Israel is facing an absolute existential crisis as tens of thousands of key role workers emigrate, with far fewer choosing to move there in return. Right, so Israel keeps telling the world it’s winning, it’s strong, it’s stable, it’s unbreakable — and meanwhile more than a quarter of its own population is quietly checking flight prices and Googling residency visas. When seventy-nine thousand people leave in a single year and the state can only tempt forty-six thousand back, you don’t need a demographer to tell you what direction the country is heading in. You just need a calendar and a passport. Because this isn’t the fringe doing the running. It’s the secular core — the engineers, the doctors, the teachers, the people who keep the lights on — deciding they’d rather build a life somewhere that isn’t permanently braced for its next catastrophe. And when the stabilisers are the first ones out the door, the wobble that follows isn’t a surprise. It’s the bill coming due when all you’re left with are the extremists. Right, so Israel is watching the people it relies on most quietly make plans to leave, and the state has created every condition pushing them out. You don’t get twenty-seven per cent of a population telling pollsters they’re considering emigration unless something has shifted at the level where people decide whether the place they live is still capable of giving them a future. I suppose it’s at least good to know that for many of them, that they can always go back to where they actually came from though. You don’t get a year where seventy-nine thousand depart to never return and only forty-six thousand arrive unless the internal story people tell themselves about their country has broken down. A country can survive many things, but it cannot survive losing the population that believes its tomorrow is worth staying for. What makes this more than another political argument is the composition of the people thinking of leaving. It isn’t a fringe. It isn’t a marginal bloc. It is the secular heart of the country, the high-tech engineers, the researchers, the medical staff, the academics, the younger families, the global middle class that pays the taxes, keeps the institutions functioning, and carries the cultural and professional bandwidth that makes a state feel like a state. When that group begins to drift, the consequences run deeper than numbers on a graph. It affects every institution, every election, every sector that depends on continuity, and every attempt to steer the country away from the extremes. And people always ask why. Why now, why this scale, why this kind of demographic? It is because the pressures that once felt temporary have turned into the norm. The wars and genocide in Gaza have ceased to be episodes and become the default setting now.