Escalating violence and Israel's 'genocidal' campaign in Gaza spark a wave of departures, with the nation facing a brain drain and shrinking population growth
Israel's (over)reaction to the hostage crisis has been very harmful for the diaspora, and sometimes I think that's by design. Basically ensuring that Israel is the only "safe" place for Jews by encouraging anti-Semitism abroad.
Seriously. Bring them over to the US! We have plenty of room in states like Wyoming, which has enough space to fit 11 Israels but currently has only 1/16th of the population! And that's just one state.
If they come to the US, they are most likely to settle in the NY/NJ area or Florida because these locations already have large (relatively speaking) Jewish populations and institutions.
No no. We need to better recreate the climate of Palestine if we're going to ask millions of Israelis to relocate. You need a warm, coastal and arid Mediterranean climate. And we need an area that's currently largely underpopulated.
Thus, we must....REUNIFY CALIFORNIA! For too long have Baja and Alta been disunited. It is time to annex Baja California, to reunify it with its Northern neighbor! Then we will offer large stretches of land in Baja California for Israeli Jews to settle in. That way they can have a homeland without oppressing the native Muslim population.
I mean yes, absolutely, it's always good to welcome people leaving a bad government behind.
But...
Do we have any statistics on who is leaving? Are jewish people over- or underrepresented? Maybe it's mostly palestinian citizens of Israel or maybe it's a lot of hardcore conservative jews who support the war, but are fleeing conscription? Maybe it's secular leftist jewish people? My point is: Apart from some cherry-picked, non-representative interviews, we don't know who is leaving and why.
Let's all welcome these new arrivals and make them realise that the World doesn't hate them as long as they don't subscribe to the genocidal ideology of Zionism.
Where is this Galt's Gulch where all the world's sane and intelligent have fled? Because they sure aren't in America, and most of Europe isn't looking too brilliant either!
The problem is that after fleeing to a new place, it's hard to rebuild back to what you could have been. Especially when that new place is also xenophobic/exclusionary.
Refugees need a generation or two of rebuilding and growing into the new community to reach their full potential.
Unfortunately, the world has become very insular and hostile to newcomers trying to build a better life. Even ivy league NY liberals will destroy you for having a mildly different background than them, let alone the Putins and Trumps and their supporters.
So if people who support Israel's war immigrate to Israel and people who don't support it emigrate from Israel, we'd expect Israelis to get more violent while Jews outside of Israel to get less supportive of Israelis. This doesn't bode well for Israel long term. This would decrease the number of people who advocate for Israel's violence in the countries who provide weapons and political cover, all the while the violence gets worse.
As long as people are voting for one of two genocidal parties that might be true. Although at some point it will be American soldiers doing the fighting and slaughtering, while the Israelis will watch and demand to get more money from the parents of the soldiers dying for them.
I was gonna say this 82k isn't much, but then I realized that that's almost 1% of Israel's population. If that's all people who have problems with Israel's current state, then yeah they'll probably go even further off the deep end in the coming years. That said, Israeli society is already so insane that it doesn't matter much at this point. Very few people in Israel actually want the genocide to stop, so their absence shouldn't change much in the short term. In the long term it decreases the odds of Israel changing of its own accord, but I don't think anyone was counting on that anyway.
This would decrease the number of people who advocate for Israel's violence in the countries who provide weapons and political cover, all the while the violence gets worse.
I don't think Jews are a significant fraction of the people supporting Israel's genocide. I mean, they support it at below to above average rates depends on where you are and who you ask, but there aren't enough of them for their immigration to affect the big picture.
Basically what I want to say is that the "limit state", for lack of a better term, of zero anti-Zionist Jews in Israel and zero Zionist Jews abroad is very close to the current situation, so there's not much room for change in that direction. We can say that modern Israel is in that limit state. And that leads us to...
This doesn't bode well for Israel long term.
Exactly. Israel is kinda fucked when gen alpha and the generation after them grow up.
Yes that's what Gideon Levy said. The people leaving Israel are the cosmopolitan, liberals and not the ideologically committed. They are the ones who would accept a one state solution with equal rights.
Still it's good to see evidence that the Zionist colony is becoming toxic.
I do not blame any of them for leaving. I probably would too. But I think this will also have a negative effect since it will mean fewer people who are against the genocide working against it from within. I'm not sure anything can be done about that though. It's too bad only those wealthy enough with the means to leave and a place to go who object to what's going on can do so.
I understand that, but they also vote. They also can protest inside the country. They also can organize others to be with them. There is a trade-off here. Let's not pretend there will not be any negative effects.
And making it even more scant won't help. Which is all I am saying.
I don't know why, but I am getting pushback here from multiple people who seem to be suggesting there's no point in opposing this from within and I just can't believe people can both oppose Israel and be that defeatist.
I suppose they still vote from abroad, although elections will only happen in 2 years or so. But brain drain does affect the economy so it is in itself a "vote".
I don't think the oligarch framework makes sense as a way to view Israeli society. Your average Israeli wants to keep stealing Palestinian land as a matter of principle, not because they stand to gain anything from it.
It's tricky to make those distinctions when you have people who are born there to immigrants, whose parents are 1 immigrant 1 not, whose grandparents are some mix of the two statuses, etc., when you're really trying to describe demographic shifts over time built on top of migration.
You catch the full picture just looking at broad demographic data 1800 to today. Roughly 3-4% of the population in the Palestine area is Jewish at the beginning of the 19th century - ranges from 5 to 14% Jewish by 1914 based on which source you check, by 1948 it's up to about a third, today about 50/50 (encompassing the same area). There's about 6 million Palestinians in diaspora now (from something like 1.5-2M fleeing in 1948, 1956, 1967, and other times). 5.7M registered with UNRWA. And we know that there were roughly 4 million Jewish immigrants since 1800 as well (primarily 1880 to today), with the large majority of those post-1948. The 1990s "post-Soviet aliyah" (migration) being the largest in the last few decades.
It it continues that way it will be even physically a state made for war, surveillance, war edge technology, etc in favor and protection of west allies. With free to do whatever they want. Because where they are. They already showed it with the multiple (not just now) genocides of Palestines . The first one was "justified" on social opinión after WW2.
Not everyone has the kind of freedom or means to do so even if they want to. While I get that a frightening majority of Israeli society is unbelievably cooked, a little more tact would be nice.