I’ve been absent here for a little while – I went through the world without a laptop, a situation, which, even though I didn’t choose it, felt relieving in some ways. Anyway, since I’ve met many Israelis in Berlin over the last years and since I started writing for the first Hebrew publication in Germany since the 30ies (a magazine called SPITZ), I decided to do some research on out-of-Israel-migration yesterday, an endeavor which turned out to be challenge. Seriously, you don’t find any current statistics for what is described with a quite loaded term in Hebrew: ירידה / Yeridah, descent, going down. However, it’s more popular counterpart עליה / Aliyah, ascent, going up, is widely reviewed and embroidered with numbers and charts. The Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics and several accessible websites deliver detailed information about every single – legal, that is: Jewish – immigrant since 1948. “The philosophy inherent to the Jewish state”, the diaspora-scholar Steven Jay Gold comments, “calls for the return of the Jews to Israel, which is why the opposite movement poses and ideological and demographic problem”. In fact, the Israeli government, back in 2007, tried to solve this problem by investing about 19 Million Shekels (something like four Million Euro), in order to tease supposedly descended souls to return with cheap flight tickets and unemployment benefits. Later, in 2012, there was a second campaign launched for the same reasons: purported emigres were shown on fake missing-person-posters, urging Israelis to locate those “lost” Jews before they succumbed to the “strategic national threat” of assimilation in the places they live. Hours had passed. I understood, that there actually is a policy in force to actively ignore the number of emigrants from Israel, a policy I explained myself as derived form a questionable codification of Zionism within the local (old) borders of Israel. The only emigration-numbers I found up to this point stemmed from 2006. Finally I got a hint to talk to a sociologist, who specified on the issue of double citizenship in a global context, but has a special focus on Israel. What he told me, was surprising: The numbers of Israelis living abroad ranged about 230.000 in 2012 (75% in the US, Canada, Australia, 25% in Europe), a number, which doesn’t really pose a demographic threat to the government. In fact, it is about average relative to other developed countries like Denmark, Germany or Belgium (the OECD does give some input here). He also told me about the number of people potentially leaving – mostly educated Ashkenazim from the Israeli middle class, who either possess a second (European) passport or at least have the opportunity to apply for one – for the country, their families’ originated and immigrated from. Overall 300.000 Israelis have such a EU-valid passport, about 60.000 applied for one over the last decade, and yet most of them don’t even use it. Could one see in this some sort of post-Zionist trend? Or is it more like a sheet anchor, an evasive joker in times of crisis? – between 2000 and 2006, when Suicide Bombers blew up three buses in South Tel Aviv alone, the numbers of newly applications soared. I don’t really have a straight conclusion yet about all this. What I feel is that Israeli policy has nothing to do with what people like Asher Ginsberg had in mind.