Israeli science – of which the country has been so proud when Nobel Prizes and other prestigious awards have been showered on leading researchers – is in big trouble. This is not due to a single crisis: It is because a number of events – political, economic, structural, and social – have converged all at once. Together, they are eating away at conditions that Israeli science has depended on for many decades.
Chartered by law in 1961, the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities – whose 157 leading scientists and scholars live and work here – is charged with advising the government on research and scientific planning, maintaining contact with parallel bodies abroad, ensuring the representation of Israeli scholarship and science at international institutions and conferences, and publishing writings that will promote scholarship and science.
The Academy is headed by computer scientist Prof. David Harel of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot – a 2004 Israel Prize winner – and it is deeply worried. That concern is reflected in the triennial report it has just published: a 187-page, Hebrew-language document titled “The State of Science Report 2025” that discusses the problems and calls for urgent action to ameliorate the situation.
The report was prepared by a special committee led by Academy member and Weizmann molecular biologist Prof. Adi Kimchi – also an Israel Prize recipient – that worked on the report for two years. Six subcommittees functioned under the committee, totaling 31 members of the country’s most senior researchers from a variety of scientific fields.
Entangled in struggles
Since the judicial reform crisis, Israeli science has become entangled in struggles over democracy, governance, and the rule of law. It raised alarm bells in universities and research institutes because an independent legal system is crucial for international cooperation, intellectual property, critical evidence-based thinking, and academic freedom. Leading scientists warned that weakening democratic institutions would harm Israel’s credibility as a research partner. Science depends on long-term trust and scientific integrity: once that trust wobbles and integrity is influenced by political moves, the damage can outlast the politics that caused it.
According to the report, scientists are increasingly feeling the effects of global polarization, with both overt boycotts and covert “soft exclusions” in which scientists are being left out of joint research projects, grant proposals, conferences, and partnerships, all with vague explanations.
Research projects with the European Union and other multinational projects have become more politically sensitive; Israeli participation often draws scrutiny that others do not face. Younger researchers, especially post-docs abroad, sense that being Israeli has become a professional liability in some fields.
This country has seen “brain drains” before, but this wave feels different. From January 2023 to September 2024, 19,000 graduates and 6,600 specialists in science and technology left Israel, as did 650 PhDs and nearly 900 physicians. While a minority have been returning to Israel, there is a significant net loss of highly educated and skilled doctors, engineers, scientists, and researchers who are offered excellent salaries and conditions abroad. In 2025, this trend continued.
“Several European universities have announced the severance of scientific ties with Israel. In addition, there is a lingering threat to remove Israel from the Horizon Europe grant program, and Israeli researchers have been excluded from European consortium grant programs,” said Harel. “The focus groups indicate that the hardest hit are researchers in the humanities and social sciences, as well as young, pre-tenured faculty members from all fields of research, who are now having difficulty establishing their international network of connections, which is so crucial to carrying out good science.”All this has made long-term planning in Israel more difficult. As science is cumulative, losing or weakening a whole generation has effects that cause decades’ worth of harm, he said.
The report states that universities and research institutes in Israel are underfunded, as management has been unable to keep up with costs, inflation, or international competition, and government subsidies have declined. Lab infrastructure – including expensive equipment – and animal facilities age faster than they are replaced. In addition, the Weizmann Institute (and the Soroka-University Medical Center in Beersheba) suffered devastating damage during the war with Iran.
Not just another opinion
Over the past decade, Israel has seen a continuous decline in national investment in academic R&D, compared to OECD countries, which saw a 20% increase. The report features a special chapter on the effects of the October 7 attack and the war, stating that since October 7, 2023, the effects of the war have been profound on science. Reserve duty and border evacuations meant many experiments were lost, and students missed their studies.
Many members of the government have constantly denigrated “elites,” thus producing skepticism about the work of academic experts, the Academy president said. When science becomes “just another opinion,” it loses its authority in policymaking. Women, Arab scientists, and other underrepresented groups still encounter structural barriers – especially during crises, when informal networks matter even more.
Also, the relative share of Israeli publications in the total global number is decreasing, even when weighted by population size. Israel also ranks last compared to the reference countries in the Highly Cited Articles index. Israeli researchers have won the most prestigious international grants, including European Research Council (ERC) ones and front-line international scientific awards – all of which testify to the excellence of Israeli science. However, we are beginning to see the erosion even in those: for example, the success rate of Israelis winning the ERC Starting Grant, aimed at early career scientists, was unusually low in 2025 and fell to a low success rate of 8% compared to 29% to 32% in the previous years, the authors of the report wrote.
One of the report’s many recommendations focuses on the need for a dedicated supercomputer solely for the use of academia, as a necessary condition for the country’s ability to lead innovation and stand at the forefront of global research. Israel has just approved the purchase of an AI supercomputer for the use of hi-tech companies as well as academic researchers, so it doesn’t meet the Academy’s request. “There is a great need to strengthen the interface between basic research and the economy, society, and industry, in all fields of science,” Harel said.
He noted that Israeli scientists participate in research at the laboratory of SESAME (Synchrotron-light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East) in Jordan, which was established to foster regional collaboration in physics, biology, materials science, and cultural heritage using advanced synchrotron light source technology.
Although SESAME is a significant scientific hub, promoting peace and capacity building for scientists from the member states of Jordan, Israel, Iran, Pakistan, Egypt, Cyprus, and Turkey as well as the Palestinian Authority, the Israel government has been delaying paying its member-state’s share for the last few years. It still owes more than $2 million since 2024, mostly because of a dispute among government ministries who are supposed to share the cost. Fortunately, Israel has not been kicked out.
Politics over excellence
“Israeli science is not collapsing,” says Harel, “but it is under great strain, and scientists feel that strain personally and professionally. What makes this moment dangerous is not any single policy or event: It is the sense that the foundations that supported scientific excellence – stability, openness, international integration, and trust – can no longer be taken for granted. But if Israel is to overcome its enemies, it must outshine them in scientific developments.”
The proposed private member’s bill initiated by hardline Likud MK Avichay Boaron to amend the Council for Higher Education Law, which was enacted in 1952, is seen as a “death blow to higher education, science, and academic research here.” The Council of the Israel Academy, headed by president Harel, has just issued a strong warning that advancing the proposed amendment “is an unbridled political takeover that would deal a fatal blow to higher education, science, and academic research in Israel in a destructive move that would wipe out what has been built in Israel over generations.”
Although its title talks about “transparency” and “public oversight,” the proposal’s true purpose is to dismantle the institutional safeguards that protect academia’s independence and place them under the direct discretion of the political leadership, the council declared.
Asked how he would rate the danger to Israeli science on a 1-to-10 scale in 2020, before the efforts to reform the courts, he gave it a two or three. In 2022, he gave it a four or five. Immediately after October 7, 2023, when Israel received condolences and sympathy from many around the world, his rating fell to three or four points, but after two years of war, he would rate the danger at seven or eight. And “if, God forbid, the proposed amendment to the Council of Higher Education Law passes, my ranking will reach a high of nine, perhaps 10,.”
The Council says such an amendment “would allow the government to decide on political appointments to senior professional positions in the Council for Higher Education and its committees, bypassing the professional appointment procedures; determine research priorities based on political considerations instead of on the basis of scientific excellence; cut budgets for institutions that don’t adhere to the desired political line; and personally harm academic leaders who dare to oppose these political decisions.”
Voting on the amendment in the Ministerial Committee on Legislation has been postponed for a couple of weeks. “At least this gives us a chance to make a lot of noise and demand that it be removed from the table. I don’t think the prime minister himself cares as much about the damage it would cause as about doing everything to keep his government from collapsing,” Harel suggested.
There is no such political control of academic funding except maybe in places like Hungary. “Science is not a luxury,” the Academy president stated. “Besides the obvious sciences and their role in a strong defense, good cyber, AI, quantum computing, food security, medicine, and the life sciences, we also can’t do without high-level research and teaching in the humanities and the social sciences.”
It’s not just an internal issue, he said. “The world is looking at us. I travel abroad, host people from the international science community, and do everything in my power to fight boycotts, explaining the futility of harming Israeli higher education and science. What will I tell my colleagues after this bill passes? They’ll say Israeli science is now controlled by a corrupt government. According to the proposed amendment, if a university ignores for a month an outrageous governmental order, its entire budget could be slashed by a full 1/12th, and its president could be held personally responsible and fined huge sums out-of-pocket,” Harel said.
“To destroy the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities,” he warned, “a Boaron-like bill would need the addition of just three words to the clause by which new members are elected to the Academy – ‘with governmental approval.’ Then we might as well shut down the Academy. At least half of its members would resign immediately because of the hostile takeover.”
Outstanding jurist and Israel Prize winner Prof. Nili Cohen, who was the Academy’s previous president, told The Jerusalem Post that “the proposed bill would transfer this independent authority into the hands of political appointees, who would ostensibly exercise their powers to serve political interests. Such a change would erode trust in Israel’s higher education system and would adversely affect research, including research vital to the defense and medical sectors. It would further accelerate the brain drain from Israel and undermine the country’s economic and social welfare.”
The Academy Council’s statement charges that “the damage that will be caused will not stop at Israel’s borders. Israeli academia is already facing an unprecedented crisis in the international arena: expanding manifestations of boycotts, very serious damage to collaborations and the ability to obtain research grants, and increasing attempts at exclusion. The proposed legislative process will directly harm the ability to present Israeli science as independent, clean, and high-quality.
“The legislation will provide further justification for the voices calling for excluding Israel from research programs, will harm the ability to recruit and retain outstanding researchers, and will severely undermine Israel’s status in the global scientific community,” it said.
“This is not a proposal that can be ‘fixed’ by softening wording or changing specific sections,” the Council declared. “This is a move that collapses the independence of the system and endangers the future of higher education and research in Israel – and as a consequence, the democratic image of the country.”