An Olam audit of 2,844 faculty at eight Israeli universities found how many signed a letter calling Gaza a war crime — and how concentrated the signatures were in one petition.
An Olam audit of 2,844 faculty at eight Israeli universities found that 1,434, or 50.4%, put their name to a public letter stating that Israel's Gaza campaign is "a horrifying litany of war crimes and even crimes against humanity," and calling on university leaders to help stop the war. Of those signers, 97% signed that one letter, the Black Flag letter. At Technion, 64 of its 85 faculty signed it.
Last updated: August 27, 2026.
גרסה עברית זמינה כאן: 50% מהמרצים הישראלים חתמו על מכתב שמכנה את המלחמה בעזה "פשע מלחמה".
The Petition Says Israel Committed "War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity" in Gaza
"Signed" here means a faculty member publicly attached their name to a written letter addressed to Israel's own academic leadership. The letter in question, the Black Flag letter, titled "An Urgent Call to the Heads of Academia in Israel" and released in May 2025, told the Association of University Heads in Israel and other academic bodies that the Gaza campaign amounted to "a horrifying litany of war crimes and even crimes against humanity, all of our own doing." It asked those leaders to "mobilize the full weight of Israeli academia to stop the Israeli war in Gaza." The letter does not use the word genocide.
Genocide framing has surfaced in comparable petitions elsewhere. King's College London's Lived Experience Advisory Board called Israel's campaign a genocide and urged a boycott in an August 2026 statement.
Olam's audit counted 1,387 Israel-affiliated signers of that letter, 96.9% of every petition signature in the sample. A second, smaller petition ran in the opposite direction: Scientists for Gaza, an August 2025 statement, condemned Hamas's October 7 attack and separately called on the Israeli government to end the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. It drew 28 Israel-affiliated signers, 2.0% of the sample. The remaining 37 signers (2.6%) came from other petitions, and 18 faculty signed more than one.
Al Jazeera counted more than 1,200 signatories on May 28, 2025, Middle East Monitor counted 1,300 the next day, and Academe Blog counted 1,403 by May 31. Olam's count of 1,387 signers, after deduplication and university-directory matching, falls inside that range.
Raphael Greenberg, an archaeology professor at Tel Aviv University who has staged daily protests against the war since December, told Al Jazeera that academics have to make their voices heard. Yael Hashiloni-Dolev, a sociology and anthropology professor at Ben-Gurion University, told Middle East Monitor the war knowingly put hostages at risk and described a moral collapse.
Technion's 64 of 85 Signers Topped the List by Rate, Not by Count
64 of Technion's 85 faculty signed the Black Flag letter. That is the highest signing rate of the eight universities audited, though Technion's small faculty means the rate comes from far fewer people than the raw counts at larger schools: Tel Aviv (303 signers) and Hebrew University (285) each had more than four times as many. Bar-Ilan had the lowest rate, 63 of 207 faculty, or 30%.
| Rank | University | Faculty | Signers | Rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Technion | 85 | 64 | 77% |
| 2 | Hebrew University | 449 | 285 | 67% |
| 3 | Weizmann Institute | 66 | 40 | 62% |
| 4 | Open University | 119 | 67 | 59% |
| 5 | Tel Aviv University | 537 | 303 | 58% |
| 6 | Ben-Gurion University | 242 | 127 | 54% |
| 7 | University of Haifa | 335 | 134 | 41% |
| 8 | Bar-Ilan University | 207 | 63 | 30% |
Tel Aviv University, Hebrew University, and the University of Haifa, the top three by raw signer count, account for 50.4% of every signer in the sample.
How Much More Likely Were Humanities Faculty to Sign?
Humanities faculty signed the Black Flag letter at roughly four times the rate of engineering and medical faculty, and that gap held at every one of the eight universities Olam audited. Signing rates fell in four steps as disciplines moved from normative fields toward technical ones: 65% in the humanities, 55% in the social sciences, 37% in the quantitative social sciences, 24% in the natural sciences, 18% in engineering, and 16% in medicine.
| Category | Average Rate | Disciplines Included |
|---|---|---|
| Humanities | 65% | Middle Eastern Studies, Philosophy, Literature, History |
| Social Sciences | 55% | Sociology, Anthropology, Political Science, Law, Education |
| Quantitative Social Sciences | 37% | Economics, Psychology, Communication |
| Natural Sciences | 24% | Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Mathematics |
| Engineering | 18% | All engineering disciplines |
| Medicine | 16% | Medical faculty |
Which Individual Disciplines Were the Extremes?
Middle Eastern Studies signed at 82% (28 of 34 faculty audited in that discipline), the highest rate of any single discipline, while Engineering signed at 15% (7 of 47), the lowest. Both are among the smaller department samples in the audit, so the tier averages above are the more stable comparison. Department-level data covers 1,516 of the 2,844 faculty in the full sample.
| Discipline | Faculty Audited | Signers | Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Middle Eastern Studies | 34 | 28 | 82% |
| Sociology | 47 | 33 | 70% |
| Anthropology | 29 | 19 | 66% |
| Philosophy | 38 | 25 | 66% |
| Political Science | 41 | 24 | 59% |
| Law | 52 | 29 | 56% |
| Literature | 63 | 35 | 56% |
| History | 44 | 23 | 52% |
| Education | 38 | 18 | 47% |
| Economics | 51 | 19 | 37% |
| Psychology | 46 | 16 | 35% |
| Physics | 59 | 16 | 27% |
| Chemistry | 44 | 10 | 23% |
| Biology | 73 | 14 | 19% |
| Engineering | 47 | 7 | 15% |
For the complete 25-discipline breakdown, including Communication, Social Work, Geography, Architecture, Mathematics, Computer Science, Materials Science, Electrical and Mechanical Engineering, and Medicine, see Olam's full department-level audit.
Four Reasons the 50.4% Figure Likely Understates the True Rate
The sample covers eight universities, not all Israeli academia, and missing institutions likely pull the true, wider rate down, so 50.4% probably understates the national figure. Signing a petition is not verified ideology, so the audit cannot confirm what any one signer privately believes. The audit cannot establish what caused a given signature. And faculty activism is not institutional policy: none of the eight universities has adopted the Black Flag letter's position as an institutional stance.
How Olam Matched 2,844 Names to University Directories
Olam drew signer rosters from the Black Flag letter (posted at academia.edu/129505708), the Scientists for Gaza statement, and a set of international law scholars' letters, all archived at the time of collection. Each name was matched against its university's public faculty directory, yielding a 100% match rate on the names checked. The raw list held 1,468 entries; 34 duplicates were removed, leaving 1,434 unique signers. A name qualified for inclusion if it was publicly posted, source-linked, individually named, tied to one of the eight universities, and attached to a petition making an explicit political claim about the war. For the complete inclusion/exclusion criteria, verification steps, and known limitations, see Olam's full published methodology.
American and Israeli Faculty Signed at Nearly Identical Rates, Despite Different Criteria
This study follows Olam's earlier audit of 2,499 American Jewish Studies faculty at 313 universities, which found 51.9% publicly on the record against Israel using a broader set of criteria: academic boycotts, calling Zionism "settler colonialism," calling Israel an apartheid state, or defining its military actions as genocide. The Israeli audit uses a narrower, single-letter-dominated criterion: signing the Black Flag letter's war crimes language. The two rates land within two points of each other despite the different criteria and different countries.
| American | Israeli | |
|---|---|---|
| Faculty | 2,499 | 2,844 |
| Institutions | 313 | 8 |
| Rate | 51.9% | 50.4% |
| Elite rate | Ivy League: 72.3% | Technion: 64 of 85 (77%) |
Read the full American faculty audit for the source study, or Olam's side-by-side comparison of both audits for the complete discipline-by-discipline breakdown.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does This Audit Cover Israel Studies Programs Specifically?
No. This audit covers faculty across every academic discipline at eight Israeli universities, engineering, medicine, humanities, and more, not only the field of Israel Studies, which is primarily taught at universities outside Israel to study the country as a subject. For faculty who specifically hold Israel Studies chairs or teach in Israel Studies programs, see Olam's companion audit of American Jewish Studies and Israel Studies faculty, which found Israel Studies chair holders at Columbia, UCLA, and the University of Washington among the signatories of similar petitions.
Why Is Middle Eastern Studies' Rate Less Reliable Than the Tier Averages?
Middle Eastern Studies has only 34 faculty in Olam's sample, so its 82% rate rests on 28 signers, a small enough group that a handful of names can move the percentage several points. The tier averages above combine multiple disciplines into larger pooled samples and are the more stable figures for comparing humanities to STEM overall.
The Bottom Line: Half of Israeli Faculty Signed, Almost All Called It a War Crime
Half of the faculty Olam audited across eight Israeli universities put their name to a letter calling Israel's own war a war crime and asking university leaders to help stop it. The rate was highest in the humanities and at Technion (a small campus where 64 of 85 signed), lowest in engineering and at Bar-Ilan. Every one of the 1,434 names is source-linked and searchable, so readers can check the record themselves.
