Israel was one of the happiest places on earth — according to the United Nations-backed World Happiness Report for 2023. Israel ranked four just under Finland, Denmark, and Iceland. The index asks citizens about a personal sense of well-being and juxtaposes that with data about GDP, social support, individual freedom, and levels of corruption, measured through Gallup polls conducted in each country.
If one were to speculate, we could ponder if kibbutz living could have contributed to a sense of social support (a kibbutz in Israel involves collective living where all income is shared by the community). Women enjoy high levels of personal freedom, and every citizen undergoes compulsory military service; and presumably, the GDP figures were healthy — possible factors that placed Israel in that position. It is no doubt a purpose-driven society where ties of family and community are strong.
One could perversely also wonder if an apartheid State that privileges one community also makes the dominant people ‘happy’. On October 7, when Hamas struck with that bloody offensive, there were Israelis attending concerts and parties and spending a day on the beach in a land that has sun, sand, and sea.
Bombing Gaza
But a dark force came out of the belly of the land on which the nation of Israel has been juxtaposed, and created a hell on earth. Hamas has been birthed in that petridish of dispossession and endless war. This explosion of terrifying and merciless violence from Hamas comes from decades of being pushed against the barricades, out of homes, hidden behind high walls that the Israeli State has built in what has been described as the world’s largest open-air prison — Gaza.
Hamas came out of the undertow of Israel that has been built on the misery of Palestinians. Many Israeli commentators are saying so as it is a society that guarantees freedom of speech, protest, and assembly for its own even if they are at odds with the policies of the Right-wing Benjamin Netanyahu government, (that faced huge protests earlier this year over judicial reforms designed to give Netanyahu relief in corruption cases).
Freedom to protest and critique could have added to Israeli’s overall satisfaction with their lives before October 7. Journalist-author Gideon Levy talks of the invasion of Gaza being Israel’s biggest war crime and says that he faces no threats but it is a difference of opinion. The day after the Hamas attack, the Israeli daily Haaretz blamed Netanyahu for “a government of dispossession and annexation” and for trying to ignore the existence of Palestinians.
The most brilliant analysis is coming out of Israel itself, noting that Hamas took revenge on all Jews while Israel is wreaking a bloody vengeance on all Palestinians and it’s a dark tunnel for a people who have historical memory of the Holocaust. Day in and out we now see dead or wounded or orphaned children and bombed-out buildings in the apocalypse unfolding. Entire families are being wiped out. The death toll in this round has surpassed all previous Hamas-Israel wars. It is terrifying.
There is a perception that the United States has given a carte blanche to Israel that has an existential dependence on the former; in the process, there is an opinion that the US is alienating the Global South. Yet, just as Israel does have a diversity of opinion, there have been large protests across the world in nations that were promoters of Israel’s creation in 1948 and fiercely back it today. In London, Paris, and New York there have been mass demonstrations demanding a ceasefire, and condemning Israel’s overkill.
Not so Vishwa Guru
India is the world’s largest democracy, multi-lingual, and multi-religious, whose freedom from colonial rule came after organised protests. We currently describe India that is Bharat as ‘Vishwa Guru’. Yet there is some sort of ill wind in the atmospherics whereby protest against the war and demanding a ceasefire in Gaza is not being permitted by the police in the national capital.
Those who have sought to do so at the designated — and constantly shrinking — protest site in Jantar Mantar have been picked up and bundled off in police vans. It is not as if Indians do not care for things that happen outside national borders; I recall, huge marches and protests after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 in Delhi.
In New Delhi, we have in recent years witnessed protests over domestic issues against the farm laws (2020 to 2021) and the CAA (2019). But there has been a twist in Indian politics whereby the Gaza battle is being profiled as that against Muslims and, thereby, satisfying to the atavistic urges of an ideology and politics that frames much of its mobilisation against the nation’s largest minority.
Indian broadcast media that has rushed crews to Israel has juxtaposed their communalised anti-Muslim narratives with the conflict. India has also produced a lot of fake news about the conflict, that seeks to profile Palestinians as perverse Islamists. All of this diminishes our standing as some sort of global visionary, but it is what it is.
Meanwhile, our ranking in that 2023 World Happiness Report was 126, better than the ‘unhappiest’, war-torn Afghanistan at 146. Next year we will most likely climb up as Israel cannot remain a happy place.
It is sadly a nation with no end game behind a stated objective of finishing Hamas but persisting with the very violence and dispossession that created them in the first place.
(Saba Naqvi is a journalist and author)
Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH