Sneak Peek: Nadav on what’s driving the wave of migration from Israel, and more…

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0:57Welcome to Inside Call Me Back, our members-only edition where we open the door and let you shape the conversation. Today, in the hot seat, addressing your questions and personal dilemmas is ARK Media contributor Nadav Ayal. Nadav, welcome back to the Inside. Thanks for having me again, Dan. All right. The first question is from Lily from Rehovot. Hi, Arkim. I'm Israeli, but sometimes I learn more from Call Me Back than I do from Israeli media. That's no insult to you, Nadav. You are a hybrid Israeli media and ARK. I just want to make sure your fragile ego is not injured by Lily here. I'm a researcher at the Weitzman Institute in Rehobot, and I recently saw concerning data about the number of highly educated Israelis who have left Israel since 2023.

1:40I am worried, she writes, as I see that happening around me. Do you have reliable data on this phenomenon? And what do you think is the long-term impact of this trend? So I have some thoughts on this too, but I'll let you go first. So between the years 2023 to 2025, including these years, 270 ,000 Israeli citizens left the country. And by leaving the country, I mean they left the country and they didn't return for at least three months. Just to compare that, between 2010 and 2019, it's about 60 ,000 per year. So this is a wave of migration out of Israel, according to a team of professors from the Tel Aviv University, led by Professor Itayatau, who published these data.

2:26By the way, before October 7, and I would say following the judicial overhaul, in which many people said they're going to leave, it turns out they actually started leaving. Now, in terms of who's leaving, there we don't have the 2025 data, but we do have previous data from 2023 and 2024. There is no doubt that the people that are leaving are young families, both parents working, graduate degrees, sometimes kind of postgraduate degrees, PhDs, young researchers, exactly the kind of the population that you would want Israel to still have. That's the bad news. Now, to put it in context, we've seen these kind of waves of migration out of Israel before.

3:12In the 1980s, we also saw a wave after the 1973 Yom Kippur War. When it happened in the 1980s, what do you understand now to have been the cause for that? Well, the 1980s are seen by Israeli economists as the lost decade of Israeli economy. Oh, I know. I got a whole chapter in Startup Nation on that. Yes, absolutely. It began actually in 1977. So until 1977, the Israeli growth was extremely substantial. Beginning 1978, 1979, it started dropping, the Israeli growth rates of the economy. And the 1980s were highly problematic. You also had the Antifada during these years. You had a national unity government.

3:50So everybody was really relatively happy on the political field, but nothing got done. The reforms were moving really slowly. And this all changed in 1989, 1990. by the way, because of what? Because of immigration to Israel. A wave of immigration to Israel from the former USSR of more than a million people, more than 10 % of the populations came to the country. This is the most highly educated immigration in the history of the world. It's a fifth of Israel's population was immigrated and assimilated in a decade. I don't think there's been any period anywhere that I can think of that has absorbed that many people and actually successfully and effectively integrated them.

4:28Yes, and by the way, highly effective workers working diligently, very hard, high education, high technical skills. And you see their kids today in the tech sector. You see their kids, by the way, you know, inventing the AI revolution at Palo Alto these days. This all comes from that wave of immigration from the USSR. It was the best and the brightest of the USSR that came to Israel. And that was a miracle to Israeli economy, together with a lot of reforms, much of them conducted during the Rabin government, which you wouldn't expect, right? It's a labor government, but for instance, the national health insurance bill that is considered one of the best in the world today, also efficient, efficient, not wasty of taxpayers' money.

5:13That's during the Rabin government. And things changed together with the Oslo Accords, whatever you want to think about that. It broke the boycott. Now we talk about boycott against Israel. There was a ferocious boycott against Israel in the 1970s and 80s, and it was broken in the 1990s because of the political process. It didn't end with peace agreements, but it did end with the Israeli economy being more entrenched into the global economy. Now, this can happen again, of course, and I'm also hearing from many Israelis, and this is anecdotal what I'm saying right now, after a few years, they're starting to understand the prices of being an immigrant, even if it's in a wonderful home of the brave country, and there's only one like that around the world, that's the United States, even there when Israelis feel most welcome, I think, in the United States, they also understand that their kids are not going to grow up as Israelis.

6:02And some of them are starting to think about returning back home. But many people are also looking at what's happening in the political field to see if things are changing. And I want to explain something really important about that. I see that the anti-Semites, anti-Israeli crowd are having a field day with this data, which as you can hear, Dan, I am not sugarcoating. I think it's a real crisis in Israel needs to deal with. And they sort of assume that it's because of the war. They're breaking the backs of Israelis. You know, Israelis have lost hope with the country with living in the Middle East because of the violence, basically because of the violence against them.

6:36And I want to make something really clear as an Israeli who speaks with many Israelis who left Israel, and mostly with Israelis who are staying in Israel. What makes Israelis hopeful as to the future or what makes them sometimes extremely depressed is all about the Israeli society. because they understand that there's going to be threats there. And they grew up with these threats and their parents fought wars and they fought wars. And they are actually willing that their kids will fight these wars again because they want to preserve the Israeli experience. They understand that this is the price to be paid for having a Jewish state in the Middle East.

7:09What really makes people depressed to the extent that sometimes they are considering leaving the country, from my experience, is what's happening within the Israeli society. It's about governance. It's about tribalism. It's about hate. It's about inefficiency and corruption and inequality. It's about my kid is going to go to the army and maybe sacrifice his life, and I'm going to send him to the army and tell him, you need to do that. But the other guy's kid, who happens to be ultra-orthodox, he's not going to fear the knock on the door, like so many parents right now. And this feeling, this sense of both injustice and huge challenges, and that what you might label the Israeli deal, like the New Deal, but the Israeli deal isn't working, the Israeli contract isn't working anymore, is what is leading people sometimes to leave.

7:56And it's not about, from my experience, the violence around Israel. Because this, with all due respect to October 7, this has not changed since 1948. So I have a couple thoughts. One is, first of all, the data, it's not clear to what extent the data reflects people who are leaving Israel for a temporary period of time rather than permanent. So that's the tricky part that's common for Israelis to leave for two or three years and then come back or a year or five years, whatever. So that's what's not clear yet is what's permanent. That's it for our sneak peek today. If you want to catch the full episode, please subscribe to Inside Call Me Back by following the link in the description or by going to arkmedia.org.

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