(JNS) We live in strange times. Diaspora Jews in the West are wondering whether they should immigrate to Israel, while a growing number of Israelis insist they would like to leave. It is a fascinating juxtaposition that reveals Israelis do not grasp the extent to which Jew-hatred has been renormalized in the West, nor do they fully appreciate that Israel has a very bright future.
It’s hardly surprising that many Israelis are dissatisfied. They are emerging from two years of incessant war, a prolonged hostage crisis, rolling terror attacks, constitutional pandemonium and a government so dysfunctional that it has permitted ideological pyromaniacs to ascend to ministerial portfolios. Some 82,700 Israelis left in 2024, surpassing the 55,280 who arrived.
Strangely, there is something salutary in this. It means Zionism has succeeded. Israel has become normal enough that its citizens experience the same tiresome bourgeois anxieties as everyone else, including the perennial fantasy that greener pastures lie elsewhere. There was a time when many Jews saw Israel as their only viable refuge.
The data underscores this normality. A 2023 Israel Democracy Institute survey found that about 37% of Israelis were contemplating emigration—a startling figure until one notices that between 30% and 35% of citizens in Western democracies routinely tell pollsters they want to emigrate. In Canada, the number is 27%; in the United Kingdom, 31%. These are countries to which people normally flock. Israelis moaning about wanting to move abroad is not an indictment of Israel’s trajectory but evidence that Israel has entered the quotidian grumblings of OECD-style middle-class life.
Yet this trend reveals that Israelis have an ossified, almost sepia-toned view of the West, which is understandable given how quickly much of it has gone to the dogs—and to packs of stray mongrels at that.
Antisemitism is at record levels across the West, governments appear unwilling or incapable of confronting it, violence and discrimination have been reabsorbed into the cultural bloodstream, and Jews increasingly sense that their countries have betrayed them.
In the United States, FBI hate-crime statistics released in 2024 showed a 361% increase in anti-Jewish incidents year on year. In the United Kingdom, the Community Security Trust recorded the highest number of antisemitic incidents since record-keeping began—more than 4,100 in 2023. France reported a 300% spike. Germany logged a 25-year high. These are not blips; this is civilizational regression.
The West is no longer the introspective, morally anchored place that emerged after World War II, where there was broad consensus on right and wrong. It has devolved into a postmodernist dystopia where left-wing ideologues declare moral categories “social constructs”; Islamist immigrants are welcomed as though their imported medieval hatreds constitute some kind of cultural enrichment; and the unlovely far right is dusting off its old regalia and polishing its jackboots.
It is bewildering that Israelis would want to migrate to such places if they understood this decay’s magnitude and how little is being done to arrest it. They also lack the intuition (which too many liberal Jews in the West also lack) that things may deteriorate dramatically. Jew-hatred does not need to reach Holocaust levels to be very bad.
In their daily struggle for survival—weighted with grief and trauma—many Israelis have also lost sight of the fact that the Jewish state’s future is unusually promising. This rarely gets reported because the press, both foreign and domestic, insists on shoving Israeli news into the conflict-zone file, rather than taking a panoramic view of the country. Plus, there is the old journalistic truism: “If it bleeds, it leads.”
Forget the Palestinian question for a moment. The conflict is a century old, and Israel has prospered despite it. It will not be resolved anytime soon because the only path to peace involves a radical metamorphosis in the Palestinian political and cultural psyche, such that they become willing to live alongside Jews rather than instead of them.
On other fronts, however, there are abundant grounds for optimism about Israel.
While Iran is facing a terrible drought and the broader Middle East remains acutely vulnerable to climate change, Israel is ahead of the curve. For decades, Israel’s national mood oscillated with the Sea of Galilee’s waterline. Yet this month, Israel began pumping desalinated water into the Sea of Galilee itself—severing, for the first time, the country’s dependency on meteorological whim. Israel now produces more than 80% of its domestic water through desalination, the highest proportion among developed states.
Coupled with its world-leading irrigation technologies, this will render vast swathes of Israel arable. The Negev may resemble suburbia within 30 years. Global and regional environmental crises will become export opportunities for Israel. The country already earns $2.7 billion annually from water-technology exports, a figure tipped to triple by 2050.
Israel is also on the brink of a demographic renaissance unrivaled in aging Europe or Asia, where Zimmer frame futures seem a good investment. Even excluding high ultra-Orthodox birthrates, secular Israelis reproduce at above-replacement levels. Israel’s total fertility rate in 2023 was 3.0—the highest in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a club of rich countries—well above Europe’s median of 1.3.
Demographics, as the adage goes, is destiny. It is exceedingly rare for developed countries to maintain such a high fertility rate, but secular Israelis do. Perhaps it is because Judaism, at its core, is a life-affirming civilization rather than a nihilistic one.
The implications are profound. A young population will grant Israel a large productivity dividend. The impact of new arrivals to the Jewish state will depend on ages and skill profiles, but recent immigrants have tended to be highly educated, multilingual and economically agile. Israel’s youth boom will also provide the Israel Defense Forces with a large pool of fighting-age citizens, which is essential given that Israel’s neighbors, including the Palestinians, also have high fertility rates.
A young population is likewise vital for Israel’s booming technology sector. That sector—and not just its flourishing defense industry—has displayed remarkable resilience during the past two years. In 2023-24, Israeli tech firms raised more than $11 billion in venture capital, despite war, sanctions chatter and a torpid global economy.
Israel’s strategic environment will forever be perilous. It inhabits a neighborhood of thugs and theocrats. It will always contend with Qatar, Iran, their attendant militias and assorted deranged factions.
But increasingly, so, too, will the rest of the world. Diaspora Jews, for the first time in decades, understand viscerally that the future is in Israel. The sooner Israelis recognize it, the more assured they will feel about the extraordinary century awaiting them.
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