A society can produce an Exodus without Egypt — not through borders and overt force, but by quietly altering the conditions under which someone can still feel “at home.”

Israel is currently an unusually sharp laboratory of a mechanism that many democracies still prefer to describe only in moral or political terms. That framing is often sincere, but it misses the instrument panel. Morality can be right yet blind to tools. Politics can see the tools yet pretend it is “just a dispute.” In the background, however, a simple apparatus can switch on: a society can produce an Exodus without Egypt. Not through borders and overt force, but by quietly altering the conditions under which someone can still feel “at home.”

In the biblical Exodus there is Pharaoh. In the contemporary variant, Pharaoh becomes procedure. It does not need a face. It needs language, institutions, media rhythms, and the steady production of labels that stop describing reality and start operating on it. “Kaplanist,” “smolani,” “reformi,” sometimes even “Ashkenazi” used as a slur — these are no longer names. They are levers. At a certain threshold they function as gates. They do not expel you at once. They simply lower your permeability in everyday life: your ease of speech, your legitimacy, your access to professional worlds, your sense that you belong.

Here a mechanistic vocabulary matters: what looks like a one-off insult behaves like a feedback loop. Delegitimization returns, accumulates, and settles into habits — until it becomes procedure, not mood. That is how a society learns to lower someone’s everyday room to breathe without ever issuing an expulsion order. A portion of the population begins to live in the country like in a waiting room.

Modern pushing-out is rarely one dramatic act. It is layered. First comes delegitimation: your argument is not “wrong,” it is “treacherous.” Then status degradation: you are no longer a citizen but a category. Then economy and law arrive wearing the mask of neutrality, but they now operate inside a pre-set selection logic. At the end there is no policeman at the door — there is only a spreadsheet. The decision to leave becomes rational because everyday life has been quietly rewritten as “less possible.”

If this sounds abstract, the numbers are not. Figures released by Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics at the end of 2024 reported roughly 82,700 departures and about 23,800 returns — a sharply negative balance. End-of-2025 figures reported roughly 69,300 departures and about 19,000 returns; the CBS also reported a total migration balance of around a net loss of about 20,000 after factoring in immigration and other inflows. In percentage terms these are fractions of a percent of the population per year, but socially they are dense numbers: they disproportionately involve people who carry institutions, professional competence, civic language, and the daily capacity to sustain common life. And even if we cannot honestly unify “personal reasons,” we do not need to. Loss is loss. Repeated loss is already a reconfiguration of belonging.

Two clarifications matter if we want to stay honest. First, war and prolonged mobilization are powerful external triggers. Since October 2023, the pressure of multi-front conflict has changed the calculus for many families. But a trigger is not the whole mechanism: when belonging has already been procedurally thinned out for a group, a shock makes departure easier, quicker, and more permanent. Second, this is not a partisan morality play. Polarization is bidirectional. Every camp has its contempt-labels and its quick-path delegitimations. That is precisely why the diagnostic should focus on what language does, not on who feels more righteous while doing it.

In that sense Israel’s current crisis is not reducible to judicial reform, war, security, or religion-and-state. It is a crisis of modulating belonging. When a community cannot sustain distinction under contact, it confuses coherence with unity. Unity is cheap: you buy it by reduction. Covenant is expensive: it requires maintaining distinction without pushing the other beyond the threshold.

That is why “brain drain” is important but secondary. Talent is an indicator, not the core. The core is that a state can train itself to lose its own people as an operational routine. Routines do not need ideology. They need a stable selection logic: who counts as “ours,” who is provisional, who is tolerable, who should be removed — even if removal takes the form of voluntary departure. If the Zionist project was, in part, a gathering in the Land in order to become “Jewish” in a shared, communal sense, then steady outflow is not only a demographic cost. It is a crack in the idea itself. The community stops behaving like a home and begins to behave like a selection device. And leadership that knows only the grammar of the State of Exception does not resolve the crisis; it stabilizes it as the only workable mode for retaining position.

There is a deeper, less obvious consequence. This kind of Exodus is not only demographic loss. It is a shift in social ontology. If a society repeatedly produces people who experience themselves as inadmissible, it stops being a home and becomes a selection device. And selection devices have a trait: they do not know how to stop. Selection must keep working in order to justify itself. Conflict becomes a resource, and war becomes an option on the menu. Not because people are evil, but because the selection logic has tuned reality that way.

Israel is an extreme case because the stakes are existential and the language of belonging is highly charged. But the mechanism is portable. Across countries we see the same technique: manufacture categories of people whose presence becomes “a problem,” then act surprised when they leave. When they do, call them disloyal. It is the classic trap: first you lower the permeability of life, then you punish the choice of exit.

I do not offer a simple fix, and I will not perform one. But there is a diagnostic test worth applying everywhere. Ask not only who is right, but what language is doing in the dispute. Does it describe difference, or nullify it? Does it enable contact, or build a gate after which the other ceases to be a person and becomes a function? When language starts operating as a gate, the Exodus has already begun — even if the airport is still quiet.

Yochanan Schimmelpfennig

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)