Recently, there has been a surge of interest in topics connected to the local Russian-speaking community. The pretext for the discussion was the report of the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute (JPPPI), which had been presented to the Knesset Committee on Aliyah and Absorption on May 22, 2012. According to this report, approximately 80 thousand Russian-speaking citizens of Israel, who initially arrived in the country in the 1990s, have now emigrated out of it again. The authors of the report and the members of the committee hold the opinion, widely circulated in Israel's media, that the main reason for this deflux was that these people were not accepted as Jews in Israel, and that their economic problems played a much smaller part.

Emigration, “running away,” or labor migration?

Experts in aliyah from the former USSR and its migration problems were quite surprised by these data, as well as by the conclusions made from the data and the propositions to mitigate the problem, including the amusing notion that emigration of repatriates could be stopped by providing free museum access for a few years, so that the new repatriates get to know better the country to which they had chosen to emigrate. The surprise was caused by the fact that the studies conducted by the Israeli Ministry of Absorption (some of them with the aid of the author of this article) and several Israeli research institutions show a completely different picture.

Indeed, according to our data, over 90 thousand repatriates from the former Soviet Union did leave Israel over the last 20 years. This is less than 10% of those who had come to Israel from that region during the Big Aliyah years, and is one of the lowest figures among the Jewish and non-Jewish communities of the country, which shows that former Soviet and post-Soviet Jews are quite “well-rooted,” so to speak, in Israel. For example, there are approximately 100 thousand Israeli Arabs only in the USA, and the core groups of Israel's economic, political, and cultural establishment – first and foremost Ashkenazi long-standing inhabitants – are also the most widely represented among Israelis living outside of Israel.

Additionally, it should be noted that the great amount of hype around the departure of Israeli citizens is the result of the yet-preserved in “postmodern” Israel Zionist ethos, which postulates that Jews should be repatriating to Israel, not leaving it. In practice, the percent of citizens emigrating out of Israel (3-4 people per year per 1000 residents) is lower than in trouble-free Switzerland, whose numbers (4-5 people per 1000 residents) are considered low.

Returning to the topic of departure of former USSR residents from Israel, it should be noted that both of the conclusions presented in the Knesset report cannot be empirically validated: neither the statement that most “leavers” are either of a mixed ethnicity or those who have been “insulted” by the native Israelis believing them to be non-Jewish, nor the idea that the reason for this phenomenon is a low extent of self-identification of these repatriates with a new country.

A study of the the opinions of 1990s repatriates held by Majid Al-Haj and Elazar Leshem in 2000, as well as Leshem's own study half a decade later (in the summer of 2006) showed that despite all of the difficulties of absorption, from 60 to nearly 70 percent of repatriates would still have chosen to emigrate to Israel, even if they could have “returned to their starting point” right now. Importantly, the youth cohorts (18-24 and 25-29 years of age) showed an even higher number than the entirety of the population sample. Similar data were received in a representative study of the civic identity of repatriates from the former USSR who came to Israel from 1989 to 2010, conducted in 2011 by the Israel Ministry of Absorption and the Ariel University Center. This study confirmed that this phenomenon is stable and long-term. Once again, nearly 70% of respondents, who had by then lived in Israel for 15-20 years, stated that they would have certainly repatriated to Israel once again. And the youth once again showed an even higher percent than the mean in the sample. Interestingly, approximately 80% of respondents said that they would like their children and grandchildren to live in Israel, and that there have been few discrepancies in opinion between the different age categories.

At the same time, the correlation of the verbal and factual readiness to leave the country is not equally represented in different groups of emigrants from the USSR and CIS countries, just as it is not equally represented in Israeli society as a whole.

The main reason for the departure of Israelis, including large-scale emigration to the USA, is a far wider range of economic possibilities than available in Israel. This absolutely pragmatic reason can be entwined with ideological or pseudo-ideological aspirations, which are mostly declarative rather than practical. Even though the widespread opinion is that those who leave Israel are running from war and terror - often reflected in academic studies by ultra-left and post-Zionist authors – there has been no empiric confirmation of this hypothesis.

According to many important studies, those who leave Israel are mostly labor migrants and not emigrants in the full sense of the word. A detailed analysis of the motives of departure and the identity of Russian-speaking minorities, conducted by the author of this article, Alek Epstein, and Velvel Chernin, shows that approximately half of those who actually left Israel fell into one of the sub-categories of labor migrants. These people had a satisfactory life in Israel, but looked for a better place to realize their professional, creative, and intellectual potential. Slightly more than a quarter of those who leave Israel do so for personal or family reasons. No more than a fifth of those Russian-speaking repatriates who choose to leave Israel are those who simply found themselves incompatible with the country. This includes all categories – both political, economic or “climatic” immigrants and those who “do not want to be second-rate citizens,” were hurt “by the racism of the locals” or by the “stranglehold of religion,” or “are looking for a peaceful life far away from the Arab-Israeli conflict.”

Indicatively, most of those Russian-speaking citizens who left Israel, either short-term or long-term, do not see themselves as yordim (Jews who left Israel), but exclusively as persons seeking an economically profitable place of temporary residence. The overwhelming majority of repatriates did not return to their “native” cities, but came to look for work in industrial centers of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and so on. Moreover, part of them live in these cities, but come back to Israel once in a couple of months, and yet another part comes to visit biannually or annualy. According to some of our informants, this is similar to the situation when someone lives in the north of Israel – in Haifa, for example – and works in the southern Be'er Sheva. Generally, emigrants continue to feel warmly towards Israel and do not break off their spiritual connection with it, even despite the difficulty of doing so during the “second intifada” and the economic crisis of the early 2000s. This is supported by numerous studies of Israelis who had returned to Israel in 2000-2011, which were held by many sociological agencies at the request of the Israeli Ministry of Absorption.

This is radically different from yordim in that these migrants do not plan to – or at least declare that they do not plan to - stay outside of the country forever.

Cui prodest? Whose gain? What is the gain?
In other words, the scientific foundation of the conclusions of the JPPPI report, discussed in the Knesset and readily disseminated by the media, is quite dubious. It is based on negative stereotypes, which have been refuted many times by serious scholars, even though they have been masked to seem to be “worries about the true needs of repatriates.”

There had, nonetheless, been a number of negativist attacks aimed at the community of Russian-speaking Israelis. Maxims by the well-known mouthpiece of the ultra-left post-Zionist camp, the popular Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy are one of the examples. Levy is, among other things, infamous for his recommendations to “go back to Russia,” given in May 2012 to certain Russian-speaking citizens who said that illegal immigrants from Africa should return to their respective countries. In his article published by Haaretz on May 31, Levi gave the unfounded statement that among the million “Russians” who came to Israel, around half are non-Jewish, the entirety of whose “merits” consists of being white, the color of their skin being the one and only difference between them and illegal migrants from Africa, who are seen as enemies, according to Levy, only because of the color of their skin.

The only question that needs to be answered is who and why needs yet another anti-Russian campaign right now? The simplest explanation is the new election campaign that has already begun in Israel, and in which the “Russian voice,” once again, will not be the least of factors. Such an explanation makes sense, but it should be noted that the “Russian” topics began to be brought up by the media not now, but a year ago, when there were mass protests against the rising cost of living. It was at the peak of these protests, which coincided with the “tent campaign” in August-September 2011 and were mostly fueled not by the lower-income strata of society, but by the left-wing representatives of the middle class, that these same representatives formed a new host of grievances against those who came from the former USSR. These repatriates are famously distrustful and suspicious of the neo-Marxist slogans of the tent protest activists.

It would seem that this is the context in in which these statements about “Russian emigrants” should be read, as they provide the much sought-after “scientific basis” for the ideological cliches of certain fractions towards repatriates from the former Soviet Union.