More than 25% of Israelis want to leave the country. How did we get here?
Israel was founded on principles that its leaders no longer honor
Passengers wait for flights at the Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv. Photo by Gil Cohen-Magen / AFP / Getty Images
Contributing Columnist Sruli Fruchter November 26, 2025
Amid this brutal cycle of war, trauma and sacrifice, more than 25% of Israelis are now considering leaving Israel behind.
The stunning results of this survey, conducted in April 2025 and published on Sunday by the Israeli Democracy Institute, reveal an existential fissure in the country. Israelis are losing faith in their nation’s future, and they don’t believe they can get it back.
It’s a shocking turnaround, after narratives of Israeli society’s exemplary resilience and social cohesion sprang up in the aftermath of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 massacre. And while this survey predates major events like the Israel-Iran war and the ceasefire and hostage deal, its findings align with other concerning trends.
“Tens of thousands of Israelis have chosen to leave Israel in the past two years,” Gilad Kariv, chairperson of the Knesset’s Research and Information Center, said at a Knesset meeting in October. “This is not a wave of emigration; it’s a tsunami of Israelis choosing to leave the country.”
Since the beginning of 2022, 125,000 more people have emigrated from Israel than have immigrated to it. The number of official requests to terminate residency in 2024 was more than double the total requests made between 2015 and 2021.
It’s not just because war is difficult. It’s because the last few years have posed a fundamental challenge to Israel’s promise to global Jewry — and Israel is failing.
Israel has never been an easy country to live in. Residing there means facing economic hardship, a constant threat of violence, existential dread and insufferable bureaucracy. What drew immigrants in and kept citizens around was their shared commitment to the Jewish state’s ultimate vision: a renewed Jewish homeland serving its inhabitants, built on “freedom, justice and peace.”
That sense of shared purpose was crucial to Israel’s founding. “The State of Israel and the Jewish people share a common destiny,” David Ben-Gurion, the country’s founding prime minister, wrote in a 1954 letter. “This state cannot exist without the Jewish people, and the Jewish people cannot exist without the state.”
As Anita Shapira explains in her 2015 book Ben-Gurion: Father of Modern Israel, Ben-Gurion recognized the need to keep all Jews invested and connected to the state of Israel — and the danger of severing that connection.
But in recent years, Israel’s leaders have failed to nurture that investment and connection. What distinguishes this period from the conflict-ridden years around the 1948, 1967 and 1973 wars is how out of sync a vast number of today’s Israelis are with their own state and government.
And the IDI’s survey reveals just how far the country has strayed from Ben-Gurion’s vision.
Those more likely to leave are less religious and more liberal — a demographic politically isolated in a country steered by a power-hungry and extremist right-wing government. While the Oct. 7 attack and the first months of war pulled many Israelis toward new or deeper religious commitment, the grueling conflict, which dragged on for months without a clear endgame, also pushed others further and further away.
Just before the United States-brokered ceasefire went into effect on Oct. 5, the Institute for National Security Studies reported that 72% of Israelis were dissatisfied with the government’s handling of the war, while more than 40% thought the country was worse off since Oct. 7. More than half believed another Oct. 7 could happen again.
But this fundamental mistrust of the country’s leadership took hold well before Oct. 7. It goes back to 2022, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu brought far-right extremists like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich into the Israeli political mainstream. Then, his government’s widely reviled plans for a judicial overhaul in 2023 brought fears of Israeli authoritarianism into reality.
The Oct. 7 attack could have been a wake-up call that Israel desperately needed to reverse this course. Instead, within a year’s time, it became clear that Netanyahu was still guided by his own interests — prolonging the war, sabotaging hostage deals and turning Israel into an international pariah.
Israel’s economy has also suffered from this turbulence. The tech sector has seen investment decline and talent flee, while the cost of living has worsened.
Yossi Klein Halevi, a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, warned me of the consequences of all these trends during a podcast interview in August 2024.
“My deepest fear is for a mass emigration of young secular Israelis, those Israelis who are the backbone of the next generation of startup nation, of Israel as an economic success story,” he told me. “I’m terrified of that, and I see this government ultimately as a threat to the Israeli success story.”
It is understandable why much of the Israeli electorate feels disillusioned, unsafe, nihilistic and betrayed. And those feelings ought to be a cause for major concern.
Jewish tradition repeatedly warns that civil fragmentation can lead to a break between Jews and the land of Israel. The Talmud explains that senseless hatred and a breakdown of trust between Jews have historically led to ruptures between our people and our homeland. This is precisely what organizations like The Fourth Quarter — a grassroots movement seeking to build consensus among Israelis through dialogue — seek to repair. We cannot know if it will be enough.
What we do know is that Israel — both its citizens and its leaders — must respond to those who feel abandoned by the country that promised to be a Jewish homeland for all.
If we want Israelis to remain committed to their country, the government must make good-faith efforts to show they still have a home here.
That means, first, political reform. There must be real political accountability with independent probes into Oct. 7 — not the internal probe the government currently plans — long-overdue elections, and a fresh focus on creating economic stability backed by strategic foreign policy. Above all, there must be restored democratic norms, and a shelving of authoritarian plans.
Unfortunately, Netanyahu and his government seem uninterested in repairing what they have broken. The Jewish state will not crumble overnight if Netanyahu and his ilk remain indifferent to these needs. But the country’s morale will weaken. And everything that has kept it strong and surviving — its defenses, its international supporters, its belief in its own mission — will do the same. The educated, the entrepreneurial and the young will leave, and they will not look back.
Israelis need something to believe in. Without that, they will flee a country unrecognizable to them.
