At a panel on Israel yesterday at the University of Pennsylvania, Ian Lustick and Max Blumenthal spoke about how many Israeli Jews are gettin out of Dodge.
Blumenthal said (at 22:00) that Israel’s doomsday-and-apartheid political culture is causing the enlightened young to flock to more sophisticated places overseas.
Listen to Netanyahu hyping up the Holocaust to create political space for war on Iran… and you look at the reaction of young Israelis…[Leftists in Berlin have] rejected this doom and gloom from Netanyahu, they want light and justice.
We hear about how many Jews will leave Israel if there is a one-state future, he said; well, they’re leaving now. There are now 1 million Israeli expats, only Mexico and Sri Lanka have higher percentages of citizens living abroad (about 14 percent).
Lustick said the number is probably closer to 600,000 but he said these are the privileged people on whom Israel depended: Ashkenazi liberals moving abroad and staying abroad. And Israel deals with it, by encouraging, say, a New Jersey dentist to keep his practice here while commuting to his family in Israel.
This brings me to two recent reports on Israeli Diasporans in the U.S., in the media line.
Yesterday, Ali Abunimah reported that the Egyptian coup regime has hired a Washington p.r. firm with connections to the Clintons and Israel, including an exec who served in the Israeli Defense Forces and then worked for Bill Clinton and Al Gore as an advance man.
Last week, the Glover Park Group (GPG) filed lobbying registration forms with the US Department of Justice, stating that the firm will “provide public diplomacy, strategic communications counsel and government relations services” for the Egyptian regime headed by General Abdulfattah al-Sisi, The Hill reported.
As Middle East Monitor points out, a managing director of GPG is Arik Ben-Zvi.
“Ben-Zvi served in the Israeli Defense Forces and received his degree in History and Political Science from Tel Aviv University,” according to GPG’s website.
He also served as the “chief communications consultant on national and local elections in Israel, Bulgaria and the British Virgin Islands.”
Now this Israeli works alongside Carter Eskew and Dee Dee Myers, leading Clintonites.
And last week The New York Times’s Jennifer Miller reported on a N.Y. schmooze artist named Jonathan Levy who runs a salon in his spacious Upper West Side apartment that brings the influential to dinner parties. The piece was slightly mocking: “Want to Meet Influential New Yorkers? Invite Them to Dinner.”
Levy’s parents are Israeli artists who lead a binational life and list a New York address. They divide their time between an erased Palestinian village that’s now an Israeli artists colony and Central Park. Per the Times, their daughter is binational: she “is a hip-hop fusion artist who lives in New York and Tel Aviv.”
Her brother Jonathan, who “works in digital marketing at the publishing company Rodale,” likely has Israeli citizenship; he surely has the option of living in Israel. But he seems to prefer life as a media influencer in the diverse U.S.
Jennifer Miller quotes a friend saying Jonathan Levy “trawls” for influential people at Cannes and Burning Man.
In the advertising and start-up worlds, an influencer is a person, product or campaign that gets everyone else talking, tweeting and buying. Mr. Levy has a somewhat grander, if more abstract vision: He believes that bringing a diverse, influential community together will inevitably lead to collaborations that, he says, have the potential to “change the world.”
Thriving in American diversity, Jonathan Levy is.
And by the way, according to Pew, there are more Jews who live in the US (5,690,000) than in Israel (5,610,000).
If you were a thinking person would you want to live in Bibistan? Imagine having kids idf prepped from age 4. Imagine the parent teacher meetings. And all with side dishes of paranoia and provincialism.
oh my , that “artists who lead a binational life” link, the youtube video..is just…they live in ayn hawd! https://mondoweiss.net/2013/10/excerpt-blumenthals-loathing.html
Let us look at facts – shall we. Israeli emigration vs immigration.
This was always a problem in the difficult country like Israel. This is why I laugh at those who call us colonialists. Tough climate, tough neighborhood, miriads of better places to go – US, Canada, Australia, South America, in the past South Africa.
We are refugees not colonialists. The country used to be (and still is) very hard place to live economically and simply dangerous. Boys serve 3 years in the army and girls 2 years. “Wasting” their best years.
We are here because we love Israel. Actually majority of my colleagues could have had much better positions abroad (I resigned from a prestigious US place to return ). Same with essentially all high tech people or medical doctors or nurses, etc, ets. And some of course do. Many do but the fact is that many more stay. We just love thiscountry. It is our home.
Historically there were especially hard times in 30ies, early 50ies, after the Yom Kippur war in 70ies (atmosphere of doom and gloom after the perceived “failure in the war) and in the lost decade in 80ies. And, by the way always our enemies looked at these periods at us and “celebrated” our rapid coming disintegration. Bad luck guys – it never happened. Israel has beed and is very good at learning from its own mistakes and correcting them in times much shorter than other countries. Our learning curves are much steeper.
What happens now with emigration? Rapidly raising prices of the real estate, food and entertainment cause lots of grief among young couples who cannot get to own their own apartments or houses, can compare food prices with other countries via (they were always much higher as I saw in my many travels but there was no easy way to see this info) or see how more expensive say a bottle of a bear is. So here is a lot of talk about youth emigrating. But not because of the political situation. Blumenthal is wrong on that . Again I see hope in the eyes of our enemies. Don’t hold you breath – we managed to reach 8 mln from few hundred thousands in late 40ies.
Here are some facts
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yerida#History
1. Estimates of the extent of emigration during the period of the first and the second immigration wave range between approximately 40% (an estimation made by Joshua Kaniel) of all immigrants and up to 80–90%. In the latter part of the fourth immigration wave, during 1926–1928, the mandatory authorities recorded 17,972 Jewish immigrants and 14,607 Jewish emigrants.[3]
2. In 1980 the Jewish Agency studied emigration to the United States and estimated that there were 300,000 to 500,000 Israelis living in the United States, mainly in New York and Los Angeles.
3. Emmigration reached a peak in the 1980s, especially after the 1983 Israel bank stock crisis. In 1984 and 1985, more Jews emigrated from than immigrated to Israel.[6]
4. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development calculated an ‘expatriate rate’ of 2.9 persons per thousand, putting Israel in the mid-range of expatriate rates among the 175 OECD countries examined in 2005.
5. Between 8,000 and 15,000 Israeli expatriates live in Germany. Practically all of them reside in Berlin.[31]
About Berlin – this is a new and exotic destination http://www.jta.org/2011/07/05/news-opinion/world/israeli-expats-flocking-to-berlin-for-the-culture-and-the-passport
“Many Israelis come to Berlin for the same reasons that young people all over flock to this city: It is Europe’s hippest capital, a magnet for young artists, musicians and writers from around the world.
But the Israelis also are coming to Germany because it’s a relatively easy country from which Jews can obtain a second passport: To be eligible, they must have a parent or grandparent who was persecuted by the Nazis. Once they have a German passport, they can live anywhere in Europe.”
But not for political reasons as Blumenthal and this blog try to represent.
“We hear about how many Jews will leave Israel if there is a one-state future, he said; well, they’re leaving now.”
What do you mean “if”, white man? They are living in a one-state situation (with the same as its likely future) NOW. And a few don’t like it. too bad it’s so few, and too bad the complaining is not publicized.
What the hell does this mean? Honestly.
Can someone translate this PR garbage?