While government laws blurring legal and physical residency make accurate numbers hard to gauge, the Israeli parliament’s own figures and those of think tanks show that increased emigration, particularly among secular Israelis, has significantly slowed the growth of Israel’s population. In all, driven by war and an increasingly polarised society, more than 150,000 people have left Israel in the past two years, and more than 200,000 since the current government took office in December 2022.
[Israeli economist] "Dan Ben-David estimates that Israel relies on around 300,000 members of a core elite to sustain it,” Hever added. “So if a significant number leave, it stops being a developed economy and becomes a developing economy … which it can’t really afford. It just doesn’t have the luxury of losing its economic power or its standard of living. For a colonial state to exist, it relies on occupying land – and that costs money.”
Some observers, such as Chatham House’s Yossi Mekelberg, were philosophical over the future of the country, or if it might collapse, saying: “When dictatorships come to an end, they break into pieces. Democracies are chipped away bit by bit until they change beyond recognition.”
“If Netanyahu and the ultra-right and ultra-Orthodox stay in power, this is the direction,” he said, “with the more liberal minded and socially mobile leaving the country”.