Thousands of protesters demonstrate against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Government in Tel Aviv, on September 7, 2024. Photo / Heidi Levine, for The Washington Post
Avraham Binnenfeld had grown so dismayed with Israeli politics that he was preparing to move abroad when Hamas’ brutal attack on southern Israel in October 2023 upended the country - and his plans.
Instead, Binnenfeld said, he immediately mobilised for Army reserve duty, spending sleepless nights worried about his two brothers in combat units and freezing his plans to emigrate.
Now, weeks after Israel and Hamas reached a ceasefire in the Gaza war, Binnenfeld is packing up to move.
“Being only a few hours from a siren, a terror attack, a regional war, a missile from Iran, our brothers in Gaza and in Lebanon, it’s all so much,” he said.
He added that he could deal with it all if he believed the Government, contrary to its current course, was steering Israel in the right direction. “I need to know that all that suffering is for a good cause.”
Tens of thousands of Israelis have left the country over the past two years, with numbers spiking during the northern summer of 2023 - amid tumultuous protests against the policies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Government and even before the Hamas attack and subsequent Israeli offensive in Gaza.
According to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, more than 80,000 of the country’s 10 million citizens had newly moved abroad in 2024 and similar numbers are expected this year.
Two years ago, Binnenfeld recalled, he had been active in the mass street demonstrations, hoisting his Israel flag as he joined other protesters in warning that Netanyahu and his Government were sacrificing Israel’s security and its democratic institutions and identity.
Next year, Binnenfeld said he will move with his boyfriend to Switzerland to begin pursuing a postdoctoral degree in astrophysics in Lausanne. Like so many others who have moved abroad, he doesn’t know how long he will stay.
Israeli sociologists and demographers say that most of those in this growing cadre of emigres are well-educated, high-earning, secular, left-leaning and deeply critical of the direction leaders have been taking the country.
Many are employees in start-up companies, doctors, and students pursuing advanced degrees. Young couples and young families are highly represented.
These departures could have momentous economic, social and political effects for decades to come, Israel experts say.
“There are other brain-drains in the world, but there is a uniqueness in light of the Israeli demographics,” said Itai Ater, an economics professor at Tel Aviv University.
He said, for instance, that workers in Israel’s cutting-edge technology sector, who constitute only 11% of the labour force but pay a third of the country’s taxes, are strongly represented among the emigres.
Daphna Patishi-Pryluk, founder of Settled.In, an agency that helps Israelis relocate, said that she has been fielding an unprecedented volume of requests, often with more urgency than in the past.
Before the Gaza war, most Israelis moved abroad for career opportunities, she said, but more recently her clients have been seeking a break from Israel’s grinding wars and political upheaval.
She said that calls surged after the 12-day war with Iran last June, when Tel Aviv was pummelled by Iranian missiles.
Many of her clients have told her that their return dates are contingent on the outcome of national elections next year.
“They say, ‘We’ll take a break, see the election results, and make a decision in another two years,’” said Patishi-Pryluk, who herself moved to Boston in the United States last year.
“In the meantime, their money can buy them good education, calm, routine and functioning urban systems abroad.”
An estimated 200,000 Israelis now live in Europe.
For years, Israelis have secured second passports from European Union countries, including Germany and Poland, which offered citizenship to descendants of Holocaust survivors, and Spain and Portugal, which in 2015 opened up citizenship for Jews whose ancestors were kicked out of those countries in the 15th century.
In Lisbon and Berlin, Israeli newcomers find vibrant Israeli expat communities, where apartment leases have long been swapped and job tips shared in Facebook groups like “Israelis in Portugal”, with more than 50,000 members, or “Israelis in Berlin”, with 38,000 members.
In deciding to leave, some Israelis said they were gripped with uncertainty over how long they intended to stay away and if forever, whether it was the right choice for them and their families.
They have also faced a cultural stigma.
Immigrants to Israel are known in Hebrew as “olim”, or “those who ascend”. Those leaving, by contrast, are called “yordim”, or “those who descend”.
The departures of these largely left-leaning Israeli can also affect the country’s tightly contested elections, because most expats do not have the right to cast a vote from abroad.
Israelis have long worried about a brain-drain. But the context changed after the October 7 assault by Hamas, when many Israelis in this tight-knit country were directly affected by the attack, the bloodiest in Israel’s history.
Visceral fear coursed through households across Israel. In the days and weeks after the attack, neighbourhood and family social media groups exploded with questions and debates over how to handle wholly new parenting dilemmas: children hiding knives under their pillows, kids with smartphones still seeing Hamas footage of hostages begging for their lives.
Dekel Shalev, from Kibbutz Beeri near the Gaza border, said she immediately knew that remaining in Israel would “not be an option”.
For 15 hours, Shalev hid with her three young children as hundreds of Hamas-led militants rampaged through her community, killing more than 100 of her neighbours and dragging 32 back to Gaza as hostages.
Afterwards, she said, she terminated her pregnancy, feeling she’d be unable to protect four children, instead of three, if there were another attack.
A month later, Shalev, her husband and their three children boarded a flight to Colorado and have been trying to rebuild their lives there ever since.
“At least there’s space. There’s quiet, I can look at my children and know they’re safe,” said Shalev, who works as a kindergarten teacher in a suburb of Denver.
She said that many other Israelis have relocated to the town over the past two years.
She said she has been anguished to be far from family and the kibbutz as they have welcomed living hostages home and buried those whose remains were held inside Gaza.
Raised with a strong Zionist ethos, she is trying to get used to her new identity as an expat. Her children constantly ask when they’ll be going home.
But her residence was destroyed; the body of her Beeri neighbour, Dror Or, who was killed on October 7, is still being held in Gaza; and the pall of fear is too much for her.
“This war is not over for us,” she said. “And we have nowhere to return to.”
Michal Bar-Or, an artist and teacher, moved from Tel Aviv to Hamburg five months ago, motivated mostly by her opposition to the devastating war in Gaza, she said.
Bar-Or and her 3-year-old son have a German passport. Her partner, who works for an Israeli tech company that has allowed him to work remotely, has a Polish passport.
She said the war had changed the atmosphere in her once-liberal bubble in southern Tel Aviv.
Parents at the playground questioned whether an Arab teacher posed a security threat.
An Army reservist dropped off his children in the morning in uniform, with weapons slung around his shoulders.
Bar-Or said she felt ill-equipped and uncomfortable when her students requested help making an art project using photographs taken by their partners or brothers who served in Gaza or with “souvenirs” that one student’s brother had “brought her” from the battlefield - prayer beads, identity cards and personal items looted from Gazan homes, she said.
Bar-Or says she feels cold and alone in Germany, that her son struggles in his German preschool school and that her family remains uncertain about whether to stay in Hamburg or perhaps continue onward, to Berlin or to Portugal, or perhaps return to Israel.
“Of course, the most important thing for me is to raise my child in a place where I feel at home,” she said.
But nowhere does. “All the time, I feel less and less at home.”
- Lior Soroka contributed to this report.
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