[lbo-talk] Israelis leave: forced out by a battered economy and years of violence

Dwayne Monroe idoru345 at yahoo.com
Thu Nov 20 08:36:45 PST 2003


A man I know owns a successful clothing shop which caters to the tastes of the sub 20 year old set. He's an Israeli expat and a fervent Zionist/nationalist. An entertaining fellow, a lover of parties, glittering, sleek women and high powered cars. Still, it's difficult to endure his mini-lectures on power politics, served up with martinis, at times.

Considering his passion for the topic of Israel I ask the logical question: why aren't you there anymore?

He replies: *because there, I'd be a poor son of a bitch!*

The article copied in part below provides a description of Isreali immiseration trends I was introduced to by reading Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler's work, *The Global Political Economy of Israel*. Nitzan was a guest on Doug's show in December of last year.

Look up the mp3 from the LBO radio site; it's quite good.

DRM

======================

Israelis leave their land, forced out by a battered economy and years of violence

By Justin Huggler in Jerusalem

20 November 2003

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=465406

...

Jean Max emigrated from Britain to Israel in 1970 as a committed Zionist. Her three children were born and grew up in Israel. But since they reached adulthood, all three have left for new lives in the United States.

And Ms Max, now divorced, is planning to follow them. Her American visa has arrived, she is going to Boston, where her daughter lives, to look for work. If she finds it, she is leaving Israel after 33 years.

Ms Max and her family are part of a growing phenomenon that has the Israeli political establishment worried. New figures from the Immigration and Absorption Ministry stunned the establishment. Those figures show 760,000 Israeli citizens now live abroad. The ministry says its figures are an informal estimate, based on research by Israeli embassies around the world.

Even so, for a country of just 6,600,000, it is a large number. But the big surprise was the growth in the number of Israelis living abroad: in 2000, it was 550,000. That increase has undoubtedly been fuelled by the suicide bombings and other attacks by Palestinian militants over the past three years, and by the severe recession into which the Israeli economy has been plunged.

[...]

full at link above

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