Gilad Kariv, the chairman of the Knesset’s Immigration and Absorption Committee, minced no words. “This is not a wave of emigration,” he said last week. “It’s a tsunami of Israelis choosing to leave the country.”
He was referring to the jolting news that roughly 125,000 Israeli citizens emigrated between 2022 and mid-2024, the largest ever departure of Israelis in so short a period. Some of these departees, or yordim, were relatively recent arrivals from Russia and Ukraine.
To put this issue of national importance into greater perspective, an average of 40,500 left Israel per annum from 2009 to 2021.
During the mid-1980s, emigration, or yerida in Hebrew, skyrocketed due to a combination of factors: the effects of the 1982 war in Lebanon, the exposure of Israeli tourists to foreign cultures, and the 1983 bank stock crisis.
In 1984 and 1985, yerida was greater than immigration.
However, the picture is not entirely black.
Israel received 74,000 immigrants in 2022, 46,000 in 2023 and 24,000 in the first eight months of 2024, according to the Central Bureau of Statistics.
Of late, the vast majority of newcomers have been observant and Orthodox Jews, in keeping with Israel’s rightward drift since the 1967 Six Day War.
Jewish immigration, a central tenet of Zionism known as aliya, has been integral to Israel’s development since statehood 77 years ago. But long before a Jewish state in Palestine emerged, the very idea of it was at the core of Palestinian grievances.
From the Balfour Declaration in 1917 to the outbreak of the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948, Palestinian Arabs railed against the inflow of Jews into Palestine, astutely realizing that the expanding Jewish population would alter the demographic balance of power in Mandate Palestine and have dire strategic consequences.
Under Palestinian pressure, the British government issued a White Paper in 1939 drastically limiting Jewish immigration, an appeasement policy that Jews vociferously opposed and attempted to circumvent through illegal immigration.
Yet even as Jews settled in Palestine, still other Jews already there packed their bags and departed, unable to adapt to the economic hardships, the clashes pitting Jews against Arabs, and the Middle Eastern weather.
The Jewish emigration rate in the early 20th century was high, ranging from 40 to 90 percent. Some Jews, suffering from hunger and disease in an underdeveloped land that had been neglected by its Ottoman overlords, left soon after they had arrived.
By one estimate, 60,000 Jews emigrated from British Mandate Palestine from 1923 to 1948. The total number who emigrated from the start of the Zionist project in the 1880s to the establishment of the state in 1948 was around 90,000
Following the birth of Israel, hundreds of thousands of new immigrants, ranging from Polish Holocaust survivors to Yemenite Jews, poured into Israel. From the 1990s onward, nearly one million Jews from the Soviet Union and its satellite states immigrated to Israel.
This influx was extremely important. It enabled Israel — the world’s sole Jewish state — to maintain a Jewish demographic majority in the face of a rising ethnic Palestinian population. Israelis of Palestinian descent currently account for about 21 percent of Israel’s citizenry.
In light of these factors, Jewish emigration from Israel usually has been seen as a failure of Zionism and a sign that something is amiss in Israeli society.
In a 1976, Israel’s then prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, contemptuously lambasted yordim as “weaklings.”
Since then, yerida has aroused much less contempt and antagonism among Israelis, but it remains a factor by which to judge Israel as a destination for new immigrants.
Fifteen years ago, Ehud Barak, the former Israeli prime minister, addressed this issue. “Jews know that they can land on their feet in any corner of the world,” he said in a reference to Jewish Israelis. “The real test, for us, is to make Israel such an attractive place — cutting edge in science, education, culture and quality of life — that even American Jewish young people want to come here. If we cannot do this, even those who were born here will consciously decide to go to other places. This is a real problem.”
Israelis who depart do so for a variety of reasons, according to Lilach Lev Ari, a professor of sociology at Oranim College. They generally seek better paying jobs, a higher standard of living, and a reprieve from wars and terrorism.
The two-year war in the Gaza Strip has been a driver of emigration as well, as was the Israeli government’s attempt in 2023 to overhaul the judicial system.
In this connection, Aaron Ciechanover, one of Israel’s leading scientists, has blamed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government for the dramatic rise in departures. Israelis who have left “want to live in a free, liberal-democratic country,” he said.
Some Israelis have departed because they were unable to master Hebrew and thereby tap into Israeli culture. Still others have been drawn by the prospect of more temperate weather in North America, Europe and Australia.
Yordim are not strangers to me.
My sister’s late parents-in-law were Holocaust survivors from Romania who lived in Israel in the early 1950s for about two years. They immigrated to Canada because life was too difficult in Israel during that austere phase of Israeli statehood.
During this period, my mother regularly sent care packages of food to her two sisters, my aunts, in Haifa.
My wife’s childhood friend, a resident of Tel Aviv, has four adult sons, but only one still resides in Israel. The eldest lives in Los Angeles. The youngest works in South Korea. The one in the middle immigrated to the Canadian province of British Columbia. His wife feared that their 16-year-old son, eligible for military service, would be conscripted.
It should be noted that her three sons were comfortably off in Israel, but felt they could significantly improve their lives abroad.
The Israelis who have emigrated in the past few years have on average ranged in age from 30 to 50, have been well educated, and have earned a reasonably good income. They have been secular and have come from major cities such as Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem.
Recent research conducted by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research in London found that about 630,000 Israelis, and Jews who had lived in Israel for a significant time, have emigrated in the last seven decades. To this list can be added 330,000 people who were born overseas and whose parent or parents were Israeli nationals.
In 2003, the Ministry of Immigration and Absorption estimated that 750,000 Israelis were living abroad, primarily in the United States, Canada and Britain, representing about 12 percent of Israel’s Jewish population.
This outflow has caused a tremendous brain drain in Israel, which is noted for its innovative high-tech sector.
Ironically, yordim have gone to Germany, where the Holocaust was conceived and planned. By last count, 24,000 Israelis lived in Germany, the biggest Israeli colony in Europe.
Britain is home to about 23,000 Israelis.
Nearly half of the Jewish population in Norway is Israel-connected, the Jewish Policy Research report says. The figure in Finland is 41 percent. The corresponding figures in Bulgaria, Ireland, Spain, the Netherlands and Denmark are 20 percent.
Israelis living abroad bring aspects of day-to-day Israeli culture with them. They speak Hebrew among themselves, usually give their children Israeli names, and consume Middle Eastern food.
Although emigration has been a constant, the Israeli government does not have a concrete plan to address it beyond encouraging immigration from advanced countries. Aliya levels from the United States, Canada and France remain low despite outbursts of antisemitic harassment, intimidation and violence.
In all probability, emigration will recede significantly if Israel is finally at peace with its Arab neighbors and prosperity flourishes. Only then will emigration no longer pose a problem to Israel.