On a visit to Eastern Europe last week, Yair Lapid, Israel’s telegenic finance minister, wrote a defiant yet innocent-seeming Facebook post: “A word to all of those who are ‘fed up’ and ‘leaving for Europe,’ ” he began,

I happen to be in Budapest at the moment. I came to give a speech in parliament against anti-Semitism and to remind them how my father was almost murdered here because the Jews had no state of their own; how my grandfather was killed in a concentration camp; how my uncles were starved; how my grandmother was saved from a death march at the last moment. So forgive me if I’m a little impatient with those who are willing to throw away the only country the Jews have because it’s easier to live in Berlin.

Lapid’s harsh words appeared to be directed at the subjects of a highly rated new documentary show, which examines the lives of Israelis living abroad. The show is called “The New Yordim,” the last word being a semi-derogatory term in Hebrew used to describe expatriates. Yordim means “those who descend,” as opposed to olim, people who immigrated to Israel, or, literally, “those who ascend.” The charged terminology provides a clue into how divisive the phenomenon of uprootedness is—and has always been—in Israeli society. (Yitzhak Rabin once called Israeli expatriates “a debris of weaklings.”)

At first glance, the numbers seem to justify the alarm: more than half a million Israelis, or about seven per cent of the population, live abroad, according to the Central Bureau of Statistics. The majority resides in the U.S. or in Canada, but recent years have also seen a booming Israeli community take root in Europe, especially in Berlin. The expatriates tend to be young and educated, in search of graduate degrees or better-paying jobs—part of the famous “brain drain” that is changing the entire developed world and against which many politicians have railed.

The truth behind these numbers paints a different picture, however: the statistics define as an expatriate anyone living overseas for at least a year. (I am one of them, and so, by the way, was Lapid, who spent several years in the U.S.) Yet, ask these people where they see themselves in five or ten years, and many of them would not flinch before answering: in Israel. Their reasons for leaving are largely financial or educational. Yes, some settle down in their adopted countries, but a surprising number of them come back. In 2010, for example, fifteen thousand Israelis left the country, but ten thousand returned. These extended trips abroad, therefore, represent a stepping stone for many Israelis, a prolonged layover on a journey whose final destination is Israel. (Some fields of work, admittedly, make it easier to return than others. In academia, the situation in Israel is dire. Two of this year’s Nobel Laureates in chemistry, which was announced yesterday, are Israeli citizens who had left the country; one of them complained that he couldn’t find tenure.)

Yet Lapid chose to ignore the financial squeeze that was driving Israelis away. If, in writing his diatribe, he was hoping to ride a wave of shared indignation, he could not have predicted that the tide would swiftly shift and come crashing over him.

“Mr. Lapid, before you talk about Zionism, when was the last time you had to worry about making ends meet?” one Haaretz op-ed writer asked. In another highly circulated blog post, the journalist Amir Mizroch pounced on Lapid’s familial reference: “You talked about your parents? Well let me tell you about my parents, and the parents of many other young people I know here in Israel,” Mizroch wrote. “Our parents come out of retirement so that they can help us; they take out mortgages on houses they already own; they buy groceries for us, they babysit our children because we have to work two jobs, and because daycare, like everything else in this country, is exorbitantly expensive.”

These commenters, and many others, articulated the findings from a fascinating recent survey by the financial newspaper Calcalist: eighty-seven per cent of Israelis over the age of twenty-five are financially dependent on their parents. That’s a startling figure that requires some unpacking.

First, by “financial support,” the survey doesn’t mean an occasional gift, such as a one-time cash infusion to make up for rent or a celebratory check for graduation. Researchers explicitly reported that it represents a steady, monthly flow of money from parents to their children, worth an average of twenty-five thousand dollars a year.

Second, as opposed to what many might think, most of the parents who support their children aren’t wealthy; the money they regularly give represents between fifteen and twenty-four per cent of their income (often coming directly out of their pension funds or social security).

Last, and perhaps most importantly, by “children” the survey, in fact, means nothing of the kind: those being backed by their parents are not the twenty-something millennials we hear about in the U.S., who move back home while searching for work, but rather people in their thirties and forties, many of whom have children of their own—and even careers. The point isn’t that they’re not working, but that they can’t keep up with the steep rise in the country’s cost of living.

While wages in Israel have stagnated over the past decade, on the heels of a 2001 recession, prices have continued to go up. The uptick is most widely felt when it comes to housing: in the U.S., it takes three years of work on average for someone to be able to buy an apartment, while in Israel it takes almost eight, according to statistics from the Taub Center for Social Policy Studies. People’s ability to afford food has eroded, too. In 2005, for example, the price of dairy products in Israel was six per cent higher than in other Western countries; by 2008, it was forty-four per cent higher. Several factors account for these shifts, such as rich foreign nationals buying secondary homes in Israel and pricing locals out of the market (the seafront in Tel Aviv is now known as a ghost town because of all the apartments that stand empty, awaiting their French, Russian, or American owners). The rising price of food has been caused, in part, by the lack of competition in manufacturing and distribution, in which a few large conglomerates are able to keep prices high. But all this only exacerbates the skewed mechanism already at work: what the young generation can’t afford, the older generation is forced to pay for.