Gaza war and Jewish emigration

4 min read EUGENIO GARCIA GASCON 0 comments

EUGENIO GARCIA GASCON

The basic foundation on which the Jewish state has been built has been aliyah, which means ascension, and by extension means the emigration to Israel of any Jew from anywhere in the world. Aliyah began in the late 19th century from Western Europe, and continues to this day. Sometimes they are massive, as happened after the fall of the Soviet Union, and sometimes they constitute a tiny trickle from different parts of the planet.

The opposite of aliyah or ascent is yeridah or descent, which by extension refers to Jews who live in Israel and who, for whatever reason, leave the country and emigrate abroad, say to the United States or Europe. The yeridá was for a long time a taboo and little-used word, and it continues to have negative connotations. Jewish Israeli families in which one of their members decides to permanently emigrate abroad, that is to say practice yeridá, do not usually raise the subject in public, beyond the first family circle, since yeridá is socially frowned upon.

A few weeks ago a statistic based on official data was published according to which in the first months of the Gaza war that began on October 7, 2023, more than 550.000 Jewish Israelis left the country because of the conflict. There is no way to know how many of those Israelis will return at some point and how many will decide never to return, but the data, which is barely discussed in the media, is worrying for Zionism.

In recent months that number from the first months of the conflict - 550.000 - has continued to grow, but at the moment there is no way to quantify it exactly. It is possible that it will be updated later and that within a year or two a more definitive assessment of the consequences of the Gaza war for the Jewish population of Israel can be made. In any case, this yerida is something that has never happened before, at least with such intensity. It is true that more than thirty years ago, during the first Iraq war, a significant number of Jewish Israelis left Israel following the attacks from Iraq, but it was largely a temporary phenomenon and very few did not return.

What is happening now is of a different magnitude, as it is affecting many more people. On the one hand, in recent years many Jewish Israelis have taken the time to obtain a second passport, usually a European one, a gesture that was unthinkable just a few decades ago. Whoever obtains it uses that second passport as a safety net for what may happen. The second passport would be something like a guarantee or insurance in case things go wrong and you have to go to less inhospitable places. This approach is novel in terms of quantity. There have always been Jewish Israelis leaving Israel, but never in the proportions we have seen in recent months.

There will always be diaspora Jews who make aliyah, that is, immigrate to Israel, but the prevailing impression is that these Jews will become increasingly radical. The country is radicalizing very quickly. I don't think many moderate families in the United States would consider emigrating to a place where they will be ruled by extremists, as is the case in Israel. This means that the country as a whole will turn more towards radicalism, a serious circumstance for its future. Commenting on this week's International Court of Justice decision calling on Israel to abandon Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories, an Israeli journalist has corrected the court in The Hague by saying that Israel does not occupy the West Bank, and that they are actually the radical Jewish settlers from the West Bank who are occupying Israel. And this is not a simple irony, but something very true, with all that it implies.

A personal note: a Jewish Israeli friend who lives in Tel Aviv told me this July that when he retires, in three years, he will emigrate to the West, that is, he will do yeridah. He is thinking about Spain or Italy as places of residence, he has not decided yet. Until recently my friend was a radical likudnik but he has suddenly come to the conclusion that Israel is becoming more inhospitable every day. He works in a liberal profession and does not lack money; He can live anywhere in the world he chooses. It is probably not a unique case. The country is rapidly becoming more extremist and less welcoming to Jews around the world, a trend that did not start with the October 7 war but goes back before, and which poses an existential threat to the future of the Jewish state.