag letter in Olam's audit of the university's 85 tracked faculty. He is not a marginal case study: he is currently the most visible face of Arab-Israeli parliamentary politics, running to lead a reunited Joint List into a national election, while holding a professorship at the university Israel considers central to its defense and technology base.
What Does the Black Flag Letter Actually Say?
The Black Flag letter, formally titled "An Urgent Call to the Heads of Academia in Israel" and released in May 2025, told university leaders that the Gaza campaign amounted to "a horrifying litany of war crimes and even crimes against humanity, all of our own doing," and asked them to "mobilize the full weight of Israeli academia to stop the Israeli war in Gaza." The letter takes its name from a phrase in Israeli law: judges ruled after the 1956 Kfar Qasim massacre that some military orders are so plainly illegal that a "black flag" flies over them, meaning no soldier may obey them, as Academe Blog reported when the letter published.
By Olam's count, 96.9% of every Technion signature in the audit traces to this one letter. The letter does not use the word genocide, and it does not name individual soldiers or officers. It addresses Israel's own academic leadership, not an outside body.
Which Technion Faculty Did Not Sign?
Three Technion Nobel laureates appear on the non-signer side of Olam's audit: Aaron Ciechanover and Avram Hershko, who shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation, and Dan Shechtman, the 2011 Chemistry laureate who discovered quasicrystals. None of the three is recorded as a signer of the Black Flag letter or the smaller Scientists for Gaza statement in the source petitions Olam matched against Technion's faculty directory.
Ciechanover has instead used his public platform for a different wartime warning. Speaking at a National Emergency Conference in Kibbutz Nir Oz in August 2024, he said Israel faces a brain drain severe enough that "we won't have a country here" if the outflow of senior doctors and researchers continues, according to The Times of Israel. That statement addresses emigration, not the Black Flag letter, and should not be read as a comment on it either way.
Did the Technion Itself Take a Position on the War?
The Technion's president joined four other university heads, from Weizmann, Hebrew University, Tel Aviv University, and the Open University, in a July 28, 2025 open letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stating they "observe with shock the harrowing scenes emerging daily from Gaza," according to Science Business. Bar-Ilan, Haifa, Ben-Gurion, Reichman, and Ariel did not sign that institutional letter.
The Technion's 2025 annual report separately lists Elbit Systems, the maker of the Hermes drone the Guardian and Haaretz linked to a 2024 strike on World Central Kitchen aid workers, as one of the university's "guardians," its highest tier of corporate donor. The same report quotes Israel Aerospace Industries chief executive Boaz Levy saying more than a third of his engineers are Technion alumni. Individual faculty activism, institutional statements to the government, and corporate defense partnerships are three separate tracks running at the same university.
How Does Technion's 77% Compare to the Rest of the Academy?
| University | Signing Rate |
|---|---|
| Technion | 77% |
| Hebrew University | 67% |
| Weizmann Institute | 62% |
| Tel Aviv University | 58% |
| Ben-Gurion University | 54% |
| University of Haifa | 41% |
| Bar-Ilan University | 30% |
Technion's rate sits 10 points above second-place Hebrew University and 47 points above Bar-Ilan, the lowest of the eight universities in Olam's audit. That gap holds even though the Technion is Israel's primary engineering and applied-sciences university, the discipline that signed at the lowest rate, 15%, in Olam's companion breakdown by field.
The Bottom Line on Technion's Faculty Politics
Technion produced the highest petition-signing rate of any Israeli university audited and, at the same time, hosts a sitting Knesset-party leader among the signers and three Nobel laureates who did not sign. Both facts sit inside the same 85-person faculty roster, at a university whose president also signed a joint letter to Netanyahu and whose top donor tier includes a major defense contractor. Read the full audit of 2,844 Israeli faculty for the university-by-university and discipline-by-discipline breakdown.