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America's happiness ratio recently sank.
Terrible adversity perhaps gave Israel a new perspective.
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Israel perfectly embodies the essence of ‘happiness’ - opinion
The great pain caused by the seizing of hostages and the loss of life of soldiers has energized us to do something about them.
By DOUGLAS ALTABEF
Once again, the solons of the World Happiness Report have prepared their list of the happiest countries in the world, and, amazingly, Israel is ranked at number five. While the naysayers will point out that we slipped a notch from the previous ranking, the rest of us will find our placement to be nothing short of astounding.
Let’s remember that this ranking was focused on 2023, one of the most difficult years in our history. From the dissension of judicial reform to the horrors of October 7, and the painful sacrifices and dislocations of the ensuing war, the idea of being happy was not at the top of the list of anyone that I know.
Yet, the index's criteria are social support, income, health, freedom, generosity, and the absence of corruption. Some of these criteria lend themselves to objective comparison, while others leave much room for subjective interpretation.
As in the past, the leading countries are Scandinavian or Nordic countries, countries with significant social welfare nets and frankly, not much to be unhappy about. None of them are on the front lines facing implacable enemies.
As I have noted previously (“In birth and death, Israel is the happiest country in the world,” The Jerusalem Post, March 23, 2018), the criteria do not include two indicia that reasonably could be viewed as the ultimate barometer of happiness: birth and suicide rates. If these were to be included, I have little doubt that Israel would top the list.
But even apart from this, it is positively mind boggling that Israel would rank where it does, or even be close to it. I would suggest that the mix of indicia, particularly social support, generosity and freedom, all mesh into the larger, if vaguer, concept of meaningfulness.
Proudly, when it comes to meaningfulness, Israel is indeed likely to be a chart topper. Meaningfulness has little to do with income, though with privation it is very difficult to look beyond the need to provide fundamental necessities for oneself and one’s family.
Meaningfulness is what one derives from the experience of living. There was much anger during the months of the judicial reform controversy, but such anger gave voice and mission to so many on both sides of the issue.
The nightmare of October 7 was an existential slap in the face, reminding us of the tenuousness of our situation here. Tenuousness need not be the antithesis of happiness, especially when it leads to the outpourings of selfless service by our soldiers and reservists, and the myriad gestures of support for them from those of us on the home front.
The great pain caused by the seizing of hostages and the loss of life of soldiers has energized us to do something about them. Having the hostages return and assuring that our soldiers’ sacrifices will not be in vain are purposeful missions, not depressions.
Young people in Israel are significantly happier than most of the world despite mandatory service
ONE OF the most telling rankings was the division by age group. In the category of under 30 Israel was ranked second in the world. What an incredible disconnect does this reveal between “difficulty” and “happiness.” Mandatory service for most of our population, especially when such service is often life threatening, seems to not impede happiness.
Arguably, it increases happiness by providing a context for seeing oneself as part of a larger, cohesive picture. This is in contrast to just focusing on one’s own needs and wants.
By way of a proof text for this notion was the distressing ranking of the United States. America fell out of the top 20 to land at number 23. More concerning by far, however, was that in the under 30 category America was 62nd.
Can it be that woke obsessiveness, the lack of required national service, the incessant focus on victimization, the anger inherent in DEI, that all of this comes at a high emotional and existential price? In the still quiet of being, these are all life draining.
Finding safe spaces, looking for reasons to judge, categorize and ultimately demean others for reasons that have nothing to do with their character, all of this comes at an immense cost to one’s self. What the report should validate is the joylessness of all of this, the focus on substitutes for fulfillment, purposefulness, and meaning.
Not surprisingly, we here in Israel do not have an extensive frame of reference for life led in other parts of the world. Yes, the grass can seem greener elsewhere, and yes, things here can seem endlessly frustrating.
However, as this index should remind us, there are problems and then there is the question of what one makes of and does with those problems. There are the questions not just of how one copes, but also of how one compensates.
We should celebrate the reality that there is much here to compensate for our burdens. For many it is their religious faith and practice. For a great many it is the sense that we are part of a people, a people that is still embarked on a great adventure of national rejuvenation.
And as our soldiers are showing us by their implicit example, there is the sense that tenuousness means that each of us counts, each of us can be doing something in our way to steady and steer the ship of our society.
In Israel there are two, at the most three degrees of separation about pretty much everything. This creates a sense of intimacy, of relatedness, of common undertaking. We might be the odd man out on the world stage, but here we are not alone.
There is a reason why we have the highest birth rate among developed Western nations. We look forward to bringing our new ones into this crazy, but ultimately magnificent undertaking that is called the State of Israel.
They will not have it easy; but like us, they will be happy.
The writer is chairman of the board of Im Tirtzu and a director of the Israel Independence Fund.
And:
BIBI AND ISRAEL'S LEADERSHIP MAY BE GUILTY OF MANY THINGS BUT THE MOST IMPORTANT HAS BEEN AVOIDING THE UNPLEASANT WHICH HAS LED TO PARALYSIS. NOW ISRAEL IS CONFRONTED WITH WHAT THEY WANTED TO AVOID. THE IMPERATIVE NEED TO TAKE OUT IRAN.
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The View From Israel’s Front With Hezbollah
The Iranian proxy’s attacks have forced 60,000 northern civilians to evacuate. Is war their only way home?
By Elliot Kaufman
Orna Weinberg can read my eyes. “In peacetime, this is heaven,” she says from atop a mountain ridge overlooking the Hula valley. The kibbutz of Manara, in Israel’s Upper Galilee, is breathtaking. Yet it feels obscene to take in the beauty amid so much pain. The only conclusion from our brisk walk through her battered, dangerous, evacuated community is that Hezbollah has made the north of Israel into hell.
The people here are no fragile flowers. “I learned to walk in a bomb shelter,” Ms. Weinberg, 57, a caregiver, says cheerfully. Frederieke Shamia, 48, stresses that “this community had never evacuated, ever—until now.” Rockets from Lebanon and Syria are nothing new to northern Israel, “but the antitank missiles changed everything,” Ms. Weinberg says. Her home was the second in Manara to be hit.
The southwest of the kibbutz is closed off. “The moment Hezbollah sees movement inside a building there, they fire,” Ms. Shamia says. “Turn on a light or adjust a blind—they fire.” Unlike the rockets, which can be intercepted and are typically inaccurate, the antitank guided missiles hit their targets in seconds.
Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy that holds the real power in Lebanon, fired on Manara half an hour before I got there. We drove east through an empty Kiryat Shmona, Israel’s northernmost city, which received 30 rockets that day, the first of Ramadan.
I had come from Rhadjar, an eerily normal village on the border between the Golan Heights and Lebanon. Israel controls it, Lebanon claims it, and locals say it belonged to Syria. “Now we’re Israeli,” the mayor says with a smile. His village is Alawite, the same sect as Syria’s ruling clique. That affords it some quiet.
Hezbollah takes Lebanon’s claim to Rhadjar and other small territories as a justification to flout United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701, which ordered the demilitarization of a buffer zone in southern Lebanon. U.N. peacekeepers were supposed to enforce that. Instead, Hezbollah entrenched itself and uses the peacekeepers as human shields in its war to destroy Israel.
Could the Lebanese military, funded by the U.S. to the tune of more than $3 billion since 2006, restrain Hezbollah? That’s another joke, as if Lebanon could act like a state rather than a willing captive to the war Hezbollah launched from its territory. The speaker of Lebanon’s Parliament leads a separate group that is also shooting at Israel.
Anyone focused only on Gaza, to Israel’s southwest, is missing half the story. Hezbollah has fired more than 3,500 rockets, missiles and mortars at northern Israel since Oct. 7. It fired 4,500 in the entire 2006 war with Israel, yet the world calls this a “low-intensity conflict.” At least 60,000 northern Israeli civilians have been evacuated from their homes for five months, at an unbearable cost in national morale. How can it be, Israelis ask, that Hezbollah has moved the hard-won buffer zone to the Israeli side of the border?
Israel is getting the better of the military exchange, killing more than 300 Hezbollah operatives and systematically destroying the group’s southern positions. Hezbollah has killed 21 Israelis, but its achievement is far greater. It depopulated an entire region of Israel, and for months it has been getting away with it.
If Hezbollah had been ready on Oct. 7 and invaded, the fighting could have reached Tel Aviv, several Israeli officials say. The terrorist group likely considered invading in the following days, but it was discouraged by the surge of Israeli troops and U.S. warships to the area.
U.S. strategy hasn’t adjusted since those early days. A senior Israeli security official says the Biden administration fails to appreciate that “the goal in the north isn’t to prevent a war, it’s to get Israelis home.” He asks why the administration sends no envoy more senior than Amos Hochstein to negotiate, and why President Biden rarely talks about the north. “Do they understand how many lives are riding on this?” War in the north could dwarf the Gaza fight and change Lebanon and Israel forever.
Visiting the north, one gets a glimpse of a longstanding vision of the destruction of Israel: Life is made so dangerous that the Jews pick up and leave. This misreads the people. Oded Stein, leader of the premilitary academy of the Upper Galilee, says, “The state and military are more scared of Israeli civilian casualties than the civilians are.” He asks, “Will Israel ‘defend itself’ to death? Sometimes the enemy needs to know that you, too, can be aggressive, that you can attack, not only defend.”
Like many Israelis, Mr. Stein bemoans the “Oct. 6 army” and mind-set. “We told ourselves stupid stories, stupid lies,” he says. “That Hezbollah was deterred and contained. No, it was growing stronger.” The terrorist group has become a formidable army with around 200,000 rockets and other munitions, thousands of which can menace Tel Aviv. Hezbollah now deters Israel.
A former Israeli commander in the area who asks to remain anonymous argues that Israel erred by accepting the “equation.” In 2014, he says, after Israel killed a top Hezbollah fighter, Hezbollah killed an Israeli company commander, and Israel let the terrorists get away with it. “We did something, so they did something, so it’s OK, we’re even,” he summarizes. Anything to avoid a larger confrontation—that’s how it was for years. “But in the Middle East, you need to solve problems directly.”
In Jerusalem, I put the problem of the “equation” to Israeli leaders and find them receptive. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu replies: “People aren’t going to come back to the north if we don’t change the equation and if they don’t have a sense of security—which means actual security.” A senior minister emphasizes that there have to be new rules of the game so Hezbollah can’t return to the Oct. 6 status quo.
Israeli strikes in Baalbek, Lebanon, nearly 60 miles from the border, and in Beirut suggest that some rules have already changed. Israel also didn’t let Hezbollah rebuild during the weeklong pause in November.
But Israeli escalation isn’t expected for now. Amit Segal, Israel’s leading political columnist, says Jerusalem is “counting down the days of the Biden administration.” A full war with Hezbollah could be too great a risk with an increasingly hostile U.S. president. Retired Gen. Amir Avivi, founder of the Israel Defense and Security Forum, says Israel’s best hope to avoid that war is to win decisively in Gaza’s Rafah before turning to Hezbollah and saying, “You’re next.” Others worry that Israel will take a deal to achieve quiet and kick the can down the road.
Gen. Avivi says the Israeli military shed three divisions in the past 20 years. Without them, it struggles to fight wars on two fronts without huge, costly call-ups of reserves. Munitions shortages, with much held back for the north, have also plagued Israeli operations.
Israeli military officials point out that the “smaller, smarter” army pursued by military leaders such as Ehud Barak and Benny Gantz ended up small and dumb. “An army should at least be big and dumb,” Mr. Stein of the premilitary academy says.
Nearly every Israeli I meet describes Hezbollah as the protection for Iran’s nuclear program, conserving its arsenal in Lebanon to deter an attack on the reactors in Iran. That may be right, and Hezbollah may now be firing only to keep up appearances and divert Israeli troops from Gaza, not to spark a larger war before Iran is ready. The prevailing view in Israel is that Iran and Hezbollah don’t want to escalate in the north.
But this is an assessment of intent, not capability, which is how Israel justified allowing Hamas and Hezbollah to fester in the first place. Facing up to Hezbollah’s capabilities would mean seeing diplomacy as a stopgap, not a solution. Even if a U.S.-brokered deal could get Hezbollah to agree to retreat north of the Litani River, as Resolution 1701 requires, its terrorist army and arsenal would persist, saved for a time of Iran’s choosing. The north will never be safe so long as Israel allows that.
“The Litani? It’s bull—,” the former commander says. Hezbollah’s elite Radwan fighters live in southern Lebanon. “They aren’t leaving, no matter the deal. They’ll ‘become civilians’ and hang around.”
It is reasonable for Israel to hold back in the north while the main fighting in Gaza continues, but how long will Israel wait? “We can’t live with the threat of Hezbollah and Iran the way we did with Hamas,” venture capitalist Arik Kleinstein says. Even the business interests in Tel Aviv seem to understand this. Some corporate and tech leaders also wonder if the “Iron Beam” laser missile defense, present capabilities unknown, will be the ace up Israel’s sleeve.
For now, Israel pushes back Hezbollah from the air, knowing that only a ground force can truly establish the buffer it needs. Hezbollah’s attacks so far have almost all been short-range, from south of the Litani.
If a deal is struck, Israelis know that no one will enforce it but themselves. The U.N. and U.S. can always find reasons to let violations slide as Hezbollah returns to the border. They would urge Israel not to overreact but to preserve peace and quiet. For the north of Israel, sheket hu refesh, as an old Zionist song has it: “Quiet” is sludge.
Mr. Kaufman is the Journal’s letters editor.
America’s Strategic Posture Is Slouching
We’ve let our nuclear force atrophy while Moscow and Beijing have expanded theirs and gone on offense.
By Jon Kyl
Thinking about war is unpleasant, and preparing for it is expensive. It isn’t surprising that many policymakers prefer to spend their time and energy hoping for peace. But there’s a cruel paradox: If we’re negligent in anticipating and preparing for military threats, we will be less capable of conducting successful diplomacy, achieving disarmament agreements and harvesting economic fruit. Ignoring the potential for war increases its chances of happening, as well as the danger of our defeat.
With these thoughts in mind, the Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States took on its congressionally mandated task of assessing how well the U.S. is positioned to deal with military threats over the coming decades. The commission is composed of 12 experts appointed by bipartisan congressional leadership in 2022. Brookings Institution fellow Madelyn R. Creedon was its chairwoman, and I was its vice chairman.
Together we submitted a unanimous report to Congress in October 2023 with 131 findings and 81 recommendations for how the U.S. can enhance its ability to deter war with China and Russia. Congress would do well to consider our conclusions during the next several weeks as it prepares to write the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act and following appropriations bills.
The U.S. is facing a historically unique global threat environment. Washington is on the cusp of having two nuclear peer adversaries—in Beijing and Moscow—each with ambitions to disrupt the international status quo, by force if necessary. We didn’t expect this and thus are unprepared to respond to it.
Two developments drove the commission’s assessment of our nation’s strategic posture. First, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S. allowed its nuclear force to atrophy. At the time we considered Russia to be a competitor, not an adversary, and China a less serious challenge.
Second is the rapid modernization of Russia’s nuclear forces and China’s military breakout. Beijing intends to create a nuclear triad—land-, sea- and air-based nuclear delivery systems—that it hopes will match that of Russia and the U.S. by 2035.
Washington has struggled to modernize its nuclear forces in response to the Russian threat. Worse, the commission found, we have barely begun to develop plans to deal with the new Chinese threat. That is unacceptable, as Russia continues to maul Ukraine and China contemplates an invasion of Taiwan. The U.S. must urgently modernize our strategic deterrent to deal with both threats.
This means being able to produce more nuclear weapons if necessary and more “delivery vehicles”—missiles, bombers and submarines—than currently planned. This isn’t, as some critics have claimed, a call for a new “arms race.” The commission simply acknowledged that Russia and China have already embarked on an unprecedented military buildup, which, if unaddressed, will neutralize the strategic deterrent to prevent nuclear war on which the U.S. has relied since the end of World War II.
Rebuilding our capacity won’t be easy. The U.S. no longer has the advantage of an unrivaled industrial base. We lack a workforce skilled in critical areas, from shipbuilders to nuclear scientists. Supply-chain deficiencies have placed great stress on delivery schedules of new weapons.
While the commission didn’t attempt to calculate the costs of its recommendations, defense spending will obviously have to increase. Every recent defense secretary and Joint Chiefs chairman has said that the U.S. strategic deterrent, underpinned by our nuclear force, is the military’s first priority. As such, the U.S. can afford to fund our recommended modernization. The nuclear-force component is only a sliver of our overall defense budget—or, as the Congressional Budget Office noted, some 7.5% of the total 10-year cost of the president’s 2023 defense budget submission. The U.S. can muster additional spending, especially if the president and congressional leadership take the case to the American people—another recommendation of our report.
The U.S. government’s first responsibility is to protect the American people—particularly from nuclear annihilation. To do so, Washington needs conventional and nuclear forces strong enough that no adversary would ever be tempted to attack. As the commission concluded: “The challenges are unmistakable; the problems are urgent; the steps are needed now.”
Mr. Kyl is vice chairman of the Strategic Posture Commission. A Republican, he served as a U.S. senator from Arizona, 1995-2013 and 2018.
Finally:
HUNTER BIDEN IS A DOPE ADDICT. HIS FATHER IS A SPENDING ADDICT.
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Biden’s Budget: $7.3 Trillion!!!
Democrats’ spending strategy is 90 years old and likely as out of date as their leader.
By Daniel Henninger
Franklin D. Roosevelt responded to growing threats abroad with a much needed U.S. defense buildup. The Biden Democrats' approach is to focus on domestic spending only.
After three years of this presidency, much of the public is either nodding off or checked out. But there may be a method in Joe Biden’s distracting madness. Passing quietly in and out of the news last week was Mr. Biden’s proposal that in fiscal 2025 the federal government would spend $7.3 trillion.
Seven point three trillion??!! Try to wrap your head around such a fantastic number
Annual federal spending broke the $4 trillion barrier in the final years of Barack Obama’s presidency. In 2020 under Donald Trump, bipartisan spending rocketed to $6.8 trillion, driven by what were supposed to be one-off outlays for the Covid-19 “emergency.”
During the primaries, Nikki Haley repeatedly pointed out Mr. Trump’s role in expanding the federal chunk. Her questions about Mr. Trump’s spending plans for a second term remain largely unanswered. An implicit question raised by Gov. Haley’s complaint is whether most voters care that the federal debt held by the public is more than $27 trillion, about 98% of gross domestic product, or if mainly what they feel is helplessness. The Biden Democrats are betting the nation is numb to public spending.
One can argue in hindsight about the need for the pandemic’s $2 trillion injection, but with the release of this $7 trillion budget, it’s clear the political operatives in the Biden administration recognized Covid as a crisis opportunity for the ages. Mr. Biden is pocketing the emergency spending level and hoping to jack it higher permanently. Think $10 trillion by 2033, the level the Biden budget forecasts. Did his dad tell him to do this?
The budget is being described as a campaign document—in other words, an election-year effort to buy votes. Implicit in this strategy is the Democratic assumption that voters can be bought and are happy to stay bought.
Among the reasons Mr. Biden won’t drop out of the race despite doom-laden poll numbers is that he thinks—or so said Sen. Bernie Sanders—that he can be the most progressive president since Franklin D. Roosevelt. That ambition is important to an understanding of his $7.3 trillion whopper.
FDR’s New Deal program dates to 1933. They say times change, but not if you’re a Biden Democrat. What Mr. Biden is proposing as the U.S. heads deeper into a century defined by artificial intelligence is policy that is 90 years old. It somehow seems appropriate.
If there is one word associated with FDR’s New Deal agenda it is “projects.” Everything—housing, airports, hospitals, schools—became a project paid for with federal spending. Back then the thing common to most of the projects was cement. Today, it’s climate. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act—accurately described by the progressive Economic Policy Institute as “essentially a climate-change bill”—spends nearly $400 billion on renewable-energy projects. The new budget proposes tens of billions more “to support clean energy workforce and infrastructure projects across the nation.”
Housing is a party perennial, so the Biden budget would spend an astounding $258 billion to subsidize it.
Despite the voguish Democratic habit of invoking Roosevelt’s memory—how this appeals to younger, history-free voters is anyone’s guess—the party’s recall of FDR ends in the 1930s.
With war spreading in Europe in 1939, Roosevelt led a big U.S. defense buildup. He repeatedly gave the American public his reasons for the commitment in speeches and statements that are stirring to this day. His 1940 message to Congress for defense appropriations warned of “disturbances abroad, and the need of putting our own house in order in the face of storm signals from across the seas.”
The Biden budget proposes to increase defense spending next fiscal year by 1%, a cut after inflation. It would decline in future years. China has just announced a 7.2% increase in its defense spending.
The Biden Democrats, overwhelmingly dedicated to domestic spending only, have set a low, unbreakable ceiling on budget support for national security. That explains in part why Mr. Biden slow-walked arms support for Ukraine and is now going wobbly on Israel. America’s national security is hostage to Mr. Biden’s antidefense vote in six swing states.
Since the mid-1970s, a rough political consensus has kept federal spending at about 21% of GDP and taxes at just over 17%. Mr. Biden wants spending to consume 24.8% of GDP and over a decade would “pay for” this increase by pushing taxes to more than 20% of national output. By 2030, the national debt would be bigger than GDP—as in Italy or Greece.
For nearly a century, the Democrats’ policy of tax-and-spend has worked for them. But one wonders if, like their leader, this strategy has arrived at a point of exhaustion with the U.S. public. An intriguing side story to this election is figuring out what’s on the minds of Gen Z, or younger voters. They are down on Mr. Biden and bleak about their economic prospects. The Biden bet is that promising to push public spending past an incomprehensible $7 trillion will make them feel better about the president and his party. Overstuffing Uncle Sam, however, may be doing exactly the opposite
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