Jewlicious, my comment wasn't aimed at you. Your response was far too reasoned and courteous for me to expect a real drag down fist fight with you. It's just that I've been around the block a time or two and seldom have I seen a political argument that doesn't go there (given enough readership). One can only hope that this thread will remain obscure.

I never formally enumerated the resaons for my decision so I may be rambling and may forget a point or two. I have a bunch of stuff to say so it may span several comments. Keep in mind that there are some gross generalizations here, but I'm specifying my reasons, so they're colored by my perceptions. They pertain more to the Zeitgeist -- as I sense it from consumption of Israeli papers and radio and from general observation while growing up and living there -- then they do to individuals which I'm sure are as varied and diverse as your average group of six million individuals. So here it goes:

The first reason for me is this volatile mix of militarism and victimhood that is so infused into the Israeli soul. Both of these symptoms can be found in places around the world, but I find the combination toxic and possibly unique. While this is not an immediate reason that people usually cite as an accute problem, in terms of raising kids I think it is major. It is so prevalent in the culture most people don't even notice it. Maybe being away for a while brought it into sharper contrast for me.

We're dealing here with a regional superpower. Its GDP dwarves the combined GDP of its impoverished neighbors, its nuclear enabled army several orders of magnitude more advanced than its purported enemies. Half the people of its the arch-enemy are malnourished. And, to top it all, it is fully backed, militarily and financially, by the world's sole superpower to an extent that not even a symbolic denouncing resolution can get through the UN without a veto (I may be off on my UN terminology here).

Yet despite all that there's this prevailing ghetto mentality. This palpable feeling that we're living on the knife's edge, on the brink of total annihilation. I'm not even going to go into the central role the Holocaust plays in the lives of Israelis as it relates to the present. Our enemies are forever scheming our destruction for no other reason than our religion. And the world is out to get us because, well, they're just conditioned that way. Nothing we do or did has any significant bearing on it and there's nothing we can do to stop it - it's part of this perpetual continuum of irrational Jewish hate that runs through the generations. This, of course, is a self fulfilling prophecy since the more we're attacked the more we feel justified in retaliating, which in turn results in more attacks which prove once again that we are indeed alone in the world.

And on top of that there's the flip side of the victimhood - the military might. We're not some Tibetan monks, suffering under the boot of China. We're a victim with weapons and we know how to use them. We're always an incursion away from fixing the Qassam problem. Always a surgical strike away from decapitating "the head of the snake". These actions have consequences (and a fairly poor track record I might add), but no matter what it is that our actions cause we always end up being the ones being wronged. And this militarism finds its way into every aspect of Israeli society.

People may disagree with my characterization here and I'm sure most people do. But in my opinion there's this huge disconnect between what I view as the reality of the situation and the manifestation of it in the Israeli psyche. While this may sound like heady analytical stuff I think it's poisonous and I think such a gap has deep psychological ramifications. We as adults can cope with it in any number of ways, but I think its effects on children are much more insidious, and while to some extent this disconnect has always existed I think it is more pronounced now as the gap between reality and perception deepens.

So this is just one reason and there are several other big ones. I don't think this one gets mentioned a lot, so I thought I'd bring it up. I doubt if I'll specify the others, unless people are genuinely interested and I fully understand if people aren't. At the very least it let me vent some which is always a good thing.