ISRAEL – Della Pergola: Negative emigration balance not surprising

Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics reported that in 2024 emigration exceeded immigration by 18,000 people. “This has not happened since the 1980’s,” Italian-Israeli demographer and statistician Sergio Della Pergola, an emeritus professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a leading expert on the subject, told Pagine Ebraiche. “The first time emigrants outnumbered immigrants in Israel was in the 1950’s due to the economic crisis that resulted from the big aliyah of that time,” said the scholar. Economic concerns again had a considerable impact in the 1980’s, the second time a negative balance was recorded, “when inflation reached 400%.” Now for the third time, economic factors take center stage, tied to the war on multiple fronts.
Della Pergola is not surprised. “This is not an endemic crisis but one that can be explained by precise events: the October 7 attacks and the war,” he pointed out. “On the one hand, there is the fear for one’s own safety, beyond the immediate shock. Then we have the economic implications. Let’s not forget that there are people who lost their homes, who have lost their jobs or who have had to file for bankruptcy. Not to mention the issue of the internally displaced.” Nonetheless, the negative data remains relatively low, “we are not talking about millions of people,” and “some 14,000 among those who left the country did so right after Hamas’ massacres.” In the months that followed, emigration remained relatively stable.
Among the data that struck Della Pergola was the fact that emigration was, “proportionally five times the number,” of those who are classified by the Bureau of Statistics as “other,” meaning, neither Jewish according to Jewish Law (Halakhah) nor members of the Arab community. Among Arabs, on the other hand, emigration was “proportionally one-fifth” of their presence. But one year does not make a statistic. “The evaluation should be done over several years, between three and five. Only then will we be able to have a definitive idea, or at least a more precise one, on the potential ongoing trends.”

Adam Smulevich

Translated by Francesco Gambino and revised by Chiara Tona, students at the Advanced School for Interpreters and Translators of the University of Trieste, trainees in the newsroom of the Union of
the Italian Jewish Communities — Pagine Ebraiche.