Among Jewish Israelis, the survey finds a strengthened sense of Israeli identity. Rather than eroding national cohesion, the traumas and conflicts of the past three years appear to have consolidated it, with respondents reporting that their identification with Israel has deepened since the attacks. The contrast with Arab Israeli respondents is stark and politically significant: Arab citizens of Israel were more likely to say that their sense of Israeli identity had weakened over the same period. This divergence points to a widening gap in how the country’s two major population groups experienced the same sequence of events, and it complicates any simple narrative about a nation unified by crisis. The Barometer’s longitudinal design, which allows comparison with earlier waves, makes these opposing trajectories visible in a way that single snapshots cannot.

Perhaps the most striking finding concerns geography and self-perception. When asked whether Israel is more like a Middle Eastern country or more like a European one, 42 percent of Israeli respondents chose the Middle Eastern description, while only 18 percent described Israel as more European. For a country whose founding generations often imagined themselves as an outpost of European civilization in the Levant, this represents a meaningful reorientation of collective self-understanding. The trend is even more pronounced among Arab respondents: the share of Arab Israelis who see Israel as a Middle Eastern country has more than tripled compared with the 2022 wave of the survey. Whatever the causes—regional diplomacy, prolonged conflict with neighbors, or a cooling toward European institutions—the direction of travel is unmistakable.

The survey also documents a widening perception gap between Israelis and Europeans on the question of Jewish safety. A substantial majority of Israeli respondents said that Israel is safer for Jews than Europe, a judgment that reflects both the memory of October 7 and Israeli perceptions of rising antisemitism on the continent. European respondents, by contrast, were far more divided on the same question, suggesting that the two publics inhabit sharply different realities when it comes to assessing where Jewish life is most secure. Among the four European countries surveyed, Poland stood out: 35 percent of Polish respondents—the highest share in any European sample—viewed Israel as the safer option for Jews, a notable result given Poland’s own complex history of Jewish life and loss.

Israeli attitudes toward the European Union have grown more skeptical as well. Compared with the 2024 wave, more Israeli respondents disagreed with the statement that the EU is, in general, a success, and this disagreement was particularly pronounced among Jewish Israelis. The finding arrives at a moment when relations between Israel and many European governments have been strained by the conduct and consequences of the Gaza war, and it suggests that the diplomatic friction is filtering down into public opinion. For a country that has long sought a special relationship with European institutions while officially belonging to no European bloc, the erosion of confidence in the European project represents a quiet but consequential shift in the political environment.

The Barometer also probes a question that has grown more uncomfortable for European observers: how Israelis view the continent’s far right. As in 2024, a large share of Jewish Israeli respondents said Israel should maintain ties with far-right parties in Europe if those parties support Israel. This pragmatic posture—prioritizing support for Israel over ideological compatibility—has long frustrated European Jewish communities who see populist nationalism as a threat. The survey adds a German dimension: fewer German respondents than in 2024 viewed the rise of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) as a dangerous development, with many saying the party’s ascent is no more dangerous than similar developments elsewhere in Europe. The normalization of a party that German establishment politics has long treated as beyond the pale is thus reflected not only in Israeli perceptions but in German self-assessment.

When Israelis are asked which European countries they consider friends of Israel, the ranking is unambiguous: Germany comes first, followed by Hungary. The prominence of Germany, a country whose relationship with Israel is shaped by historical responsibility, has been a consistent feature of the Barometer across waves, and Hungary’s second-place position reflects the Orbán government’s explicitly pro-Israel foreign policy. More surprising is the collapse of the Netherlands, which has fallen sharply in Israeli perceptions and now ranks among the countries seen as least friendly to Israel—a remarkable reversal for a state once regarded as one of Israel’s warmest European partners. At the other end of the emotional spectrum, Israeli respondents pointed most often to France and Spain when asked which European countries they perceive as most antisemitic, naming two governments that have taken prominently critical positions on Israel’s conduct of the war.

One of the Barometer’s longest-running questions concerns whether today’s Germany is a different Germany compared with the period before 1945. Here the survey records a subtle but telling decline: among Jewish Israelis, 67 percent answered yes in 2026, down from 75 percent in 2024. The generational pattern is equally significant, with older Jewish respondents more likely than younger ones to hold this view. The finding suggests that the postwar German project of earning Israeli and Jewish trust, built over decades of remembrance culture and staunch support, is not immune to erosion, whether through German political debates over the Gaza war, the mainstreaming of the AfD, or simply the passage of time as the generations with living memory of the Holocaust recede. That the decline is concentrated among younger respondents raises questions about how historical memory will continue to anchor the German-Israeli relationship in the decades ahead.

Prof. Dachs summarized the survey’s significance by observing that the Barometer captures a moment of profound reassessment: three years after October 7, Israelis are not only rethinking questions of security and identity, but also their relationship to Europe and the political forces shaping it. The methodological foundation of the study lends weight to these conclusions. The 2026 HU-EF Barometer is based on online surveys conducted by Kantar in Germany, Great Britain, France, and Poland, alongside a benchmark survey conducted in Israel. Each European country sample included 1,000 representative participants, while the Israeli sample comprised 1,003 respondents: 502 from the general sector, 250 Arab respondents, and 251 Orthodox Jewish respondents. Fieldwork in the four European countries was carried out in June and July 2026, with Israeli fieldwork conducted in May 2026. The questionnaire took approximately eight minutes to complete, and the sampling error is 3.1 percent per total market sample, a margin that places the headline findings on solid statistical ground.

Taken together, the 2026 Barometer paints a portrait of an Israeli society turning inward and eastward: more confident in its own identity, more convinced of its own indispensability to Jewish safety, more doubtful of the European project, and more willing to engage with political forces on the continent that traditional pro-European constituencies regard with alarm. The divergence between Jewish and Arab Israeli respondents on identity, the tripling of the Arab Israeli share viewing Israel as Middle Eastern, and the Dutch fall from favor all indicate that the realignment is not uniform but layered across communities and issues. What the survey cannot yet show is whether these shifts are durable transformations or acute responses to war that will soften as time passes. The Barometer’s value lies precisely in its ability to answer that question in future waves, tracking whether the Israel of 2026—a country that increasingly sees itself as Middle Eastern, safer than Europe, and skeptical of the EU—becomes the settled self-image of the next decade or a snapshot of a nation in the midst of crisis.

Subject of Research: Israeli and European public perceptions of Israeli identity, Jewish safety, and Israel-Europe relations three years after the October 7 attacks

Article Title: Three years after October 7, Israelis reassess identity, safety, and Europe, Hebrew University survey finds

Article References: Three years after October 7, Israelis reassess identity, safety, and Europe, Hebrew University survey finds. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: October 7, Hebrew University, Barometer survey, Israeli identity, Jewish safety, Europe, European Union, Germany, antisemitism, far-right parties, Arab Israelis, public opinion

Beyond the four top-50 subjects, the ranking revealed considerable depth across the university’s portfolio. Seven subjects in total placed among the world’s top 100, with Dentistry and Oral Sciences falling in the 51–75 band and both Economics and Political Sciences landing in the 76–100 range. Taken together, the Hebrew University had 30 subjects included in the global ranking, and 13 of those placed among the world’s top 150. In addition to its seven top-100 subjects, the university ranked in the 101–150 range in Atmospheric Science, Biological Sciences, Human Biological Sciences, Sociology, Education, and Psychology. For a single institution of roughly comparable size to many mid-tier international research universities, that breadth of high placement is a notable statistical achievement.

The Global Ranking of Academic Subjects, often referred to as GRAS and colloquially associated with the broader family of Shanghai rankings, is published annually and assesses universities across 57 disciplines spanning the natural sciences, engineering, life sciences, medical sciences, and social sciences. The 2026 edition is one of the largest subject-level assessments in the world, incorporating approximately 20,000 academic subject units drawn from around 2,000 universities in roughly 100 countries and regions. Unlike overall institutional rankings, which compress an entire university’s performance into a single number, subject rankings allow analysts to see precisely where a university’s research strengths and weaknesses lie, discipline by discipline.

Methodologically, GRAS relies on internationally comparable indicators grouped into five categories: world-class faculty, world-class research output, high-quality research, research impact, and international collaboration. Within these categories, the ranking considers factors such as influential journal publications, citation impact, international academic awards, the presence of highly cited researchers, leadership roles in international academic organizations, and the extent of research collaboration across borders. This multi-indicator approach is designed to reduce the distorting effect of any single metric and to capture different dimensions of academic excellence, from the sheer volume of published work to the recognition a department’s scholars receive from the global scientific community.

For Mathematics, the Hebrew University’s 24th-place finish continues a long tradition. The discipline has historically been one of the university’s flagship fields, associated with pioneering work in logic, analysis, and theoretical computer science, and the 2026 result suggests that this legacy remains fully intact in an era of intensifying global competition. The 17th-place ranking in Communication is equally striking, reflecting a field that has grown rapidly in importance as researchers grapple with digital media, misinformation, and the transformation of public discourse. High placement in Communication signals strong citation performance and international visibility in a discipline where publication venues and scholarly networks are increasingly global.

The university’s showing in Law, at 36th, and Public Administration, at 44th, adds a professional-school dimension to its research profile. These fields are evaluated alongside the same bibliometric and reputational indicators as the natural sciences, which makes strong placements particularly meaningful, since legal scholarship and public administration research are often published in national or regional venues and in languages other than English. Achieving top-50 global status in both fields indicates that the Hebrew University’s legal and policy scholars are publishing in leading international journals, attracting citations from abroad, and participating in cross-border academic networks at rates comparable to the world’s most prominent institutions.

The presence of Dentistry and Oral Sciences in the 51–75 band, along with Economics and Political Sciences in the 76–100 range, further illustrates the breadth of the university’s research base. In the life sciences, placements in the 101–150 range for Biological Sciences and Human Biological Sciences reflect sustained output in fields ranging from molecular biology to neuroscience, while Atmospheric Science points to growing activity in climate and earth-systems research. Social science placements in Sociology, Education, and Psychology round out a profile in which nearly half of the university’s ranked subjects sit within the top 150 worldwide, a ratio that few institutions in the region can match.

University leadership framed the results as a validation of long-term investment in research quality. Prof. Tamir Sheafer, President of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said the results reflect both the exceptional quality and the remarkable breadth of research at the institution. Across mathematics, the life sciences, dentistry, law, communication, economics, and public policy, he noted, researchers are advancing knowledge that deepens understanding of the world and helps address its most pressing challenges. He described the international recognition as a testament to the creativity, rigor, and dedication of the academic community, and to the university’s continuing role at the forefront of research in Israel and worldwide.

The broader significance of the result extends beyond institutional pride. Subject-level rankings of this kind are closely watched by prospective graduate students, international research partners, funding agencies, and faculty recruits, all of whom use them as a proxy for the strength of specific departments. A concentration of top-50 placements in fields as varied as Mathematics, Communication, Law, and Public Administration can influence where talented early-career researchers choose to apply, where collaborative projects are initiated, and how international consortia are assembled. For Israeli academia as a whole, the result reinforces the country’s reputation for research excellence in a small national system that consistently punches above its weight in global metrics.

The 2026 edition of the ranking also illustrates how subject-level evaluation has matured into a sophisticated analytical tool. By combining publication counts in influential journals, normalized citation impact, international awards, highly cited researcher counts, organizational leadership, and collaboration measures, GRAS attempts to capture a multidimensional picture of departmental performance that a single composite score cannot provide. For the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the 2026 results, with four subjects in the global top 50, seven in the top 100, and 13 in the top 150 out of 30 ranked subjects, provide a detailed, data-driven map of where the institution stands in the international research landscape, and a benchmark against which its future performance will be measured when the next edition of the ranking is published.

Subject of Research: Global university subject rankings evaluating research performance across academic disciplines

Article Title: Hebrew University leads Israel with four subjects among world’s top 50 in 2026 Shanghai ranking

Article References: Hebrew University leads Israel with four subjects among world’s top 50 in 2026 Shanghai ranking. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Hebrew University, Shanghai Ranking, Global Ranking of Academic Subjects, Mathematics, Communication, Law, Public Administration, Israel, university rankings, research impact, higher education, academic collaboration