Beyond Guilt and Stigma: Changing Attitudes among Israeli Migrants in Canada

Abstract

Over 60 years ago, the Jewish nationalist movement known as Zionism culminated in the creation of the State of Israel. Millions of Jews immigrated to Israel over the twentieth century, a process known as aliya (literally, “going up”). Yet over the years, thousands of Israelis have also chosen to leave Israel in a movement termed yerida (“going down”). As the term suggests, this reverse migration has been highly stigmatized. During the 1960s and 1970s, emigrants were publicly disparaged in the Israeli media for having abandoned a struggling state. Consequently, Israeli migrants suffered strong feelings of guilt that often, hampered their integration process abroad, a phenomenon observed as late as the 1990s. This paper, however, reveals that feelings of stigmatization have greatly decreased among Israeli migrants in recent years. The study is based on research that I conducted in 2008–2009, involving nine months of participant observation in Vancouver’s Israeli community and 34 in‐depth interviews. Unlike in previous studies, most of my informants expressed no feelings of guilt over having left Israel. Of those who did, most framed their guilt as a longing for family and friends rather than the patriotic longing for the land as expressed by previous generations. Previous studies have also found that Israelis harbour a “myth of return”– a continuously expressed desire to return to Israel and a reluctance to accept their stay abroad as permanent. However, I have not found that the myth of return is still strong today, despite the continued prevalence of a strong sense of Israeli identity among Israelis abroad. I suggest that these changing attitudes are the product of shifting ideals in Israeli society that have developed as the state of Israel has matured. This paper thus serves to update the outdated image of Israeli migrants as it exists in the prevailing literature.

De-coupling or remaining closely coupled to ‘home’: educational strategies around identity-making and advantage of Israeli global middle-class families in London

“…Migrants, today, have been found to be more critical of Israel (Hart, 2004) expressing nuanced and more individualised motivations for their mobility. This challenges previous scholarship that found where more collectivist drivers were articulated by both Jewish and Israeli diaspora communities in relation to the state of Israel and the need to collectively organise and support one another in different host countries (Harris, 2015;Harpaz, 2013).…”

“…Gold and Hart (2013) claim that Israeli migrants (the Israeli diaspora) tend to resist full integration into the host societies, viewing their stay abroad as a temporary venture due to Zionist ideology which demands that Jews should live in their historical homeland, the state of Israel. However, recent studies on Israeli emigration (Gold & Hart, 2013;Harris, 2015) have found increased migration of highly skilled and educated Israeli-born population, and argued that the rationales for migration are no longer purely financial but also display ideological motivations, specifically in relation to a disapproval of current right-wing governments' approach to managing the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and a lack of hope that it will ever be resolved. Migrants, today, have been found to be more critical of Israel (Hart, 2004) expressing nuanced and more individualised motivations for their mobility.…”