The Migration Debate Israel Is Not Having

Since the October 7 massacres, Israeli media have been awash with stories about citizens—usually secular, well-off professionals—leaving the country because they are fed up with political dysfunction and the poor performance of the government. These reports create the impression, and sometimes state outright, that this is an unprecedented wave of emigration that risks creating a “brain drain” with serious economic consequences. Simultaneously, Jews in the Diaspora are reading and sharing stories about a boom in migration to Israel among those fed up with anti-Semitism and feeling a new and deeper sense of attachment to their ancestral homeland. These two, diametrically opposed narratives exist in almost complete isolation from one another, with those exposed to one paying almost no attention to the other.

The first narrative predominates in Israel’s opposition media as well as in the social milieu that is its primary audience: the liberal elite and the secular middle class. Newspapers such as Haaretz (the best known one abroad), Yediot Aharonot (far less well-known internationally, but much more widely read in Israel), and Maariv, and TV channels critical of the ruling coalition, regularly publish interviews, portraits, and special programs that cover the phenomenon of Jews leaving the country to settle abroad. The emigrants spotlighted are typically recent ones who hail from Israel’s secular middle class, and who often work in widely sought-after white-collar professions or in the knowledge economy. They are doctors, high-tech workers, engineers, academics, and entrepreneurs. They are rarely portrayed as simply fleeing from war, which is still widely seen as taboo in Israel. Rather, they tend to speak of a sense of exhaustion with the political system and with what they see as the government’s bungling of the war, and of seeking a better future for their children.

Such reports have contributed to a popular narrative about these emigrants: systematic mismanagement by Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition partners has been pushing Israel’s best and brightest into emigration for many years, but the phenomenon picked up with the political crisis in 2023 that followed Yariv Levin’s proposed judicial reform (which many Israelis saw as an attack on Israel’s liberal-democratic character), and accelerated further with the ongoing multifront war (or rather, its mishandling and/or unnecessary length). We may call this the Abandonment Narrative: Israelis leave en masse because they feel abandoned by the country and its government; the October 7 massacre and the government’s actions since are symptoms of this abandonment.