Does Sergey Brin Support Israel?

Maya Mizrachi Feb 27, 2025 Updated Aug 06, 2026 4 min read

Short answer: As of July 2026, yes. Sergey Brin has a long, well-documented record of warmth toward Israel, from teenage and adult visits (1980s, 2003, 2008) praising its tech growth, to a $1 million gift to the Jewish immigration group that helped his family flee Soviet antisemitism, to a notably blunt July 2025 statement, made as Google's co-founder, calling a UN report accusing Google of aiding an Israeli "genocide" in Gaza "transparently antisemitic." He has not taken detailed positions on Israeli-Palestinian policy specifics, but his public record leans clearly supportive of Israel and protective of Jewish concerns, not neutral.

What Sergey Brin has actually said and done

2003: Brin makes a return trip to Israel, after a childhood visit at age 11, and is reportedly staggered by how much the country had developed since his earlier visit, according to The New Republic.
May 2008: Invited by Israeli President Shimon Peres, whom he had met at Davos, Brin travels to Israel with his family for the country's 60th-anniversary celebrations. Speaking about Israel's tech sector, he tells reporters, "I've just seen some of the companies and their states of development... it's just incredible," and marvels that the country was built "out of nothing, just dirt," reporting from The New Republic and Ynetnews shows.
October 25, 2009: Brin donates $1 million to HIAS (the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society), the organization that helped his family emigrate from the Soviet Union roughly 30 years earlier to escape antisemitism. He noted at the time that his family's total charitable giving across all causes, not HIAS specifically, stood at more than $30 million, per the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Worth noting: HIAS is a Jewish immigration charity, not an Israel-specific cause.
2021: Google, together with Amazon, signs the $1.2 billion "Project Nimbus" cloud and AI contract with the Israeli government, a deal that later becomes a flashpoint for internal employee protest, as TIME reported. This is a corporate decision rather than a personal statement from Brin, but it forms the backdrop for what came later.
April 2024: Google fires 28 employees who staged sit-in protests against Project Nimbus at company offices. Leadership, led by CEO Sundar Pichai, tells staff to leave politics at the door and does not reverse the firings. Brin's personal position on this specific episode is not independently documented. See The Daily Telegraph.
July 5, 2025: After a UN rapporteur report accuses Google, Amazon and Microsoft of aiding Israel's "ongoing genocidal campaign in Gaza" through their cloud and AI services, Brin writes in an internal Google forum that the UN is "transparently antisemitic" and that "throwing around the term genocide in relation to Gaza is deeply offensive to many Jewish people who have suffered actual genocides," as first reported by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and confirmed by the Washington Post.
July 10, 2025: The story is independently confirmed and widely reported, including by the Times of Israel and the Jerusalem Post, establishing this as Brin's most explicit and most political statement in defense of Israel and Jewish concerns to date.

Jewish identity and the industry-Israel intersection

Sergey Brin, Google's Russian-born Jewish co-founder, immigrated to the United States as a child in 1979 with his family, fleeing Soviet antisemitism. That origin story, and HIAS's role in it, has repeatedly shaped how he talks about Jewish identity and Israel. His personal visits to Israel go back to a teenage trip and continued through at least 2003 and 2008, each time marked by public praise for the country's technological and economic transformation rather than policy commentary. For most of his public life he avoided explicit Israeli-Palestinian political statements. That changed materially in July 2025: after the UN human-rights report accused Google, alongside Amazon and Microsoft, of enabling an Israeli "genocide" in Gaza through Project Nimbus and related cloud and AI contracts, Brin personally and publicly rejected the "genocide" framing and called the UN "transparently antisemitic," a comment carried across Jewish and mainstream outlets including JTA, the Washington Post, the Times of Israel and the Jerusalem Post. That is a genuine escalation from "warm but apolitical" to an explicit, on-the-record defense of Israel against a genocide accusation. Separately, Google's Project Nimbus contract with the Israeli government has drawn sustained internal employee protest, including the 2024 firing of 28 protesting employees; Brin has not personally reversed or apologized for that stance. No evidence was found of Brin making any personal statement specifically refusing to join a boycott of Israel, so that specific claim is not addressed here.

The bottom line

Sergey Brin supports Israel in a real, sourced and now sharper-edged sense: repeated admiring visits, a Jewish-identity-rooted giving history, and, as of July 2025, an explicit public rejection of the "genocide" charge against Israel paired with a direct accusation that the UN is antisemitic. His earlier public posture was warmer and less political, but the 2025 statement is the clearest signal yet of where he stands.

Wear your own answer

Brin's story, a Jewish family that fled antisemitism and never stopped watching Israel with pride, is one a lot of our customers recognize in their own families. If his 2025 stand against a genocide libel resonated with you, our I Stand With Israel collection is built for saying so out loud, whether that is at your desk, at the gym, or at a rally.

Last updated August 2026. We update these profiles as the record changes.