Israel's Emigration Problem

Why it’s far more serious than the Jewish diaspora’s

In popular discourse there’s a lot of hysteria about Jews fleeing countries like the United States and Britain, but in truth, emigration from Israel is far more of a concern. A typical example of this is Nachum Kaplan’s article on ‘The Future of Jewish’ Substack titled ‘The West is sleepwalking into a Jewish exodus.’ He writes: “Jewish emigration from France, Belgium, Sweden, and the UK has already accelerated. The U.S. is behind Europe, but rising too.” What he doesn’t mention is that Jewish emigration from countries like the UK and the U.S. may have risen slightly but it remains vanishingly small.

During the first seven months of 2025, just 11,314 people moved to Israel, a decline of around 42 percent from the same period in 2024 and about 60% less than in the first seven months of 2023 (when there was a spike in arrivals due to the war in Ukraine). In recent decades, a majority of immigrants to Israel have come from the FSU, generally for very different reasons than those moving from Western countries, which will be the focus of this article.

Non-FSU aliyah in 2024 increased by 47% compared with the previous year (11,000 compared to 7,500). Clearly this is a post-October 7 phenomenon that can at least partially be attributed to some of the issues Kaplan raises in his article. But the numbers are still tiny. There were over 2,000 French olim in 2024, 676 from the UK, and roughly 2,000 – 3,000 from the United States.

On a per-capita basis, aliyah numbers from the USA are by far the lowest in the world. As expert demographer Della Pergola notes, with around 7.5 million Jews, “[American] aliyah should be about 10 times as high as in France,” which has about 500,000 Jews, but is actually equal. By contrast, South Africa has one of the highest rates of aliyah, with about 300 of its 50,000 Jews moving to Israel each year.

Turning to the country of my birth, the United Kingdom, in a January 2025 article titled ‘The data is clear: there is no ‘Jewish exodus from the UK,’ Jonathan Boyd, the Executive Director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, wrote: “It happens over and over again: alarmist headlines about how Jews are leaving the country in unprecedented numbers because of antisemitism.” In reality, over the past 30 years, the average number of people migrating to Israel from the UK has been around 500 per annum (the relatively high figure of 676 in 2024 was offset by the lower figure of 396 in 2023). Fewer than two British Jews in every 1,000 make aliyah every year, and just one percent of British Jews have made aliyah over the past seven years. To put this in perspective, in the seven years of pre-war Nazi rule in Germany, 50% migrated; in the seven years following the fall of the Soviet Union, 53% migrated; and in the 1960s, 72% of all Moroccan and Tunisian Jews emigrated.

More striking is the fact that for every two British Jews making aliyah, three Israelis are moving in the opposite direction. This is because Israel has the emigration problem many falsely claim the Jewish diaspora has. According to a report presented in October to the Knesset’s Immigration and Absorption Committee, 125,000 Israelis moved abroad between early 2022 and mid-2024, including an all-time high of 82,800 in 2023. During this time, Israel’s net balance of citizens – the number of people leaving without intending to return, minus the number of long-term returnees – fell by 125,200 people. By contrast, between 2009 and 2021, the average number of long-term emigrants was around 40,500 per year. Apart from certain periods in the 1950s and 1980s, there have always been more Jews moving to Israel than leaving it. In 2024, though, 82,700 Israelis left the country, about 50,000 more than made aliyah (of course, not all of those who left were Jewish, but that doesn’t account for the discrepancy).

To put this in percentage terms: By the end of 2024, Israel’s population reached just over 10 million, meaning that 0.827 percent of Israelis left that year. If 0.827 percent of American Jews left in a single year, 62,025 would have made aliyah, instead of 2,000 – 3,000. The figures are undeniable: Emigration from Israel is much more significant than aliyah from the diaspora. Why, though, are people leaving? According to Lilach Lev Ari, a professor of sociology at Oranim College, nearly all Israelis who moved to the United States since early 2023 cited either the judicial overhaul or the war (whereas previously Israeli emigration was driven by more traditional factors like education and employment). While more than half of those leaving are of Russian origin, who may never have intended to stay long in the first place, the figure includes hundreds of PhDs and medical doctors and thousands of engineers, clear signs of a brain drain and the loss of an estimated NIS1.5 billion ($461 million) in income taxes. As Prof. Itai Ater of Tel Aviv University explains: “Israel is a country with few natural resources and is dependent on quality human capital, and without the knowledge and expertise of the people driving high-tech innovation, academia, and healthcare, the economy will not be able to continue to prosper and everything will collapse.”

It’s impossible to produce a complete sociodemographic profile of those leaving, but I’d confidently bet that more of them vote for the opposition than the coalition. As a result, some are happy to see them go, for example Baruch Hasofer, author of the ‘Postkahanism’ Substack, who writes:

People who previously mocked fallen soldiers who had happened to be too far to the right and sneered at the Force 100 reservists being framed on false charges have now seen which the way the wind is blowing and are busy “reassessing their priors” and attempting to reframe their stance in some way which would make them appear to be anything but sniveling wormtongued villains. Those of us who’ve been paying attention can see the pivot for what it is. I can only suggest to these people that they will be much more uncomfortable here soon than they already are, and that they should seriously consider joining their fellow triangulating “centrist” intellectuals elsewhere. There is no future for them here. Things will get much, much uglier before they get better; if Israel were ever a country for the weak and faithless, it is not now and will hopefully never be such a country. This place requires sacrifice and courage. It’s no place for narcissistic cowards who are slaves to their comfort and respectability in polite Western society.

Reading his post, I was reminded of what they used to say about Gandhi: “He has no idea how much it costs to keep him in poverty.” His life of “sacrifice and courage” is only possible thanks to the tax money disproportionately provided by those he disparages; without them, he wouldn’t survive a single day on a West Bank hilltop. In living memory, many countries have suffered terribly as the result of brain drains, including Lebanon, Argentina, and Iran. Israel should do everything it can to avoid going in that direction.

Thankfully, we are still very far from that outcome. While emigration rates are certainly far higher than those of diaspora Jews, they remain relatively small, reversable, and offset by Israel’s exceptionally high birth rate. As Jay-Z might have put it, we’ve got 99 problems but underpopulation ain’t one. Nor should we be sanguine about the very real problems faced by diaspora Jewry, even if the hysterical tone employed by the likes of Kaplan isn’t very helpful. We should, though, recognize that the real emigration problem is over here.