Immigration is at the heart of the country’s self-image. But people have been leaving.
Jonathan didn’t want to leave Israel. When his wife first broached the idea, it was he who pushed back.
But as the country’s war in Gaza dragged on, and the stresses of the conflict compounded the economic pressures and social tensions never far below Israel’s surface, he realised they had to go.
Then one evening, as he returned to his apartment in Tel Aviv, he ran into the child of one of his neighbours. They spoke, and the boy, aged five or six, said he would see Jonathan that night in the building’s shelter, where residents would go to take refuge from missiles launched by Israel’s foes.
“That was one of the big breaking points for me… (I thought) that’s the future of the country and this is what he knows,” Jonathan recalls.
“Imagine, for a couple of years now, people have been in this fight or flight mode. And there’s no escape from this cycle… When you combine all of the social, the economic, the political aspects, it just became untenable.”
And so, in 2024, the 30-something real estate professional, who asked for his full name not to be used, packed up his home in Tel Aviv and moved to the US with his family, joining a wave of 150,000 Israelis who have left the country over the past three years.
The outflow has been fuelled by a period of unprecedented tumult in Israel. In early 2023, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government launched a controversial drive to overhaul the judiciary, triggering the deepest domestic crisis in Israel’s near-80-year history. Then Hamas’ Oct 7 attack that year plunged the country into a war that became a years-long regional conflict, drawing in Iran and allied militant groups from Lebanon to Yemen.
By international standards, the share of Israelis who have left over this period is not huge. But for Israel, the outflow is highly unusual — and has already had an outsized impact.