Something strange is happening to Jews across the world.
Jewish immigration to Israel, and Israeli emigration from it, is actually a sign that Zionism has been a great success.
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This is a guest essay by Nachum Kaplan, who writes the newsletter, “Moral Clarity.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.
We live in strange times.
Diaspora Jews in the West are wondering whether they should make aliyah (immigrate to Israel), while a growing number of Israelis insist they would like to leave Israel. It is a fascinating juxtaposition that reveals Israelis do not grasp the extent to which Jew-hatred has been re-normalized in the West, nor do they fully appreciate that Israel has a very bright future.
It is hardly surprising that many Israelis are dissatisfied. They are emerging from two years of war, a prolonged hostage crisis, rolling terror attacks, constitutional pandemonium, and a dysfunctional government. 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 percent of Israelis were contemplating emigration, a startling figure until one notices that between 30 and 35 percent of citizens in Western democracies routinely tell pollsters they want to emigrate. In Canada, the number is 27 percent; in the UK, 31 percent. These are countries to which people normally flock. Israelis 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 the West 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-percent increase in anti-Jewish incidents year over year. In the UK, 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-percent spike. Germany logged a 25-year high. These are not blips; this is civilizational regression.
I share these sentiments and believe Jews — especially the young, whose futures lie before them — should be acquiring Israeli passports, if only as insurance.
Much of the West is no longer the introspective, morally anchored place that emerged after World War Two, where there was broad consensus on what is considered 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 indeed.
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, foreign and Israeli, 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, if the media will permit you such “heresy.” 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 in place 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 percent 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, where the average is 1.5 believe it or not. Secular Jewish Israelis average 2.2 children, well above Europe’s median of 1.3. By 2050, Israel’s population may reach 15 million, up from today’s 9.8 million.
Demographics, as the old 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 aliyah will depend on the age and skill profiles of new arrivals, 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 — 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, which has displayed remarkable resilience during the past two years, in addition to its flourishing defense industry.
In 2023 and 2024, Israeli tech firms raised more than $11 billion in venture capital despite war, sanctions chatter, and a torpid global economy. Multinationals such as NVIDIA, Microsoft, Amazon, and Intel expanded their research and development operations in Israel. Intel alone committed $25 billion to its new fabrication plant, the largest investment in the nation’s history. Global capital is not sentimental; it is wagering heavily on Israeli ingenuity.
What’s more, Israel’s defense industry will continue creating jobs and earning vast export revenue. Defense exports reached a record $14.8 billion in 2024. The government’s badly needed push to reduce its reliance on foreign arms supplies will make Israel more secure. Short wars are won through tactics, intelligence, and technology; long wars are won through industrial capability. Israel is constructing precisely that.
While political pugilism over Gaza’s next chapter will continue indefinitely, the Abraham Accords’ durability during the Gaza war suggests that regional integration is a secular trend that will not easily be undone. Bilateral trade with the United Arab Emirates vaulted from zero to over $3.2 billion annually within two years. Moroccan-Israeli trade has quadrupled.
And the cooperation is not just pecuniary. Israel is developing a hospital on its soil to treat Jordanian cancer patients as part of the joint Israeli-Jordanian industrial zone known as the Jordan Gateway, where Israelis ad Jordanians will be able to work on either side. Such ventures demonstrate how pragmatic integration can elevate regional welfare and prosperity.
Israel’s strategic environment will forever be perilous. It inhabits a neighborhood of thugs and theocrats, and it will always contend with Qatar, Iran, their attendant militias, and assorted deranged factions. This is simply the condition of being a small nation-state in a predatory world. Taiwan does not feel secure vis-à-vis China. Eastern European states do not feel secure vis-à-vis Russia. The phrase “Peace in the Middle East” is sentimental gibberish that many Westerners recite like an incantation. History does not end; the great game must perpetually be played and won.
Israel is well-positioned to play it, even if some of its citizens find it hard to see that right now. As much of the West is decompensates, Israel is consolidating strength. Many Israelis may fantasize about Berlin or Toronto or Melbourne or Miami, but those fantasies are increasingly anachronistic. Many Diaspora Jews, for the first time in decades, understand viscerally that the future is in Israel.
Your country is so wonderful. I can’t imagine anyone not wanting to live there.
It is not surprising that many Israelis need to experience the current state of the West and not just read about it. On the positive side, the Diaspora Jews will benefit from the sabras more offensive attitudes rather than defensive postures against antisemitism.