A tip of the kippah to the architects of Zionism — those stubborn visionaries who believed a battered people could build a modern state out of desert, memory, and sheer human will. They dreamed of a country that would gather Jews from around the world and give them safety, dignity, and a shared future. What they didn’t dream of was an Israel where the most talented and ambitious citizens were quietly searching for one-way flights to Lisbon.
The rupture of October 7 is the unavoidable backdrop to everything that follows. The attacks shattered not only lives but the national psyche, ripping open wounds that still haven’t begun to heal. Israel entered a war of necessity, fought with remarkable resolve, but the psychological aftershocks were immediate and profound. For many Israelis, especially young families and the globally mobile professionals who power the country’s economy, the sense of existential vulnerability didn’t fade once the bombs stopped falling. It lingered. It metastasized. And in that atmosphere of fear, uncertainty, and political dysfunction, the idea of building a life elsewhere shifted from unthinkable to merely tragic.
Yet that is where the country finds itself in 2025: the “Startup Nation” has become, alarmingly, the “Exit Nation.”
The data is unambiguous. From 2015 to 2021, Israeli emigration stayed within a familiar band, roughly 22,000 to 28,000 departures annually, normal for a developed country with global mobility. Then came 2022, when 55,000 people left, a 46 percent jump driven largely by the judicial overhaul crisis. In 2023, the figure climbed to roughly 64,000. And in 2024, the number exploded to nearly 83,000 Israelis leaving – the highest level ever recorded. Meanwhile, return migration and new immigration have not kept pace; Israel saw a net loss of roughly 27,000 to 30,000 people last year.
But the real story is not the quantity… it’s the quality. Those leaving are not the fringe, the disaffected, or the economically desperate. They’re engineers, cybersecurity specialists, software founders, medical professionals, researchers, academics, and young secular families. They are, in other words, the beating heart of Startup Nation. The people whose skills, taxes, and innovation have powered the country’s extraordinary success. When a nation’s creative and professional class votes with its feet, that’s not a demographic drift. It is a crisis of confidence.
Ask these emigrants why they’re leaving, and a pattern emerges. October 7 didn’t merely expose security failures, it shattered a foundational covenant. Israelis send their children to the army under a simple promise: the state will keep them safe. That promise was broken in ways too traumatic and too public to ignore, and trust cannot be restored with slogans or spin.
Add to that the political chaos of the judicial overhaul, which many Israelis saw not as a policy disagreement but as an attempted power grab that threatened the democratic character of the state. Add the corrosive, long-festering issue of Haredi draft exemptions, which send an unmistakable message to secular families: your children will serve; others will not. No modern democracy can sustain such an imbalance without consequence. And then there’s the cost of living. Tel Aviv is now so expensive that even well-paid families feel they are living in a parody of middle-class life. It’s a perfect storm of insecurity, inequity, and exhaustion.
But beneath these factors lies the deeper, unavoidable truth: Israel’s crisis is a crisis of leadership. The country has been governed for fifteen of the last sixteen years by Benjamin Netanyahu, a man who long sold himself as “Mr. Security” and the steady hand on the wheel. Under his tenure, Israel experienced its gravest security disaster in half a century, its most perilous internal fissures in decades, an unprecedented wave of emigration among its most talented citizens, and the rise of extremist coalition partners shaping national policy. This isn’t a partisan judgment; it’s a matter of observable outcomes. The prime minister has become so consumed by political survival – legal, electoral, and personal – that he has forfeited the one thing a leader must possess: the trust of his people.
To be clear, none of this erases the fact that Benjamin Netanyahu has steered Israel through the most harrowing chapter of its modern history. Whatever one thinks of him politically, his post–October 7 wartime execution has been formidable. He coordinated an immensely complex military campaign, held together a fragile emergency coalition, managed international pressure, and maintained operational clarity under unimaginable strain. Israel has asked much of him, and he has delivered more than many expected. But even great wartime leaders must know when their chapter is over. Netanyahu has earned the right to take a bow, and Israel has earned the right to turn the page. The country does not need him to disappear; it needs him to pass the torch so the political and generational renewal Israel desperately requires can finally begin.
And yet, for all the gloom, there is a path forward because Israel’s political future is not a barren field. There is a bench of leaders who have demonstrated competence and seriousness. Naftali Bennett, whatever one thinks of his ideology, governed without theatrics or corruption and showed that pragmatic coalition-building is not a lost art. Benny Gantz still commands broad public trust, especially among Israelis who want stability more than slogans. Gadi Eisenkot carries the gravitas of a security professional who has put country above career, and Yair Lapid and Tel Aviv’s longtime mayor Ron Huldai remain viable options for a public hungry for competence and calm. None is perfect, but perfection is not the job requirement. Israel needs leaders who prioritize the country over their careers, not the other way around.
And beyond the familiar names, a younger generation is beginning to stir, the first real sign that Israeli politics might yet free itself from the long shadow of its twentieth-century protagonists. Figures like Yonatan Shamriz, a rising social-entrepreneur-turned-public leader, represent a cohort that came of age after Oslo, after the Second Intifada, and now after October 7 — Israelis shaped less by ideology than by pragmatism and the lived experience of instability. There is a growing bench of under-50 activists, technologists, and civil-society leaders who emerged from the 2023–24 protest movements: people fluent in security realities but unwilling to accept the fatalism of the old guard; people who understand both code and combat. Their names are not yet household fixtures, and none has the machinery of a major party behind them, but they are already changing the tone of Israeli public life. If Israel is going to restore itself as Startup Nation rather than slide deeper into Exit Nation, the renewal may well come from this rising generation: leaders with no corruption cases, no coalition debts, and no nostalgia for a political era that has outlived its usefulness.
A nation can survive war, economic strain, even political division. What it cannot survive is the erosion of belief in its own trajectory. Herzl famously declared, “If you will it, it is no dream.” The current government has delivered an unintended counterpoint: “if you break it, they will leave”.
Israel stands at a crossroads. One path leads to renewal, new leadership, restored trust, a repaired social covenant, and a return to the creative dynamism that made the country the envy of the world. The other path leads to departure gates, LinkedIn updates announcing relocations, and a slow, corrosive hollowing-out of the very population that made Israel thrive.
The choice is stark. Startup Nation can still be saved. But only if Israelis, and their leaders, recognize that the country’s greatest risk is not external enemies. It is the internal failure of leadership. It is time for the political equivalent of aliyah: not people moving to Israel, but leadership rising to meet the moment.
Israel must decide what it wants to be: the nation that gathers its people, or the one that drives them away.
That’s all for the week. As usual, be safe out there.
Brad out.
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