Since 2005, when the UN began collecting international statistics on happiness, the Jewish state consistently has appeared near the top of the list. In the most recent rankings, it came in fourth after Finland, Denmark, and Iceland. Jonah Cohen, drawing on general trends in psychological research on happiness, identifies many reasons why, among them:
[A] spirit of neighborliness, of honest and wholesome day-to-day connection, is palpably evident in Israeli society. I recall, for example, when I took my wife on her first visit to Israel she was deeply moved by the way strangers would stop us on the sidewalk to play with our newborn baby, while others would crowd around to give us unsolicited parenting advice. Childhood innocence commands Israeli attention. Mothers are honored. Strollers are everywhere. Big families with loud, lively kids fill restaurants and cafés and then they stroll together with parents and grandparents for peaceful evening walks. Not every country is like that; I’d say much of [Israel itself] isn’t like that. But these seemingly small, ordinary instances of human connection combine to give the impression that the Israelis are happy because they are, each in his own way, fully present to the people around them.
Wise recollection of their grandparents’ suffering has helped younger Israelis to keep their own worries in perspective. That poisonous psychological temptation to measure oneself against those who are better off, to tally constantly who is getting ahead, has been properly restrained in Israeli consciousness, thanks to their shared memory of those who were once far worse off and left behind. Careful awareness of past Jewish miseries, such as the Holocaust or the Farhud in Iraq, has resulted in the Israeli inclination to appreciate what they have rather than to obsess over what they do not.
Unlike Arab nationalists and Western anti-Israel activists who burn inwardly for complete Palestinian control “from the river to the sea,” the less utopian Israelis have tended to make do with whatever national sovereignty that fate has afforded them.
Read more on Fathom: https://fathomjournal.org/why-israelis-are-so-happy-at-75/