Leaving Israel is easier, Shira Z. Carmel thinks, by saying it’s just for now. But she knows better.

For the Israeli-born singer and an increasing number of relatively well-off Israelis, the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack shattered any sense of safety and along with it, Israel’s founding promise: to be the world’s safe haven for Jews. That day, thousands of Hamas militants blew past the country’s border defences, killed 1,200 people and dragged 250 more into Gaza in a siege that caught the Israeli army by surprise and stunned a nation that prides itself on military prowess. This time, during what became known as Israel’s 9/11, the army didn’t come for hours.

Ten days later, a pregnant Carmel, her husband and their toddler boarded a flight to Australia, which was looking for people in her husband’s profession. And they spun the explanation to friends and family as something other than permanent — “relocation” is the easier-to-swallow term — acutely aware of the familial strain and the shame that have shadowed Israelis who leave for good.

“We told them we’re going to get out of the line of fire for awhile,” Carmel said more than a year later from her family’s new home in Melbourne. “It wasn’t a hard decision. But it was very hard to talk to them about it. It was even hard to admit it to ourselves.”

Thousands of Israelis have left the country since October 7, 2023, according to government statistics and immigration tallies released by destination countries such as Canada and Germany. There’s concern about whether it will drive a “brain drain” in sectors like medicine and tech. Migration experts say it’s possible people leaving Israel will surpass the number of immigrants to Israel in 2024, according to Sergio DellaPergola, a statistician and professor emeritus of Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

“In my view, this year people entering will be smaller than the total of the exit,” he said. “And this is quite unique in the existence of the State of Israel.”

The October 7 effect on Israeli emigration is enough for prominent Israelis to acknowledge the phenomenon publicly — and warn of rising anti-semitism elsewhere.

“There is one thing that worries me in particular: talks about leaving the country. This must not happen,” former Premier Naftali Bennett, a critic of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, tweeted in June after a conversation with friends who were leaving. Israel, he wrote, needs to retain the talent. “Who wants to return to the days of the wandering Jew, without real freedom, without a state, subject to every anti-Semitic whim?”

Thousands of Israelis have opted to pay the financial, emotional and social costs of moving out since the October 7 attack, according to government statistics and families who spoke to The Associated Press in recent months after emigrating to Canada, Spain and Australia. Israel’s overall population continues to grow toward 10 million people.

But it’s possible that 2024 ends with more Israelis leaving the country than coming in.

Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics estimated in September that 40,600 Israelis departed long-term over the first seven months of 2024, a 59 per cent increase over the same period a year earlier, when 25,500 people left. Monthly, 2,200 more people departed this year than in 2023, CBS reported.

The Israeli ministry of immigration and absorption, which does not deal with people leaving, said 33,000 people have moved to Israel since the start of the war, about on par with previous years. The interior minister refused to comment for this story.

The numbers are equally dramatic in destination countries. More than 18,000 Israelis applied for German citizenship in 2024, more than double the same period in 2023 and three times that of the year before, the interior ministry reported in September.

Canada, which has a three-year work visa programme for Israelis and Palestinians fleeing the war, received 5,759 applications for work permits from Israeli citizens between January and October this year, the government told AP. In 2023, that number was 1,616 applications, and a year earlier the tally was 1,176 applications, according to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada.

Other clues, too, point to a notable departure of Israelis since the October 7 attacks. Gil Fire, deputy director of Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Centre, said that some of its star specialists with fellowship postings of a few years in other countries began to waver about returning. “Before the war, they always came back and it was not really considered an option to stay. And during the war we started to see a change,” he said. “They said to us, ‘We will stay another year, maybe two years, maybe more."