Middle East Monitor / December 20, 2022
A new Israeli group has emerged calling on Jews to leave the country as they fear the incoming right-wing government headed by Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu may implement strict religious policies, Anadolu reported yesterday.
“Let’s leave the country together” is a group which is active on social media, with a campaign aimed at persuading 10,000 Israelis to leave Israel.
On Facebook, leader of the group, Yaniv Goralik, said: “Given what is happening in the country, unfortunately we have to prepare for moving abroad. The country is important to me, but we see what government will be formed and who its ministers will be.”
So far, hundreds of Israelis have joined the campaign’s accounts on Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and Telegram, without it being clear whether anyone has followed the call to migrate.
No officials from the outgoing government or the next government have commented on the movement and its agenda.
“After changes to the country’s nature to the worse, life has no longer been the same, we decided to organize a group to leave the country, initially the first portion will consist of 10,000 people and it will be expanded later,” Goralik wrote on Telegram.
Comments on the group’s social media accounts appear to identify its supporters as secular people who fear the implementation of Jewish religious laws.
On Twitter, independent journalist Orly Barlev wrote: “The laws planned by the effectively formed coalition will change the type of regime in Israel. They will crush democracy and the state institutions that protect it and establish an oppressive dictatorship that works against the citizens.”
Barlev said: “Thousands of concerned and determined citizens demonstrated on Saturday against plans to form a coalition to crush the justice system and end democracy.”
Among the supporters of the group calling for people to migrate is American Jewish businessman Mordechai Kahane, who tweeted: “After years of smuggling Jews from war zones in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen and Ukraine to Israel, I decided to help Israelis emigrate to the United States.”
