Nearly 50,000 Israelis left the country for more than a year in 2025, marking the third consecutive year of record emigration, according to a new report from researchers at Tel Aviv University. The finding builds on Central Bureau of Statistics data showing roughly 90,000 Israelis spent at least three consecutive months abroad in each of 2023, 2024, and 2025, well above the annual average of about 60,000 recorded throughout the 2010s.
The researchers, Professor Itai Ater of the Coller School of Management, Professor Nittai Bergman of the School of Economics, and doctoral candidate Doron Zamir, built their 2025 estimate using a different method than the government’s official count, since CBS figures for a given year only become final once departed residents have spent a full twelve months abroad, meaning official 2025 numbers will not be published until 2027. The team found a 0.96 statistical correlation between three-month departures and eventual year-long emigration, and used that relationship to project that between 45,000 and 50,000 Israelis will ultimately be confirmed to have left for a year or more in 2025. In total, 268,509 Israelis left the country for at least three months between 2023 and 2025, a nearly 50% increase over the 183,219 who did the same between 2013 and 2015. Combined with a much smaller number of new arrivals, Israel has run a net migration deficit for two consecutive years, an occurrence Israeli demographer Sergio Della Pergola notes has happened only rarely since the state’s founding.
The report deliberately excluded recent immigrants from Russia and Ukraine who arrived within the past three years, a group government officials had previously pointed to to argue that the emigration numbers were misleading. “We wanted to show how many ‘real Israelis’ are actually leaving,” Ater said. The brain drain component of the findings is especially stark: roughly 950 doctors emigrated between 2023 and 2024 alone, and even after accounting for physicians who returned, Israel suffered a net loss of more than 500 doctors and 2,360 engineers over the same period.
Ater was careful not to overstate the immediate danger. “These figures do not yet, in themselves, pose a threat to Israel’s resilience,” he said, “but looking ahead, and unless there is a change, there is growing concern that emigration from Israel will increase to a level that endangers the country’s security and economy.” The report explicitly warned of a possible “domino effect,” in which each additional departure increases the incentive for others to follow, and cautioned that once emigration crosses a certain threshold, reversing it becomes extremely difficult. The findings drew immediate political fire. Gilad Kariv, who chairs the Knesset’s committee on immigration and Diaspora affairs, called the trend “a strategic threat to Israel’s future” tied directly to government conduct, while Yesh Atid’s Meirav Cohen and Karine Elharrar both framed the numbers as evidence of governing failure.
Aliyah, Yeridah, and What Jewish Tradition Says
The very language Jewish tradition used to describe the two directions of movement carries a moral charge: aliyah, immigration to the land of Israel, means “ascent,” while yeridah, emigration from it, means “descent.” The Talmud in Bava Batra recounts the story of Elimelech, a wealthy and influential figure in the book of Ruth who left Bethlehem for Moab during a famine rather than remain with his people and pray for relief. The Sages judged him harshly for it, holding a leader of his stature to a standard that required him to stay and intercede on his community’s behalf rather than flee when conditions worsened. The Rambam, Maimonides, in Hilchot Melachim, codifies living in the land of Israel as a matter of ongoing religious significance, and the weight Jewish sources place on this question is precisely why yeridah has never been treated in Jewish memory as a simple personal or economic choice, even when the reasons behind it are entirely understandable.
A Wave Israel Has Seen Before
This is not the first time Israel has faced a serious wave of departures driven by disillusionment with its own government, and the last comparable episode offers a genuinely instructive parallel.
The Yom Kippur War of October 1973 ended in a military victory, but one that left Israeli society shaken to its foundations. The war’s opening days brought a level of surprise and Israeli casualties that shattered the post-1967 sense of invincibility, and the political fallout was severe. Demobilized soldiers organized public protests against Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, and both IDF Chief of Staff David Elazar and Prime Minister Golda Meir resigned in April 1974 under pressure from the Agranat Commission’s findings on the government’s failures leading up to the war. The emigration that followed was sharp and immediate: aliyah from the United States, which had reached 9,100 people in 1970, collapsed to just 3,500 by 1974, while yeridah to the United States climbed considerably, with contemporary reporting citing roughly 30,000 Israelis holding US status by late 1974. Accounts from that period describe entire families quietly packing up and leaving in the middle of the night, a pattern strikingly close to the anecdotal texture of today’s departures, driven then, as now, less by economics alone than by a collapse of trust in the country’s leadership.
What the Last Disillusionment Produced
The 1973 emigration wave was not the end of the story. It was a symptom of a deeper collapse in public confidence that reshaped Israeli politics entirely. The Agranat Commission’s findings, combined with a corruption scandal involving Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s wife that forced Rabin from office ahead of schedule, left the governing Labor establishment, which had led Israel without interruption since the state’s founding in 1948, unable to convince the public that it still deserved the public’s trust. In the 1977 elections, Israeli voters delivered what is still remembered as the Mahapach, the upheaval, handing victory to Menachem Begin’s Likud and installing Israel’s first right-wing government in the country’s history, ending 29 consecutive years of Labor rule in a single election.
Whether today’s emigration wave produces anything resembling that kind of political reckoning remains an open question, and the current government is itself already right-of-center, meaning any parallel political consequence would have to take a different shape than it did in 1977. But the underlying pattern from 1973 is worth sitting with regardless: a wave of departures driven by disillusionment with governing failures did not simply pass quietly once the immediate crisis ended. It became one of the forces that redrew Israeli politics for a generation. Whether the country’s current leadership recognizes today’s numbers as that same kind of warning, or waits, as it did once before, for the public to deliver the answer at the ballot box, is likely to matter more than the emigration statistics themselves.
