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Hating Israel Isn’t New; How the CIA and State Department Undermined the Jewish State
“Teddy Roosevelt’s great-great-great grandson is an anti-Israel protester at Princeton,” blared a New York Post headline on May 4, 2024.
The Post reported that Quentin Colon Roosevelt, an 18-year-old freshman, and descendant of the 25th President, is an anti-Israel activist at the Ivy League university. But far from being hip and new, Quentin’s brand of anti-Zionism is old hat — he is merely continuing a long family tradition of anti-Israel activism.
There is an abundance of literature on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s views on Jews and Zionism, the belief in Jewish self-determination. Both FDR and his wife Eleanor had made antisemitic remarks. In a private conversation in 1938, then-President Roosevelt suggested that by dominating the economy in Poland, Jews were themselves fueling antisemitism. And in a 1941 Cabinet meeting, FDR remarked that there were too many Jewish Federal employees in Oregon. In his final days, FDR promised Saudi leader Abdul Aziz Ibn al Saud that he would oppose the creation of Jewish state in the Jewish people’s ancestral homeland.
FDR is the president who led the United States to victory against Adolf Hitler. He also employed Jews in high-ranking positions in his government. But he is also the president whose administration failed to save more Jews fleeing Nazism, and who refused to bomb the railway tracks leading to Auschwitz and other death camps where millions of Jews met a ghastly end. Accordingly, it makes sense that his beliefs regarding Jews have been the subject of books and belated study.
Less examined, however, is the Oyster Bay branch of the Roosevelt clan, and their beliefs regarding Zionism. In part, this is easily explained by the unique place that FDR holds in American history. He is the only president to serve four terms, and presided over both the Great Depression, World War II, and arguably the beginning of the Cold War. His branch of the family, the Hyde Park Roosevelts, were Democrats and remained active in public life for decades after his 1945 death.
At first glance, the Oyster Bay Roosevelts were more of a turn of the 19th century affair. They were Republicans, and their scion was Teddy Roosevelt, a war hero turned governor of New York state who, thanks to an assassin’s bullet, found himself as the nation’s leader in 1901.
The famously ebullient Roosevelt helped redefine the country’s idea of a president, and served as an inspiration for his cousin Franklin. But Teddy largely presided over an era of peace and tranquility, not war and upheaval.
Teddy was a philosemite. He was the first occupant of the Oval Office to appoint a Jewish American to the Cabinet. He championed the rights of Jews, both at home and abroad, and was harshly critical of the numerous pogroms that unfolded in czarist Russia.
As Seth Rogovoy has noted, Roosevelt’s “special relationship with Jews was forged during his time serving as police commissioner in New York City, a post he assumed in 1904.” When an antisemitic German preacher named Hermann Ahlwardt gave speeches in the city, Roosevelt assigned a contingent of Jewish police officers to guard the man.
Roosevelt was also a Zionist. In 1918, shortly after the Balfour Declaration, he wrote: “It seems to me that it is entirely proper to start a Zionist state around Jerusalem.” He told Lioubomir Michailovitch, the Serbian Minister to the United States, that “there can be no peace worth having … unless the Jews [are] given control of Palestine.” Six months later Roosevelt died in his sleep.
Not all his descendants would share his belief in Jewish self-determination, however.
Two of Teddy Roosevelt’s grandchildren, Kermit and Archie, served their country in the CIA during the early years of the Cold War. Both were keenly interested in Middle East affairs, and were fluent in Arabic. Both were well read and highly educated, authoring books and filing dispatches for newspapers like the Saturday Evening Post, among others.
They were also prominent anti-Zionists.
Kermit Roosevelt, known as “Kim,” played a key role in anti-Zionist efforts in the United States and abroad. He was not, by the standards of his time, an antisemite. But he was ardently opposed to the creation of Israel.
As Hugh Wilford observed in his 2013 book America’s Great Game: The CIA’s Secret Arabists and the Shaping of the Modern Middle East: “the anti-Zionism of the overt Cold War foreign policy establishment is well known” but “less widely appreciated is the opposition to Jewish statehood of the individuals responsible for setting up the United States’ covert apparatus in the Middle East.”
This began with the OSS, the CIA’s precursor. And it included men like Stephen Penrose, a former American University of Beirut instructor, and Kim Roosevelt’s boss during his wartime service in the OSS.
“Documents among Penrose’s personal papers reveal him engaged in a variety of anti-Zionist activities at the same time that he was commencing his official duties with the OSS,” Wilford notes.
Like many of his fellow Arabists, Penrose was the son of American missionaries who, failing to convert the native population to Christianity, sought to foster Arab nationalism instead. Penrose described himself as a “chief cook” who was “brewing” opposition to Zionism. He became one of Kim Roosevelt’s mentors.
In a January 1948 Middle East Journal article entitled, “Partition of Palestine: A Lesson in Pressure Politics,” Kim called the 1947 UN vote in favor of a Jewish state an “instructive and disturbing story.”
Roosevelt believed that the US media was unduly supportive of the creation of Israel, and claimed that almost all Americans “with diplomatic, educational, missionary, or business experience in the Middle East” opposed Zionism.
Kim’s pamphlet was reprinted by the Institute for Arab American Affairs, a New York-based group whose board he sat on. He also began working with the Arab League’s Washington, D.C., office and “turned elsewhere for allies in the anti-Zionist struggle, starting with the Protestant missionaries, educators, and aid workers.”
This nascent group soon received financial support from the American oil industry, which maintained close links to Kim’s OSS/CIA colleague, William Eddy.
As Wilford noted, the Arabian consortium ARAMCO “launched a public relations campaign intended to bring American opinion around to the Arab point of view.”
In addition to missionaries and big oil, Kim gained another important ally in the form of Elmer Berger, a rabbi from Flint, Michigan. Berger served as executive director of the American Council for Judaism, an anti-Zionist group that, among other things, opposed the creation of a Jewish army during World War II at the height of the Holocaust. Berger and Roosevelt became drinking buddies and close collaborators on their joint effort against the Jewish State.
Kim eventually became “organizing secretary” for a group called The Committee for Justice and Peace. The committee’s original chair, Virginia Gildersleeve, was both a longtime friend of the Roosevelts of Oyster Bay and the dean of New York City’s Barnard College, which today is part of Columbia.
Gildersleeve was “also a high-profile anti-Zionist” who “became involved with the Arab cause through her association with the Arabist philanthropist Charles Crane and the historian of Arab nationalism George Antonius.”
Crane, a wealthy and notorious antisemite, had lobbied against the creation of a Jewish state since the beginning of the 20th century, even advising then-President Woodrow Wilson against supporting the Balfour Declaration.
By 1950, the Committee had managed to recruit famed journalist Dorothy Thompson to their cause. Thompson was reportedly the basis for actress Katharine Hepburn’s character in the 1942 movie Woman of the Year. A convert to anti-Zionism, Thompson’s extensive network of reporters and celebrities proved crucial to Kim and Berger’s efforts to rally opposition to the Jewish State. In a 1951 letter to Barnard College’s Gildersleeve, Thompson wrote: “I am seriously concerned about the position of the Jews in the United States.” People, she claimed, “are beginning to ask themselves the question: who is really running America?”
Another ally emerged that year: the Central Intelligence Agency.
The CIA began funding the Committee, as well as its successor, the American Friends of the Middle East (AFME). Beginning in June 1950, Kim’s correspondence with Berger began making veiled references to the ACJ head taking on “official work” in Washington. This, Wilford believes, is a reference to working with the CIA. Indeed, the well-connected Kim and Archie Roosevelt had known top CIA officials like Allan Dulles since childhood.
With support from figures like Eddy, AFME also began encouraging Muslim-Christian alliances — ostensibly to counter Soviet influence, but also to attack the Jewish state. This led to some awkward alliances, including with Amin al-Husseini, the founding father of Palestinian nationalism and an infamous Nazi collaborator.
Husseini had ordered the murders of rival Palestinians, incited violence against Jews since the 1920s, and had led forces, equipped with Nazi-supplied arms, to destroy Israel at its rebirth in 1948. Now, along with the Secretary General of the Arab League, and Saudi King Ibn Saud, he was meeting with Eddy to discuss a “moral alliance” between Christians and Muslims to defeat communism. Kim himself knew Husseini, having interviewed him for the Saturday Evening Post after World War II.
AFME lobbied for the appointment of anti-Zionist diplomats and in favor of Eisenhower administration efforts to withhold aid from Israel. And both Berger and Thompson pushed for favorable coverage of the new Egyptian dictator, Gamal Nassar, who would wage war on the Jewish state for nearly two decades. Initially, they were successful, with TIME magazine writing that Nasser had the “lithe grace of a big, handsome, all-American quarterback.” Of course, there was nothing “all-American” about Nasser, who would become a Soviet stooge.
AFME officials like Garland Evans Hopkins would draw rebukes after claiming that Jews were bringing violence against themselves — a staple of antisemitism. Hopkins claimed that Zionists “could produce a wave of antisemitism in this country” if they continued acting against “America’s best interests in the Middle East.”
AFME itself would eventually lose influence, particularly after its boosting of figures like Nasser was revealed as foolhardy. Berger would go on to advise Senator J. William Fulbright (D-AR) in his efforts to get pro-Israel Americans to register as foreign agents.
In 1967, as Arab forces gathered to annihilate Israel, Berger blamed the Jewish State, accusing it of “aggression” and its supporters of “hysteria.” Top ACJ officials resigned in protest. That same year, Ramparts magazine exposed CIA support, financial and otherwise, of AFME.
Kim and Archie Roosevelt, however, would continue their careers as high-ranking CIA officers before eventually starting a consulting business and making use of their extensive Middle East contacts.
For some college protesters, attacking Israel — and American support for Israel — might seem new and trendy. Yet, both the CIA and big oil were precisely doing that, decades ago, forming alliances with anti-American dictators, antisemitic war criminals, the press, Protestant groups, academics, university administrators, and fringe Jewish groups claiming to represent “what’s best” for American Jewry.
As William Faulkner once wrote: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
The writer is a Senior Research Analyst for CAMERA, the 65,000-member, Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis
The post Hating Israel Isn’t New; How the CIA and State Department Undermined the Jewish State first appeared on Algemeiner.comhttps://www.algemeiner.com/.
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We need to talk about New Jersey’s Jewish master of literature. No, not that one
Philip Roth and Judy Blume were born five years apart in the 1930s. Both grew up in New Jersey, in the crucible of Jewish American suburban assimilation. Both were haunted by the Holocaust, news of which trickled stateside just as they were nearing adulthood. And both are literary icons.
But they’re icons of different kinds.
We see Roth as a giant of American Jewish literature, and Blume as a giant of American children’s literature. Within that distinction is a kind of tacit hierarchy. Roth was perceived as a writer for serious adults with serious concerns; Blume, as a writer for girls with girlish concerns. When Roth wrote about diaphragms (see Goodbye, Columbus) it was a bracing examination of shifting sexual mores at an inflection point in American culture. When Blume did, in Forever, it was sex education with a narrative twist.
I’ve been reading Mark Oppenheimer’s new biography Judy Blume: A Life, and thinking a lot about that hierarchy. I’ve read and loved a decent amount of Philip Roth, and a lot of Judy Blume. (I’ve written about both of them for this publication.) But I have a stronger relationship with her work than with his. One measure of a great novel is the dimensionality with which a reader experiences it. Do you see the characters as you read, smell their surroundings, hear their music? With Blume, my answer is always “yes.” With Roth, it’s “sometimes.”
So why have I, like many others, tended to think of Roth as an Important Writer, and Blume as merely an important writer to me?
This is a classic conundrum when it comes to children’s literature. As Alison Lurie wrote in her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Foreign Affairs — which I am, by coincidence, also reading right now — children’s literature is the “stepdaughter grudgingly tolerated” in any English department. We must read extensively to grow up well, but there is a sense that anyone who stays overly attached to the things they read in those early years has somehow gone developmentally awry.
The book that has most influenced me is almost certainly Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery, but for much of my adult life, I would never have named it if a stranger asked me about my favorite novel. Not just because doing so would have seemed like a bit of a faux pas — what if that stranger thought I was childish, rather than merely open to the joys of childlike wonder? — but because it felt private. Like the part of me that loves that red-headed orphan beyond measure was too personal to share.
Roth and Blume both made careers out of writing about things that felt too personal to share. Both were taboo breakers, who experienced the vicious backlash that can accompany such transgression.
But Blume broke taboos in what might be seen as safer ways. Roth engaged with the unspeakable; she attacked the impolite. By being open about the stranger parts of girlhood — the bleeding, the sexual experimentation, the friendships that collapse in ways neither party really understands — her work made it feel a little safer to be a girl. The intimate things could now be intimate, but shared.
A tragic literary paradox is that women writers often need to win male readers to be taken seriously. Once they’re known as a writer who women like, the spectre of “chick lit” attaches itself to their work, a phenomenon that predates the development of that label by centuries. Aphra Behn, one of the first professional women writers, broke boundaries in the 17th century only to be dismissed by the 18th as a lightweight who was too open about sex. I once spent a six hour drive from Chicago to St. Louis fighting with my progressive-minded college boyfriend about his reluctance to read Jane Austen. The fight wasn’t really about him; Persuasion was never going to be quite his style. It was about my sense that the things I liked lost respect in some vaguely defined public eye because people like me liked them.
On a certain literary level, it’s strange to argue that Judy Blume should be considered as great an American Jewish literary master as Philip Roth. Her sentences are simpler. So are her themes. Her approach to great American issues, like race, can be hamhanded. (To be fair, Roth’s could, too.)
But on another level, I think it’s not just reasonable but right to define great literature in part by its impact. Books are meant to deepen our connection to the world. They are meant to brighten our experience of life. They are meant to help us understand ourselves and our neighbors. Few American authors have done either of those things more powerfully, or for more people, than Judy Blume.
The release of Oppenheimer’s book has been clouded by the mystery of why Blume fell out with the author after reviewing his first draft. As a reader, I understand: Nothing is more enticing than a mystery. But I find it, frankly, sad that the first in-depth accounting of how Blume came to be a writer of such impact has been clouded by the desire for an accounting of what mysterious rifts opened between her and her biographer.
By 1964, Oppenheimer writes, Blume’s “specific milieu of suburban Jewish middle-class ease was nationally recognizable,” thanks to Roth’s work. When Blume had not yet started to write, Roth had produced a “shorthand for a kind of tacky, nouveau riche suburban Jewish experience.”
But he had done so for only a select portion of that populace: the young man on the come-up, the wealthy, bored girl trying to throw off her parents’ values without breaking herself off from their comfortable lifestyle.
The unspoken others in that vision — the basically good mothers, the mostly obedient daughters — needed their own chance to be recognizable, too. They were just as interesting, only, perhaps, in quieter ways. The literature of American Jewish life isn’t just more complete because Blume gave them voices. It’s better, too.
The post We need to talk about New Jersey’s Jewish master of literature. No, not that one appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel Continues to Kill Key Iranian Officials as Netanyahu Says Iran Can No Longer Build Missiles, Enrich Uranium
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during a press conference, amid the US-Israel conflict with Iran, in Jerusalem, March 19, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun/Pool
Israel continued its efforts to kill key Iranian officials and destabilize the regime on Friday, one day after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised what he described as the military’s unprecedented achievements three weeks into the war.
The Israeli military said on Friday it killed Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) spokesperson Ali Mohammad Naini in an overnight airstrike against regime targets across the Iranian capital of Tehran.
“Naini disseminated the regime’s terrorist propaganda to its proxies across the Middle East,” the military said, describing him as a central figure in messaging tied to attacks against Israel.
Kasra Aarabi, director of IRGC research at United Against Nuclear Iran, described Naini’s death as “a significant blow to the regime’s psychological warfare and propaganda operations — an increasingly central pillar of the IRGC’s current war strategy.”
Iranian state media had reported his death earlier in the day.
The Israeli military also announced on Friday that, two days ago, it killed a key, senior commander in Iran’s intelligence ministry, Mahdi Rostami Shamastan, in an airstrike in Tehran following a joint operation involving Israel’s Military Intelligence, Mossad, and Shin Bet.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) also said on Friday that it killed the Basij militia’s intelligence chief, Esmail Ahmadi, in a strike in central Tehran.
ELIMINATED: Esmail Ahmadi, Head of the Intelligence Division of the Basij Force, as well as several other senior commanders in a strike on the senior leadership of the Basij Force in the heart of Tehran.
Ahmadi played a central role in advancing and executing terror attacks… pic.twitter.com/M9mwVmlvH7
— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) March 20, 2026
The Iranian regime uses the Basij paramilitary force, which is affiliated with the IRGC, to violently suppress protests and crush political opposition across the country.
“Ahmadi played a central role in advancing and executing terror attacks carried out by Basij Forces,” the IDF posted on social media. “He was also responsible for enforcing public order and the regime’s values on behalf of the IRGC and leading major suppression operations during the recent internal protests in Iran.”
Ahmadi was killed earlier this week in the strikes that targeted and successfully eliminated other senior Basij militia members, including top commander Gholam Reza Soleimani and his deputy, Seyyed Karishi.
The IDF’s announcements came after Netanyahu on Thursday vowed the campaign against Iran will continue “as long as necessary” until all objectives are met.
Speaking at a press conference, Netanyahu reiterated the war’s three main objectives, emphasizing the dismantling of Iran’s nuclear program, the destruction of its ballistic missile capabilities, and the creation of conditions for the Iranian people to determine their own future.
“Today, after 20 days [of conflict], I can tell you: Iran does not have the ability to enrich uranium … and it does not have the ability to produce ballistic missiles,” the Israeli leader said. “Not only did we destroy the existing missiles [and nuclear components], but we seriously damaged the industries that make it possible to produce them.”
He also stressed that Israel is operating on all fronts — by air, on land, underground, and across the Caspian Sea — where, this week, Israeli forces launched their first attack on Iranian Navy targets since the outbreak of the war.
“A revolution cannot be made from the air; there are also ground-based options,” Netanyahu said.
“We have eliminated the political and military top command, the [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] and the Basij,” he continued.
On Tuesday night, the IDF killed Iranian Intelligence Minister Ismail Khatib in Tehran during a precision airstrike carried out with a narrow window of real-time intelligence.
Appointed in 2021, Khatib led Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence, a central pillar of the regime’s repression apparatus, overseeing espionage, covert operations, and intelligence activities targeting both domestic dissent and foreign adversaries, including Israeli and US targets.
He also played a central role during the regime’s brutal crackdown on internal opposition, including the latest nationwide anti-government protests, which security forces violently crushed, with thousands of demonstrators tortured and killed.
Khatib’s assassination was part of an ongoing wave of targeted killings of senior Iranian officials in recent days, further weakening the regime’s leadership and operational networks.
During Thursday’s press conference, Netanyahu praised Israel’s recent military and strategic successes, presenting them as a defining moment for the country’s strength and influence in the region.
“I promised that we would change the Middle East — and we have changed it beyond recognition. The State of Israel is stronger than ever and Iran is weaker than ever,” he said.
“We have turned Israel into a regional power, and some would say … into a global power,” he continued. “The relationship between me and my friend [US President Donald Trump] is unprecedented, and together we are leading the fight of the free world against the forces of evil.”
Earlier this week, the Israeli Air Force also killed Ali Larijani, secretary of Iran’s National Security Council, in what was the most significant assassination since the killing of former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei at the start of the campaign on Feb. 28. Larijani was widely believed to be running the country following Khamenei’s death.
With the military campaign escalating, Israeli forces have now been authorized to carry out targeted assassinations of senior Iranian officials without requiring approval from higher command.
Netanyahu also said he had instructed intelligence officers to “act so that the Revolutionary Guards’ killers know we will hunt them down in the cities as well.”
“It’s too early to say whether the Iranian people will take advantage of the conditions we are creating to take to the streets,” the Israeli leader said. “I hope so — but it will depend only on them.”
“I see this war ending much faster than people think,” he continued. The Islamist regime’s collapse “will not happen in one day, but we can already see the cracks.”
According to a recent intelligence assessment, the Iranian regime shows no signs of surrender and remains far from collapse, and Israeli officials have been warned that the war could continue for weeks, the Israeli news outlet N12 reported.
Even though there have been demonstrations in Iran in recent days, this latest assessment shows that they have been limited to a few locations with relatively small numbers of participants, and that the regime’s brutal repression continues to instill fear.
However, a senior Israeli source also told the outlet that the regime is in a state of “complete chaos,” with Jerusalem seeing increasing signs of a breakdown in the regime’s systems in Tehran.
“There is no one there at the moment who is taking the orders, and the government vacuum is deepening,” the official said, adding that Israel is “working to create a breaking point” for the regime.
“The goal is for the Iranian public to understand for itself, through the reality on the ground, that this regime has reached a ‘game over.’ We want to create the conditions in which the Iranian people feel they have an opportunity to take their fate into their own hands and take to the streets,” the source reportedly said.
Israel’s campaign is increasingly focused on dismantling Iran’s internal repression systems, aiming to create a leadership vacuum and logistical breakdown that could hinder the regime’s ability to respond if mass protests erupt again.
Israeli forces have carried out targeted strikes on senior Basij and IRGC officers, destroyed infrastructure used to suppress protests, and launched cyber operations to disrupt internal security communications and coordination, crippling the regime’s ability to redeploy its forces effectively.
So far, Israel says it has dropped some 10,000 munitions on targets linked to the IRGC, Basij, and other internal security forces, delivering a devastating blow to the regime’s security apparatus.
Late Tuesday night into Wednesday morning alone, around 300 Basij commanders and field officials were killed in a wave of strikes on key command and operational centers, according to Iran International.
During Thursday’s press conference, Netanyahu expressed pride in the Israeli people for their steadfast stand, praising their resilience and unity in the face of ongoing conflict.
“I know how difficult it is to stay in the security rooms and showers, and I understand the challenges with studies, businesses, and reservist duties. Your patience gives us the strength to keep fighting until we achieve the campaign’s objectives,” he said.
“Continue to stand tall, continue to stand with us, and with God’s help, together, we will stand and together we will win.”
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Israel Ranks 8th in World Happiness Report as ‘Extraordinary’ Resilience Masks War Toll
An Israeli flag waves as Israeli Air Force planes fly in formation over the Mediterranean Sea during an aerial show on Israel’s 74th Independence Day on May 5, 2022. Photo: Reuters/Amir Cohen
Israel held on to its spot in the world’s 10 happiest countries, placing eighth in the World Happiness Report published Thursday, even as the country continues to grapple with war, instability, and trauma.
A key takeaway from this year’s data is the performance of younger Israelis. Those under 25 stand out not just domestically but globally, placing third worldwide and emerging as the most content group in the country. That contrasts sharply with peer countries, where younger cohorts are faring far worse. In the US, for example, they sit at 60th.
Across Israel’s population more broadly, other age groups also post strong results, averaging around 11th place.
In the overall country rankings, Finland secured the top spot once again, marking nine consecutive years in first place. The US ranked 23rd, while the UK and France came in at 29th and 35th, respectively.
The UN-backed World Happiness Report tracks how people rate their lives overall, not how they feel in a given moment, so extreme turmoil such as war may not be accurately reflected. Its scores draw on a three-year average and factors such as income, health, social support, and generosity, which can mute the immediate effect of shocks such as war.
The report’s emotional data is less reassuring. Measures of worry, sadness, and anger show Israel climbing from 119th before the war to 39th, while trust in public institutions has kept weakening. On perceived corruption, Israel now ranks 107th.
One of Israel’s leading demographers, Sergio DellaPergola of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, also noted the findings should be read with some caution because they reflect an average from 2023 through 2025, rather than a snapshot of current conditions. Still, he said, that period itself was marked by “war, disturbances, and great sorrow,” making Israel’s high ranking “quite extraordinary.”
“We see many countries in the West much more developed economically than Israel with much lower rates of optimism,” he told The Algemeiner. “The explanation must come not so much from the contingencies of the situation, but from deeper social forces that exist in Israeli society.”
DellaPergola pointed to what he described as a deeply rooted culture of solidarity. “The feeling of togetherness is what keeps morale high,” he said. “We are all on the same boat. We have first of all to survive, but also we have to win.”
He described how that dynamic plays out in daily life under fire. “You rush to the shelter, and the atmosphere is paradoxically happy,” he said. “People circulate jokes, encouragement, funny comments.” In his own building, he added, “there is a sense of mutual help, like an extended family.”
“This is one of the secrets of the extraordinary resilience of the Israelis under these deplorable and very sad circumstances,” DellaPergola said.
That cohesion, he said, is reinforced by demographic patterns that distinguish Israel from much of the West. “The nuclear family has kept a role which has been lost quite completely in Western Europe,” he said. “There is still a belief that there is a future for your children.”
Even within Israel’s relatively strong showing, DellaPergola noted important internal differences. “Paradoxically, perhaps the most optimistic are also the most religious,” he said, pointing to surveys showing a clear link between religiosity and optimism despite lower average income levels. “Among the younger, the proportion of religious [people] is higher, and so the level of optimism increases.”
“Whatever it is,” he added, “Israel remains, even under pressure, a very exceptional case.”
Anat Fanti, a happiness policy researcher at Bar-Ilan University, said the results should not be read as evidence that the war has had limited impact.
“Israel’s result in this year’s World Happiness Report does not erase the psychological and social cost of the war,” she said. “On the contrary, it highlights the gap between the resilience of Israeli society and the difficult emotional reality of daily life.”
“The fact that Israel is still ranked 8th in the world, and that young Israelis in particular are ranked 3rd, points to the strengths of Israel’s population in comparison to other countries,” she added. “At the same time, the rise in worry, sadness, and anger, together with the erosion of public trust, makes clear that resilience is not immunity.”