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Alarmed by their country’s political direction, more Israelis are seeking to move abroad
TEL AVIV (JTA) — When Daniel Schleider and his wife, Lior, leave Israel next month, it will be for good — and with a heavy heart.
“I have no doubt I will have tears in my eyes the whole flight.” said Schleider, who was born in Mexico and lived in Israel for a time as a child before returning on his own at 18. Describing himself as “deeply Zionist,” he served in a combat unit in the Israeli army, married an Israeli woman and built a career in an Israeli company.
Yet as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu returned to power, assembled a coalition that includes far-right parties and started pushing changes that would erode hallmarks of Israeli democracy, Schleider found himself booking plane tickets and locating an apartment in Barcelona. Spain’s language and low cost of living made the city a good fit, he said, but the real attraction was living in a place where he wouldn’t constantly have to face down the ways that Israel is changing.
Israel’s strength over its 75 years, Schleider said, is “the economy we built by selling our brains.… And yet, in less than half a year, we’ve managed to destroy all that.”
Schleider has been joining the sweeping protests that have taken root across the country in response to the new right-wing government and its effort to strip the Israeli judiciary of much of its power and independence. But while he considered recommitting to his country and fighting the changes rather than fleeing over them, he also accepts the government’s argument that most Israelis voted for something he doesn’t believe in.
Daniel Schleider and his wife Lior are leaving Israel for Barcelona because of the political instability in their country. (Courtesy Schleider)
“I have a lot of internal conflict,” he said about the protests. “Who am I to fight against what the majority has accepted?”
Schleider is far from alone in seeking to leave Israel this year. While Israelis have always moved abroad for various reasons, including business opportunities or to gain experience in particular fields, the pace of planned departures appears to be picking up. No longer considered a form of social betrayal, emigration — known in Hebrew as yerida, meaning descent — is on the table for a wide swath of Israelis right now.
Many of the people weighing emigration were already thinking about it but were catalyzed by the new government, according to accounts from dozens of people in various stages of emigration and of organizations that seek to aid them.
“I’ve already been on the fence for a few years — not in terms of leaving Israel but in terms of relocating for something new,” said Schleider.
“But in the past year, with all the craziness and everything, I realized where the country was going. And after the recent elections, my wife — who had been unconvinced — was the one who took the step and said now she understood where the public is going and what life is going to be like in the country. You could call it the straw that broke the camel’s back,” he said.
“And then when the whole issue of the [judicial] revolution started, we just decided not to wait and to do it immediately.”
Ocean Relocation, which assists people with both immigration to and emigration from Israel, has received more than 100 inquiries a day from people looking to leave since Justice Minister Yariv Levin first presented his proposal for judicial reform back in January. That’s four times the rate of inquiries the organization received last year, according to senior manager Shay Obazanek.
“Never in history has there been this level of demand,” Obazanek said, citing the company’s 80 years’ experience as the “barometer” of movement in and out the country.
Shlomit Drenger, who leads Ocean Relocation’s business development, said those looking to leave come from all walks of life. They include families pushed to leave by the political situation; those investing in real estate abroad as a future shelter, if needed; and Israelis who can work remotely and are worried about the country’s upheaval. Economics are also a concern: With foreign investors issuing dire warnings about Israel’s economy if the judicial reforms go through, companies wary to invest in the country and the shekel already weakening, it could grow more expensive to leave in the future.
The most common destination for the new departures, Drenger said, is Europe, representing representing 70% of moves, compared to 40% in the recent past. Europe’s draws include its convenient time zones, quality-of-life indices, and chiefly, the relative ease in recent years of obtaining foreign passports in countries such as Portugal, Poland and even Morocco. Many Israelis have roots in those countries and are or have been entitled to citizenship today because their family members were forced to leave under duress during the Holocaust or the Spanish Inquisition.
Israelis protesting against the government’s controversial judicial reform bill block the main road leading to the departures area of Ben Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv on March 9, 2023. (Ahmad Gharabli/AFP via Getty Images)
On the other hand, Drenger said, emigration to the United States, where the vast majority of the 1 million Israeli citizens abroad live, has declined significantly. The United States is known for its tough immigration laws and high cost of living in areas with large Israeli and Jewish communities, and even people who have no rights to a foreign passport have an easier time obtaining residency rights in Europe than the United States.
Some Israelis aren’t picking anywhere in particular before leaving. Ofer Stern, 40, quit his job as a tech developer, left Israel and is now traveling around the world before deciding where to settle.
“We’re living in a democracy and that democracy is dependent on demography and I can’t fight it,” he said, alluding to the fact that Orthodox Jews, who tend to be right wing, are the fastest-growing segment of the Israeli population. “The country that I love and that I’ve always loved will not be here in 10 years. Instead, it will be a country that is suited to other people, but not for me.”
While others have already started their emigration process, American-born Marni Mandell, a mother of two living in Tel Aviv, is still on the fence. Her greatest fear is that judicial reforms could open the door to significant changes in civil rights protections — and in so doing break her contract with the country she chose.
“If this so-called ‘reform’ is enacted, which is really tantamount to a coup, it’s hard to imagine that I want my children to grow up to fight in an army whose particularism outweighs the basic human rights that are so fundamental to my values,” Mandell said.
Most people who look into emigrating for political reasons do not end up doing so. In the weeks leading up to the United States’ 2020 presidential election, inquiries to law firms specializing in helping Americans move abroad saw a sharp uptick in inquiries — many of them from Jews fearful about a second Trump administration after then-President Donald Trump declined to unequivocally condemn white supremacists. When President Joe Biden was elected, they largely called off the alarm.
The Trump scenario is not analogous with the Israeli one for several reasons, starting with the fact that the Israelis are responding to an elected government’s policy decisions, not just the prospect of an election result. What’s more, U.S. law contains safeguards designed to prevent any single party or leader from gaining absolute power. Israel has fewer of those safeguards, and many of those appear threatened if the government’s proposals go through.
Casandra Larenas had long courted the idea of moving overseas. “As a childfree person, Israel doesn’t have much to offer and is a really expensive country. I’ve traveled around so I know the quality of life I can reach abroad,” she said. But she said she had always batted away the idea: “I’m still Jewish and my family are still here.”
Clockwise from upper left: Benjamin-Michael Aronov, Casandra Larenas and Ofer Stern are all leaving Israel because of political unrest there. (All photos courtesy)
That all changed with the judicial overhaul, she said. While not against the idea of a reform per se, Laranes is firmly opposed to the way it is being carried out, saying it totally disregards the millions of people on the other side. Chilean-born, Laranes grew up under Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship.
“I still remember [it] and I don’t want something like that again,” said Larenas, who has purchased a plane ticket for later this spring and plans to take up residency abroad — though she said she would maintain her citizenship and hoped to return one day.
The departure of liberal and moderate Israelis could have implications on Israel’s political future. Israel does not permit its citizens to vote absentee, meaning that anyone who leaves the country must incur costly, potentially frequent travel to participate in elections — or cede political input altogether.
Benjamin-Michael Aronov, who grew up with Russian parents in the United States, said he was taken aback by how frequently Israelis express shock that he moved to Israel in the first place. “The No. 1 question I get from Israelis is, ‘Why would you move here from the U.S.? We’re all trying to get out of here. There’s no future here.’”
He said he had come to realize that they were right.
“I thought the warnings were something that would truly impact our children or grandchildren but that our lifetime would be spent in an Israeli high-tech, secular golden era. But I’m realizing the longevity of Tel Aviv’s bubble of beaches and parties and crazy-smart, secular people changing the world with technology is maybe even more a fantasy now than when Herzl dreamt it,” Aronov said. “I found my perfect home, a Jewish home, sadly being undone by Jews.”
Not everyone choosing to jump ship is ideologically aligned with the protest movement. Amir Cohen, who asked to use a pseudonym because he has not informed his employers of his plans yet, is a computer science lecturer at Ariel University in the West Bank who voted in the last election for the Otzma Yehudit party chaired by far-right provocateur Itamar Ben-Gvir. Cohen was willing to put aside his ideological differences with the hared Orthodox parties if it meant achieving political stability — but was soon disillusioned.
“None of it is working. And now we’re on our way to civil war, it’s that simple. I figured, ‘I don’t need this nonsense, there are plenty of places in the world for me to go,’” he said.
Thousands of Israeli protesters rally against the Israeli goverment’s judicial overhaul bills in Tel Aviv, March 4, 2023. (Gili Yaari Flash90)
Cohen stuck with the country after one of his brothers was killed in the 2014 Gaza War. Now, he said, his other brothers have recently followed his lead and applied for Hungarian passports in an effort to find a way to move abroad permanently.
“I’m not alone,” he said. “Most of my friends and family feel the same way.”
Others still, like Omer Mizrahi, view themselves as apolitical. A contractor from Jerusalem, Mizrahi, 27, headed to San Diego, California, a month ago as a result of the reform. Mizrahi, who eschewed casting a vote in the last election, expressed a less common impetus for leaving: actual fear for his life. Mizrahi described sitting in traffic jams in Jerusalem and realizing that if a terror attack were to unfold — “and let’s be honest, there are at least one or two every week” — he wouldn’t be able to escape in time because he was caught in a gridlock. “Our politicians can’t do anything about it because they’re too embroiled in a war of egos.”
Now 7,500 miles away, Mizrahi says he feels like he’s finally living life. “I sit in traffic now and I’m happy as a clam. Everything’s calm.”
Back in Israel, Schleider is making his final preparations for leaving, advertising his Tesla for sale on Facebook this week. He remains hopeful that the massive anti-government protests will make a difference. In the meantime, though, his one-way ticket is scheduled for April 14.
“I dream of coming back, but I don’t know that it will ever happen,” he said. “We made a decision that was self-serving, but that doesn’t mean we’re any less Zionist.”
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ITV’s ‘Breaking Ranks’: The IDF Soldier Documentary That Broke From the Truth
Then-IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, center, speaking to commanders and soldiers in the Golan Heights on Dec. 13, 2024. Photo: IDF.
A new documentary airing on ITV, Breaking Ranks: Inside Israel’s War, claims to be “the story of the war in Gaza told by the soldiers who fought it.”
An insider account of war sounds promising, especially amid the flood of misinformation online from people who were never on the ground as IDF soldiers and have no experience of the reality of fighting a terrorist organization.
Yet, of all the thousands of soldiers, both in mandatory service and reserve duty, the documentary presents a carefully selected handful of soldiers to tell the story of what they believe really happened in Gaza.
But the story they tell distorts — if not entirely omits — key facts. The film overlooks the reality of what it means to fight a terrorist organization driven by an ideology of extermination, one that deliberately embeds itself among civilians to wage war from within their communities.
That didn’t stop other media outlets from jumping on allegations of war crimes, with outlets such as The Guardian and Independent publishing pieces based on the documentary’s conclusions. That the Tehran Times gleefully pounced on it as well tells a story in itself.
The War Against Hamas
While the film does spend a few minutes showcasing the horrific tragedies of the October 7, 2023, massacre led by Hamas, it quickly shifts its focus to alleged atrocities committed by the IDF in the aftermath.
From the very beginning, the IDF made it explicitly clear that the war was against terrorist organizations only – there was no deliberate targeting of innocent civilians in Gaza. The IDF has maintained this throughout the war, taking every measure possible to warn the civilian population of any potential danger, including sending leaflets before a targeted strike and creating civilian zones to ensure the safety of non-combatants.
The complexity of fighting a terrorist organization is largely overlooked throughout the film. At one point, the use of force in Gaza is called “unprecedented in combat in terms of the number of explosives dropped per square mile,” making it out to be worse than the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What it fails to acknowledge is that Israel precisely targets terrorists and terrorist infrastructure.
That viral cartoon comparing Gaza to Hiroshima and London is seriously misleading. Designed to provoke outrage, the reality shows Israel’s precision in targeting terrorists, even in the toughest situations. Context matters. pic.twitter.com/rxvi2YBvl2
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) December 14, 2024
Of course, for the documentary to accurately acknowledge the terrorist infrastructure in Gaza, it would have to spend a considerable amount of time discussing the vast tunnel network Hamas has built beneath the entirety of the Gaza Strip. However, this undeniable fact gets quickly glossed over. The filmmakers suggest the tunnels are merely used for “smuggling, warfare, and to avoid Israeli airstrikes.”
This framing subtly shifts blame onto Israel, as if Hamas’s need to “avoid” the Israeli air force is a defensive response rather than a deliberate strategy to wage war from beneath civilian areas. Terrorism? The inhumane holding and torture of hostages in clear violation of every facet of humanitarian law? Entirely unmentioned.
Breaking the Silence
The omission of the true purpose of the tunnels instead becomes spun into a claim based on hearsay that the IDF uses human shields in Gaza. Despite the IDF’s unequivocal denial of such allegations, this assertion is amplified by the interviewees.
However, this should come as no surprise, as one of the interviewees, under the name “Yaakov,” has previously espoused this claim to the New York Times via Breaking the Silence. This highly politicized Israeli organization spends less of its time trying to convince the Israeli public of its case and more on providing the foreign media with fodder to attack Israel.
While the organization seeks to “expose the public to the reality of everyday life in the Occupied Territories,” in reality, it relies on unverified and exaggerated claims provided by IDF soldiers, some of whom receive a paycheck from the organization and therefore may very well have ulterior motives.
“Yaakov” shared photos he took during his time in reserve duty in Gaza, including one now infamous photo that was previously shared in his New York Times article. The photo is said to display civilians who are used as human shields by the IDF when exploring the tunnel network. But the blurry and contextless image offers no evidence whatsoever to support such a serious accusation.
The credits of the documentary give special “thanks” to “Yaakov” from Breaking the Silence, revealing a clear bias in its sources in order to frame a specific narrative about the IDF as a whole. Instead of drawing on a range of credible voices – including a wide array of active-duty soldiers, independent analysts, and military experts – they elevate a figure tied to a controversial advocacy group with a record of misrepresentation.
Amplifying Non-Neutral Voices
“Yaakov” from Breaking the Silence is not the only biased source. Dr. Itamar Mann, a professor of international law at Haifa University, for instance, gives highly critical commentary on the IDF’s actions.
Dr. Mann is listed as an author and legal consultant on a report by Physicians for Human Rights (Israel), claiming there is genocide in Gaza. The organization has been known to spread false, distorted narratives as a way of delegitimizing Israel. In fact, in the immediate aftermath of October 7, the organization stated that it is our “human obligation to contextualize yesterday’s violence.”
The documentary also brings in Amjad al-Shara, the director of the Palestinian NGO Network (PNGO), who refers to the IDF as the “occupation forces,” and is himself described as a “pro-Hamas” figure. PNGO has in the past supported terrorism and hosted conferences or speakers connected to the PFLP.
False Casualty Statistics and Disproved Claims
With the poor sourcing and reliance on problematic organizations, it is no surprise that the documentary also fell into the trap of repeating already thoroughly debunked claims about casualty statistics, genocide, and famine in Gaza.
At one point, the film refers to a previously debunked statistic from a so-called study by The Guardian and +972 Magazine, which claims that 83% of all casualties in Gaza are women and children. This figure is based on data from the Hamas-run Ministry of Health, creating a misleading comparison to the IDF’s confirmed count of 8,900 identified terrorists. By subtracting that number from Hamas’ unverifiable total of 53,000 casualties at the time, these outlets and the documentary falsely present the remaining 83% of casualties as civilians, echoing Hamas propaganda.
Naturally, given the bias of the documentary, the claims of genocide and famine are also leveled against Israel. Even though the definitions of both terms have been distorted in order to accuse Israel of such atrocities, the film presents these allegations as fact, rather than propaganda.
Final Gaza fake “famine” analysis: IPC declared famine on Aug 22. Through ceasefire on Oct 10 there should have been 10,000 starvation deaths. But Hamas/UN counted 192 (most if not all with pre-existing conditions). That’s 98% below famine levels. It was always a hoax. 1/ pic.twitter.com/jWcZOnwdAe
— Aizenberg (@Aizenberg55) October 21, 2025
For a documentary to do its job and remain neutral on such serious allegations, the contrary evidence must be presented, but throughout the documentary, this was deliberately avoided.
War, especially against a terrorist organization that operates using guerrilla tactics, presents immensely challenging scenarios. In the fog of war, mistakes and errors of judgment can and do happen. But it is also true that the IDF has consistently held its soldiers to the highest of standards, investigating any wrongdoing as it occurs.
It would be naive to suggest that every soldier in the IDF or any other comparable army behaves in an exemplary fashion. In September 2024, The New Yorker published a database of what it said is the “largest known collection of investigations of possible war crimes committed [by the US military] in Iraq and Afghanistan since 9/11—nearly eight hundred incidents in all.”
Some of the alleged crimes include “the case of soldiers raping a fourteen-year-old girl and subsequently murdering her and her family; the alleged killing of a man by a Green Beret who cut off his victim’s ear and kept it; and cruelty toward detainees at Abu Ghraib prison and at the Bagram Air Base detention facility.”
All of this is not to claim that the IDF is necessarily more moral than the American military, although there is certainly a good case to be made. The point is that nobody would condemn the entirety of the U.S. Army as an immoral entity that brings shame to its country despite the behavior of a minority of its troops.
And ultimately, ITV’s documentary relies on a tiny number of Israeli soldiers as “eyewitnesses,” most of whom appear to have a political agenda backed by Breaking the Silence.
Rather than offering an honest insight into the complexities of modern warfare against a terrorist organization, the filmmakers chose a simplified, one-sided narrative of Israel’s supposed aggression. In doing so, ITV’s Breaking Ranks fails the very test it set for itself: to tell the story of the war “through the soldiers who fought it.” Instead, it tells a story already written — one shaped by bias, omission, and a refusal to confront the full truth.
The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.
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Musician-ethnographer Michael Alpert to receive Dreaming in Yiddish Award
Michael Alpert, an influential klezmer musician and ethnographer who has played a key role in the global renaissance of Yiddish music and culture, has been selected as this year’s recipient of the prestigious Adrienne Cooper Dreaming in Yiddish Award.
The ceremony will take place at the Dreaming in Yiddish Award Concert during the Yiddish New York festival — the largest annual Yiddish culture festival in the world — in December.
Now in its eleventh year, the hybrid festival brings together a global community for in-person events at Hebrew Union College in downtown New York, as well as online programming via Zoom. The festival includes concerts, workshops, lectures, films, Yiddish classes, dance parties and intergenerational community events.
Adrienne Cooper was a popular Yiddish singer, musician and activist who was integral to the revival of klezmer music. The Dreaming in Yiddish Award supports artists who have contributed to the contemporary Yiddish cultural scene.
Michael Alpert, also known by his Yiddish name Meyshke, received an NEA National Heritage Fellowship — the nation’s highest honor in the traditional and heritage arts — in 2015. He has been a pioneering singer, multi-instrumentalist, ethnographer and educator for over five decades. His award-winning work with ensembles including Brave Old World, Kapelye, Khevrisa and Itzhak Perlman’s In the Fiddler’s House has shaped generations of performers and listeners alike.
A native Yiddish speaker and cultural bridge between East European-born tradition bearers and contemporary artists, Alpert is celebrated both for preserving the roots of Yiddish folk and klezmer music and for composing a new body of Yiddish songs that speak to today’s world.
The Dreaming in Yiddish Award Concert — an evening of music, memories, and celebration — is sponsored by Yiddish New York and GOH Productions. It will take place on Wednesday, Dec. 24, 2025 at 7 p.m. ET at Hebrew Union College and will be livestreamed as well.
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A new documentary humanizes Israeli soldiers. It also alleges war crimes.
“It feels like a betrayal to be interviewed by foreign media,” an IDF combat veteran says. He’s out of uniform, brow furrowed, plucking nervously at his goatee. His name is Yuval Ben-Ari, and he is here — on camera, using his real name — telling us what he saw in Gaza.
Ben-Ari, who served in an infantry unit, is one of nearly a dozen soldiers who appear in Breaking Ranks: Inside Israel’s War, a new documentary from indie production company Zandland which streamed in the U.K. and can be viewed on YouTube. Four of the speakers appear on camera, identified by their real names; the rest are disguised and use aliases. Taken together, their testimonies are a scathing indictment of what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called the “world’s most moral army.”
If their stories are true — and nearly everything the soldiers say has already been corroborated by other media reports — they are describing war crimes as the rule in Gaza, not the exception. Unarmed civilians are shot or bombed as a matter of course. Homes are torched without cause. Humanitarian aid sites are shelled out of sheer resentment. The people telling us this — young men and women who served hundreds of days in the territory over the past two years — are still reckoning with their role in the destruction.
Breaking Ranks is not the first documentary to be made about the war in Gaza, and it will not be the last. But it may be the only one to focus on the targeting of innocent Palestinians while also humanizing Israeli soldiers. The soldiers outline their belief in the IDF and the importance of the mission in Gaza. The film contextualizes the war, showing footage of the atrocities of Oct. 7 and noting that Hamas leaders, too, have been charged with war crimes in international courts. Palestinian casualty figures are provided, the film notes, by the “Hamas-run Gaza health ministry”; the tunnel network, it explains, is used for smuggling and warfare. It does not avoid discussing the 251 Israeli hostages.
Those elements ultimately strengthen the film’s argument about how the war was conducted. They do not, however, soften the accounts that follow. The picture that emerges is one of lawlessness and cruelty, coupled with a tolerance for collateral damage and a lack of accountability that runs counter to the IDF’s “Purity of Arms” statute. Yet that portrait also shows the rank-and-file — not all, but some — resisting the practices of their superiors.
A tank commander (“Daniel,” an alias) recounts a time his commander informed troops he planned to destroy a humanitarian aid building. The unit warned him the building was off-limits, but the commander shelled it anyway. Then — according to the soldier — the commander made up an excuse to justify the attack: “I had an anti-tank weapon pointed at me.”
A member of a different unit tells a similar story: When a man hanging laundry on the roof of a building is deemed a “spotter,” a commander shells the structure, killing and injuring many people inside. “This kind of thing happened every week,” says the soldier telling us this story. “And that’s just my unit.”
A platoon sergeant, using the alias “Yaakov,” tells how a pair of Palestinian teenage boys came to be his unit’s human shields, sent down into Gaza’s tunnels as scouts. The unit’s objections eventually won out — they cited international law — but Yaakov insists the IDF has a policy sanctioning the practice called “Mosquito Protocol.” (The Associated Press published an investigative report on the practice earlier this year; the IDF denies that it uses human shields.)
“I carried out these things,” says Yaakov. “I hope I can find a way to live without feeling shame with every step I take.”
One soldier says his unit once reported killing 112 people over the course of a deployment. Only one of the 112, he said, was even suspected of holding a weapon.
Not all of the soldiers recalling their enlistment in Breaking Ranks regret their participation. We meet Rabbi Avraham Zarbiv, who claims to have invented the tactic of razing entire Gaza neighborhoods, block by block, with a bulldozer. Another, given the alias “Lt. Col. F.,” says he would have happily pushed every Palestinian in Gaza into the ocean, given them snorkels and “let them swim to Egypt.”
Their hawkishness puts the defiance and disillusionment of soldiers like Yaakov in stark relief. And it raises questions as to why the IDF — which says it has launched dozens of Military Police investigations into alleged misconduct by soldiers — has not found more wrongdoing.
Ben-Ari, who admits that after Oct. 7 he was “consumed by rage and a desire to fight and avenge,” has since become a peace activist; he was injured last week in the West Bank, attacked by Israeli settlers, while accompanying Palestinians during the annual olive harvest.
He vows to never return to Gaza. But Ben-Ari will not quit the IDF entirely, either. Toward the end of the film, he says he would answer a call to protect Israel’s other borders because that is what he is trained to do, and because he still believes it’s necessary.
“This separation works for me,” he says. “I totally understand if people would say I’m a hypocrite, but this is my decision.”
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