This summer, the Nobel laureate Prof Aaron Ciechanover joined a group of prominent Israelis gathered in the ruins of the Nir Oz kibbutz to demand a hostage release and ceasefire deal.
Nir Oz was the worst hit of all the communities targeted by Hamas on 7 October, with a quarter of its residents kidnapped or killed. Twenty-nine are still in Gaza.
If the hostages were not brought back, the basic social contract that underpinned Israeli society would unravel, the 77-year-old professor of medicine warned – with catastrophic consequences for the entire country.
He cited an accelerating “brain drain” of doctors and other professionals as a worrying sign that some of Israel’s elite already feel they no longer have a future in the country. And without them, Israel itself might struggle to have a future.
Ciechanover is a long-term critic of Benjamin Netanyahu and joined protests against his government before the war. But concern about this trend is not limited to political opponents of the Israeli leader. Earlier this year, Netanyahu’s former chair of the National Economic Council, Eugene Kandel, joined forces with the administrative expert Ron Tzur to warn that Israel faces an existential threat.
In a paper calling for a new political settlement, they warned that under a business-as-usual scenario “there is a considerable likelihood that Israel will not be able to exist as a sovereign Jewish state in the coming decades”.
Among the threats they highlighted were rising emigration, particularly among the people who have built up Israel’s hi-tech sector and the schools and hospitals vital to attracting the global elite. “Israel’s locomotive of growth is innovation, and that is driven by a small group of several tens of thousands of people in a country of 10 million,” the paper warned. “The weight of their departure from the country is immense in comparison to their number.”
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