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Posted on 04/27/2025 6:39:16 AM PDT by Twotone
The numbers are in: Israel is a happy place. Despite constantly facing vicious enemies and enduring a year and a half of sustained fighting and funerals, Israel ranks in the top 10 countries with the highest levels of happiness, according to the newly released 2025 World Happiness Report. At No. 8, Israel contrasts sharply with other war-torn countries that are quite reasonably miserable: Ukraine sits at 111, and Lebanon, which opened a second front against Israel in October 2023, is third from the bottom, at 145. Even advanced Western nations such as Great Britain and the United States, in 23rd and 24th place, respectively, have a glee gap with Israel. How come?
An illuminating if perhaps counterintuitive datapoint is that, since Oct. 7, 2023, Israelis have rushed ahead with making babies. Baby booms often occur postwar, not in the middle of one. But Israelis have continued to affirm life even while mourning more than 1,700 dead. At almost three babies per woman, Israel already has the leading birth rate among member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)—a forum of 37 democracies with market-based economies—and in the final months of 2024, it witnessed an estimated 10 percent increase in births.
Another remarkable statistic explains Israeli optimism. On April 12, 96 percent of Israeli Jews will participate in the oldest ongoing ritual in the Western world: the Passover Seder, celebrating the exodus from Egypt three millennia ago. Few democracies, if any, match these participation rates. While 88 percent of Americans enjoy turkey on Thanksgiving, the ritual surrounding that meal is less elaborate and usually much shorter. Seders are often hours long, ritualized re-creations of the flight from Egypt, a reflection of how Jews live inside their history—and with their history. Prayers, songs, food, and other rituals invite Jews to see themselves as having been personally redeemed.
Most optimists are mission-driven. Feeling a sense of belonging, they progress confidently toward worthy goals. And as the best-selling British historian Paul Johnson, who wrote histories of the Jews, Christianity, and the American people, observed, “No people has ever insisted more firmly than the Jews that history has a purpose and humanity a destiny.” Despite searing political divisions, Israelis remain united culturally. Cherishing family, community, country, and history shapes their faith in the future.
In democracies, meanwhile, happiness tends to evoke notions of peace, serenity, and the search for one’s personal bliss. Rather than singing their national anthem proudly, aspiring Western universalists dream of the paradise of John Lennon’s “Imagine,” where there is no heaven, no hell, and no countries. We have “nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too.” Everybody is just “livin’ for today … aha aaa.”
Alas, living in the moment often strips those moments of meaning. Fewer people choose to become parents in this happy, peppy, borderless, self-indulgent utopia. The American birth rate in 2023 was the lowest in 40 years at 1.7 births per woman. The average birth rate of OECD countries has plummeted to 1.5 since 1960, when a more traditional, religious, and patriotic West had a birth rate of 3.3. Today’s runners-up to Israel’s birthrate of 2.9 in the OECD are Mexico and France, at 1.8. Although ultra-Orthodox and Arab women boost Israel’s rate, secular Jewish women average a chart-topping two children per woman.
Whereas optimism was always synonymous with America, today an epidemic of despair afflicts young Americans especially, and the West more broadly. According to a Financial Times analysis of 2023-2024 Gallup data, American youth are some of the most pessimistic among OECD countries. In 2023, the demographer Karen Guzzo explained that the great American baby bust can be attributed to “economic strains, work instability, political polarization, student loans, access to health care, climate change, and global conflicts.”
Moreover, too many young Americans appear to have lost pride in their nation and its story, even though it’s one of world history’s greatest epics—a story of pioneers and immigrants coming together to launch a civilizational enterprise fueled by life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These young Americans have been subject to a campaign of demoralization, whether by woke schoolteachers or the board of the American Historical Association, who have promoted what could be dubbed as “historicide”—killing their own history—and have emphasized America’s “systemic” sins rather than the good that America has been responsible for.
In contrast, Israelis feel they are part of Israel’s story and the Jewish story, that of a proud people trying to do better in the world while also bettering it. After repeatedly overcoming oppression, they’ve returned to their homeland to live freely—and happily. Israeli schools repeatedly assign students shorashim, “roots,” projects. These family-tree explorations, even in high school, usually culminate in evenings celebrating parents’ or grandparents’ differing ethnic origins, cuisines, and Zionist journeys, propelling everyone forward together.
With so much to live for, Israelis know what they are willing to die for, too. On the eve of battle, many soldiers write goodbye letters to be read in case they die. Having buried more than 1,000 soldiers since Oct. 7, Israelis have cherished these messages by fallen soldiers affirming their motivation to fight and their willingness to sacrifice everything for this country that imbued them, as individuals, with a particular identity—past, present, and future.
To be sure, wars usually inspire patriotism. But, remarkably, Israel’s mourning rituals honor each soldier as a critical link in the Jews’ old-new chain. Most funerals are massive and hours long. Fellow citizens often line the streets for miles as the bereaved parents leave their home to endure the worst moments of their lives. Shivas—seven days of mourning—are so crowded, most mourners host comforters in tents, featuring fridges overstocked with donated food and drinks. Within days, the family announces some living monument reflecting their loved one’s values or continuing their life mission. The community then kicks in with its own acts honoring the fallen warriors: supporting a new school in the desert for youth at risk, a hip-hop album of the soldier’s songs, a national competition in a beloved sport, and so on. Creating a constructive culture of memory, not a nihilistic death cult, Israelis integrate the life that was ended prematurely into an eternal story going back millennia that Israel’s reestablishment reinvigorated in 1948.
Quotations from the letters of soldiers killed in action adorn bumper stickers throughout Israel. It is true that having cruel enemies, and being able to recognize the threat they pose, provides moral clarity. But the heartbreaking letters go further. The soldiers, including reservists, who volunteered for combat duty, affirm their mission to defend Israel and the world against Hamas, Hezbollah, and the terrorist scourge. A 35-year-old father of four, Master Sgt. (res.) Elkana Vizel, wrote in a letter retrieved with his body, “We are writing the most meaningful moments in the history of our people and the whole world … Keep choosing life all the time—a life of love, hope, purity and optimism.” Sgt. Maj. (res.) Ben Zussman, 22, a Jerusalemite neighbor, wrote a letter while rushing toward Gaza, which friends passed to his parents after he was killed fighting there. “I’m happy and grateful for the privilege I have to defend our beautiful country and Am Yisrael [the Jewish people],” he wrote. “Even if something happens to me, I don’t allow you to sink into sorrow,” he demanded, insisting that his mother make her special cookies and that the mourning week flow with meat along with “beers, sweet drinks, nuts, tea.” “I had the privilege to fulfill my dream and my mission.”
In the Gulag, prisoners with robust identities, national and/or religious, were the strongest partners in the daily struggle against Soviet jailers. Those connected to communities awaiting them back home felt accountable and saw their actions as part of a historical chain.
Israel’s historical optimism proves that identity is built through shared stories and values, not political agendas and competing grievances. When nurtured thoughtfully, group identity doesn’t compromise our freedom; it enhances our journey, filling our free, prosperous lives with the sounds of others, inspired by the ideas of our ancestors.
The West needs good tribalism: A healthy commitment to community, connectedness, and history anchors us. It motivates us to defend ourselves when necessary, while inspiring us always to build a better world. That’s the essence of most Israelis’ Zionism, which many just call patriotism. And that’s the essence of the Passover seder message, too.
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If I had the USA looking out for my welfare I’d be happy too.
Because it has been decades since the "Greatest Country in the World" has had either, we are not at the top of the list.
Would much rather help israel out, who returns help in several forms, especially in medical breakthroughs, but also monetarily, than help out Palestine which offers the world nothing in return but grief and destruction.
Israel provides ecological techno,ogres that have benefitted the us tremendously, it offered critical help in Florida after hurricanes, they offer cyber security, and mich much more- Palestine? Nope, nada.
I can confirm this from the streets of Tel Aviv:
Israel is happy and positively bursting with Jewish babies!
Maybe because they finally have a leader who won’t cave in the Islamic terrorists and far-left press.
Because they are allowed to have pride, identify themselves as a people, they nave a national identity and name it when fighting outsiders, people like that.
Europeans became safer and happier, after Hitler was disposed of.
It can be said that Israel is safer and perhaps happier, now that Hamas and Hezbollah and Iran are less of a problem.
And they are one of the few countries in the world that tolerate religious and ethnic minorities. Maybe that’s why they’re so happy? Or Vice versa.
"Moreover, too many young Americans appear to have lost pride in their nation and its story, even though it’s one of world history’s greatest epics—a story of pioneers and immigrants coming together to launch a civilizational enterprise fueled by life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These young Americans have been subject to a campaign of demoralization, whether by woke schoolteachers or the board of the American Historical Association, who have promoted what could be dubbed as “historicide”—killing their own history—and have emphasized America’s “systemic” sins rather than the good that America has been responsible for.In contrast, Israelis feel they are part of Israel’s story and the Jewish story, that of a proud people trying to do better in the world while also bettering it. After repeatedly overcoming oppression, they’ve returned to their homeland to live freely—and happily. Israeli schools repeatedly assign students shorashim, “roots,” projects. These family-tree explorations, even in high school, usually culminate in evenings celebrating parents’ or grandparents’ differing ethnic origins, cuisines, and Zionist journeys, propelling everyone forward together."
"too many young Americans appear to have lost pride in their nation and its story"
And secular American jews played an outsized role in fomenting that calumny.
“”””And they are one of the few countries in the world that tolerate religious and ethnic minorities.””””
Isn’t that the standard for white countries?
The "media", movie and TV industries have a LOT of them.
Anybody in the USA or from other countries sees almost everyone, no matter how stupid or lazy magically having a nice apartment or house and new car or SUV.
Not having that magically given to them, causes depression and negative thinking.
I read an interview with an illegal alien from Africa who had this rosy outlook on America from watching TV shows and movies.
He just wanted to go home to Africa, but had spent his life savings, $9,000 to get here and is now broke.
He said he had it better in Africa.
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