Even after 20 months of siege, displacement, and mass killing, Palestinians in Gaza continue to assert their will to remain – as Israel escalates its genocidal campaign by attacking aid distribution sites and massacring starving civilians who refuse to leave.
Meanwhile, Iranian retaliation against Israel’s recent aggression has triggered yet another exodus of Israeli Jews from the settler colony.
Israeli citizens, dual citizens, and tourists have been desperate to flee the country on so-called “escape flotillas” and “rescue flights”, as conditions have become even more unlivable in the last two years than they had been before 7 October 2023.
With “large numbers of Israeli citizens” desperate to escape, the Israeli government has issued a decision effectively barring them from leaving.
Despite the return of those who were stranded abroad during the latest war, the current flight of Israeli Jews continues a broader trend in recent years to leave the country.
New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch
Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on
Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters
Already in December 2022, the Israeli newspaper Maariv reported on a new movement aimed at facilitating the emigration of Israeli Jews to the United States following the last Israeli elections, which participants feared had altered the Zionist state’s relationship to religion.
For years, a growing number of Israeli Jews have sought to abandon the state, driven by fears over the long-term unsustainability of the Zionist project
The group, called “Leaving the Country – Together”, spoke of relocating 10,000 Israeli Jews in the first stage of its plan. Leaders of the group include anti-Netanyahu activist Yaniv Gorelik and Israeli-American businessman Mordechai Kahana.
Kahana stated in an interview: “I saw people in a WhatsApp group talking about immigration of Israelis to Romania or Greece, but I personally think that it will be a lot easier for them to immigrate to the US,” he said.
“I have a huge farm in New Jersey, and I offered Israelis to join in order to turn my farm into a kibbutz… With such a government in Israel, the American government should let every Israeli who owns a company or has a sought-after profession in the US, such as doctors and pilots, immigrate to the US.”
This is hardly a new phenomenon.
For years, a growing number of Israeli Jews have sought to abandon the settler colony, driven by political disillusionment, fears over the loss of Jewish-majority rule, and the long-term unsustainability of the Zionist project.
Earlier departures
As I chronicled in an article for this publication more than two years ago, by the end of 2003, the Israeli government estimated that more than 750,000 Israelis were living permanently outside the country, the majority in the US and Canada.
‘Clean out’ Gaza: Why Trump’s ‘voluntary’ transfer proposal should be made to Israelis
Read More »
Of the estimated 600,000 to 750,000 Israelis living in the US, 230,000 were Israeli-born Jews (meaning children of Jewish settlers in Israel).
According to Israeli government figures, between 1948 and 2015, 720,000 Israelis left the country and never returned.
By 2016, an estimated 30 percent of French Jews who emigrated to Israel ended up returning home to France, despite intense efforts by Israel and Zionist groups to attract them and keep them in the country.
In 2011, Israel’s Ministry of Immigrant Absorption launched an advertising campaign designed to guilt-trip Israeli emigrants into returning. As Moment magazine described one of the ads:
A little boy, done with colouring, turns to his father. But Dad is asleep in an easy chair, an Economist draped over his chest. ‘Daddy?’ the boy calls, to no avail. A pause. He tries again, this time in a whisper: ‘Abba?’ Dad’s eyes open at once. The artwork is admired; hair is affectionately ruffled. The scene fades, and a narrator says in Hebrew: ‘They will always remain Israelis. Their children won’t. Help them return to the land.’
The ad sparked immediate backlash for suggesting “that America is no place for a proper Jew, and that a Jew who is concerned about the Jewish future should live in Israel” – a view that former Israeli prison guard and now US-based journalist Jeffrey Goldberg described as “archaic”. The ad was pulled, and the ministry apologised.
Demographic crisis
In 2017, the Israeli government was so concerned about the growing emigration of Israelis to the US that it began offering more benefits and services to those willing to return, and encouraging others to come back.
Indeed, that same year, Israeli Minister of Science and Technology Ofir Akunis attempted to lure expats in Silicon Valley back to Israel by offering scholarships to complete their doctorates. He was unsuccessful.
In fact, Israeli demographers, including Sergio Della Pergola, the country’s top population expert, have been predicting a mass exodus from Israel for years.
This active emigration preceded the wars Israel has engulfed the region in since its genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people began on 8 October 2023. Since then, official Israeli data showed that 82,000 Israeli Jews have fled the country, with unofficial estimates placing the number closer to half a million.
In view of this significant Israeli Jewish exodus, Israeli authorities are right to worry that Jews are abandoning the state.
This is a grave matter, especially as Palestinians have constituted a majority between the River and the Sea since 2010, threatening the long-term survival of the Jewish supremacist state. As I recently argued, that is the primary reason for Israel’s ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people.
Official ban
To stem the tide of Jewish emigration, the Israeli cabinet last week issued a resolution “conditioning flying out of the country” for Israeli citizens “on approval by a government-led exceptions committee”.
The resolution stated that “the government also determined that when commercial flights become possible… a government steering committee will establish criteria for dealing with requests to leave Israel.”
While some of the 40,000 foreign citizens stranded in the country could leave, commercial airlines, acting on instructions from the Israeli government, informed Israeli citizens seeking to buy tickets out of the country that they were prohibited from selling them tickets.
Commercial airlines informed Israeli citizens seeking to buy tickets out of the country that they were prohibited from selling them tickets
Still, tens of thousands are trying to flee.
According to estimates, there are upwards of 700,000 American and half a million European dual citizens in Israel. State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce told reporters on 20 June – before the US bombed Iran – that more than 25,000 Americans had reached out for information on leaving Israel, the West Bank and Iran.
While Bruce refused to “give a breakdown of where the queries had come from and would not comment on embassy evacuations”, it is clear that the majority came from Israel and the Occupied Territories.
Indeed, an internal State Department memo listed nearly 10,000 requests to leave Israel made in a single day last week. These numbers are likely to have multiplied significantly since then.
Foreign evacuations
At the beginning of this week, Global Affairs Canada stated that 6,000 Canadians had registered in Israel using the department’s database, while some 400 others had registered in the West Bank to flee the country.
Canada responded by arranging flights and providing bus transport for Canadians fleeing Israel to neighbouring Egypt and Jordan, days after France and Australia had offered similar services to their own citizens.
By then, many Americans had already fled the war-mongering country through Egypt, as had many German nationals, who left through Jordan.
Follow Middle East Eye’s live coverage of the Israel-Palestine war
Many other Israeli Jews have been abandoning the country by sea, sailing to Cyprus on yachts and boats in what Israel’s leading newspaper Haaretz dubbed “escape flotillas”.
The Israeli government’s exit ban, enforced by Transportation Minister Miri Regev, has been sharply criticised. As Haaretz put it: “Israelis are welcome to return home to danger, but are forbidden to escape it.” According to reports, thousands of Britons – including dual Israeli citizens – have been desperate to get back to the UK.
‘Let my people go’
Meanwhile, in Gaza, as Israel continues to use starvation as a weapon of genocide and ethnic cleansing, a Haaretz report from earlier this month showed that most Palestinians held firm in their desire to return to their homes, defying Israeli assumptions that they would rather leave.
By contrast, the same report observed that three times as many young Israelis now want to leave the country compared to the early days of the war. As one put it: “War is a double-edged bitch. Israelis aren’t suffering like Gazans, but more and more don’t like living here either.”
Jews are leaving Israel in disillusion. They’ve been leaving for a long time
Joseph Massad
Read More »
Yet as the Israeli government continues to bar its citizens from exiting the war-torn country, the Israeli Movement for Quality Government has raised concerns about the opaque criteria used by the cabinet’s “exceptions committee” to grant exit permits.
The group sent a letter to Israel’s attorney general, complaining that the ban on leaving violates Israel’s Basic Law.
Ironically, when the US and Israel launched a propaganda campaign in the 1970s to attract Soviet Jewish immigration to Israel, they demanded special emigration permits for Soviet Jews, denied to other Soviet citizens.
Israel’s sensational call on the USSR was “let my people go,” echoing the biblical appeal to Pharaoh.
Today, it seems that thousands of Israeli Jews are pleading: “Netanyahu, let my people go.”
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
