Photo

TEL AVIV — Israelis are fretting about emigration after a recent series on Channel 10 News featured disillusioned Israelis who left the homeland. The émigrés thought the country didn’t pay enough attention to the needs of the young and the middle class.

Comparing the cost of food, housing, schooling and transportation in Israel and in London, New Jersey and other popular destinations, the TV program revealed that there are nicer and cheaper places to live than Israel. We knew this already, but the reminder irked the proud among us. And it irked all the more because of all the places to move to, the yordim — Hebrew for “those who climb down” — seem to favor Berlin.

“Disgusting,” declared Gen. Uzi Dayan, retired, a former deputy chief of staff for the Israel Defense Forces and a former national security adviser.

Finance Minister Yair Lapid attacked the deserters on his Facebook page (a habit that has gotten him into trouble before). “I am in Budapest. I came here to speak before Parliament about anti-Semitism,” he explained, adding — with an ambiguous reference, to the Nazis or Hungarians — that “they tried to murder my father here just because Jews did not have a country of their own, how they killed my grandfather in a concentration camp, how they starved my uncles, how my grandmother was saved at the last moment from a death march.”

“So forgive me if I am a bit intolerant of people who are prepared to throw into the garbage the only country that the Jews have because Berlin is more comfortable.”

As it happens, not that many Israelis are throwing the country into the garbage. In recent years, about 15,000 Israeli citizens, mostly Jews, have emigrated annually, while about 10,000 have come back from abroad, according to official data. Not only is Israel’s rate of emigration low compared with other developed economies; that 5,000-person deficit is the lowest the country has known in 30 years.

Israel’s population has increased tenfold since its birth in 1948. New immigrants — also mostly Jewish — keep arriving, in numbers smaller than before but large enough to more than compensate for the Israelis who are leaving.

So why all the fretting? Because of a manifest sense of insecurity. Jewish Israelis remain exceedingly apprehensive that the Zionist enterprise has not been completed. Israel has few friends and many critics, plenty of whom see it as a colonialist power. It is also a state whose borders have yet to be properly defined.

As the columnist Ruthie Blum, herself an immigrant to Israel, wrote of the recent TV series, “There’s nothing like a tale of coming full circle — from Jews fleeing the Nazis, only to have their grandchildren flock back to Germany a few decades later for affordable housing, easily obtainable marijuana and trendy pubs — to make for an interesting study.” And for a study so disquieting that it convinces in spite of the facts.