Campaigns to flee Israel after Netanyahu elected as PM

The Israeli newspaper Maariv reported on a new movement whose goal is to facilitate the emigration of Israeli Jews to the United States following the recent Israeli elections, which, in their view, alters the Zionist state’s relationship to religion. 

The group, which calls itself “Leaving the country - together”, plans to move 10,000 Israeli Jews in the first stage of its plan. Leaders of the group include Israeli anti-Netanyahu activist Yaniv Gorelik and Israeli-American businessman Mordechai Kahana.

Kahana, who has historically been active in bringing Jewish colonists to Israel, told the newspaper: “After years of smuggling Jews from war zones in Yemen, Afghanistan, Syria, and Ukraine to Israel, I decided to help Israelis make Aliyah to the US… it is time to offer the Zionist movement an alternative in case things in Israel keep getting worse.”

Kahana is among a group of Israeli Americans who in the recent elections for the so-called "World Zionist Congress," got enough votes to send one representative to the Israeli Knesset.

Maariv quoted Kahana as saying that "members of the Israeli-American party thought I was a bit extremist, and I told them that it was time to offer an alternative to the Zionist movement in case the situation in Israel continued to deteriorate."

" I don't wish for Israel to be destroyed, but what will happen if it is destroyed? I see a great hatred and I see the Iranians with precision missiles aimed at Israel, two thousand years ago it was exactly the same," he added.

Kahana has received dozens of requests from Israelis for assistance in immigration, especially from those who run small tech companies and want to move their offices to the US.

Kahana added: “I saw people in WhatsApp groups talking about the immigration of Israelis to Romania or Greece, but I personally think that it will be a lot easier for them to immigrate to the US.

The newspaper wrote: "Kahana believes that the Jewish people will never know how to rule Israel, and their destiny is to live in the diaspora."

"I have a huge farm in New Jersey, and I offered Israelis to join in order to turn my farm into a kibbutz… with such a government in Israel, the American government should let every Israeli who owns a company or has a sought-after profession in the US such as doctors and pilots, immigrate to the US."

Kahana is not the first Jewish businessman to own a huge farm in New Jersey with plans to turn it into a Jewish settler colony.

Israelis have created smaller groups on social media to help immigrate to 26 countries, including Canada, Romania, Ukraine, Australia, Thailand, Germany, Greece, Portugal, Spain, as well as the United States. As of now, only a few hundred Israelis are members of these groups on social networking platforms.

For the Palestinians, Israel has been, since its founding, a religious and racist state, and most importantly, a settler-colonial one.

Unlike Israeli Jewish liberals and their international supporters, for the Palestinians, the new Israeli government is likely to differ from its predecessors only in its open rhetoric about Jewish supremacy and Jewish colonization, but not in its actual racist and colonial policies against the Palestinian people.

Nonetheless, most Palestinians certainly hope that the “Leaving the country—together” group is a good harbinger for the final decolonization of their country in the near future.