Al Jazeera recently published a news article titled, “‘Tsunami’ of emigration reshapes Israel’s future, experts warn,” wherein they reported the following:

Nearly 270,000 Israelis have left the country over the past three years, the Tel Aviv University study found, drawing on Central Bureau of Statistics data. More than 86,500 Israelis left in 2023, followed by about 91,500 in 2024 and a similar number in 2025.

 

Israel is facing a “tsunami” of emigration, the opposition’s Gilad Kariv, the chair of the Israeli parliament’s Immigration, Absorption and Diaspora Affairs Committee, warned, which the government was doing nothing to address.

The scale is quite significant. Israel had approximately 7 million Jews in 2025. The three-year gross departure figure therefore amounts to almost 4% of Israel’s total Jewish population.

Most of them cite the post-7/10 security situation as the main reason for their departure, and the number of Israelis leaving the country is now higher than the number of those arriving.

And that’s not all. Not too long ago, The Jerusalem Post had reported that nearly a fifth (18%) of Israelis had considered leaving in the last two years (that number would probably be higher if it was limited only to Jews), while a third knew someone who had already left.

Let us take a look at how this has an enormous symbolic impact on the Zionist imagination.

Aliyah Is Not Merely Immigration

The term aliyah does not, strictly speaking, mean “return.” Its literal meaning is actually “ascent.” The older language of “return” is better captured by “Shivat Zion,” i.e., the “Return to Zion.”

The opposite of aliyah is yerida, which literally means “descent,” and an emigrant from Israel has traditionally been referred to as a yored, i.e., “one who descends.”

The terminology already contains a political theology. Immigration to France, America, or Australia is horizontal – one moves from one country to another. In the classical Jewish and subsequently Zionist vocabulary, movement toward the Land of Israel is vertical. One ascends to it, and one descends from it.

Such symbolism long predates modern political Zionism.

For Nahmanides (the RamBan), still remembered for his religious polemic with Christians, the Land of Israel possessed a theological status far stronger than it did for Maimonides (the RamBam). Nahmanides regarded settling the Land to be a positive commandment and connected Jewish religious existence intimately to the Land itself. His Kabbalistic thought associated the Land with the Shekhinah, i.e., the divine presence. (Nahmanides was in fact one of the earliest major Kabbalists, while Maimonides was instead critical of any form of mystical approach due to his Aristotelian rationalism.)

Exile was consequently not merely a matter of geographical displacement. Separation between Israel, its people, and its land possessed a cosmic dimension.

Lurianic Kabbalah later developed an even more elaborate metaphysics of exile and redemption. In the Lurianic conception, primordial catastrophe scattered divine “sparks” throughout creation. Israel’s exile participates in that dispersion, while the gathering and elevation of those sparks forms part of the process of “tikkun,” i.e., cosmic restoration. (When you hear modern Jewish liberal-humanists speak so frequently of “tikkun olam” as “repairing the world,” in the sense of secularized philanthropy and universalist altruism, know that such language has Kabbalistic roots.)

The “ingathering of the exiles” could therefore be imagined simultaneously as historical return and metaphysical repair.

Political Zionism secularised much of this vocabulary without eliminating its structure. What had been redemption became national restoration. Exile became political abnormality. The ingathering of Israel became the construction of a Jewish demographic majority in Palestine and subsequently Israel. The theological movement from exile toward redemption was translated into the nationalist movement from galut to sovereignty.

This is why yerida has historically been so much more embarrassing to Zionism than ordinary emigration is to an ordinary nation-state. A Frenchman moving to Montreal does not refute France. An Italian moving to New York does not constitute an ideological argument against Italy. But the Israeli Jew who voluntarily leaves the Jewish state for the Diaspora reverses the foundational movement of Zionism itself.

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The Diaspora Jew’s Revenge

This becomes even more ironic when one remembers the extraordinarily hostile attitude that important currents of early Zionism adopted toward Jewish life in the Diaspora.

Labor Zionists and Revisionists disagreed bitterly about economics, socialism, territorial strategy, Britain, and the use of force. Yet both participated, in different forms, in what historians call the “negation of the Diaspora,” i.e., the conviction that Diaspora existence produced an abnormal, vulnerable Jewish condition which Zionism had to overcome.

The famous Zionist ideal of the “New Jew” (productive, sovereign, physically capable, rooted in land, speaking Hebrew, and capable of defending himself) was constructed as the antithesis of the stereotyped Diaspora Jew: politically powerless, dependent upon gentile tolerance, economically precarious, and perpetually vulnerable to expulsion or massacre.

All the major Zionist ideologues, including Herzl, Nordau, Ben-Gurion (founder of the modern state of Israel), and Jabotinsky (spiritual father of Israel’s right-wing, including Netanyahu’s Likud party) all despised Diaspora Jews.

This history makes contemporary yerida extraordinarily ironic: the Zionist revolution was supposed to transform the Diaspora Jew into the Hebrew sovereign… yet Israel increasingly fears that the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of that revolution may voluntarily “transform themselves back” into Diaspora Jews.

Who Is Leaving?

Israeli parliamentary data describes emigrants as disproportionately young, married, and educated. In 2023, the average age of emigrants was only 32.45. Almost half were between the ages of 20 and 44, compared with roughly a third of the overall population.

Emigrants were also more highly educated than the Israeli population generally, while the proportion who were married has been increasing.

Tel Aviv University researchers have separately identified increased emigration among “physicians, engineers, PhD holders, university graduates, and relatively high-income Israelis.”

That is potentially even more damaging than raw population loss.

Israel’s geopolitical model depends upon maintaining an unusually sophisticated economy and state apparatus in a country with a relatively small population: medicine, universities, advanced engineering, cybersecurity, military technology, venture capital, and the high-tech sector celebrated in the mythological cliché of the “start-up nation.”

Losing a doctor or senior engineer is therefore not demographically equivalent to losing an interchangeable statistical unit, as the issue is one of human capital.

Even worse, the Knesset data shows a growing share of married emigrants. This matters too, because a family that establishes itself permanently in Boston, Toronto, Berlin, Melbourne, or London doesn’t only remove two working-age adults from Israel. It potentially relocates the socialisation of the next generation.

Their children attend Western schools. Their friendship networks become American, Canadian, Australian, or European. Their Hebrew may weaken. They marry people they would never have encountered in Israel.

Their political assumptions are increasingly shaped by Western rather than Israeli political culture. Israel can remain emotionally important to them without remaining the centre of their existence.

That is the deeper demographic danger – not just emigration but diasporisation.

And the United States remains especially important. OECD data shows that, among Israeli citizens emigrating to OECD countries in 2023, approximately a third went to the United States, ahead of Germany and Canada.

So, you have yet another irony here: Zionism was created to redirect Jewish migration away from the great Western destinations and toward Palestine… yet America, the great demographic competitor to Zionism since the nineteenth century, continues to exert an enormous gravitational pull.

This also explains why American Jewry presents Zionism with a peculiar problem.

Zionism was extraordinarily successful at attracting Jews that were fleeing places where Jewish life became insecure or politically precarious: postwar Europe, the Arab world, Ethiopia, and, above all, the former Soviet Union.

It has been much less successful at persuading millions of prosperous Western Jews that their lives constitute an exile requiring termination.

America presents the most uncomfortable example because American Jews possess precisely what classical Zionism argued the Diaspora could never permanently provide: extraordinary economic success, political influence, institutional security, and the possibility of maintaining Jewish identities without Jewish sovereignty.

However, Pew, as early as 2021 (thus years before the Gazacide further polarized the situation), had found substantially more critical attitudes toward the Israeli government among younger American Jews, while Jewish policy research likewise identifies a younger, liberal constituency for whom Israel is considerably less central to Jewish identity.

Thus, Israel finds itself in a battle on two fronts. It has difficulty convincing affluent Western Jews to make aliyah permanently, while it simultaneously struggles to prevent some of its own young, educated citizens from making yerida into those same affluent Western societies.

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The Palestinian Variable

But here’s a question that could become a matter of further discussion: how much of this reversal has been produced by the persistence of the Palestinian question?

This should not be reduced to Hamas or to October 7, as the Second Intifadah provides an instructive precedent.

After it erupted in 2000, Jewish immigration to Israel declined dramatically: by 2006–7, annual immigration had fallen below 20,000, compared with an annual average of roughly 73,000 between 1992 and 1999.

Obviously the collapse also reflected the exhaustion of the enormous post-Soviet migration wave, so causation cannot be assigned exclusively to Palestinian violence, but the deterioration of security plainly weakened one of Israel’s central attractions.

But let’s do some “counterfactual history.” Suppose the Palestinian population had simply accepted its defeat after 1948 and 1967. Suppose there had been no sustained national resistance, no First Intifadah, no Second Intifadah, no recurrent wars around Gaza, and no October 7. Imagine Israel had enjoyed several generations of something approaching Western European levels of physical security while retaining American military protection, a booming high-tech economy, and preferential access for Jews throughout the world.

How many more American, French, British, Canadian, or Argentine Jews might eventually have made aliyah? How many would have stayed? How many of their children would have become Hebrew-speaking Israelis, served in the IDF, married other Israelis, and produced another generation of what Zionism regarded as the normalised Jewish nation?

From a Palestinian perspective, one of the least appreciated achievements of Palestinian sumud, i.e., “steadfastness,” has been to simply prevent Zionism from converting military supremacy into an uncontested historical normality. Palestinian resistance has taken many forms, including political mobilisation, civil resistance, diplomacy, and armed struggle. The latter has also repeatedly inflicted terrible costs on Palestinian civilians and Israelis alike.

This matters demographically because Zionism is not merely a state-building project. It is a population project. Its long-term success depends upon persuading Jews that living under Jewish sovereignty in Israel is preferable to living elsewhere, not just spiritually or ideologically but even materially.

Every Israeli family that decides Boston, Berlin, Toronto, or Melbourne offers its children a safer or freer future therefore poses a serious question that missiles and GDP statistics cannot answer.

There is consequently something almost dialectical about the present situation.

Classical Zionism looked upon the Diaspora and said: “Jewish history has demonstrated that you cannot remain there safely forever. Come home.” The contemporary yored replies through his actions: “I was born in the home you constructed, and I am leaving it for the Diaspora.”

That is why yerida strikes such a sensitive ideological nerve, as physical death removes an individual while leaving the national narrative intact, but the emigrant lives; he simply chooses to do so somewhere else. He takes his education, profession, capital, and children with him. He exchanges the Hebrew-speaking Jewish polity for precisely the Diaspora that was declared historically untenable by Zionism.

And if his children subsequently become ordinary liberal American, Canadian, or European Jews, or simply Americans, Canadians, or Europeans with some Israeli ancestry, the ideological reversal becomes intergenerational.

For a Muslim or Palestinian observer, there is an additional historical irony. Palestinians were repeatedly told that Zionism represented an irreversible demographic fact: Jews would continue to arrive, Israel would continue to consolidate itself, and Palestinian resistance could only postpone acceptance of the inevitable.

Yet history is not moving in only one direction. The extraordinary phenomenon now visible is not merely that fewer Diaspora Jews may feel compelled to “ascend.” It is that tens of thousands of people that are already incorporated into the Zionist project are choosing to move in the opposite direction.

The supposed terminus of Jewish exile can itself produce a new Diaspora.

And if that process ever became structurally self-reinforcing, if insecurity and political polarisation drove out precisely the mobile, educated population upon which Israel’s military-technological advantage depends, thereby weakening the state and encouraging still more departures, then Israel would face something considerably more consequential than just a temporary migration crisis.

It would confront Zionism’s oldest nightmare in inverted form: not that the Jews of the Diaspora refuse to come but that the Jews of Zion start to leave.

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