Why are record numbers of Israelis leaving their country?

Israelis have been leaving their country in record numbers in what has been described as a “worsening trend” of brain drain.

In a research paper released on December 9, Tel Aviv-based think tank Shoresh Institution for Socioeconomic Research said that the number of native-born Israelis who left their country in the first nine months of 2023 was 24,900 – up 42 percent from the average number throughout the last decade and a half.

Emigration from Israel has never seen such a sharp increase at least since 2009 when Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) revised its methodology for tracking brain drain.

CBS releases emigration data with a considerable lag. It will take another year to release the numbers for the first year of Israel’s war on Gaza, which has killed at least 44,758 Palestinians and wounded 106,134 others since October 2023.

The research note implied that the so-called judicial coup in Israel was to be blamed for the massive rise in the number of Israelis leaving the country.

In 2023, Tel Aviv experienced a constitutional crisis, exposing deep divisions in Israeli society.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pushed for a series of legislative measures to overhaul Israel’s judiciary. The so-called reforms aimed to curtail the powers of the Supreme Court.

Proponents of the legislative measures argued these changes were necessary to limit judicial overreach. Critics labelled them a power grab threatening the balance of power between Israel’s judiciary, legislature and executive.

According to Shoresh Institution President Dan Ben-David, the ratio between native-born Israelis who left the country in January-September 2023 and those who returned reached a peak “unseen over the preceding decade and a half”.

There are widespread concerns that educated and skilled workers are leaving Israel to raise their children away from never-ending military adventures.

In a speech in August, Nobel Prize-winning Israeli biologist Aaron Ciechanover noted that there was a “huge wave of departures” from the country’s scientific community.

Israel’s “best and brightest” want to live in a “free-liberal democracy” and away from a place where “the government forcibly takes power” while too many people stay “silent and do not react”, The Times of Israel quoted him as saying.

“Most senior doctors are leaving the hospitals; universities are finding difficulties in recruiting faculty members in critical areas… as soon as 30,000 of these people leave, we won’t have a country here,” he was quoted as saying.

Numbers speak louder than words

The average number of native-born Israelis who leave for greener pastures every year usually exceeds the annual number of native-born returnees.

The only exception since 2009, when CBS revised its data collection methodology, was 2020 when Israel recorded fewer emigrants than returnees because of the Covid pandemic.

But the trend of native-born citizens leaving Israel has been particularly worsening for the last two years, the research paper notes.

In each of the last two years, the emigrant-to-returnee ratio remained higher than the preceding year. In fact, the ratio in each year was higher than in any year since 2009.

In simpler words, it means native-born Israelis are leaving Israel at a much faster rate than ever before.

At the same time, the number of native-born Israelis coming back to Israel is going down every year, resulting in a net loss in Israel’s native-born population.

Emigration trends, from 2009 to 2022

On average, 17,529 native-born citizens would leave Israel in the first nine months of every year between 2009 and 2022.

In contrast, an average of 12,214 native-born Israelis would return to their country over the same nine months of every year during the last decade and a half.

But then the constitutional crisis hit Israeli society in early 2023, creating disenchantment among the professional and middle classes who resented Netanyahu’s attempts to clip the judiciary’s wings.

The social instability led Israelis to leave their country for a better place in greater numbers than ever before.

There was an unusual drop in the number of people returning to Israel while the number of Israelis moving abroad surged.

As a result, the difference between the numbers of emigrants and returnees – which averaged 44 percent between 2009 and 2022 – suddenly spiked to 120 percent last year.

What about foreign-born Israelis?

One perception within Israeli society is that olim – or new immigrants to Israel – can more than compensate for those Israelis who choose to leave the country.

“The actual migration numbers suggest that just the opposite is true,” says Ben-David.

Net emigration among foreign-born Israelis is “considerably higher” than among the native-born Israelis, data shows.

The emigrant-to-returnee ratio among foreign-born Israelis has gone up for most of the period under review, with a particularly sharp spike in 2023.

“However, much of this latter data is significantly influenced by Russians and Ukrainians who immigrated during the war between their two countries, became Israeli citizens, and left Israel shortly thereafter,” says Ben-David.

Economic threat is existential

Israel’s economy was under pressure even before the start of Tel Aviv’s genocidal war on Gaza. Israel’s real GDP growth rate slowed down significantly from 9.3 percent in 2021 to 6.5 percent in 2022 and then to just two percent in 2023.

A slowdown in the economic growth rate is generally taken as a sign of lower tax revenue collection in the coming months and years—something that’s bound to affect the country’s debt repayment capacity.

Israel’s creditworthiness has also suffered immensely under the prevailing political, economic and fiscal conditions in Tel Aviv.

More than 46,000 Israeli businesses went bankrupt while foreign investments dropped by 60 percent in the first quarter of 2023.

In a paper earlier this year, Netanyahu’s former chair of the National Economic Council, Eugene Kandel, said there was “considerable likelihood” that Israel would not be able to exist as a sovereign Jewish state in the coming decades because of rising emigration among a “small group of several tens of thousands of people”.

“The weight of their departure from the country is immense in comparison to their number.”