Nobel and Israel Prize laureate: ‘We won’t have a state’ if brain drain continues

Israel is in grave danger due to the departure of its best and brightest who want to live in a “free-liberal democracy,” not one where “the government forcibly takes power” and too many people are “silent and do not react,” Nobel-winning scientist Prof. Aaron Ciechanover said.

Ciechanover, 76, a biologist associated with the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, is one of Israel’s leading scientists. He won the Nobel Prize in Biology in 2004 and the Israel Prize in 2003.

“There is a huge wave of departures from the country,” Ciechanover said in a speech delivered Sunday at a “National Emergency Conference” in Kibbutz Nir Oz.

“Most senior doctors are leaving the hospitals; universities are finding difficulties in recruiting faculty members in critical areas. This community is “very narrow,” he added.

Citing economic reports, Ciechanover said that “as soon as 30,000 of these people leave, we won’t have a country here.”

“These are people who leave the country because it’s not good for them… because of what was before the war,” he continued, referring to the wide-scale 2023 protests against the government’s divisive judicial reform initiative. Ciechanover, like many of the other leaders attending the Sunday conference, was a vocal participant in the protest movement.

Israelis who are departing “want to live in a free, liberal-democratic country, and not in a country where the government is forcibly taking power… These are the people who have decided that they can no longer live in this country,” Ciechanover said.

According to recent data from the Central Bureau of Statistics, the number of Israelis who permanently left Israel spiked after Hamas’s October 7 massacre and the ensuing outbreak of war in Gaza but dropped in the following months.

The figures, issued in June, showed a huge increase in emigration during October 2023, the month when Palestinian terrorists invaded southern Israel, killing some 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages, and starting the ongoing war.

About 12,300 Israelis left the country that month and had not returned as of June. This compared to only 3,200 who left permanently in October of the previous year — a 285 percent increase.

About 30,000 Israelis left the country permanently between November 2023 and March 2024, a 14% decrease from the same period the previous year, but the data also showed that 21% fewer Israelis returned from living abroad over the same period.

In his Sunday remarks, Ciechanover also described the return of the hostages held in Gaza, a central tenet of the conference organizers, as the “only goal” the government should be pursuing. A failure to do so would represent a rupture of “the most basic contract between society and the government and IDF,” he said.

If the government fails to bring home the hostages, he added, Jewish mothers will know that they must entrust the lives of their children to those “who abandon them to their fate.”

Ciechanover said that too many Israelis “are silent and do not react” to the multiple difficulties facing Israel. He specifically called on President Isaac Herzog, widely seen as a mediating figure between Israel’s political camps, to “get up and do something.”

The National Emergency Conference, held at Kibbutz Nir Oz, an evacuated community that was devastated by the October 7 assault, was attended by about 100 business and academic leaders, including Wix head Nir Zohar, Fox CEO Harel Wiesel, and Mellanox founder and recent Israel Prize recipient Eyal Waldman.