Thousands of Israelis Abroad Return to Vote in Critical Election

I landed at Ben Gurion Airport yesterday, the air thick with the familiar scent of pine and jet fuel. The terminal was crowded, but not with the usual tourists. The conversations swirling around me were in rapid Hebrew, peppered with accents from New York, London and Toronto. People were hauling carry-ons toward the taxis, not toward a vacation, but toward a polling place. They had come for one reason only: to vote.

This election is different. Tuesday’s vote is the first since the Hamas-led attacks of October 2023 and the devastating wars that followed. It is widely seen as a referendum on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership during that period and the hard-right trajectory of his government. For many Israelis abroad, watching from a distance has crystallized a sense of urgency they say they no longer feel they can ignore.

Yael Natra, a 61-year-old who left Israel for Canada twenty years ago, told me she never considered voting from abroad before. She felt it was improper for a non-resident to influence the country’s path. That changed. She spent thousands of dollars to fly nearly 6,000 miles from Toronto to Tel Aviv. “The Israel that I grew up in is disappearing,” she said before her trip, citing an eroding democracy and a divided society. “If something won’t change this time, I don’t know what’s going to be.”

Natra is not alone. The U.S. based nonprofit AID Coalition, which runs a “Fly&Vote” initiative, estimates as many as 67,000 voters are returning to Israel for this election. Their data suggests about half are flying from the United States, with others coming from Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. In a country with over 7.3 million registered voters, this bloc could be decisive. Previous Israeli elections have been decided by thin margins.

“It doesn’t matter what side of the political spectrum you’re on, everyone views these elections as going to be critical,” said Jonathan Barsade, AID Coalition’s president.

The motivation for this costly pilgrimage is a complex mix of democratic duty and deep political fear. Many of those I spoke with are liberal or centrist Israelis who have watched their country shift from afar. Mairav Zonszein, a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group, noted, “Many Israelis who have left over the years are exposed to the isolation and animosity toward the country much more palpably than those inside, and as such are likely to want to vote out Netanyahu.”

Hadar Susskind, 53, is flying back from the U.S. with four relatives. He told me he wants a new government to halt settlement expansion and settler violence in the West Bank and to allow for reconstruction in Gaza. “This government is digging the hole deeper every day,” he said. “The first thing the new government needs to do is put the shovel down.”

It is a mistake, however, to assume all returning expats are voting against the current government. Political analyst Dahlia Scheindlin cautions, “There are also expats coming in to vote for the pro-Netanyahu side.” The full impact of the fly-in vote remains an open question.

What is clear is that for some, this election represents a painful reckoning with their own choices. A record number of Israelis have moved away in recent years, a trend that spiked after October 2023. Eti Wissotzky Cohen, 44, settled in the U.K. last year with her family, alarmed by democratic backsliding. She told me she flew back to vote for the center-left Democrats party. “They’re looking at the Israeli population as pawns,” she said of the current leadership.

Others, like Natra’s sister Tamar Ichilov, 57, are motivated by a profound distress over Israel’s international standing and actions in Gaza. “People don’t like us, and I can’t blame them,” she said after landing in Tel Aviv. She sees a government consumed by a destructive “vendetta” since October 7.

For Zorik Nitzan, who moved to Canada for a better life, this trip feels like a final attempt to correct course. He is coming back because it feels like “the last chance to beat the Netanyahu movement and to get this country back on course.”

Standing in that airport, I heard the same word repeated: “last.” Last chance. Last hope. Last stand. These voters are not tourists. They are former residents making an expensive, emotionally charged intervention in a homeland many feel is slipping away from the ideals they once held. They have calculated that the cost of a plane ticket is now lower than the cost of staying silent. Their collective action underscores a raw truth about this election. It is not merely a choice between parties. It is a battle for Israel’s soul, fought by people who felt they had left but discovered they never really could.

• Election shaped by Hamas-led attacks.
• Over 67,000 voters returning to Israel.
• Majority flying from the U.S. and Europe.
• Critical choices for Israel’s future.
• Voters express deep political fear.
• Complex motivations behind voting decisions.