We're as happy as Canadians! 

by Hillel Halkin
September 18, 2003
http://www.jpost.com

We are, it seems, a bunch of happy troopers. 

This isn't sarcasm. It's statistics. They were recently released 
in a survey of 7,000 Israelis commissioned by the Budgets Division 
of the Ministry of Finance, which presumably wanted to know if the 
billions of shekels it is spending on (let alone taking from) us 
every year is making us content. It turns out that - although I 
rather doubt the Ministry of Finance deserves much credit for it - 
we're content as all get-out. 

You don't believe it? Consider: 

83% of all Israelis report that they are "satisfied" or 
"very satisfied" with their lives. 

53% of all Israelis feel their lives will get even better, and 
another 33% do not think they will get any worse, leaving only 
14% who think the years ahead are going downhill. 

And in case you're wondering how well we stack up against other 
countries that have commissioned similar surveys, the answer is: 
Very well indeed. In fact, I was told by Charles Kamen, director 
of Social Statistics at the Central Bureau of Statistics in 
Jerusalem (which carried out the Finance Ministry's study) that 
we're near the top of the list. In the shangri-la of Canada, 
for example, where even global warming is good news, 
the satisfaction rate is 85%. 

It's hard to believe that this is the country you and I live in. 

It's not merely that, judged by obvious criteria, we Israelis 
should be miserable. Not only do we live under great stress, 
faced with daily terror attacks, the long-term danger of all-out 
war with our neighbors, and the knowledge that we are intensely 
disliked by these neighbors and by much of the rest of the world. 
We also suffer from overcrowding, claustrophobia, environmental 
blight, bad schools, poor government, unemployment, low wages, 
high prices, and sharp cleavages in our own society - in which, 
we are told, if civil war does not break out between Israeli Jews 
and Israeli Arabs, this is only because it will erupt before then 
between Ashkenazim and Sephardim, or between the religious and 
the secular, or between the settlements and the Coastal Plain. 

No - it isn't just that which makes our 83% level a shocking 
statistic. It's also that anyone eavesdropping for five minutes 
on the things we regularly say to each other would be convinced 
that we are miserable. When did you last take part in a serious 
conversation in which one of the following sentences was not 
uttered by somebody? 

"How much longer can this go on?" 

"I only survive by not reading the newspapers." 

"Everyone I know is talking about leaving the country." 

"What kind of future do we have here?" 

And we're as happy as the Canadians! 

I can think of three explanations. 

1. Statistics lie - or rather, people do. We're miserable, 
all right. We just won't admit it to the pollsters. 

2. We're not only happy, we're stupid. If we had any brains, 
we'd realize how miserable we should be. 

3. This is actually a pretty good place to live in. 

Explanation 1 is illogical. If we're constantly complaining to 
our friends, why pretend we're happy on a questionnaire? 

Explanation 2 is irrelevant. It is stupid for anyone to be happy. 
As Schopenhauer put it: "If you imagine the sum total of distress, 
pain and suffering of every kind which the sun shines upon in its 
course, you will have to admit it would have been much better if 
the sun had been able to call up the phenomenon of life as little 
on the earth as on the moon." 

That leaves Explanation 3. By elimination it must be the right one. 

Yes, we're complainers with a lot to complain about. But when you 
get right down to it, our lives, in spite of everything, are better 
than they would be in a lot of other places that, in our moments 
of anguish or frustration, we threaten to leave, or actually do 
leave, this country for. 

They're sometimes better even in a material sense, if one thinks 
not only of the sizes of our houses and salaries, but of the 
safety of our streets, the freshness of our food, the generally 
high level of our medical care, and other benefits of life here, 
not to mention the sun and the sea and the generally good weather, 
of which we have a glorious amount. Although we may envy the 
Norwegians, we tend to forget that they walk around in darkness 
for several months of the year. 

The real quality of life in Israel, though, is the human one, 
the breadth and depth of our relationships and activities - 
the intensity and intimacy of our friendships, the closeness of 
our families, the solidarity of our society despite all its 
arguments, the sheer aliveness and stimulation of the place. 
These are things we take for granted and assume that all peoples 
have. But many don't, certainly not the way we do, and this 
does much to explain why so many of us are upbeat about our lives. 

Take the fact, for instance, that 99% of all Israelis report in 
the survey that they have families, 98.5% are regularly in touch 
with them, and 94% think these relations are good. Although 
I don't know precisely how Americans or Frenchmen would score 
on these questions, the figures for them would almost certainly 
be lower, just as they would be lower than the percentage of 
Israelis who say they have close friends and get the support 
they need from them. 

There are different reasons why we score so high in these areas. 
One is that we are Jews and Jews have always been a highly 
family-and-community-oriented people. Another is that Israel is 
a small country. Although we commonly see this as a drawback, 
one of its pluses is that friends and family remain close by. 
They do not disappear on us or (unless they leave the country) 
move thousands of miles away, which is in part why we are 
willing to invest so much in our relationships with them. 

And of course, the very stress we are under produces a high 
degree of social cohesiveness, as sometimes happens in countries 
under attack, such as London during the Blitz or the New York of 
9/11. Living in the human drama called Israel gives us a sense 
of purpose, which is the respect we differ most in from other 
Western societies. Unlike them, we are still a people, not a mere 
amalgam of private selves. Not a little of the anti-Israel 
sentiment in today's world is really jealousy of that. 

Knowing what you are living for makes up for a lot of other 
things. This is as true of countries as it is of individuals. 
And 83% of us appear to realize that. 
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The writer is an author and translator.