Yoram Ariely left Israel more than thirty years ago and found his way to New York City, where he worked in the food-and-beverage industry. “Mostly juices,” he told me. He eventually retired to Florida, but on Wednesday he was back in New York, sitting in the departures terminal at Kennedy Airport. Ariely is eighty-four years old; when I approached him, he requested that I give him a moment so he could put in his hearing aids. His journey, which had begun that morning, at 7 A.M., in Sarasota, would end up totalling twenty-four hours. He already looked exhausted.
Ariely, along with others clustered around Gate 18B, waiting to board a non-stop flight to Tel Aviv, was returning to Israel to cast a ballot in the country’s upcoming election—the first time Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will face voters since his contentious effort to neuter Israel’s judiciary; his failure to prevent the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023; and his prosecution of the ensuing war on Gaza, which has shredded Israel’s international reputation and resulted in a warrant for his arrest, for war crimes, from The Hague. “This is the most important election of my lifetime,” Ariely said. (Given that he’s six years older than the Israeli state, his lifetime includes every previous Israeli election.) It will be the first time he’s voted in Israel since moving away.
Around eleven per cent of the Israeli electorate lives abroad. The country does not permit absentee voting, except in rare cases, so any citizen who wants to cast a ballot must return and, on election day, go to the designated polling place for their last official in-country address. This puts a huge price, in time and money—often hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars—on casting a single vote. For Ariely and many like him, it is no deterrent. Eight in ten Israeli voters who live abroad share his view that the upcoming election is “the most crucial” in Israel’s history. Polls show Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition in a dead heat with his chief rival, the centrist Gadi Eisenkot.
Ariely is to the left of Eisenkot politically, but “these considerations must be put aside to give him the majority,” he told me. A man named Hiam Simon, a Jewish American dual citizen who lived in Israel for a stretch in the seventies, piped up from the row of seats opposite us. Ariely, he said, should throw his lot in with the Democrats, a smaller party that would likely become part of Eisenkot’s government, so as to “pull the coalition to the left.”
Ariely was booked in a block of coach seats that had been reserved by the America-Israel Democracy (AID) Coalition, a nonprofit based in Pennsylvania that seeks to mobilize Israeli citizens and “concerned Americans” in “preserving the democratic foundations of the state of Israel.” (Simon bought his own ticket, in business class, on the same flight.) The AID Coalition was formed in 2023, after Netanyahu proposed that the Knesset, by majority vote, should be able to overrule Supreme Court decisions. That move sparked enormous street protests in Israel, and alarmed many Israeli citizens overseas.
When the election date was set, this past July—spurred by the legal mandate that Israel hold a parliamentary election at least every four years—the war that Israel and the U.S. had launched against Iran was in its fifth month. Many foreign airlines had paused service to Israel. On those airlines that hadn’t, prices were steep; in May, a round-trip coach seat on our route from New York was running as high as twenty-five hundred dollars. The AID Coalition launched an initiative, Fly&Vote, to help people get back to cast their ballots.
Officially, AID is nonpartisan and assists any eligible voter, irrespective of their political leanings. “We don’t ask,” Batell Blaish-Sultanik, the group’s executive director, told me. Under Israeli election law, it is illegal to provide free or subsidized trips. AID bought blocks of seats on Arkia Israeli Airlines at a commercial rate, securing around a hundred seats on each of five inbound flights before the election and five outbound flights after it. Tickets were then sold to voters at set prices at the lower end of the market rate—topping out at nine hundred dollars each way. Hagai Nassau, an environmental consultant in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, who left Israel as a five-year-old and now sports a graying beard, told me that he had glanced at flights on El Al “and it was, like, three thousand bucks. So I was, like, I’ll do Fly&Vote.”
Of course, for some overseas Israeli citizens, price is no object. Soon after chatting with Nassau at our gate, I spotted Neri Oxman, an Israeli-born architect and the wife of the hedge-fund billionaire Bill Ackman, by a barista counter in the Centurion Lounge. Ackman was sitting nearby. Oxman told me that she saw no option but to return for this election. “It’s so important,” she said, stiffening up like a soldier. “I’m doing my civic duty.” They would be flying El Al.
More than thirty-five thousand overseas Israeli citizens registered to receive information about the AID Coalition’s reserved seats, and for access to a bespoke search engine that had been programmed to find other, affordable options, with complicated itineraries and long layovers. AID estimates that more than sixty thousand will ultimately vote on October 27th.
Netanyahu’s Likud Party clearly regards overseas voters as an obstacle—perhaps even an enemy. While there is scant survey data on the political leanings of Israelis who live abroad, they tend to be secular and more educated, and it is assumed that they skew anti-Netanyahu. More than a quarter of a million people have left the country since 2023. In August, Likud’s attorneys accused the AID Coalition of bribing voters, and brought legal action to try to block its efforts. Three weeks before the election, the chairman of Israel’s Central Elections Committee dismissed the case, but the AID Coalition agreed not to buy more blocks on additional flights. Over the summer, anonymous sources inside Israel’s Transportation Ministry, which is helmed by the populist Likud provocateur Miri Regev, leaked to Israeli media that officials were plotting to reduce capacity at the country’s only major international airport in order to stop anti-Likud voters from arriving. (The AID Coalition has distributed the phone numbers of attorneys to call if any of its passengers run into trouble at passport control.)
Besides the Fly&Vote initiative, several other efforts to bring in voters seem to be under way. A group called Mind-IL is running something called Israeli Science and Academia Week—fifty-nine scholarly conferences, ranging in topics from A.I. to zoology, which all conclude the day before the election. Organizers expect to draw well over three thousand participants, many from overseas. Guli Dolev-Hashiloni, an Israeli-born scholar and activist who is flying in from Berlin, where he is a Ph.D. student in Jewish history, categorized the conferences as “a very good subversive act of Israeli academia that enables people to come back to vote without taking vacation days.” Ran I. Snitkovsky, a member of Mind-IL’s steering committee and a professor at the business school of Tel Aviv University, insisted that any intimation that he and his colleagues were gaming the electoral system was unfair. “We realized there will be a lot of people that want to be here, and we wanted to take advantage of that,” Snitkovsky told me. The result, whatever the intention, will be hundreds of foreign-based academics flying to Israel the week of the election, many on stipends from their universities. Meital Avivi-Reich, an Israeli-born expert on the science of speech perception, who teaches at CUNY, applied for fifteen hundred dollars in funding to present her research at one of the Mind-IL conferences. That will help with the airfare, she told me, but she still plans to stay with her mother and then crash with friends during her shoestring voting-cum-conference trip, doing “a night here, a night there.”
More generous travel budgets will be provided to overseas tech workers flying to Tel Aviv for Tech1, a conference of some seventeen hundred attendees, a fifth of whom come from abroad, that focusses on A.I. and cybersecurity. Last year, the event, which is billed as annual, was held in May. This year, it starts in October—on the day after the election. Tech1’s organizers have, like Snitkovsky, asserted that the timing was adjusted simply to take advantage of the fact that so many expat Israelis would be flying in to vote. Maybe so. Tech1 turned down my requests to interview its organizers, though they did encourage me, repeatedly, to buy a ticket to the conference.
In an election that could hinge on a single seat, those pulling for the opposition think—or at least hope—that the overseas contingent may put it over the top. With nearly forty parties vying for a hundred and twenty seats in the Knesset, a complicated and fractious process of coalition building will commence after the votes are tallied. A few weeks ago, the liberal newspaper Haaretz, in a lead editorial, issued “an urgent plea to Israelis abroad” to “come home and help save our democracy.” Dahlia Scheindlin, a veteran pollster who works for left-of-center candidates and parties in Israel, speculated that the number of returning overseas voters was unlikely to be big enough to change the outcome of the election. Still, she was quick to add, “I wouldn’t discourage any of them from coming.”
Snitkovsky, of Mind-IL, anticipates another draw for those travelling back: group-therapy sessions for highly educated Israelis to process the post-2023 brain drain. More than one in ten Israeli Ph.D. holders already live abroad. In a recent survey, half of medical residents told pollsters that they aim to practice overseas after completing their training. Itai Ater, an economist at Tel Aviv University, who earned his Ph.D. from Stanford, found that more than thirteen hundred doctors have left Israel in the past three years—about one out of every twenty-five. The rate of emigration by physicians has nearly doubled since the twenty-tens.
On the AID Coalition flight, I met Danielle Gutman, a forty-one-year-old with a nose ring, a Star of David tattooed on her right forearm, and a Ph.D. in biology, from the University of Haifa. As a graduate student and young mother in Israel, she had been appalled that her kids were being taught creationism in public school. Still, Gutman wanted to build her life in the country. The judicial overhaul made her reconsider. She got a job at a biotech company in Philadelphia, based partly in Israel and partly in the U.S. On Tuesday, she’ll be voting for the Democrats. (Gutman had built a local protest group of Israelis in Philadelphia. Of the sixty or seventy involved, she told me, somewhere over the Atlantic, “all but ten are going back to vote.”) Losing the election, she said, with a look of stricken disbelief, would turn her native country “into Afghanistan, or Iran.”
Ater, in his paper “Recent Findings on Israeli Emigration,” noted that “although the recent increase in emigration from Israel is significant and concerning, the current number of emigrants does not yet constitute an immediate threat to the Israeli economy.” When I spoke to him by phone, he sounded more panicked. He recalled recently attending an international conference with brilliant colleagues from Russia, Turkey, Hungary, and Poland, and realizing that none of them still lived in their home countries. He feared that Israel would meet the same fate. He spoke with alarm of the risk of “spiral collapse.” If Netanyahu is reëlected, he said, he, too, may leave.
A few weeks ago, I spoke to Shachar Kariv, a former chair of the economics department at U.C. Berkeley. Born in Israel, he would be flying in to attend a Mind-IL-organized conference, and so he could vote. After teaching his weekly class on the Thursday before the election, he would travel halfway around the world—through ten time zones—and fly back in time to teach his next one. He’s a dual citizen, and his California ballot was sitting on his desk, waiting to be filled out and mailed, for free, in its postage-paid envelope. (Like most Californians, he votes by mail.)
I was curious why he was going through so much trouble to vote in Israel. Kariv is a game theorist. Shouldn’t he know better? “In game theory,” he told me, “there is a notion called the pivotal player. A player in a game is pivotal when his actions are both necessary and sufficient to establish something. Game theorists are always asking why people vote, because the likelihood that you are going to be what we call a pivotal voter—a voter that changes the election—is basically zero. Yet still people are participating.”
Game theorists have been arguing about this phenomenon, dubbed “the paradox of voting,” for decades. There is still no consensus on why billions of people routinely cast ballots even though it seems to be irrational. Perhaps the reassuring sense that one is part of a community is the real driver? Others think that the reward of not having to regard oneself, in Kariv’s words, as a “selfish bastard,” is enough of an enticement.
Kariv is a veteran of the Israel Defense Forces and the Shin Bet, Israel’s intelligence agency, but he has been horrified by recent events: “When I see what is going on in the West Bank with the settlers—I would say, with the support of the current government—this is something that I cannot accept.”
“I feel it’s my moral obligation,” Kariv told me. “I would not be able to look myself in the mirror if I didn’t vote. I just think that, if we lose the moral ground, we lose everything.” ♦
This piece was supported by the Pulitzer Center.