Hate to rain on your Transfer parade, but I bet you’d get even higher figures if you polled Israelis. It’s a hard place to live right now, and many are demoralized. And hey, if it was that easy for Palestinians to actually move around and go where they wanted to, we wouldn’t have these problems in the first place.

According to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics testifying before the Knesset’s Committee on Absorption, between 1990 and 2001, 270,000 Israelis became “yordim.” That’s 1/3 of the total number who made aliyah in that same period. Of the 1000 Jews who made aliyah from North America in 2003, 500 returned back to North America.

It gets worse… In January 2004, Yuri Shtern, chairman of the Knesset Interior Committee, asserted that these figures under-reported the problem. He said the figures “did not include statistics for yeridah in the last two years, during which the number of those abandoning the country for Russia has increased very significantly.”

And to get to the real issue at hand here: Israeli’s thinking of living permanently in another country, we have a Market Watch poll commissioned by Maariv. It found that 20% of Israelis have recently considered living in a different country, and more than half of these “would like their children to grow up outside Israel.”

I wonder what is the relative breakdown percentages of dati’im and chilonim in the numbers who would like to make yeridah and how this compares to the overall numbers of dati’im and chilonim in Israeli society. It is important that everyone stay, regardless of religious level. But how much does religious education affect this? Or on the opposite extreme, a Chiloni, Zionist education. Figuring out what motivates people to stay and what motivates people to leave is the first step in finding a way to convince those who are leaving to stay, and convince those stuck in shmutz-l’aretz to come on over. (I think that that sentence made sense. Kind of…)

Your blog depresses me….you decide to move to Israel, great, but you choose to move beyond the green line thus placing yourself within the centre of a contentious debate. A debate which really you have no right to influence not having previously lived in the country, paid taxes or served in the army.
Your previous posts mentioned about ‘jews uprooting other jews’, yes a democratic decision was made [exhaustively so] and taken, Israel is not some backward theocracy. If you decide to move beyong the green line and take that risk then you will have to be accountable for that [foolish] decision. Why you wish to take such a risk in the first place with a wife and children is beyond me.
Secular Israelis can’t relate to American Aliyah right now, not because they are not zionist or religous as many of them love this country as much as the next n’b'n aliyahnik; they can’t relate to how you can come and settle in occupied land when you have never lived in the state before.
Why don’t you live in a religous community in the Galille or Negev if you want a sense of purpose? Or is it because the property is that much cheaper beyond the green line?

ryan – You seem to be making certain assunmptions about me and my motives. I would like to clear some things up:

I am not moving to Kochav Yaakov simply because it is over the green line. Similarly, I did not go to yeshiva in the Old City because it was over the green line. And the last time I was in Israel, I did not stay in a hotel near Mercaz ha’Ir because it was “not over” the green line. I simply do not see the “Green Line” as having any real importance on how I make my decisions. We chose the Kochav Yaakov because we feel that it has a great location, good community, good atmosphere to raise children.

I will admit to one thing though: Part of the reason that I support and encourage people who choose to move “over the green line” is that by doing so, they further strengthen the settlement of the Land of Israel. You bring up a very frightening scenario – that a quarter of a million Jews would be expelled from their homes and that Israel would revert to its pre-67 borders. (Of course at that point, the world will be trying to convince the Jews to totally return to the diaspora and give everything back to the Arabs, chas veShalom. And you will probably be saying to people – how can you move into Bet Shemesh and Tel Aviv and involve yourself in the contentious debate of whether or not the land of Israel should be Judenrein). Imagine now if there are half a million Jews. Or 1 million. How much more secure would our hold on our land be if we were not just talking the talk but also walking the walk.

It seems to me that If you were in charge of whether or not people were allowed to move “over the green line” than I am sure that in a few years your self-fulfilling prophecy would come true. Is this an outcome that you would like to see?

You may be surprised to learn that most people who live “over the green line” are not doing so in order to take part in a “contentious debate”. Most people live there because they love the communities there and they believe in building and settling the Land of Israel, as we are commanded in the Torah on numerous ocassions.

You call them occupied territories. I call them liberated territories. Whose side are you on? What a depressing comment.

Mordechai – thanks for the support. We can’t wait to come home!

Haha

It will be good to see you go Ryan. No need in wasting my bandwidth any more.

In case you missed it, this is a pro-aliyah blog. I am writing things here that are supportive of the settlement of the Land of Israel by the Jewish people.

Here is where my empathy lies. Not there.

I am sorry that you found your way to this website. I think that this may be the site where you were trying to go.

Welcome joe90. And welcome to all of our ‘Palestinian’ visitors. It is a pleasure to host your web-browsing experience.

To date, the only ethnic cleansing that has occurred in Israel was the expulsion of the Jews from Gaza and Northern Samaria (and Sinai). That’s it. (And please dont tell me that when the so-called palestinians left their homes and villages before the 1948 and 1967 wars that those are examples of ethnic cleansing. They were initiated by the Jordanian/Egyptian/Syrain/Iraqi armies).

As for ‘racist suppremacy’ and ‘apartheid’, they are not mentioned here because they do not apply. When you see me or others supporting measures that encourage the non-Jewish residents of the West Bank and Gaza to emmigrate to one of the other Arab countries, it is not based on claims that the Jewish people are a superior race. Likewise when you see me and others supporting road blocks and the like. If the so-called Palestinian people would stop trying to push the Jews into the sea (don’t take my word for it – just check out the PLO Charter which is still rife with mention of the goal of the PLO/PA – “the elimination of Zionism in Palestine”) and would try to live with their neighbors in peace (instead of trying to blow people up) then the few measures taken by the Israeli government to protect its citizens would not be necessary.

(And since you seem like one to start throwing out terms, I think that you had better read up on what apartheid actually was before accussing others of it. Apartheid was the legal separation of races where the blacks in South Africa were denied legal priveleges specifically because they were black. Compare that with Israel where Arabs are allowed citizenship, are granted more democratic previleges than any other of the Arab countries in the area and are allowed seats in the Kenesset even while calling for Israel’s destruction. So read up the next time before you start throwing terms around).

And now, dear joe90 and all others of your ilk. I invite you to go wherever it was the ryan went to (see two comments above this one for more information).

I think that you should leave the rantings of Joe90 up. Or, if you are able, edit them to remove the purely antisemitic drivel he pretends is prose. Right now he is the thick of things on various antisemitic blogs such as peacepalestine.blogspot.com and umkahlil.blogspot.com as well as being a member of one of those terrorist supporting PSM’s in scotland.

By leaving the rantings of such, it is easier to show what insanity infests the palestinian movements.

It is your blog. He mostly screams about being censored while ranting on umkahlil.blogspot.com, a heavily censored pro-palestinian site. I, myself, have been banned but I just change IP to keep posting truth there.

Ryan,

Thanks for reading. I can tell that you put much thought into the substance of your comments (kind of like joe90).

Before responding to any of your specific points (at least the ones worthy of response), for the benefit of anyone else reading this I would like to quote what the esteemed Ryan has written on other Israel-related sites:

The merkaz is a place for absolute losers, the people who live there are clueless americans who just sit around all day hanging out in each others rooms, in their little anglo bubble. They have nothing both employment wise or life wise to offer Israel and they should do themselves a favour and head back to long island or wherever they came from….
(Rysk, ryskinmoriah@hotmail.com, Tel Aviv; Israel – 11/14/2005 at 11:48:40 PM)

The above was posted on Merkaz Hamagshimim Hadassah a site that “is dedicated to helping young immigrants, tourists and native Israelis build a life rich in culture, social interaction and involvement in Israeli society.”, Apparently I am not the first American-born oleh upon whom Ryan’s wrath has been unleashed. I will leave it up to you to draw your own conclusions from the pattern’s in Ryan’s writing as to what Ryan has learned in his presumably very broad education.

I do not know what you have based your presumptions on, but they are false. My education has been limited in the sense that I have much to learn, both in the disciplines of Torah as well as everything else. However, that which I have learned has not been limited to Torah-only sources. (My alma mater would definitely take issue with that claim). But since your education has obviously been much broader than mine, please enlighten me as to the following:

• What nation has the Jewish people or Israel been subjugating? (sources please. also remember, self-defense does not equal subjugation)
• On the assumption that your answer is “the Palestinian nation”, please provide me some historical sources giving the history of this nation. When was it founded and where? How far back does its history go? etc.
• According to the modern family of nations what should Israel be like and look like?

As to your claims regarding my level of maturity, I have no defense against your claims. They are so rock solid and so well backed-up that there is really nothing else for me to respond.

See Who are the Palestinians for more follow-up questions.

I lived in Israel from 11/25/01 through 06/29/80. The reason I made a “yerida” was because of the “sibun” (rhymes with tune) that was perpetrated against me. As every sabra knows, “sibun” is a synonym in Israeli slang for integration of new “olim”. There was a computer programmer/analyst at the Israel Electric company in Hafa by the name of Jesse Brandywine wh said to me in 1977, “If you were not in Israel we could get along without you very, very well.” I do not think Israel could have gotten along without me the night in July 1967 when I ran my budget program of the procurement system of the IAF. That was because the “big brass” in the IAF were worried that France might put an embargo on aircraft parts to Israel like she did on the 50 Mirage III-C jets that the IAF had ordered. That left 5 months to send out the orders and receive the equipment. Without my program, it would have taken several months to do the calculations, send out the orders and receive the equipment. If that had not been enough time there would have been aircraft in status “AOG” ,Aircraft On Groung”, during the “War of Attrition”. One of the people who took the reprot to the meeting with the “big Brass” said, “you did well.” That was the only time in the 3 1/2 years when I was a civilian programmer in the one and only computer unit of the IAF when anyone ever said I did anything “b’seder”. I had already submitted my resignation because my B.Sc. from M.I.T. was exploited to give me the lowest salary in MAMRAM. Because I was a new oleh without protektsiah my position was to weak to do anything about it. The budget program that I wrote was the only program to have achieved the goal of saving the IAF money. Therefore, the whole corps was more efficient. TO BE CONTINUED