The West is losing something essential that Israelis do best.

While many people in the West feel embarrassed by their own countries, Israelis carry deep-seated pride rooted in history, responsibility, and a clear-eyed understanding of reality.

photo: Yoav Aziz/Unsplash

Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.

---

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

---

Walk through Jerusalem or Tel Aviv or Haifa on a Friday afternoon, or sit next to Israelis on a long-haul flight, and you’ll notice something that has quietly disappeared in much of the Western world: an unembarrassed sense of national belonging.

Not chest-thumping. Not obnoxious flag-waving. Just a grounded, almost casual confidence in who Israelis are and where they come from.

In contrast, many people in the West now speak about their countries in apologetic tones. Being American, Canadian, British, or French is increasingly framed as something to explain away, qualify, or feel uneasy about. Pride has been replaced by irony, distance, or outright shame. National identity is treated as a moral liability rather than a shared inheritance. History is no longer something to be understood and carried forward, but something to be endlessly litigated, reduced to a catalogue of sins with no accompanying story of meaning or continuity.

Israelis, by and large, did not get that memo.

Their pride is not performative; it is historical, relational, and lived. Israelis know where they come from — not in a vague, mythologized way, but in a deeply literate one. They know the story is long, fractured, painful, miraculous, and unfinished. They understand that their country is not an abstraction or a branding exercise, but the result of survival, return, and responsibility. Israeli identity is inseparable from Jewish memory, from exile and ingathering, from language revived and land reclaimed, from trauma endured and life rebuilt.

That knowledge produces something rare: gratitude without naïveté.

Israelis argue constantly. About politics, religion, the courts, the army, the wars, the economy, and each other. But those arguments take place inside the story, not outside it. Criticism is not the same as disavowal. Disagreement does not require self-erasure. The country is not experienced as an embarrassing relic of the past, but as a living inheritance — flawed, demanding, and worth sustaining.

A large part of that inheritance is linguistic. Hebrew is not merely a tool for communication; it is a civilizational bridge. Israelis speak the language of our ancestors, our prayers, and our holy texts. Ancient words animate modern lives. The same language carries law, poetry, grief, humor, and bureaucracy. This continuity anchors identity in a way that resists erosion. In much of the West, language has become abstract, managerial, and constantly policed — less a source of meaning than a terrain of anxiety. When words lose their rootedness, belonging follows.

Israeli identity also endures because it demands something: military service, reserve duty, shared risk, high taxes. Collective responsibility in moments of crisis. Citizenship is not merely a set of rights; it is a set of obligations. And yet, this identity is forged far before an Israeli turns 18 and drafts to the IDF or does “national service” (a two-year volunteer program in some sort of social work).

By then, the foundation has already been laid.

Israeli children grow up inside a culture that assumes responsibility is normal. Youth movements like the Scouts (Hatzofim), Ezra, Bnei Akiva, The Young Guard (Hashomer Hatzair), and many others are not peripheral activities; they are formative institutions. These youth movements are not like others across the world, where adult supervision is often predominant. In Israel, children learn leadership by being given real responsibility for younger kids. They learn commitment by showing up weekly, hiking the land, sleeping outdoors, singing songs tied to place and history, and internalizing the idea that they belong to something larger than themselves. These movements do not promise comfort or self-expression above all else; they emphasize contribution, resilience, and mutual reliance.

At the same time, Israeli children are not shielded from reality. They grow up knowing that being Jewish in the Middle East is not an abstract identity or a purely cultural preference. Missile attacks are not theoretical. Memorial days are not distant history. The names on plaques and the stories told at ceremonies often belong to neighbors, cousins, or older siblings of friends. The hard truths of Jewish vulnerability — and Jewish agency — are woven into everyday life. This does not produce hysteria; it produces clarity. Israelis understand early that history is not over, that safety is not automatic, and that responsibility cannot be outsourced.

This early exposure shapes a different relationship to citizenship. When Israelis eventually serve their country, they do not experience it as a sudden rupture or an imposition by the state, but as a continuation of a role they have been preparing for, consciously or not, since childhood. Service is not romanticized, but neither is it treated as exploitation. It is understood as part of the social contract, one generation carrying the weight so the next can live more freely.

Hence why, in the wake of the October 7th Hamas-led massacre and kidnappings, thousands of Israelis abroad booked the first flight back to Israel to help, to support, and to rejoin their reserve units. Some came to put on uniforms. Others came to cook, to volunteer in hospitals, to harvest crops for farmers whose workers had been displaced, to sit with families of the wounded and the dead. Parents left young children behind. Students paused their studies. Careers were interrupted without drama or fanfare. This was not driven by slogans or pressure from the state, but by an internalized understanding that when the collective is under threat, opting in is the obvious choice.

This response was not spontaneous heroism; it was muscle memory. A society that teaches its children early that they are bound to one another will see that bond tested in moments of crisis — and, if the teaching has worked, affirmed.

By contrast, many Western societies postpone responsibility indefinitely. Childhood is extended, adolescence is padded, and civic obligation is framed as coercion rather than contribution. Young people are taught to interrogate authority but rarely to assume it; to demand rights but rarely to shoulder duties. When responsibility finally appears, it feels alien and unjust.

Pride survives where obligation survives. Where nothing is asked of you, nothing binds you. In much of the West, citizenship has become transactional: “What does my country give me?” When a nation becomes a service provider rather than a covenant, attachment weakens, and pride becomes brittle.

This is why Israelis, even when they leave Israel and move abroad, rarely sever the emotional cord. They find each other, and you can see this even in the most unexpected places. On the tiny Thai island of Koh Phangan, better known for backpackers and beach parties, enough Israelis settled there in recent years that they opened a Hebrew-speaking kindergarten for their children — a place where Israeli kids could speak their language, sing familiar songs, and grow up with other children who share the same cultural instincts.

This pattern repeats itself across continents. Israelis abroad cluster together not out of fear or insularity, but out of recognition. They share a rhythm of life, a humor, a directness, and a dense web of shared memory that does not dissolve the moment they cross a border.

This is not about believing Israel is superior. Israeli pride is not rooted in fantasies of perfection. It exists despite war, sacrifice, and constant insecurity — not because life is easy, but because life is meaningful. Israelis know what it cost to have a country at all. They understand that sovereignty is fragile, that safety is never guaranteed, and that continuity requires effort. A nation survives not because it is flawless, but because enough of its people believe it is worth inheriting.

In much of the West, the opposite lesson has been taught. National shame did not arise organically; it was cultivated. Institutions, cultural gatekeepers, and media narratives have trained citizens to view their own societies with suspicion while offering little in the way of replacement meaning. Patriotism is equated with chauvinism. Belonging is framed as exclusionary. Shared stories are dismantled without new ones being built. The result is a population emotionally unmoored: citizens of places they no longer feel permitted to love.

Israel, for all its ferocious internal debates, still tells its people a different story: You are part of something older than you, bigger than you, and dependent on you. That message produces commitment rather than embarrassment, including a commitment to pursuing the truth. This instinct runs deep in Jewish tradition, where argument is not a threat to truth, but a method for approaching it. Disagreement is treated as productive rather than corrosive, and questions are valued precisely because answers matter. Israelis inherit this disposition almost by osmosis. Debate is loud, relentless, often exhausting — but it is oriented toward reality.

For example, most Israelis are not “proud” of what the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become, but they accept it for what it is, not what they wish it to be. They understand that Israel has offered peace to the Palestinians nearly a dozen times since the 1930s, that mainstream Palestinian culture and leadership reject the existence of a Jewish state outright, and that many Palestinians would rather cling to antisemitic rejectionism and violence than pursue a realistic path toward coexistence.

This willingness to face harsh realities, rather than reshape them to fit ideals, reflects Israel’s enduring commitment to truth over comfort, a trait increasingly rare in the West. In fact, across much of the West, truth has been flattened into perspective, and perspective into power. Disagreement is no longer a search for what is right, but a contest over who is allowed to speak. Institutions once designed to pursue truth (universities, media, even courts) are increasingly evaluated not by their accuracy, but by their alignment. When truth becomes secondary to narrative, societies lose their ability to argue honestly, course-correct, or trust one another.

All of this, to be clear, is not an argument against the West. On the contrary, the West has so much that is worth loving, preserving, and continuing. Its societies produced ideas that transformed human history: individual dignity, the rule of law, separation of state and religion, freedom of conscience, scientific inquiry, and so forth.

The United States, for all its internal contradictions, anchored the modern idea that sovereignty flows from citizens rather than kings, that speech must remain free even when it is unpopular, and that capitalism is the single-greatest form of economic coordination ever created, capable of lifting millions out of poverty while rewarding ingenuity, creativity, and perseverance.

Canada built a pluralistic civic culture that, at its best, balanced minority rights with social trust and public responsibility. Britain produced parliamentary democracy, the common law tradition, and a political culture that valued continuity over revolution. Australia demonstrated that a liberal democracy could be built far from Europe’s historic power centers — combining the rule of law, robust civic institutions, compulsory voting, and a deeply pragmatic political culture that (historically) values social cohesion over ideological purity.

France gave the modern language of citizenship, secular law, and universal civil rights, insisting that individuals stand equal before the state rather than sorted by birth or tribe. Germany, after catastrophic moral collapse, undertook one of the most serious national reckonings in history and rebuilt a democratic society that made memory, restraint, and institutional humility core civic virtues.

These achievements were not accidental, nor were they morally weightless. They emerged from long struggles, internal failures, and hard-won lessons. They deserve critique, but also stewardship. A civilization that teaches its children only what to reject, without explaining what is worth carrying forward, does not produce moral seriousness; it produces disconnection. Pride need not mean denial, and love of country need not mean blindness. It can mean understanding that what was built, however imperfectly, still requires citizens willing to defend, refine, and continue it. Without that sense of inheritance, even the most enlightened ideals eventually lose their human custodians.

So the real question is not why Israelis are proud to be Israeli. The question is what happens to societies that teach their children not to be — and whether any nation can long endure once its people are convinced that their inheritance is something to apologize for rather than carry forward.

---