Does Bill Gates Support Israel?

David Svetsky Feb 25, 2025 Updated Jul 30, 2026 7 min read

Short answer: There is no public record, as of July 2026, of Bill Gates making a direct political statement in support of or against Israel, including through the Israel-Hamas war that began in October 2023. His documented connection to the country runs through business and technology, not political advocacy: Microsoft has operated a major research and development hub in Israel since 1991, and Gates has visited the country and repeatedly praised Israeli tech talent, calling its work "improving the world" in 2016. He has also, notably, refused to join the campaigns pressing him to denounce Israel, including one signed by more than 120 of his own scholarship alumni. Separately, Microsoft itself has been drawn into Israel-related controversy in recent years, which this piece addresses below rather than leaving out.

What Bill Gates has actually said and done

1991: Microsoft opens what becomes Microsoft Israel R&D, one of the company's first research and development centers outside the United States, a relationship Microsoft's own newsroom has documented as foundational to its global R&D strategy. See Microsoft News Center Israel.
1995 and 2005: Gates makes his first visit to Israel and returns a decade later, praising Israeli universities, information-security work, and computer literacy. "There is a greater concentration of talented hi-tech manpower here in comparison to other countries, almost to the extent of Silicon Valley," he said on the 2005 trip, as covered by J. Weekly. The first visit was reported at the time by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
February 25, 2016: Gates addresses more than 2,000 people at the Microsoft Israel R&D Center's Think Next event in Tel Aviv, marking the center's 25th anniversary. He says Israeli work in analytics and security is "improving the world," that "the technology they have produced over the years more than justifies our decision," and closes: "I have been very impressed with what they have done in the past 25 years, and I can't wait to see what they come up with in the next 25." Reported by The Times of Israel.
Ongoing (1990s-2020s): Under Gates's chairmanship and afterward, Microsoft steadily expanded its Israel footprint through acquisitions of Israeli startups and continued hiring at its Herzliya campus, long covered in Israeli and international tech press as part of the country's "Startup Nation" story.
2023-2026: That same Israel relationship has also drawn serious scrutiny. Reporting from The Guardian and +972 Magazine/Local Call, later covered by Al Jazeera and other outlets, found that Israeli military intelligence Unit 8200 used Microsoft's Azure cloud to store and process mass surveillance data on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Microsoft opened an internal review, restricted Unit 8200's access to parts of Azure in late 2025, and the head of Microsoft's Israel operation departed his role in 2026 in connection with that review. Microsoft has also faced internal employee protests over the arrangement. See Al Jazeera, Microsoft cloud used in Israeli mass surveillance of Palestinians. None of this is a statement from Gates personally, who by this period was years removed from day-to-day Microsoft management, but it is part of "Microsoft's Israel ties" and belongs in any full accounting of them.
October 12, 2023: The Gates Foundation posted a statement from its official account saying it was "deeply pained by the horrifying terrorist attacks in Israel and the devastating impacts of the escalating war and cascading humanitarian crisis in Gaza." The post is on the Foundation's own X account. It named the attacks as terrorism while also citing Gaza's humanitarian crisis, and it stopped short of taking a side on the war's conduct.
April 2025: Pro-Palestinian Microsoft employees interrupt the company's 50th-anniversary event, which Gates attended alongside Steve Ballmer and Satya Nadella, protesting Microsoft's supply of AI technology to the Israeli military. Gates did not address the protest publicly, per Kashmir Observer.
June 2025: More than 120 current and former Gates Cambridge Scholars, recipients of Gates's own scholarship program, publish an open letter demanding he issue a public statement rejecting "Microsoft technologies being used as a tool of war and genocide" and endorse the No Azure for Apartheid campaign. They argue his silence undermines international law. The letter is published by Cambridge University Staff for Palestine. Gates has not endorsed the campaign or issued the statement they asked for.
Since October 2023: Gates's personal channels (Gates Notes, his X account) have not carried any statement of his own on the war, and the Foundation has not gone further than that single October 2023 post. The Foundation's public work continues to center on global health and development rather than geopolitical conflicts, per its own published priorities. See Gates Foundation, Our Work.

Where the Gates-Israel connection actually comes from

Bill Gates is not Jewish and has not spoken about Israel through a lens of religious or ethnic identity. The tie that does exist is commercial and technological: Israel's dense concentration of engineering talent made it an early and lasting draw for Microsoft's R&D investment, the same pull that has brought Google, Apple, Intel, and Amazon to build large Israeli engineering centers. That is a business relationship between a company Gates co-founded and a country's tech sector, not a personal political endorsement, and it now sits alongside a genuine controversy over how an Israeli intelligence unit used Microsoft's own cloud infrastructure. It is worth separating the threads: plenty of global business leaders have deep operational ties to Israel through their companies while staying publicly silent on the region's politics, and some of their companies have also faced hard questions about how those ties were used. Gates himself has not weighed in personally on any of it, even as employees at his former company have publicly pushed back on Microsoft's handling of the Azure matter.

That silence is worth reading carefully, because it has been tested. Gates is a prominent liberal donor, and the pressure on him has come almost entirely from one direction: activist campaigns, protesting Microsoft employees, and more than 120 recipients of his own Cambridge scholarship have all publicly demanded that he denounce Israel's use of Microsoft technology and endorse a boycott campaign against it. He has not done so. Refusing to join a boycott is not the same thing as endorsing a country, and it would be a stretch to call it support. But it is the closest thing to a revealed position in his record, and it cuts against the assumption that a figure with his politics would have lined up against Israel by now.

The Gates Foundation, meanwhile, is a distinct organization from Microsoft and from Gates's personal statements. It operated for years as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation before Melinda French Gates stepped back from her co-chair role, and the foundation formally adopted the shorter "Gates Foundation" name and a new logo in January 2025, timed to its 25th anniversary year. Beyond its brief October 2023 statement of pain over the attacks and the war that followed, its public priorities remain global health, poverty, and development work, not running commentary on the Israel-Hamas war or the Azure controversy.

The bottom line

If the question is whether Bill Gates has personally and publicly declared support for Israel, the answer is no, there is nothing on the record from him directly. The foundation that carries his name did condemn the October 7 attacks as terrorism in a single 2023 statement, but Gates himself has not spoken. If the question is whether his life's work intersects with Israel, the answer is yes and it is more complicated than a simple success story: decades of Microsoft R&D investment there, alongside a real controversy over Azure's use in surveillance of Palestinians that Microsoft itself has had to respond to. Gates's own public silence covers both sides of that picture, not just the flattering half. The one thing his record does show clearly is what he has declined to do: despite years of sustained public pressure from activists, Microsoft employees, and his own scholarship alumni, he has never denounced Israel or endorsed a boycott of it.

Support Israel directly

Public figures may stay quiet, but you do not have to. Wearing your position is a simple, visible way to show where you stand, whether that is an IDF t-shirt or a piece from the I Stand With Israel collection, built for people who want their support seen, not just felt.

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em>Last updated July 2026. We update these profiles as the record changes.