Tel Aviv — When my father was born in Palestine, before the State of Israel was established, less than half a million Jews lived in this territory. In 1949 — a year after Israel was born — the one million threshold was crossed, and was celebrated with a poem by a leading literary figure of the day. “It is good to be a million,” Natan Alterman wrote. Two decades later, when I was growing up, the magic number was “three million.” In 2014, the count was more than six million Jews. Ten times the number of Jews on Israel’s inauguration.

It’s therefore amusing to follow the latest raging Israeli debate prompted by some Israelis’ threats to jump ship and leave the country. The number of Israeli Jews has grown but Israelis have still not outgrown their sense of demographic apprehension.

For educated, liberal Israelis it’s easy to air one’s frustration with the country and grab a headline by declaring their intention to leave. Last year, the public was chattering about young Israelis who were moving to Berlin, of all places, because of high rents in Tel Aviv. Now, Israel is threatened to be abandoned because it “is a dangerous place, which takes much more than it gives, for reasons that I do not accept”, as columnist Rogel Alpher wrote in Haaretz last week.

This threat is a dog that never bites. Certain Israeli leftists feel sidelined and powerless and therefore they threaten to leave, which makes the rest of Israelis even less attentive to their views. (Why would we listen to those who don’t even want to live here?) This, in turn, makes the leftists feel even more isolated.