May 20, 2026
The Political Context behind Israel’s Migration Numbers
It's true that birthrates will be the primary vehicle of Israeli demographics. But who is having children, and what kind of country will they grow up to lead?
In his essay “The Migration Debate Israel Is Not Having,” Rafi DeMogge has made a number of perceptive points about the patterns of immigration to, and emigration from, the Jewish state in the past several years, based on a serious and thorough analysis of the data. Before making some specific remarks about the essay, I should point out that the author and I approach the subject from different perspectives: his primary interest is in narratives and their political salience, while mine is in demography per se. We have, nonetheless, come to some similar conclusions.
The most important of these conclusions is that emigration from Israel is not that exceptional in a global context, and it fits quite regularly with the experience of other contemporary countries. Moreover, while there are certainly people who come to Israel because of hostility toward Jews in their home countries, any expectation that growing anti-Semitism would produce mass aliyah has been firmly disproven by the evidence.
DeMogge, however, minimizes the significance of Israel’s recent negative migration balance and, more importantly, fails to identify the deeper causal mechanisms and their longer-term consequences. A look at the numbers may be instructive in this regard. Given that October 7, 2023, constitutes a tragic watershed in Israeli history, it makes sense, first, to compare the data on Israeli emigration during the first nine months of 2023 to the first nine months of 2022. We thus learn that 44,258 had left Israel between January and September 2022 and had not yet returned one year later in 2023; but 59,454 had left Israel between January and September 2023 (hence before October 7) and had not yet returned one year later in 2024. This means an increase of 15,201 departures still unrelated to the war, but possibly related to political protest. Conversely, the number of Israelis returning to the country after a long-term absence was 23,377 between January and September 2023, versus 18,533 in the corresponding months of 2024. This means a reduction of 4,794 returns, only partially related to war. The total negative balance of departures and returns for the months January-September (actually assessed one year later) thus resulted 19,995 higher in 2024 than in 2023—40,876 versus 20,881.
