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Israel has been engaged in a decades-long violent campaign, with periodic mass-casualty events on both sides, against a hostile ethnic group within its own borders. This is your example of a happy country?
Weirdly enough, I recall reading an article that basically said exactly that; a Jew found he was much happier living in Israel than he was in America, despite the issues you outlined.
He basically concluded that it was a mix of close proximity, similar culture, and a sort of espirit de corp - a type of shared experience leading toward tighter and closer bonds.
I wish I could remember the name of the article, though. I hate how my brain works, sometimes.
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You have actually seen the post we are discussing, correct?
Ha! I fully admit that I had not seen the post; I originally replied to your comment from the new comments thread, rather than seeing it under the parent post.
So, yes, I agree that @Highlandclearances’s comment claiming a link between national happiness and homogeneity looks very odd considering the post to which he was replying, especially considering that even besides Israel, another country in the top 5 (Serbia) has its own internal ethnic divisions, including an ethnically-separate breakaway region it refuses to recognize as a sovereign nation. Hell, even the #1 entry, Lithuania, has a substantial ethnic Russian minority.
So yes, I would agree with you that the link between homogeneity and happiness is not as straightforward as might be assumed. However, I would also be very interested in the methodology of the report under discussion. In the case of Israel, for example, I’d be curious to know how representative their sample was. (Were the Palestinians included?) I’d also want to see where Israel has ranked on that same report in previous years. (I’m indisposed right now or I would look into it myself before commenting.) That being said, my argument does look a bit comical when juxtaposed with the post that it’s under. It could just be that Israel is an extreme outlier and that the general link between ethnic homogeneity and happiness is generally true and observable.
Usually no, since they're not Israelis.
Israel places high in all those various happiness surveys, top 10 is common.
I actually think that's part of it. Americans and Europeans seem to be obsessing over unsolvable low-stakes nonsense, or making new problems up, or generally complaining about richest-country-in-the-world problems (maybe besides immigration, which is a huge deal your politicians don't seem to be taking seriously enough). Having a war once in a while, and especially one where the population is confident in winning, helps keep things in perspective.
Jews and Arabs are very self-segregated though. Each community lives in their own towns, have their own educational systems, their own religious institutions and even get to apply different religious rules on their own communities. Same goes for the smaller minority groups like Druze or Circassian.
Intra-Jewish political friction does exist, but it doesn't manifest in the kind of hostility I saw between red and blue Americans (outside of online spaces, which are always nuts).
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