Take a visit to Terminal 3 at Ben-Gurion Airport on any given day, and you’ll see them. They’re easy to spot among tourists and vacationers, corralling their families while schlepping far too many suitcases for a short holiday. Their facial expressions exhibit a mix of excitement and worry. Doctors worn down to the bone, software engineers anxious about the future of the industry, and researchers who find a more suitable outlet for their skills overseas. They are, collectively, Israel’s “brain drain” — a term that sounds academic and distant but in practice represents the quietest and most dangerous hemorrhage taking place in the State of Israel.
Their decision to leave, or not to return after what was intended as a two- to three-year sojourn, does not happen overnight, and it’s not accompanied by front-page headlines. It happens in quiet Friday-night living-room conversations, in parents’ WhatsApp groups, and in hesitant LinkedIn posts announcing a “new beginning.” If emigration from Israel was once considered a taboo — or at least a step taken quietly and with a certain sense of shame — in recent decades, and especially since the judicial-reform protests in 2023 and the beginning of the war, it has become a legitimate and even desirable option among broad segments of Israeli society.
These segments are not random. A study published in 2007 showed that educated Israelis were two-and-a-half times more likely to emigrate than those without a bachelor’s degree. And data from 2025 show that the higher one’s education level, the higher the likelihood of emigration, with 11.9 percent of Israeli Ph.D. graduates living abroad for three years or more. These are precisely the segments of the population that contribute the most to the economy. Israel can’t afford to lose them.
Why is Israel losing them, and how can it get them back?
To start with the good news, Israel’s brain drain is a global vote of confidence in Israel’s higher education system. The large cohort of Israeli college graduates working abroad (54,778 of them in 2024) is a testament to their desirability on the international labor market, which is today characterized by increasing flexibility, highly trained workers, and a technological orientation. The rapid growth of the information economy, the pace of technological change, and massive investments in research and development have generated global demand for workers with high-level technological and scientific training. The global nature and international connectivity of academia on the one hand, and the high-tech industry on the other, enable broad and easy movement of engineers, scientists, and researchers between countries. This reality underlies the international competition among developed countries for knowledge, skills, and human capital. And Israelis are highly competitive and prized in this market.
The problem is that their absence from Israel’s economy means that they are not contributing to it, and senior economists have long warned that this economy rests on an astonishingly narrow base of high-quality human capital. When a senior engineer, a brain surgeon, or an artificial intelligence researcher leaves Israel, she takes with her not only her purchasing power but also her talent and creativity, decades of state investment in education, and the potential to create additional jobs and attract foreign investment. Israel risks shifting from a growing and thriving economy to a stagnating one with low growth rates and declining standards of living.
The medical sector may be the field in which the danger is most tangible and immediate. Israel’s health-care system suffers from a chronic shortage of physicians and has for many years largely relied on medical doctors educated or trained abroad. A significant portion of these physicians came from the former Soviet Union and are nearing or past the age of retirement. When hundreds of doctors — residents and specialists — submit applications for relocation fellowships with no intention of returning, or they simply emigrate to countries such as Canada, Australia, and the United States, the shortage is exacerbated and the result immediate: longer waiting times, overcrowded emergency rooms, and declining quality of medical care for every Israeli citizen. Medical research is, of course, also harmed under these circumstances.
The Israeli economy is built on a “locomotive and railcars” model. The locomotive is the high-tech sector, advanced industries, and academic research. This sector constitutes a relatively small share of total employment (about 10 to 12 percent), yet it’s responsible for the lion’s share of economic growth, technological development and export, and state tax revenue. These sources of revenue are necessary to finance the state’s welfare services, security, education, and health-care systems. According to the Shoresh Institution for Socioeconomic Research, “In a country of 10 million people, 287,000 persons (roughly 3% of the population) are key to Israel’s primary economic engine, are key to the society’s healthcare, are key to maintaining Israel’s cutting-edge research and innovation capabilities.”
Brain drain is not a one-time event; it is a self-reinforcing process that creates a negative vicious cycle. The initial damage to state revenues leads first to deficits and cuts to public services, education, and infrastructure, reducing quality of life and further encouraging emigration of talented individuals with options elsewhere. Those leaving are often liberal and secular. Their departure alters Israel’s demographic and political balance, potentially accelerating extremist trends that further alienate the remaining population of innovators.
The “start-up nation” needs entrepreneurs. When founders register companies in Delaware and manage them from New York or London, intellectual property, knowledge, and all their rich cultural accoutrement leave as well. Once these citizens leave, it’s very difficult to get them back. They set down roots in their new home.
If Israel loses its locomotive, the railcars will lie immobile and precipitate the loss of Israel’s comparative advantage. Israel is something of an economic miracle: a young, small country that since its founding 77 years ago has faced immense security challenges and massive immigration absorption, a country largely devoid of significant natural resources (aside from natural gas in recent years), yet one that has developed a prosperous and growing economy with GDP per capita exceeding $50,000 per year. Israel built the core of its economic and security strength on its investment in brain power. The more of that brain power it loses, the weaker, poorer, and less secure it will be.
So how bad is it?
In 2024, for the first time in many years, Israel recorded a clear negative migration balance of Israelis holding academic degrees from Israeli institutions. Forecasts for 2025–2026 anticipate a persistently high negative balance, contingent on Israel’s economic and security stability.
The proportion of degree holders among those leaving has risen significantly and exceeds their proportion among returnees. According to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS), about 60 percent of those who left in 2023 had a bachelor’s degree, many of them adults ages 25 to 45: the age range of peak productivity. As reported in Ha’aretz, CBS found that “25.4 percent of recipients of Israeli doctorates in mathematics were living abroad. The numbers were 21.7 percent for computer science, 19.4 percent for genetics, 17.3 percent for microbiology, 17 percent for physics and around 14 percent for chemistry, electrical engineering and biology.”
Reports from the Israel Innovation Authority point to the departure of thousands of senior high-tech employees and experts during 2023–2024, directly harming Israel’s innovation and growth capacity.
According to Shoresh data, no other country comes close to Israel in terms of the share of its population studying or working in U.S. academic institutions. Not only is net emigration of Israeli faculty and researchers increasing, but the higher the quality of the academic institution, the higher the emigration rate of its graduates. Emigration rates are highest among graduates of universities, followed by academic colleges, and then teacher-training colleges. The highest emigration rates are among university graduates in science and engineering.
It’s customary to divide migration drivers into “push factors” and “pull factors.” In the current Israeli case, push and pull factors engage in a symbiotic dance, and lately the push factors have been leading.
1. Cost of living and housing: Until 2023, this was the major pull factor. Israel is among the most expensive countries in the world. Soaring housing prices have pushed the dream of home ownership out of reach for young couples, even when both work in high tech. Comparisons with other Western countries — where one can purchase a house with a garden for the price of a modest three-room apartment in Israel’s periphery — constitute an enormous economic temptation. Israelis faced with attractive economic prospects abroad have often left Israel reluctantly, citing the inability to pass up the option of a more financially comfortable life.
2. Political and social instability and polarization: In 2023, the governmental attempt at judicial overhaul and the deep social rupture it created cracked the sense of belonging and personal security among many in the upper-middle class. The feeling that the unwritten social contract between citizen and state had been violated, and that Israel’s core values as a liberal democracy were at risk, pushed many to seek societies where liberal democracy was perceived as more secure from internal threats.
3. Security and prolonged war: The Iron Swords War following the October 7 attacks has compounded the push. Beyond physical danger, the war created extreme uncertainty about the future. Young families fear raising children amid sirens and constant insecurity. Lengthy and exhausting reserve duty, which severely affected both the self-employed and salaried workers, became for many the straw that broke the camel’s back.
4. Academia and research: Israeli researchers in particular face growing difficulties at home: shrinking research budgets, heavy teaching loads, and sometimes overt or covert academic boycotts by institutions abroad that complicate international collaboration while based in Israel. They are enticed abroad by the promise of greater academic freedom and generous budgets.
The central question is whether this process is irreversible. Israel has experienced emigration waves before — for instance, during the recession of the 1960s — and has always rebounded. This time, the challenge is more complex and not all of the factors are in Israel’s control alone.
For that reason, Israel must address, as thoroughly as it can, the factors within its control, beginning with an inconvenient truth: Israel’s brain drain poses as much of an existential threat to its future as any of its foreign enemies do. The crisis requires an emergency action plan, before it’s too late.
Building and Revitalizing University Infrastructure
The plan needs to focus, first and foremost, on the basic, fundamental element of Israel’s locomotive engine: the academy. If Israel’s academic research infrastructure is made robust enough to compete with that of other countries, the industrial base for commercial enterprises will stay close to it. The current moment, with Israelis experiencing a hostile political climate abroad, may offer a window of opportunity to attract Israeli researchers back home and incentivize those already in Israel to stay. But creating the most attractive incentives to achieve this goal requires a keen understanding of the market for top research talent.
From a professional point of view, what every researcher values most is excellent research conditions — laboratories and equipment, access to research grants, and top-shelf research partners — that will facilitate their work at the highest level.
Israeli academic institutions face significant challenges when competing with the set of conditions that leading universities in the United States and Europe can offer:
- Large research budgets
- State-of-the-art laboratories
- High salaries
- Access to an international pool of gifted students and postdoctoral fellows
- Prestigious academic appointments
At the same time, Israel’s universities have long punched above their weight. Before Israel was the economic powerhouse that it is today, it was already producing world-class research. Its universities were the toast of the Mediterranean despite their relatively modest budgets in an agricultural economy. Now that Israel has a modern economy, it must reinvest its substantial state resources into the production of advanced labs, ample funding for research initiatives, and, yes, salaries that can compete with those abroad.
And the funding for these initiatives needn’t come entirely from the state. At a time when Jewish donors are rethinking their charitable relationships with America’s most prestigious universities, Israeli universities, and the government ministries themselves, should identify these donors and actively pursue partnerships with them on the grounds of the potentially catalytic impact of their investment in Israel’s future. The government has failed to see the urgency of this crisis, embroiled as it has been in the war and the many daily and weekly crises that characterize Israel’s political scene. The brain drain simply has not found its way onto the policy agenda. This is why anyone with the means or connections to get policymakers to devote attention to this crisis should use every possible lever to do so. If you are an investor or philanthropist who loves Israel, use whatever leverage you have to build momentum and get money behind this idea.
The influx of such resources would have the opposite effect of the brain-drain cycle; it would create a positive spiral rippling outward and upward to the entire society, not to mention the world.
Policy Change
These direct incentives in the academic sphere should be accompanied by additional macro policy priorities, particularly cost-of-living and housing issues. Since home ownership is a primary pull factor for many young educated people, they need to see it as an attainable goal if they are to stay or be drawn back to Israel. That means a policy of dramatic housing expansion and development.
Israel’s 3 percent, its 287,000-strong core, also wants to know that they are committing to a state that is committed to itself as a secure liberal democracy. Restoring a sense of stability and calm to the political situation will disempower the push factors unleashed since the furor over judicial reform.
Combining the elements below will enhance Israeli universities’ competitiveness, incentivize researchers abroad to return, and strengthen existing pull factors, which are already significant:
- An open and efficient academic system that is less hierarchical and less bureaucratic; more collaborative and open, and capable of doing more with less.
- A culture that fosters intellectual independence, with young researchers being given autonomy from Day One while enjoying relatively low teaching loads.
- A profound sense of mission, offering the intangible satisfaction of knowing that research not only advances science and knowledge but also contributes to Israel’s well-being and resilience.
- “The Israeli pace,” entailing a work environment that is less formal and more dynamic.
Many Israeli researchers want to stay in Israel, and many abroad want to return. Or at least they want to want to. They’re primed for persuasion. They want to raise their children in an Israeli framework, close to family and close friends. The push and pull factors have just, in recent years, become increasingly strong. Many want Israel to pull them back, and they want it to happen at the most opportune stage in their career and lifespan.
Two points in time are particularly effective. First, after the postdoctoral stage, when researchers are early in their career and have not yet formed deep institutional ties abroad. That’s also when family units are younger and less established, making the decision to return easier. Second, during their children’s adolescence, when they want their children to live in Israel and absorb Israeli culture, this sometimes coincides with a desire to care for aging parents in Israel.
The recently published brain drain data from the Central Bureau of Statistics should be as a wake-up call. The problem is real, and it’s happening fast. Currently existing programs — such as the Beresheet program for returning outstanding postdoctoral fellows and the OR program for outstanding senior researchers, operated by the Israel Science Foundation (ISF) through a combination of state and philanthropic funding — can be models for a joint government and philanthropic approach to the crisis. A philanthropic-government partnership sends a message of national importance and allows the ISF to expand the number of fellowships, increasing the chances of bringing Israel’s best minds home.
National Research Centers
Another proposal is the establishment of national research institutes, akin to national laboratories, in high-priority fields, capable of absorbing significant numbers of returning Israeli researchers. Each institute would be devoted to a small selection of the world’s major challenges — food insecurity, climate science, artificial intelligence processing, bioconvergence — and be granted the resources necessary to be a leading center in its field. Here, too, funding would combine public and philanthropic sources, along with commercialization of research outputs. Resource concentration would enable top-level research. Beyond their economic and social value, such institutes would attract the attention of outstanding Israeli researchers who now work abroad. The institutes would house laboratories, each of which would cost around $15 million to build and $20 million annually to operate. Allocation of funds for these labs must become a national priority, and we must all do whatever is in our power to get it on the legislative agenda. Surely this is one policy initiative that the governing coalition and the opposition should theoretically agree on: ensuring the future of Israel’s human capital.
Network Israeli Research Across the Globe
Finally, we must never give up on those researchers who choose to work abroad for now. It’s Israel’s job to ensure that their professional ties to Israel’s research community do not fray. This could be done by establishing a network called the Israeli Community for Academic Excellence, that would be a platform for top Israeli researchers abroad to contribute academically to Israeli universities. There is genuine interest within Israel’s scholarly expat population to maintain ties and contribute to the Israeli academy. This can be facilitated through, for example, periodic stays and teaching in Israel, summer semesters, doctoral supervision, online courses, hosting Israeli students in overseas labs, and expanding collaborative research between Israeli and overseas scholars.
Israel’s brain drain is a flashing warning light for the “start-up nation” vehicle, indicating that its gas is running low. Those who are leaving are the best of Israel’s sons and daughters, including IDF reserve commanders who are also technological entrepreneurs and who can lead Israel in the global economy.
An Israel without its best human capital would be a fundamentally different country: poorer, weaker, and more vulnerable. Confronting the brain drain is not only an economic imperative. It’s the heart of struggle to define Israel’s very character for the decades ahead. The time to act is now, before the drain trickle turns into a flood.
This is perhaps Zionism’s greatest 21st-century challenge. Israel is itself the laboratory that Zionism built. Now let’s use it.
