Nearly 60,000 Israelis left the country last year and didn’t return — more than twice the number in 2023. A full 81 percent were young people and families, often between 25 and 44 years old, the statistics bureau says. And the company Ci Marketing found that around 40 percent of Israelis still here are considering leaving.
Reasons for these figures might seem obvious: the war, the government’s attempt to weaken the judiciary, the rising cost of living. The children’s future might be better elsewhere.
But what about the reasons to stay? Four Israelis have told Haaretz why they’re thinking of leaving, and why — at least for now — they’re staying.
Riky Cohen, 56, is a writer, poet and editor who lives in Tel Aviv and has been thinking about emigrating for a decade. “Every time I hear that someone is leaving I throw a tantrum,” she says.
Cohen is in a relationship and the mother of two: a 23-year-old son in the career army and an 18-year-old daughter doing a year of national service before the army. For a few years, Cohen’s partner totally rejected the idea of leaving.
“He even objected to me getting a Portuguese passport, when it was possible. Today he regrets it,” Cohen says.
The frequency and durability of these thoughts gradually increased, and for two years “we’ve had heated arguments about it,” she says. Her partner feared they might not find work abroad, and their children are rooted here. And they didn’t want to leave without them.
Cohen is looking abroad because she’s pessimistic about Israel’s future in terms of security, politics and economics. She’s also wistful about a “normal” life, “without worrying all the time about what’s happening in a disintegrating country, in a dystopia.”
But not only her partner has reasons to stay. “Hebrew is my first anchor in the world,” Cohen says, adding that “when you leave, you lose your network. I’d be happy to leave with a group.”
Antisemitism doesn’t scare her; “they make more out of it than it is,” she says. And for her, life is scarier here; after all, she lives in a house with no safe room. “During the sirens I worried that a wall might fall on me, and for months after October 7, I had nightmares about terrorists,” she says.
In the meantime, Cohen is trying to convince her children to emigrate after the army. “I ask them what needs to happen for them to no longer be able to bear life here, in the hope that if this comes, it will still be possible to leave,” she says. “I think we might have missed the opportunity.”
She fears that Israel will become a dictatorship, “and one way or another, what’s happening now will bring down on us something similar to annihilation.”
As Cohen puts it, “We’re in a disaster. I’ve asked myself many times what I would have done in the Holocaust — join the partisans and fight, or try to flee and be saved. Now I’m wavering between the question of whether to fight to the end to try to save this place — and what the price could be — or flee.”
Despite the many reasons to leave, Cohen concludes the interview with a quote from a 2011 poem by Eli Eliahu, “City and Fears”: “A person must leave signs of struggle behind.”
“I hope we will fight, despite everything,” she says.
Feeling unwanted
Another interviewee requested anonymity, so I’ll call her Shira. She’s 41 and lives in the center of the country. For her, too, thoughts about emigrating are nothing new.
“I’ve thought about it forever, but since the war began it’s grown stronger, and it’s become more socially acceptable to talk about,” she says.
Shira, who’s a graphic designer and single, says a lot of her friends have left. For her, the reason is a feeling that Israel has no future politically. “As long as we insist on ‘Jewish and democratic,’ and as long as there’s an occupation, there won’t be a true democracy,” she says.
Emigration isn’t an abstract idea for Shira. Her family lived for a few years in the United States when she was a child. “I realize that it’s possible to live differently, but because I’ve experienced emigration, I know how hard it is,” she says.
Her English may be excellent, but “I don’t feel it’s home for me.” Plus she knows how a new place makes it hard to fit in. “I remember how hard it was for me when I was a girl, so what could I expect at 40 plus?”
Another reason concerns health. “I suffer from health problems, I’m supported by National Insurance, and I’m treated in the public [health] system,” she says. “I also have a support system of family and friends. To build it all up in a new place is very complicated.”
And how will she move her pets and belongings — and where to? “It’s not simple to decide; the United States is in a horrible state, and in the past, New York wasn’t so good to me,” she says.
All the same, Shira still believes that she’ll leave Israel. “I don’t know when or how, and maybe I’m deluding myself, but life here is becoming unbearable, and I’m feeling that my right to feel at home here is being stolen from me.”
The gap between mainstream views and Shira’s political opinions — especially since October 7 — has made her feel unwanted. She’s increasingly alienated from what Israeliness seems to represent.
She mentions the small talk in the dog park since October 7. One day, the women there were friendly to her, and then one asked, “In what way would it be better wipe out Gaza — starvation or a nuclear bomb?”
Shira asks: “How can it be that this is a normal conversation in the street, and I’m considered strange?”
When the house is burning, you stay
Israeli filmmaker Barak Heymann feels he’s living in a parallel Israeli universe. “We don’t breathe the same air,” he says.
He’s talking about right-wing voters, but also his own people who are protesting against the undermining of the judiciary and for a deal that brings all the hostages home. Alas, these kindred spirits are ignoring the suffering of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
“This always makes me the party pooper. I’m with them in opposing the judicial coup, and I’m with the anger over the abandoning of the hostages, of course,” he says.
“But when I tell them that around 70 Palestinian prisoners have been killed in Israeli prison facilities since the beginning of the war, they doubt my sources. And when I write in my work WhatsApp group about the Gazan children who are being murdered by soldiers, I’m seen as an extremist and a depressing provocateur — as if I’m insensitive to the suffering of Israelis.”
Heymann has been off social media for a year now, after his picture and personal information were posted in far-right Telegram groups. But on WhatsApp he reads about the children being killed in Gaza.
“Most Jewish Israelis are living in a false reality of a Holocaust because of October 7, and I’m in a reality of a Holocaust because of Gaza and the West Bank, and that creates a very heavy and sad emotional disconnect,” he says.
Almost everything that happens looks different to him than it does to other people; for example, the recent letter by reservist fighter pilots. “This wording that we need to bring back the hostages ‘even at the price of ending the war’ — it’s as if to stop killing children is a price and not something desirable,” Heymann says.
His partner, Warsaw native Anna Kardaszewska, came to Israel in 2009 because of Heymann. Even though they always talked about living in Poland for a while, when the war broke out, Kardaszewska decided that it was time to leave, but Heymann realized he couldn’t join her.
For now, she and the children are in Poland, and Heymann visits every month. He says he can’t leave his job as head of the film school at Beit Berl College northeast of Tel Aviv.
“It’s unimaginable for me to tell my students: It’s hard here, so I’m going and deal with it yourselves,” he says. “When the house is going up in flames, my instinct is to stay, resist and pour water on it.”
His situation is “strange and complicated,” he says. “Politically, I prefer to fight fascists. In emotional terms, even though I’m disgusted by all the Israeli nationalism and I support those who boycott Israel, in the same breath I’m the most Israeli person in the world and see myself as a patriot.”
The alienation simply hasn’t been great enough to leave. “As part of my work, I travel around the world a lot, and there’s nowhere I enjoy more than here,” he says. “I’m connected to the mentality, to the weather, the people, the language, the food. I’m staying here not just for moral and political reasons, but for an egotistical reason, too.”
And Heymann is working on a Hebrew-language documentary about — of course — Israelis leaving the country. “It’s totally schizophrenic,” he says with a smile, adding that while he was spending time with people preparing to move abroad, his family was heading to Warsaw.
“I’ll need to make a decision about when to join them, because longing is the strongest emotion I’m having now,” he says. “But I hope that even if I join them, it will be for a limited time. The harder it gets here, the more I feel a desire and obligation to stay.”
A new bag of problems
Meital, a 38-year-old sustainability expert from Jerusalem, has also opted for a pseudonym. She says [that] she makes a decision every week, sometimes every day, on whether to stay in Israel. Meital, who is single, says [that] she has been asking herself this same question since the 2014 Gaza war.
“But recently the decision to stay has become harder and harder,” she says. “For the first time I realized I had a red line: If we lose in the next election I’ll leave, because I’ll finally realize that people like me don’t have a chance here.”
Meital also went through relocation as a child. When she was 11 her family moved to London for a few years, and as an adult she studied there for a master’s.
“I’m here out of choice,” she says. “When people talk about emigrating, I tell them it’s no picnic. Anyone who hasn’t experienced it doesn’t understand the depth of the loneliness.”
In many ways, life was better in England. “More money, more culture. Everything there was better, except for what really matters.”
She adds: “There’s also an element of what my grandmother would have said. I come from a family of kibbutzniks who built the country, passionate Zionists. To leave Israel forever, for us that’s like leaving religion.”
She adds: “There’s also an element of what my grandmother would have said. I come from a family of kibbutzniks who built the country, passionate Zionists. To leave Israel forever, for us that’s like leaving religion.”
Meital also doesn’t want to leave feeling that she’s escaping; she wants to be heading to something. “A lot of people complain that I have a foreign passport, so I’m all set,” she says.
“But the bureaucracy isn’t the main obstacle in migration. What’s hard is to leave your home.”
