An interviewee in Haaretz has offered a remarkably apt illustration of the damage done to Israel—and of the prolonged suffering inflicted on Palestinians—by Haaretz’s own persistent habit of portraying Israeli society as weak, fractured, and on the verge of collapse. (Haaretz‘s newspaper readership in Israel is under 5% of the market but its websites are read internationally by more than 10 million monthly, underscoring its influence internationally.)
The interviewee was Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, a Palestinian-American commentator who, rather unusually in the pages of Haaretz, placed responsibility for Gaza’s devastation primarily on Hamas rather than Israel. He recalled an encounter at a Haaretz conference with someone who reproached him for writing in that vein.
“I opened my phone,” Alkhatib said, “and showed him the Telegram channel of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades. I typed ‘Haaretz’ in Arabic. I told him: Look how often Hamas quotes Haaretz: ‘Israeli society is disintegrating from within’; ‘reservists are no longer reporting for duty’; ‘there are no spare parts to continue the war.’ Hamas says: ‘Look, all we have to do is keep fighting a little longer and, according to Haaretz, Israel will fall apart.’”
Haaretz may be the standard-bearer for this genre, but it is, regrettably hardly alone among Israeli media outlets. Over the past few days, Israeli society has once again been subjected to precisely the sort of sweeping accusations Alkhatib was talking about. And since it would be unfortunate to encourage yet another Hamas miscalculation—one that persuades it to prolong the fighting in anticipation of Israel’s imminent collapse—it may be worth checking whether these claims bear any resemblance to reality.
Earlier this week, Iris Leal declared in Haaretz that “Israeli society is undergoing a prolonged nervous breakdown.”
A few days earlier, on the prominent Israeli podcast “In Sharon’s Living Room,” Ronen Tzur—a well-known political activist and former candidate in the Democratic Party primaries—predicted that if the right wins the election, roughly a quarter of a million Israelis will leave the country “because of the violence” supposedly engulfing it.
“This is no longer the country I grew up in, and not the country in which I want to raise my children,” Tzur said, speaking on behalf of the quarter-million Israelis he predicts will flee because of that violence.
So which is it? Is Israeli society mentally unraveling? Has violence become dramatically worse than before—or exceptionally severe by any objective standard?
Fortunately, both claims can be tested against readily available data.
Let us do exactly that.
Israel’s “Prolonged Nervous Breakdown”
Contrary to the claim, Israeli society is not undergoing a prolonged nervous breakdown. If anything, the evidence points in the opposite direction.
Israeli society has displayed extraordinary psychological resilience—relative to its own prewar condition, relative to other developed countries, and certainly relative to the world at large.
Following the October 7 massacre, there was indeed a sharp rise in symptoms of psychological distress. But a recent longitudinal study found a very clear pattern: a dramatic spike immediately after the attack, followed by a gradual decline back toward prewar levels.
Probable PTSD rose from 16.1 percent before the war to 29.8 percent immediately afterward, but fell to 19.7 percent after 27 months. Depression rose from 30.5 percent to 43.1 percent, then declined to 23.3 percent. Anxiety rose from 22.1 percent to 40.1 percent and later fell to 21 percent—slightly below the prewar baseline.
In other words, Israelis as a whole absorbed the shock of October 7, suffered a severe psychological blow, and then largely recovered.
That helps explain why Israel continues to post remarkably strong mental-health indicators compared with the rest of the developed world.
The average suicide rate in OECD countries is 11 deaths per 100,000 people. In Israel it is roughly one-third of that: just 4 per 100,000, with no dramatic upward trend.
Rates of hazardous alcohol and drug use are also substantially lower than in most developed countries. Alcohol consumption in Israel is less than one-third of the OECD average, while the prevalence of drug-use disorders is less than half the average in high-income countries.
It is therefore perhaps not terribly surprising that more than 91 percent of Israelis report being satisfied with their lives. That, too, is an exceptionally high figure by international standards and is consistent with Israel’s stubbornly persistent presence near the top of the World Happiness Report, even during wartime.
So Israel’s enemies would be well advised not to build their strategy around the country’s supposed “nervous breakdown.”
It does not appear to be coming.
A Country Drowning in Violence?
Which brings us to Ronen Tzur’s claim that Israelis are preparing to leave because violence has become so intolerable that the country is no longer recognizable as the Israel in which they grew up.
Here too, the data are rather uncooperative.
The standard international measure for comparing levels of serious violence is the intentional homicide rate per 100,000 inhabitants.
Globally, the homicide rate is approximately 5.8 per 100,000 people.
In developed countries, the figure is roughly 5 per 100,000, according to the latest comparable data I was able to find.
One might therefore assume that if violence in Israel has truly become so unbearable that hundreds of thousands of citizens are ready to flee, the Israeli homicide rate must be unusually high.
It is not.
Israel records approximately 3.61 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants.
In other words, by global standards Israel is not an exceptionally violent country at all. Quite the reverse.
And now to the elephant in the room: the enormous disparity between violence in Israel’s Jewish and Arab communities.
According to the latest available figures cited by the Taub Center, the homicide rate among Arab Israelis is 4.9 per 100,000—slightly below the average for developed countries. Among Jewish Israelis, by contrast, the rate is just 0.67 per 100,000.
That is an extraordinarily low level of lethal violence by international standards.
So much for the country drowning in violence.
Nor should it be surprising that Israel also performs strongly on the OECD’s personal-safety measure asking people whether they feel safe walking alone at night.
Roughly 80 percent of Israelis say they do, compared with an OECD average of 74 percent—and naturally an even lower figure across the world as a whole.
That result also makes sense given Israel’s relatively low rates, compared with many developed countries, of sexual crime, theft and residential burglary.
So this particular hope of Israel’s enemies—that the country is disintegrating from within under the weight of rampant violence—also has an unfortunate tendency to collapse upon contact with the data.
There was once a major enemy of Israel who consumed Israeli media narratives of weakness and defeat with particular enthusiasm.
His name was Hassan Nasrallah.
After absorbing what he saw and read, he famously concluded that Israeli society was “weaker than a spider’s web.”
That assessment encouraged him to test the proposition.
Unfortunately, he did not survive long enough to offer a retrospective analysis of how well it turned out.
