ARAB AND WORLD

Mon 19 Aug 2024 9:43 am - Jerusalem Time

Since the beginning of the war, one million Israelis have left and 40% are thinking of emigrating

The Hebrew newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth revealed that the number of settlers leaving the occupying state abroad has increased, in light of the increase in threats, the ongoing war on Gaza, the decline in the standard of living, and the worsening of the internal division, noting that the number of these people has reached about one million since last October.


The newspaper said, "These reasons have prompted many Israelis to reconsider their stay in Israel and fear for their future."


She quoted data from the Central Bureau of Statistics indicating that there was a 20 percent increase in the number of immigrants compared to last year, in addition to the spread of the phenomenon of Israelis establishing gatherings abroad during the past two years.

While statistical reports indicated an increase in reverse migration from Israel after the outbreak of the war on Gaza, it was noted that movements and associations were announced with the slogan “Let’s leave together,” which attracted tens of thousands of Israelis.


Earlier, former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett called on settlers not to leave Israel, and expressed the utmost Israeli fears about the consequences of this migration, stressing that Israel is going through the most difficult period since its establishment, with the confusion of war, the international boycott, the damage to deterrence, 120 Israelis remaining in captivity, thousands of bereaved families, thousands of displaced persons, loss of control over the economy and disability. Bennett said: "All of this is completely true, but one thing worries me, which is talk about leaving the country."

The results of a poll among Israelis revealed that 40 percent of them are thinking of reverse migration (leaving Israel) and returning to where they came from. They put forward many explanations for this, such as the deterioration occurring in Israel for many and varied reasons, such as the economic situation, inequality, and disappointment due to the failure of the settlement with the Palestinians.
In the same context, according to a study issued by the Begin Heritage Center, 59 percent of Jews in Israel have gone or are thinking of going to foreign embassies to inquire and submit applications for foreign citizenship, while 78 percent of Jewish families have expressed support for their young sons to travel abroad.

As Israelis become increasingly concerned about mass immigration, right-wing writer Kalman Libeskind wrote in an article in the Hebrew newspaper Maariv that “we are facing a growing phenomenon in Israeli society, represented by the emergence of a growing class of the Israeli left, which is distancing itself from Zionism and Israel, and whose interest in the Jewish state is declining less and less. It is even conducting an active, vigilant discourse against the entire Zionist project, calling for a re-reading of the events of the Nakba, the Palestinian state, and the reality of the 1948 and 1967 borders,” as he put it.

“Most of these activists are involved in Israeli civil organizations that receive donations from foreign countries, with the aim of tarnishing the reputation of the Israeli army and its soldiers. Now they have come to realize that the Israeli and Zionist group to which they belong is fundamentally wrong, and they have begun to adopt slogans such as that the Green Line separating Jews from Palestinians is a symbol of the separation between what is legitimate and what is illegitimate, and they have begun to draw distinctions between the settlement of Kiryat Arba in Hebron and the city of Ramat Aviv in Tel Aviv, and they believe that the state’s efforts to maintain a Jewish majority are undemocratic behavior,” the right-wing writer asserted.

In a study prepared and published by the Israeli Ministry of Absorption, it became clear that a third of Jews in Israel now support the idea of immigration, especially after the Battle of the Sword of Jerusalem in May 2021, a date when Palestinian and Israeli statistics expected that the number of Jews in historical Palestine would have reached 6.9 million people a year before, compared to 7.2 million Arabs.


According to figures from the Ministry of Absorption, a total of 720,000 Jewish settlers have left Israel and settled abroad since the beginning of 2021, while the same year saw a superiority in the balance of reverse migration for Jewish immigrants who are mainly coming from abroad.

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Since the beginning of the war, one million Israelis have left and 40% are thinking of emigrating