“When they go low, we go Chai.”
It’s a slogan that is often painted in blue and white across signs at pro-Israel protests and rallies. The Hebrew word “Chai” translates to life and is often used in this pun to demonstrate Israel’s resilience. And a new report suggests the concept is in wide use in Israel.
Despite five months of war with Hamas, Israel placed in the top five in the World Happiness Report.
The annual report, which is conducted by Gallup, the Oxford Wellbeing Research Centre and the UN, was released on March 20 and ranked 143 countries in terms of their happiness. Israel dropped one spot from last year, but it still surpassed the United States, which came in at 23.
The report measures happiness and subjective well-being according to life evaluation and positive and negative emotions. The report uses the Cantril ladder, which asks respondents to think of a ladder with the best possible life for them being a 10 and the worst possible life being a zero. They are then asked to rank their current lives on a zero to 10 scale. More than 100,000 people from 130 countries participate in the poll each year.
Logan Barth, a senior at USC studying law, history and culture, was one of 25 students on a selective trip led by the Maccabee Task Force in early January to explore what happened when terrorists attacked Israel on Oct. 7 and the impacts of the ongoing conflict.
He said the experience was “heartbreaking,” elaborating on how much the country and people have changed since the war broke out. He said almost everyone there currently is or knows someone serving in the army, has friends or family who were at the Nova Music Festival or Kibbutzim or has been impacted by Oct. 7 in some other way.
“When something that tragic and so repulsive happens to a country that the spirit of the country is hindered, you can really feel that people are upset,” Barth said.
Barth explained that Israel lost its “Chutzpah,” a Yiddish word that is often used to describe the loud and rambunctious personality and sport that is often associated with Israelis or Jewish people together.
Barth said he sees fewer people joking around with each other on the streets. On his trip, he did not take on the Tel Aviv nightlife as he believed it felt wrong during the times of war.
Still, he is not surprised by the country’s high ranking.
On Barth’s recent trip to Israel, he spoke to a worker from ZAKA — Israel’s emergency response team that processes and handles all of the bodies from mass casualty events, including Oct. 7.
He said speaking to the ZAKA employee was an extremely difficult experience where he heard some of the most graphic scenes he had ever heard in his life from a person who actually saw the carnage.
In the presentation, Barth said, the ZAKA employee discussed what it was like driving around the Gaza envelope, filling his truck up with bodies, seeing bodies disintegrate in his hands, helping victims of sexual assault and dealing with children who have died.
After Barth’s group heard this story, they all gathered to take a picture with the ZAKA employee in which none of the students on the trip smiled because they were all so horrified by what they heard. But the ZAKA worker told the group they had to smile and said, “If we don’t smile, then we won’t survive.”
Barth then explained that happiness is a central part of religious values and that for 3,000 years, the Jewish people and Israel had faced difficult situations.
“If you never have joy, then you know, it’d be difficult for the Jewish people to move on,” Barth said.
Patricia George is a professor at USC with a PhD in Brain and Cognitive Sciences who now focuses on studying happiness and teaches a class at USC called PSYC-468: Happiness: Research in Neuroscience and Positive Psychology.
George said she is not surprised with the happiness report’s placement of Israel, saying that Israel is in an unstable political region and the people have always lived with that. But she also noted that much of the data collected for this year may have been collected before the war broke out.
“Israelis, despite living in an unstable political, and socioeconomic climate, they do really value the things that bring them happiness,” George said.
She explained that Israel values social connection and religion — two factors in which George says are factors to a country’s happiness.
Sophie Muncy, a freshman studying international relations at USC, had a similar perspective and described Israel as a “tight-knit community.”
While Muncy has only traveled to Israel once, in 2019, her mom is Jewish and from Iran, and now calls Israel her second home. She describes the country as where everyone is “peaceful and spreading love” and it is easy to go up to anyone and have a meaningful conversation.
George is also not surprised by the United State’s happiness drop as she said the United States has a “loneliness epidemic” where there are a lot of people moving away from family and friends. She also said that religiosity is at an all-time low in the United States. A 2024 study conducted by Gallup states that religious services in the United States have significantly declined.
Muncy describes the culture in the United States as “more reserved.”
“People just tend to stick to what they find familiar,” Muncy said. “I found that quite different in Israel.”