No place like home....
Israelis leave their land, forced out by a battered economy and years of violence
By Justin Huggler in Jerusalem
20 November 2003
Jean Max emigrated from Britain to Israel in 1970 as a committed Zionist. Her three children were born and grew up in Israel. But since they reached adulthood, all three have left for new lives in the United States.
And Ms Max, now divorced, is planning to follow them. Her American visa has arrived, she is going to Boston, where her daughter lives, to look for work. If she finds it, she is leaving Israel after 33 years.
Ms Max and her family are part of a growing phenomenon that has the Israeli political establishment worried. New figures from the Immigration and Absorption Ministry stunned the establishment. Those figures show 760,000 Israeli citizens now live abroad. The ministry says its figures are an informal estimate, based on research by Israeli embassies around the world.
Even so, for a country of just 6,600,000, it is a large number. But the big surprise was the growth in the number of Israelis living abroad: in 2000, it was 550,000. That increase has undoubtedly been fuelled by the suicide bombings and other attacks by Palestinian militants over the past three years, and by the severe recession into which the Israeli economy has been plunged.
[...]
Israelis leave the country for many reasons. Ms Max says she and her family did not decide to go because of the violence. "I'm leaving because I've always wanted to," she says. "I came here as a Zionist but found Israeli culture was very different from what I was used to." She stayed, she says, first because she met her husband, then for her children.
But now her children have left, she wants to follow them. Her children went for their own reasons. Only her eldest son, Adam, might return if the suicide bombings stopped and the economic situation improved, she thinks.
But Ms Max's neighbours in Jerusalem did leave because of the suicide bombings. "They said they were too frightened for their children to stay here," Ms Max says. "They went back to Australia, where they had come from. But they said it was very difficult to start a new life."
Because Ms Max's former husband is American, her children have US citizenship. In Israel's immigrant society, many Israelis have second passports, and can leave the country easily. In the past year, embassies in Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary [and Germany, France, Belgium, Lithuania... pick your own: (*)] have had long queues of second-generation Israelis claiming their right to their parents' old citizenship.
[snip]
news.independent.co.uk
(*) Message 19419571
Talk about a tear-jerker, huh? Those poooor Israelis who've got only ONE homeland!!! And those ugly Palestinians with dozens of passports who savagely want to drive them all to the sea!!!
When are you leaving, Bob? Oh dear! You gonna miss Eilat beaches, huh? But... idiot that I'm! You've left already!! You're a Manhattan couch Zionist! You're a Jupiter Island hill settler! You're a Malibu penthouse kibbutznik! |
