Two years after Oct. 7, even Israelis are losing faith in Israel
Can Zionism survive the disenchantment of the Jewish state’s citizenry?
An anti-government protest in Tel Aviv on Sept. 27, organized by the families of the Israeli hostages in the Gaza Strip. Photo by Jack Guez/AFP/Getty Images
This year — for the second year in a row — more people have emigrated from Israel than have immigrated to it. That startling new piece of data from Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics should be a wake up call: Nothing is a greater threat to Zionism than the Jewish nation losing Jews. If that emigration trickle becomes a flood — as it well might, if President Donald Trump’s peace plan fails and the destruction of Gaza continues — it will damage the Jewish nation far more than Hamas ever could.
For many Israelis, and Zionist Jews, the notion of emigration away from Israel is nothing less than a sin. “Yeridah” is what it’s called in Hebrew — literally “going down,” as opposed to the notion of “rising” captured in the phrase “aliyah,” which describes Jewish immigration to the Jewish state.
Now, those words’ connotations are perilously close to inverting. Leaving Israel is, the data shows, increasingly seeming like the path to a better Jewish life.
There’s a clear reason why. The vision the majority of Israelis have for their country is radically different from that advanced by its political leaders, specifically Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right allies.
Recent polls indicate that more than two-thirds of Israelis would be willing to end the war if Hamas returns all of the hostages — even if Hamas remains undefeated. For weeks, if not months, choruses of thousands of Israelis have chanted for a ceasefire and the return of the estimated 20 living hostages.
In other words, the majority of Israelis no longer need Netanyahu’s “complete victory” to feel victorious. They simply need the fighting to end, and for their soldiers to come back home.
Until very recently, Netanyahu appeared to have abandoned diplomacy for warfare — including through the unimaginably brazen strike he authorized in Doha, Qatar, which targeted Hamas deep in a sovereign nation heavily aligned with the United States.
This was a middle finger of monumental proportions, not just to Qatar — which lost citizens in the attack — but to Israel’s own citizenry back home, worn out from war in Gaza. And humiliatingly, Netanyahu had to pay for it as part of conversations with President Donald Trump leading up to his acceptance of Trump’s proposed peace plan: He apologized to the Qatari prime minister for the strike earlier this week.
What has been lost amid Netanyahu’s endless maneuvering — and what remains lost, now, as the world waits to see if Hamas will also accept Trump’s deal — is the voice of the Israeli public. They have been silenced and sidelined. And so they are showing their discontent, by moving away.
Too many Israelis feel like they’ve become pawns in their prime minister’s ploys to retain power. No wonder they’re abandoning their nation. The next question is: Where do they go?
If it’s becoming newly impossible to be Israeli in Israel, it’s just as difficult everywhere else. In the world’s eye, Israelis are denied a sense of fundamental, complex humanity. Even their antigovernment protests haven’t helped. They’re mostly framed as acts of opposition toward their government, not as reminders that Israelis possess cultural and political autonomy and, like many of us, often find their values at odds with those of their leaders.
But having access to a new nation hardly guarantees being welcomed into that new nation — not just because of how the world views Israelis, but also because of the antisemitism raging across the globe.
One of the byproducts of Zionism was that it allowed secular Israelis to consider their Jewishness almost as an after-thought or cultural quirk — like being Catholic in Italy or Ireland. But outside of Israel, that Jewishness has rarely had more fraught meaning than it does today — despite, at times, meaning so little to Israelis themselves.
The deep tragedy, in Israel, of the last two years is that to many, the daunting risks that accompany leaving Israel increasingly look less dismal than the risks of staying.
Netanyahu recently spoke of Israel embracing its increasing political isolation. Self-sufficiency should be Israel’s goal going forward, he said, particularly when it comes to weaponry. Netanyahu suggested that Israel should become a “super Sparta” — immune from global opinion, functioning without global support, even as its edges closer to bona fide pariah status.
But for Sparta to become Sparta it needed Spartans. An emboldened and independent Israel will only be as strong as the Israelis who fill it. And Zionism’s most valuable asset — Israeli Jews — are beginning to turn away from Zionism, and vote with their feet.
If they keep going, Netanyahu will find his nation differs from Sparta in one crucial way: Sparta was defeated in war, but Israel’s undoing could very well be entirely homegrown.
