Who's leaving Israel?

Contents

"Sixty-nine thousand Israelis left Israel in 2025," the headlines blared. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tried to sound reassuring, and said that to the best of his knowledge thousands of the emigrants were people born in Ukraine who were returning there, although he conceded that further examination was required. Leader of the Opposition Yair Lapid was much less tentative. "The emigration this year is not from Ukraine," he declared from the Knesset podium earlier this month, "They are only Israeli citizens. At least take the trouble to check the facts," he called to Netanyahu. So we took the trouble to check the facts.

Let us first recall the context. These questions arose last year over the same Central Bureau of Statistics report. It turned out that the number of people leaving Israel shot up in 2024, and this was seized upon by the opposition, which sought to portray it as a negative consequence of the government’s conduct. The counter argument was that the growth in emigration chiefly stemmed from new immigrants from Ukraine and Russia who apparently came to Israel because of the war in Ukraine and the extensive military conscription in both countries.

The difference this time, according to Lapid, is that the counter argument is no longer valid, as the latest figures indicate that the emigrants are not people who came to Israel temporarily and chose to move on, but permanent residents. Are they?

According to the CBS figures, 69.5 thousand people emigrated from Israel in 2025. (An emigrant is defined as "an Israeli who stays overseas for at least nine months cumulatively in the year from the date he or she departs from Israel, of which the first three months are consecutive.") But contrary to Lapid’s statement, these are not "just" native-born Israelis. In fact, almost half of them were born overseas: 33.5 thousand people, representing 48% of the emigrants. Native-born Israelis account for 36 thousand emigrants, 52% of the total.

But Lapid is not entirely wrong. The number of native-born Israelis who left in 2025 is the highest ever in a single year. Moreover, 2025 was the second consecutive year in which the number broke the record, following the jump in 2024. In the period 2010-2019, before the Covid pandemic and the war in Ukraine, about 23 thousand native-born Israelis left the country each year on average. The 2025 figure is thus 58% higher than the numbers recorded before the pandemic.

No response to the analysis was forthcoming from Yair Lapid.

Conclusion: Lapid’s statements are inaccurate. Almost half of the 69 thousand people who left Israel last year were not native-born Israelis. However, that year did see the highest ever number of native-born emigrants.