For some time now, a number of pundits have been advancing the following
argument: Faced with the seemingly intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict and
stuck with consecutive governments unwilling to reach an equitable agreement
with the Palestinian leadership, highly educated and moderate-minded Israelis
have been leaving Israel in droves. This trend has been boosted in recent years,
it is claimed, by the added factor of Iran’s menacing push to achieve nuclear
capability. Those remaining in Israel are increasingly ethno-nationalists such
as religious Zionists, Russians, traditional-minded Sephardim and
Ethiopians.
Stephen Walt, the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of
international relations at Harvard University, argued in April of last year on
Foreign Policy’s website, for instance, that [Prime Minister Binyamin] Netanyahu
“ought to be... concerned by signs that the Zionist ideal is losing its
hold within Israel itself.”
For proof of this claim, Walt noted that
“there are reportedly between 700,000 and one million Israeli citizens now
living abroad, and emigration has outpaced immigration since 2007.” According to
Walt, the conflict with the Palestinians in eminently solvable, but “because
Netanyahu has long opposed the creation of a viable Palestinian state and
instead wants to extend Israel’s control of the West Bank, he has to lay out a
set of demands that will endlessly delay the process and make it hard for Obama
to put meaningful pressure on him.”
A similar argument has been put
forward by Ian Lustick, the Bess W. Heyman professor of political science at the
University of Pennsylvania. In a 2008 article in Middle East Policy, Lustick
pointed to the construction of the security barrier, the movement of Israeli
populations from the periphery to the greater Tel Aviv area and the low numbers
of Israelis who speak Arabic as examples of “escapist” tendencies rampant in
Israeli society.
“The logically extreme expression of escape is, of
course, emigration,” Lustick noted. The collapse of the Oslo process and the
outbreak of the Aksa Intifada had sparked a sharp rise in emigration, Lustick
asserted. “The danger for the Jewish state is that, given the choice between
convincing Middle Easterners that Israel can be a good neighbor and leaving the
neighborhood, more and more Israelis are attracted to the latter,” he
concluded.
Like Walt, Lustick’s unambiguous message was that if Israel’s
leadership decided to be “good neighbors,” moderate Israelis would not feel the
need to leave the neighborhood.
AGAINST this intellectual backdrop, the
US Census Bureau has just released new figures on the number of Israelis living
in the US at the end of 2009. According to the data, the number of individuals
born in Israel now living in the US grew by about 30 percent since 2000. Some
140,323 people living in the States at the end of 2009 were born in Israel, up
from 109,720 in 2000. Of the Israelis living there, 90,179 had US citizenship;
50,144 did not.
Some observers will doubtless be tempted to interpret
this rise as a direct result of disenchantment with Israel’s failure to reach a
peace agreement with the Palestinians. But, strikingly, Walt, Lustick and
others claiming that “moderate” Israelis are abandoning the Zionist project,
ostensibly fed up with Israeli policies, have never actually troubled to ask the
Israeli expatriates why they left.
Now, several immigration sociologists
have done that. One of them is Lilach Lev-Ari, who heads the Oranim
Academic College of Education’s sociology department. From in-depth interviews
with hundreds of Israeli expats in North America, Lev-Ari has reached the
conclusion that “push” factors such as the two Lebanon wars, the two intifadas
and suicide bombings had negligible impact on emigration. In contrast, economic
“pull” factors have dominated since the 1970s, when Israelis began to go abroad
en masse.
In short, Israelis leave Israel to make money or achieve some
other form of social mobility. And many Israelis who leave their homeland to
pursue academic advancement or perform a specific job end up coming back. Those
who make a lot of money abroad through personal business ventures tend not
to.
Israelis who have lived large portions of their lives here apparently
harbor few illusions regarding the tremendous complexities of finding a solution
to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and do not widely hold a
life-choice-motivating grudge against their political leaders for failing to do
so.
The ongoing conflict with the Palestinians, endangering Israel’s
Jewish and democratic character, and the Iranian nuclear threat represent real,
critical challenges for Israel. For the Israeli electorate, the
Palestinian issue in particular has been a key factor in their choice of
democratically elected leadership.
Israelis agonize over the most minute
aspects of this conflict; evidently, according to Lev-Ari’s research, and
despite certain critics’ assertions to the contrary, they do not abandon the
country over the failure to solve it.