In 2023 and 2024, Israel’s net emigration figures reached record highs. At the same time, interest among Jews in the Diaspora – particularly French Jews – in immigrating to Israel has never been higher, a double sign of the troubled times facing the Jewish people, two years after October 7.
In Israel’s most popular satirical television show, two people cross paths at Ben-Gurion Airport: one is leaving the country to settle in New York, while the other is arriving to settle in Israel. Each congratulates the other, believing they have made the same choice, until they realize they are heading in opposite directions. The sketch ends with both in complete perplexity.
Israelis disillusioned by Israel
Nothing better illustrates the reality of the Jewish people in 2025 than this sketch, as enormous numbers of Jewish families today are asking themselves where the best place is to raise their children.
Educated, integrated, patriotic middle- and upper-middle-class Israelis are wondering whether they can continue to live in a country that takes more from them each day to finance ultra-Orthodox populations who neither work nor serve in the army like them, or settlements tied to a messianic project they do not support.
These doubts are reinforced by the erosion of their freedoms, battered by a government determined to weaken or eliminate all checks and balances in Israel – first and foremost the media and the judiciary. These are the families who took to the streets for months in 2023, before the terrorist attack of October 7 came to remind them of another immediate threat: security.
Problems in the Diaspora
Already shaken by a rise in antisemitism since the 2000s in Europe, mainly in France, and since 2015 in the United States, Jews in the Diaspora have been living with a muted, constant anxiety since October 7, which shattered the few certainties they still had.
Between relentless attacks on American and European campuses, incendiary rhetoric from far-left parties criminalizing an entire country, the resurgence of conspiratorial far-right movements, and physical attacks on people or buildings that force Jews to hide or be “discreet,” Jews in the Diaspora are experiencing the most difficult period since the end of the Second World War.
The post-1945 world saw the emergence of a double miracle: the birth of a Jewish and democratic state, and a West rid of “respectable” antisemitism after the horror of the Holocaust. Jews (outside Arab countries and Eastern European countries) could choose to be Jewish citizens in a democracy, or citizens of a Jewish and democratic state.
Disguised in the trappings of radical anti-Zionism, the hatred they face is making their existence increasingly difficult in the West as visible or openly self-identified Jews. Meanwhile, it is a democratic failure that now weighs on Jews in Israel. Western democracies no longer know how to protect their Jews, and the Jewish state no longer knows how to protect its democratic rights.
This double failure opens an era of uncertainty for the Jewish people – an uncertainty that the creation of the State of Israel was meant to resolve. It calls for joint awakenings, in the Diaspora and in Israel alike, to allow Jews finally to live with peace of mind and to put an end to the endless search for passports and new “options,” a manifestation of their current distress.
Born and raised in France, the writer is the correspondent of French Jewish radio, Radio J, in the US, where he has been living for 15 years. He also holds US and Israeli citizenships. His opinions are his only.