Figures released by the Central Bureau for Statistics last week showed a 22 per cent fall in the number of Jews immigrating to Israel last year. The number was a further 30 per cent down in the first three months of this year. The figures reflect growing anxieties about the prospect of life in Israel six months after the start of the intifada. Ariel Sharon, the prime minister, who took office two months ago , said he wanted to see a million new immigrants over the next decade. Zionists have always maintained that Israel's future depends on attracting increasing numbers of immigrants because of the demographic imbalance and a Arab birth rate that far outstrips the Jewish.
Potential newcomers are also worried about the integration of immigrants and the standard of living.
Under Israel's immigration law, migrants receive automatic citizenship if one parent or grandparent is Jewish. Since the early 1990s some 800,000 immigrants have reached Israel from Russia and the former Soviet republics to make up more than 16 per cent of the country's Jewish population. Now, though, Israel has trouble luring migrants from eastern Europe as the economy there stabilises and the half a million Jews still left become more sceptical of the benefits of life in the Middle East. In the first two months of this year only 5,038 Russian Jews emigrated, compared with 8,031 last year. All they knew was that it was a land flowing with milk and honey.