Sneak Peek: Nadav on what’s driving the wave of migration from Israel, and more…

**Dan Senor** (0:00)
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**Nadav Eyal** (0:46)
You are listening to an Ark Media podcast.

**Dan Senor** (0:58)
Welcome to Inside Call Me Back, our members-only edition where we open the door and let you shape the conversation. Today in the hot seat, addressing your questions and personal dilemmas is Ark Media contributor Nadav Eyal.
Nadav, welcome back to The Inside.

**Nadav Eyal** (1:12)
Thanks for having me again, Dan. All right.

**Dan Senor** (1:14)
The first question is from Lily from Rehovot. Hi, Arkim. I'm Israeli, but sometimes I learn more from Call Me Back than I do from Israeli media. That's no insult to you, Nadav. You are a hybrid, Israeli media and Ark. I just want to make sure your fragile ego is not injured by Lily here. I'm a researcher at the Weitzman Institute in Rehovot, and I recently saw concerning data about the number of highly educated Israelis who have left Israel since 2023 I am worried, she writes, as I see that happening around me. Do you have reliable data on this phenomenon, and what do you think is the long-term impact of this trend?
I have some thoughts on this too, but I'll let you go first.

**Nadav Eyal** (1:54)
Between the years 2023 to 2025, including these years, 270,000 Israeli citizens left the country. By leaving the country, I mean they left the country and they didn't return for at least three months. Just to compare that, between 2010 and 2019, it's about 60,000 per year. So this is a wave of migration out of Israel, according to a team of professors from the Tel Aviv University, led by Professor Itay Atal, who published these data, by the way, before October 7th. And I would say following the judicial overhaul in which many people said they're gonna leave, it turns out they actually started leaving. Now, in terms of who's leaving, there we don't have the 2025 data, but we do have previous data from 2023 and 2024
There is no doubt that the people that are leaving are young families, both parents working, graduate degrees, sometimes kind of postgraduate degrees, PhDs, young researchers, exactly the kind of the population that you would want Israel to still have. That's the bad news.
Now, to put it in context, we've seen these kind of waves of migration out of Israel before, in the 1980s. We also saw a wave after the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

**Dan Senor** (3:17)
When it happened in the 1980s, what do you understand now to have been the cause for that?

**Nadav Eyal** (3:20)
Well, the 1980s are seen by Israeli economists as the lost decade of Israeli economy.

**Dan Senor** (3:26)
Oh, I know. I got a whole chapter in Startup Nation on that.

**Nadav Eyal** (3:29)
Yes, absolutely. It began actually in 1977 So until 1977, Israeli growth was extremely substantial. Beginning 1978, 1979, it started dropping the Israeli growth rates of the economy. And the 1980s were highly problematic. You also had the Antifada during these years. You had a national unity government, so everybody was really relatively happy on the political field, but nothing got done.
Their reforms were moving really slowly. And this all changed in 1989, 1990, by the way, because of what? Because of the immigration to Israel. A wave of immigration to Israel from the former USSR of more than a million people, more than 10% of the populations came to the country. This is the most highly educated immigration in the history of the world.

**Dan Senor** (4:16)
It's a fifth of Israel's population was immigrated and assimilated in a decade. I don't think there's been any period anywhere that I can think of that has absorbed that many people and actually successfully and effectively integrated them.

**Nadav Eyal** (4:28)
Yes, and by the way, highly effective workers working diligently, very hard, high education, high technical skills. And you see their kids today in the tech sector. You see their kids, by the way, inventing the AI revolution at Palo Alto these days. This all comes from that wave of immigration from the USSR. It was the best and the brightest of the USSR that came to Israel. And that was a miracle to Israeli economy. And together with a lot of reforms, much of them conducted during the Rabin government, which you wouldn't expect, right? It's a labor government, but for instance, the National Health Insurance Bill that is considered one of the best in the world today, also efficient, efficient, not wastey of taxpayers' money. That's during the Rabin government. And things changed together with the Oslo Accords, whatever you want to think about that. It broke the boycott. Now we talk about boycott against Israel. There was a ferocious boycott against Israel in 1970s and 80s, and it was broken in the 1990s because of the political process. It didn't end with peace agreements, but it did end with the Israeli economy being more entrenched into the global economy. Now this can happen again, of course. And I'm also hearing from many Israelis, and this is anecdotal what I'm saying right now, after a few years, they're starting to understand the prices of being an immigrant, even if it's in a wonderful home of the brave country. And there's only one like that around the world. That's the United States. Even there, when Israelis feel most welcome, I think, in the United States, they also understand that their kids are not going to grow up as Israelis. And some of them are starting to think about returning back home. But many people are also looking at what's happening in the political field to see if things are changing. And I want to explain something really important about that. I see that the anti-Semites, anti-Israeli crowd are having a field day with this data, which, as you can hear, Dan, I am not sugarcoating. I think it's a real crisis that Israel needs to deal with.