I once heard about a conversation between an Israeli journalist and a new immigrant from Russia to Israel that went like this:
Journalist: How was life for you in Russia?
Russian: Couldn’t complain.
Journalist: Did you like your job there?
Russian: Couldn’t complain.
Journalist: How was the school system for your children?
Russian: Couldn’t complain.
Journalist: So, you were happy in Russia?
Russian: Couldn’t complain.
Journalist: Well, if you couldn’t complain then why did you move to Israel?
Russian: Because here I can complain!
In the last two years, the United Nations’ inaugural World Happiness Report and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development ranked Israel in the top 15 happiest countries. The UN report ranked Israel at 14th place and according to the OECD, Israel is the 8th happiest nation on the planet. Considering other factors that typically correlate positively with national happiness rankings, this positive data is somewhat surprising.
I remember the first time I traveled to Israel, for six weeks during the summer of 2005 on an artsy program for American and Israeli teenagers called Nesiya. I remember being flabbergasted by the zest for life I encountered among my Israeli peers. They were all relatively close to graduating from high school and heading off to serve in various branches of the Israel Defense Forces. If I were in that position, I thought at the time, I would not be as happy. But they joked, sang, laughed, cried, hiked – did everything the Americans on the trip did, but there was a unique fervor that my new friends exhibited. It was contagious.
We traveled the country – hiking through the ravines in the Galilee, swimming in the oases like Ein Gedi south of the Dead Sea, climbing around the Ramon crater in the Negev desert, and exploring the cosmopolitan areas of Tel Aviv and the historic holy sites of Jerusalem. It was exhilarating.
Israel was preparing that summer to evacuate 8,000 of its citizens from the Gaza Strip in mid-August, the day after we left the country for our hometowns across the U.S. I was getting ready to enter my junior year of high school while one of my Israeli friends left the program early so her family could move elsewhere in the country, following the “land for peace” deal that Israel made with the Palestinians. (I wrote this article when I returned home right before the disengagement.)
One would think that with all the negativity in its neighborhood including the daily threats of terror and destruction, de-legitimization campaigns around the world – to name just a few of the realities of life in Israel – that Israelis would be less than ecstatic with life. In spite of everything, though, Israelis are by and large content. Everything is relative, even on the scale of national happiness.
State of Our Own 