Oil, War, and Aliyah: Does the Hormuz Crisis Change the Calculus?

It has been a tense Passover. Millions in Israel holding seders in bomb shelters, the rest of us keeping a lower profile than usual elsewhere.

Jews across Europe and North America have been sitting at seder tables in countries where energy bills have spiked, food prices are rising, and the news is dominated by an active US-Israeli war in the Middle East. Some will be asking, not for the first time, whether it is time to leave.

This year, the question comes with an unusual complication: the country they might be considering moving to is directly involved in the conflict generating the economic pressure pushing them out.

That is the aliyah paradox of 2026. The Hormuz crisis has not created a simple directional push toward Israel. It has created a genuine dilemma.

The economic case, honestly assessed

Israel was already the fourth most expensive developed country to live in before the war began, with prices of goods and services running about 29% above the OECD average. That is not a welcoming starting point for someone weighing financial incentives — particularly when you look behind the headline numbers.

National Insurance Institute figures for 2024 show that 21% of Israelis live in poverty, including approximately 880,000 children. This disturbing figure is the second-highest rate of child poverty in the OECD. Israel is simultaneously one of the most expensive places in the developed world and one of its most unequal. That contradiction does not get enough airtime in diaspora aliyah conversations, which tend to focus on the spiritual and communal dimensions while glossing over what life on the ground actually costs for those without significant capital behind them.

The Hormuz closure compounds this. Israeli economists note that many essential items the country imports: fertilizers, metals, grains including wheat and corn will become more expensive as energy costs filter through transportation, manufacturing, and food production. Israel is not insulated from the same price pressures pushing European and American Jews to reconsider their circumstances. It is subject to them, plus the direct costs of active combat.

And yet the Israeli government has moved deliberately to sweeten the financial case for new arrivals. Israel unveiled a 0% income tax rate for immigrants arriving in 2026, alongside a NIS 170 million program to improve integration and reforms to speed up professional licensing. For a French professional earning €80,000, a British doctor, or an American tech worker, the tax incentive alone changes the arithmetic substantially. Europe’s oil-shock-driven cost of living spike makes the comparison more favorable to Israel than it was two years ago, even accounting for Israel’s own elevated prices.

The Western aliyah trend was already moving before this crisis. France recorded a 45% jump in arrivals in 2025 to roughly 3,300; the UK rose 19% to 840; North American aliyah hit 4,150, one of the highest annual figures in Nefesh B’Nefesh’s 23-year history. Combined, Western Europe and North America accounted for over 9,000 new immigrants in 2025, nearly double the 4,954 who arrived in 2023. The Hormuz crisis lands on top of a trend already in motion.

The asymmetry of blame

There is something else that rarely gets said plainly. Iran has effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz. Iran is firing missiles at civilian infrastructure across the Gulf. Iran’s proxies are the ones dragging Lebanon back into war. And yet, in much of the international conversation, it is Israel as usual that is in the dock.

This is the ambient condition of Jewish life in 2026. Hezbollah, a militia that CNN analysts describe as “a shadow of the force it once was” after Israeli operations degraded its leadership and arsenal, has nonetheless entered the conflict, firing hundreds of rockets and drones into northern Israel at Iran’s command rather than Lebanon’s. Lebanon’s own government has declared Hezbollah’s military activity illegal and banned it, while the Lebanese Armed Forces commander has acknowledged he lacks the capacity to enforce that declaration. The Soufan Center Lebanon is being pulled into a war its government explicitly did not choose. Israel gets the headlines.

IRGC threats to obliterate Israeli cities are met with international hand-wringing at best and open sympathy at worst. Israel is the only party in this conflict that takes those threats at face value. It knows all to well than when an enemy claims to desire your eradication, you don’t just laugh it off. The European and American Jews sitting at seder tables wondering whether to move to Israel are watching this asymmetry in real time. It does not make the decision easier.

The proximity problem

Here is what the optimistic framing leaves out. Israel is not a bystander to this conflict. Missile alerts interrupted seders this week. Flights have been curtailed, with airlines halving takeoffs and landings. The Home Front Command is telling civilians to keep following shelter instructions. The IDF is fighting simultaneously on the Iranian front, in Lebanon, and maintaining readiness elsewhere. Israel still of course has Gaza and the remnants of Hamas to worry about.

The aliyah data itself contains a warning that tends to get buried in headlines about Western Jewish solidarity. For the second consecutive year, more people left Israel than arrived in 2025, producing a negative net migration balance unprecedented in the country’s modern history. The Taub Center projects the gap between departures and arrivals to widen to approximately 37,000 people in 2026.  Secular, young, and high-income Israelis are leaving at rates the state has not previously recorded. The people best positioned to evaluate life inside Israel are voting with their feet in the opposite direction.

This matters for how diaspora Jews should read the aliyah conversation. The pull toward Israel is real, documented, and driven by authentic Zionist conviction and genuine safety calculations in places like France and the UK. The push away is also real, and it comes from people who know the country intimately, for all its wonders and its flaws.

The honest answer

The Hormuz crisis does not resolve this dilemma. But it does sharpen it.

For Jews in Paris, London, or Manchester, where antisemitic incidents have risen sharply and where energy-driven cost of living pressures are acute, Israel’s financial incentives for 2026 immigration look more competitive than at any point in recent memory. The tax position alone is not trivial. The daily experience of being Jewish in Western Europe, weighed against the daily experience of being Jewish in Israel, missile alerts included, is a calculation each family makes privately and differently. More than half of North American applicants in 2025 cited solidarity with Israel following the outbreak of war as a primary motivation for immigrating. For those people, the current conflict intensifies rather than deters.

For others, the active war makes Israel feel more frightening precisely when it is supposed to feel most necessary. That deserves respect rather than dismissal. Aliyah under fire requires a particular kind of conviction — not just Zionist sentiment but a genuine willingness to absorb the material and psychological costs of living in a country at war. Not every Jew has that, and there is no shame in it.

I left the UK twice. I have not yet made aliyah. I am learning Hebrew, I visit Israel, I feel the pull. But for now I choose to live in Southeast Asia, where I am raising a family and building a business. The streets are safe and my family sleeps without listening for sirens. The Hormuz crisis has not changed that calculation for me. It has only made me think harder about it.

That, I suspect, is where most diaspora Jews find themselves this Passover: pulled in multiple directions simultaneously, watching the news, doing the maths, and not yet ready to declare the answer obvious.

Perhaps the IRGC falls. Perhaps the Gulf alliances hold and something resembling peace starts to rebuild. The winners of genuine stability in the Middle East and the rest of the world would be, without question, everyone.