Zionism is founded on the idea of Jews migrating to Palestine and later Israel. For that reason, those who move there are given aid and accorded a lofty title – “Aliyah” – which literally means “ascent” in Hebrew. Jewish immigration is provided for under the controversial Law of Return, which Palestinians regard as another instrument in their dispossession and Israelis view as a tool for Jewish self-determination. In contrast, emigration is frowned upon and is known as “Yerida” (“Descent”) in the Zionist lexicon, implying some kind of fall from grace.

Just how many do Aliyah or Yerida is a highly contested and emotive issue, with the state keeping tabs mainly on those who arrive. According to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, more than 3.1 million people have immigrated to Israel since the founding of the state. In recent years, this has averaged at just over 16,000 annually. Interestingly and unexpectedly, the rate was much higher during the second intifada, with around 60,000 moving to Israel in 2000 and some 43,000 in 2001. The rate of emigration – and the number of Israelis living abroad – is harder to pin down, for both practical and ideological reasons. The Central Bureau of Statistics estimates that about 16,000 Israelis left the country for more than a year in 2012 – which would cancel out the number of immigrants that arrived during the same period. The current Netanyahu government says that somewhere between 800,000 to 1 million Israelis live in the diaspora, with the World Council of Israelis Abroad opting for the higher figure.

But beyond the impersonal statistics, what motivates Jews to immigrate and Israelis to emigrate? There is no simple, single explanation for why diaspora Jews move to Israel. Immigrant Jews I have encountered moved to Israel for a complex variety of reasons: ideological, personal, cultural, social, political, religious and just for the hell of it.

“Israel to me is like a lover,” believes Alex Stein. “If you’re in a loving relationship with someone or something, you commit yourself to it.” And being a “lover” has effectively meant that Stein can be a passionate defender of his adopted homeland, especially at times of high tension, such as the 2014 conflict in Gaza.

For Lisa Goldman, the decision to move to Israel was originally “motivated by idealism”, though she stresses that “I never said I made Aliyah – I don’t like the term.” Despite these reservations, Goldman’s Jewishness was a vital factor. “My Jewish identity was always very important to me but I didn’t know how to express it – I didn’t want to express it religiously,” she notes.
There are also those who come out of religious conviction and others who find religion after they arrive – sometimes to an extreme degree. “I don’t know, something shifted … something clicked and pushed me in a different direction,” David Wilder, who grew up in a secular Jewish household in America but now heads the ultra-ideological settler community in Hebron, widely regarded as among the most extreme, told me in one of the most unlikely encounters I had here. “I became more religious, having become introduced to religious Judaism, which I didn’t know anything about before.”

While historically most of the traffic has been towards Israel, this is changing, and some native-born Israelis actually grew up abroad. Ricky Ben-David, a journalist and TV producer, left Israel early in life when her parents moved to Canada for work. “Growing up I was aware that at home [in Montreal], my [Jewish] friends did not speak Hebrew, like we did, or necessarily had family in Israel, like we did,” she recalls. Ben-David’s decision to return to Israel was driven by nostalgia. “Israel was where my extended family lived, where my parents grew up, where we went on summer vacations. It was all long days at the beach and festive, noisy dinners with relatives,” she points out.

As for emigration, those who leave do so for a variety of reasons. Some depart out of disillusionment with the state of affairs in Israel, such as Amos Elon. “Nothing has changed here in the last 40 years,” he confessed before his final departure in 2004. For some who did Aliyah, the reality in Israel brings them back down to earth with a thud. “Israel is a place I care about, though I can’t live there,” admits Goldman, who now lives in New York.
A growing number of native-born Israelis are lured by the temptations of Yerida for an equally wide range of reasons. Those keenest to join the diaspora so belittled by Zionist ideology often belong to the demographic which built Israel in the first place: secular, educated and progressive or liberal. “I don’t want to live in a bubble, certainly not one that’s protected by an Iron Dome,” wrote Israeli journalist Rogel Alpher in the aftermath of the Gaza war. “My fate and the fate of my children will be determined here by people who have a God whom they talk to and in whose name they act. I think they are crazy.”

And Alpher is not a lone voice. A recent poll found that a full 30% of Israeli Jews would leave the country if they had the opportunity. The depth of this flight instinct is demonstrated by the Israelis choosing to live in countries they once shunned because of their history of persecuting Jews, such as Germany, where a vibrant Israeli community has set up shop in Berlin. Then there was the bewildering “Spanish freak out”, when Israelis went crazy over an offer of citizenship to the descendants of Jews expelled from Iberia by Spain in what was possibly the worst case of Jewish ethnic cleansing prior to the Holocaust. “Israelis today, it seems, react to the chance of a foreign citizenship with the enthusiasm usually reserved for people dying of thirst after they find water,” observed one journalist, which reflects “Israel’s love-hate relationship with [the] diaspora”.

This is an edited extract from Intimate Enemies: Living with Israelis and Palestinians in the Holy Land by Khaled Diab (Guardian Shorts £1.99 / $2.99).

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