Want to escape and don’t know where? Stressed out, bad for you? Did the election results make you itch all over along with the deep understanding that there is no hope for the future? In this case, Livnat Foran will not help you. But you know what? Flight abroad.
It seems that the Israelis are the most traveled nation that exists, so it is not surprising that we encounter the Hebrew language in every corner of the globe. Call it escapism, call it denial, Israelis love to fly and that’s a fact.
Since the results of the last elections, there has been a lot of talk about the Israelis who choose to leave the country for a better and less corrupt future elsewhere. And even though they receive a barrage of criticism regarding this “non-Zionist” act, no one thought to mention the Portuguese passport industry that makes hundreds of thousands of shekels a year on operative Israelis who obtained the coveted passport.
The Portuguese Ministry of Justice revealed that tens of thousands of descendants of Spanish deportees have already received citizenship,,,, and only in the last seven years has the country granted citizenship to 56,685 descendants of martyrs. The state still has more than 80,000 applications waiting in line, so in total more than 137,000 applications for Portuguese citizenship have been received under the Nationality Law for Sephardic Jews since 2015. Based on these data, it can be concluded that preparing to leave is allowed but leaving is not allowed.
For God’s sake, people hire special companies to find their great-great-grandfather’s birth certificates in a remote village in Romania. At least this was an episode of “The Lost Passport Version” with Scout Grant: “I am happy to inform you that we have found the birth certificate of your grandfather Yankala Konilevich In a tin can in an attic in Czechoslovakia.” I would like to know in what other country citizens armed with foreign passports are going to bombard them with an atomic bomb in a second at least?
And despite all of this, not everyone is in a hurry to leave, it requires a lot of resources and energy and therefore the best compromise in a bleak and crooked daily reality is flights, forays, jumps abroad to refresh. And it’s not just what you think, Israelis really do travel a lot. Almost a million Israelis have flown Abroad in September – more than before the corona virus. In May, there were 698.3 thousand departures of Israelis abroad compared to 656 thousand in May 2019. According to the CBS data, of the 698.3 thousand Israelis who went abroad, 611.7 did so by air, 72.5 thousand by land, of which 53.4 thousand at the Taba crossing to Egypt and the rest At the border crossings to Jordan. In addition, 11.4 thousand passengers left the country on cruises.
Yes, the Israelis have already forgotten about the corona and are compensating in a big way for all the time they were locked at home. In a reality where a vacation in Prague is cheaper than a bed and breakfast in the Galilee, a shopping basket costs half as much and there are dozens of options for trips in pastoral nature, who can blame them? So fly, fly like it’s not there, just don’t forget to come back tomorrow because otherwise we’ll get really angry.