From Israel’s establishment in 1948, its leaders viewed the expansion of the Jewish population as essential to the survival of the Zionist project: a way to ensure a lasting demographic majority over the Palestinian population and a steady supply of soldiers to defend the state’s borders. Alongside efforts to increase Jewish birth rates, the promotion of Jewish immigration has been central to this strategy. Near-automatic citizenship under the Law of Return, coupled with financial incentives, were designed to draw Jews from across the globe and anchor them permanently in the new state.
The flip side of this policy was the state’s response to those who left, which was often openly hostile. Jewish emigrants were officially referred to as yordim — “those who go down” — a term coined in opposition to olim, who were said to “ascend” by immigrating to Israel.
The moral hierarchy embedded in this language framed emigration as a personal and national failure rather than a neutral life choice (it is worth noting, for example, that Israel does not permit citizens abroad to vote in elections, making this division concrete). In 1976, then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin famously dismissed Jewish emigrants as “the fallout of weaklings,” a remark that captured the state’s prevailing contempt for those who choose to leave.
With nearly half of the world’s Jewish population now living in Israel, this project can, in many respects, be deemed a success. Yet Israel’s history has also been marked by recurring waves of emigration, usually triggered by moments of crisis. Economic downturns, such as the recession of 1966–67, and security shocks like the 1973 Yom Kippur War, prompted significant numbers of Jews to leave the country.
Emigration became an even more contentious issue in Israeli public discourse during the early 2000s, when the state began to more closely track departures. This period, which coincided with the Second Intifada, saw increasing emigration of young, secular, middle-and upper-class Israelis — the so-called “brain drain.” The phenomenon generated widespread concern among Israeli academics and in the mainstream media, where it was largely framed in cultural and economic terms. In response, the state launched taxpayer-funded campaigns aimed at encouraging emigrants to return, marking a shift away from its earlier singular focus on attracting Jews who had never lived in Israel.
Over the past two years, however, a wholly different wave of departure has taken hold, one that represents a decisive break from earlier understandings of emigration. The shift began well before October 7, driven in part by the far-right government of Benjamin Netanyahu and its efforts to weaken the judiciary. But the exodus that followed the Hamas attack and Israel’s subsequent genocidal assault on Gaza transformed departure into something more abrupt and urgent. Increasingly, Israelis are not simply leaving but fleeing — buying one-way tickets with only days’ notice, often with no intention of returning.
Israelis block the Ayalon Highway during a protest against the Israeli government’s planned judicial overhaul and in response to the removal of Tel Aviv District Commander Amichai Eshed in Tel Aviv, July 5, 2023. (Yossi Aloni/Flash90)
According to an October 2025 Knesset report, Israeli emigration surged in 2023, with 82,800 people leaving the country for extended stays — a 44 percent increase compared to the previous year. October 2023 saw a particularly sharp spike following the outbreak of the war. The exodus continued into 2024, with nearly 50,000 departures recorded in the first eight months alone. For the first time, Israel registered more long-term emigrants than returnees, with 2023 marking the largest gap between departures and returns in the state’s history.
The pattern persisted into 2025. In its end-of-year report, Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics found that nearly 70,000 Israelis left the country over the course of the year, while only 19,000 returned. These figures were corroborated by a report published by the Taub Center for Social Policy Studies, which found that after years of steady growth, Israel’s population growth slowed in 2025. Researchers attributed the shift primarily to the sharp rise in emigration, alongside declining fertility rates and increased mortality linked to the war.
In total, over 150,000 Israelis have left the country in the past two years alone, rising to over 200,000 since the current government took power.
For this article, I interviewed several Israeli Jews who have left the country over the past two years. Their testimonies point to a profound loss of faith in the Zionist project itself — one that may signal a broader systemic unraveling. Mass emigration during what the state frames as an existential crisis exposes a central contradiction: If Israel is meant to serve as a safe haven for Jews, why are so many choosing to flee it? This exodus challenges core tenets of Zionist ideology and reveals the limits of the collective responsibility narratives that have long bound Israeli society together.
‘There’s really nothing left to fix’
For years, Asaf, 44, believed that meaningful change in Israel-Palestine was still possible. He and his wife were among the parents who helped found Jaffa’s bilingual Arab-Jewish school. He worked as a journalist at Haaretz — widely considered one of Israel’s few left-leaning outlets — before resigning in 2021, outraged by what he described as his editors’ refusal to accurately portray the violence against Palestinians in Jaffa during the mass unrest of May that year. The family made a deliberate choice to live in Jaffa, with its large Palestinian-Israeli population, rather than in the segregated Jewish neighborhoods typical of most Israeli cities.
October 7, and everything that followed, extinguished whatever remained of Asaf’s resolve to stay.
At 7:20 a.m that morning, Asaf booked plane tickets for himself, his wife, and their two daughters. The following day, around noon, they boarded one of the last flights operated by a non-Israeli airline out of the country, each carrying a single piece of hand luggage. A friend’s apartment in Berlin awaited them for the first week.
Two years later, Asaf has not returned, not even for a visit. His wife went back several times to pack their belongings and settle affairs, but the decision to stay in Germany was made as early as December 2023. During those first three months, the family moved between six apartments, and Asaf lost his job after his Israeli employer demanded that he physically reside in Israel — a condition he believes was politically motivated.
“I had no illusions about reality, about how fucked up and terrible things were, even before the war,” Asaf told +972. “We knew the education system was crumbling, the healthcare system was falling apart. And we knew the army mainly committed war crimes. But there was still this illusion that, despite everything, the army would at least fulfill the bare minimum: protecting Israeli civilians. By the afternoon of October 7, we understood that even this wasn’t true. If even this is broken, there’s really nothing left to fix.”
An Israeli soldier inspects the destruction caused by Hamas militants in Kibbutz Nir Oz on Oct. 7, southern Israel, October 30, 2023. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)
Asaf noticed something else on that fateful day. “So many Israelis started saying horrifying things, openly talking about murdering people in Gaza. It hadn’t happened like this before,” he recalled. “It’s been two years, and I haven’t gone back. I’m afraid to walk down the street there, knowing that so many people around me participated in this.
“It wasn’t that it came out of nowhere,” he added. “All of this was already there, building up. But suddenly it was all out in the open. Watching an entire society become Nazi — that was frightening to watch.”
‘I know I’ll live in exile until the end of my days’
In the days leading up to October 7, Arye, 73, and his wife had already been planning a visit to Berlin, but had not yet booked tickets. “The question of moving to Berlin was already in the air before the war,” he said. “[My wife and I] are both retired, and our only son lives here. We thought about splitting our time.”
As they watched the news that morning, they began monitoring flights, noticing foreign airlines rapidly canceling routes in and out of Israel. Within hours, they made a snap decision to leave earlier than planned, securing one-way tickets on El Al for a flight ten days later. “Until October 7, I didn’t see any reason to completely leave the country,” he said.
But as soon as the war started, Arye understood the direction things were heading. “Already in November 2023, a month after we arrived, I decided that I didn’t want to be part of the genocide that Israel had begun carrying out,” he continued. “I felt that the only — or at least the best — way not to be complicit in this crime was to leave the country.”
Arye stayed in Germany for the 90 days permitted under his tourist visa, after which he and his wife returned briefly to Israel with the intention of packing their belongings and relocating permanently. His wife holds German citizenship, which simplified the process. A few months later, in May 2024, they returned to Berlin for good. I asked him what it was like to start over at an advanced age, leaving behind a familiar community and an entire life.
Passengers at Ben-Gurion International Airport near Tel Aviv, September 18, 2025 (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90).
“I don’t want to sound over the top, but it’s good. As retirees, we don’t need to build a career or find a livelihood. All we need to do is choose from the infinite supply of cultural events,” Arye said. “My wife knows German; I don’t. I’m trying to learn, but it’s not easy.
“I know I’ll never be German — that I’ll live in exile until the end of my days. But I’m not the first,” he continued. “And for exiles, we’re living in the most privileged way possible. Our income hasn’t changed: We had two pensions in Israel, and as senior citizens we receive old-age allowances from Israel’s National Insurance Institute. We also rent out an apartment in Jerusalem. As long as the Israeli economy doesn’t collapse, we’re fine.”
Friends in Israel, Arye recalled, worried that he and his wife would be isolated. “They asked us: who will your friends be in Berlin? Who will you go to the movies or the theater with?” But the concern quickly proved unfounded. “When we arrived, we discovered something very interesting: many couples our age from Israel had also moved to Berlin, people troubled by exactly the same things, constantly looking for one another.”
Today, Arye and his wife socialize regularly with three Israeli couples in Berlin, all of whom arrived within the last two years. “We didn’t know any of them in Israel,” he said. “They’re all from the same political spectrum.”
As a Berlin resident myself, I knew of a Facebook group connecting Israeli retirees in the city. When I asked Arye whether he had joined it, he said he deliberately stayed away: the group, he explained, had ties to Israel’s Ministry of Aliyah and Integration, and he had no interest in participating in anything connected to the Israeli state.
I later learned that while the group was initially created by private individuals, it soon received support from an organization called Zusammen (“Together” in German). A recent article in Haaretz revealed that the umbrella organization managing Zusammen and similar initiatives across Europe — Israeli Community in Europe (ICE) — is heavily funded by the Israeli government. This is just one example of how Israeli state institutions continue to entrench themselves in the lives of citizens who have chosen to leave.
Protecting the children
Mordechai, 42, left Israel with his wife and two sons on October 12, 2023. Like many other emigrants who spoke to +972, he says the decision took shape almost immediately. As they followed the news on October 7, he said, it became clear that they were not safe — “that nobody was protecting us.” They booked the first affordable flight they could find out of the country and landed in Cyprus, moving on to Athens a few days later. By November, they knew they would not be returning. “At some point we understood that this chapter of our lives in Israel was over,” he said. “We wanted normalcy for our children.”
An El Al flight takes off at Ben Gurion International Airport, outside of Tel Aviv, August 14, 2025 (Yossi Aloni/Flash90)
Their decision was also shaped by concerns about personal safety tied to their political activism. Mordechai had volunteered for years with an NGO that transported Palestinian patients from the West Bank to hospitals inside Israel and worked for an organization operating bilingual schools. In the weeks following October 7, he watched fellow activists increasingly become targets. “There was a journalist who was almost lynched for criticizing what Israeli soldiers were doing in Gaza,” he said. “Our political opinions were public — on social media and through our work. It really felt unsafe.”
Leaving, Mordechai added, was also a way to remove his children from “the hands of the army.” His sons are now settled in Greece and relieved not to face Israel’s mandatory military service. The Jewish community in Athens, he said, rallied to support many of the Israelis who arrived in the city in the aftermath of October 7.
Noga, 53, left Israel for Italy a year after October 7, with her two children. Like Mordechai, she made the decision out of a desire to prevent her children from being conscripted. “My son was 14 when we left,” she said. “I was afraid that if we stayed, he would go through a very militaristic and nationalist school system — the brainwashing, the social pressure — and eventually want to enlist.”
From the first days of the war, Noga said, she feared the scale of devastation Israel would unleash in Gaza. What ultimately pushed her to leave, however, was not only the war itself, but the reaction within her own community during the first year of the genocide. “Everyone is in denial, as if there’s no war, as if they’re not killing 30 children every day,” she said, describing gatherings with friends where mundane discussions eclipsed any acknowledgment of what was happening in Gaza. “They were talking about which restaurant to go to on Saturday morning, what to do with the kids. No one was talking about what we, as a society, are doing in Gaza.
“I couldn’t be part of that society, and I don’t want my children to grow up in it,” Noga added. “We’re raising our children inside this, and we’re not even discussing it. I felt completely alone, like I couldn’t say anything. I was forced to participate in this fake normality.”
Who gets to leave?
It is important to emphasize that most of the Israelis interviewed for this article are Ashkenazi Jews — members of the country’s ruling hegemony. Many hold dual citizenship, often obtained through European ancestry tied to families who survived the Holocaust. Those who do not have a second passport have nonetheless been able to create exit routes through higher education, professional mobility, or a spouse’s citizenship.
At the same time, it is also crucial to note that large segments of Israel’s Jewish population, mostly Jews of non-Ashkenazi origin, lack any realistic option to emigrate. This group, which constitutes roughly half of Israel’s Jewish population, consists largely of descendants of Jews brought to Israel by state authorities in 1949–50 from the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. In Israel’s early years, they were used as pawns to boost the Jewish demographic share of the population, and have since been subjected to persistent and well-documented social and economic discrimination.
Yet regardless of these internal hierarchies, both groups are far less exposed than Palestinians to the daily violence Israel unleashes across the land. And, Jewish Israeli citizens retain the ability to leave — if only temporarily — and to return at will (in fact, Israelis returning after extended stays abroad are entitled to generous state benefits). In this sense, Israeli citizenship operates as a form of colonial privilege: it grants members of the hegemonic group the ability to abandon the project when its political and material costs become unbearable.
Several interviewees reflected openly on this privilege. Noga, a single mother, said she lacked the financial and emotional capacity to become a full-time activist. “The most noble thing is to stay and physically protect Palestinians,” she said. “But I couldn’t realistically do that. Staying, living your daily life there with children, forces you to participate in and normalize the situation just by being present.”
Others, like Asaf and Mordechai, who had spent years opposing apartheid and occupation from within Israeli society, described reaching a point of political exhaustion. They felt they had done everything available to them, and that there were simply not enough people on the Israeli left to effect meaningful change. “Yes, I could stay there and die there and let my children die there,” Asaf said. “But that won’t stop the horrors from happening.”
Dr. Hila Amit is an independent researcher and writer. Her 2018 book "A Queer Way Out: The Politics of queer Emigration from Israel" showed that sexual orientation and left-wing political affiliation play significant roles in decisions to leave Israel. The book received the 2019 Association for Middle East Women's Studies Book Award. She is the author of two works of fiction, and of the queer feminist Hebrew learning book "Hebrew for All".
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