Op-ed: Political agents who say ‘entire generation’ wants to leave Israel are conveniently ignoring facts. By Shaul Rosenfeld for Ynet News. Articles about the “new emigrants” are trying to prove to us why hell on earth has decided to settle in Israel of all places, and how anyone packing his or her bags and getting out of here as soon as possible is doing the self evident thing.
It’s not a specific group which feels this way, but “an entire generation.” Many have resumed recently the jabbering about the State torturing its citizens, about the deteriorating education, about the collapsing health system, about the lack of hope for young people, about the dried-up academia, about the cost of living and about the soaring prices of real estate.
There is quite a clear intention behind this campaign – to paint Israel pitch black. This is mostly a calculated and orchestrated work of deception by certain political, ideological and media agents, who have realized that when the ballots repeatedly refuse to be nice to them, to their views and to their messengers – blatant lies and inconsistencies are appropriate persuasion tools.
In order to present the emigration from Israel as an acute problem which is only getting worse, with a big hint towards those who are to blame in the current government, while the numbers point to a significant drop in the phenomenon – one has to be completely unwise or have a clear malicious intent.
Even during the year of the social protest, 2011, only 16,200 Israelis left the country without returning by the end of 2012, while at the same time 9,500 returned to Israel. This is among the lowest figures in the past 30 years and much lower than the average in OECD countries. Even in a short-term comparison, the emigration rate falls. In the past few years, the number of emigrants went down to 2.1 citizens per 1,000 compared to 3.2 in 2006.
Israel 11th on happiness index
In general, facts and statistical findings are mostly a heavy and troubling assignment for many who naturally prefer to ignore this overlapping excess while they distribute their ideological merchandise.
For example, that collapsing health system, in their opinion, was named fourth in the world in efficiency in the Bloomberg ranking, and in the OECD report the Israeli system was mentioned as one of the best among the organization’s member states.
And in the same country where “life is an impossible mission,” life expectancy is among the highest in the world, the number of suicides is among the lowest in the world, it is third in the world in the number of scientific articles relative to population, the number of Israelis engaging in research in the academia relative to population is the second in the world, Israel’s part in global science output is almost 10 times bigger than its relative part of the world’s population, it is third in the world in investment in research in universities relative to GDP, and it is first in the world in national spending on civilian research and development as a percentage of GDP.
And this is the same horrible country which in the latest happiness index was ranked 11th in the world, and which in a Geocartography survey from last year, 70% of its citizens defined their situation as good, and almost 90%, according to a different survey from the same period, were unwilling to live in any other place on earth.
Yes, it’s the same country with the failing economy, which was ranked fourth in the world by esteemed American magazine Atlantic in an adjusted calculation of innovation and economic and technological development indices, which ranked 16th in the global Human Development Index (HDI), which had the highest growth in recent years among Western countries, and which has the lowest unemployment rate among these countries.
Even if Israel’s situation needs to be improved and fixed on quite a few levels, considering its slew of security, demographic and other constraints, its balance is not that bad. Unless you ask certain journalists, who prove once again that lies often have long legs, and many of them, and even loyal and returning customers. They don’t let moldy archives and dry facts get in the way of their picture of “the entire generation which feels life in Israel is an impossible mission”
Shaul Rosenfeld Photo: Hagit Peltz
