5 Israeli Habits That Will Change Your Life

This isn’t a list of banal, cliché habits you’ll read in an “Introduction to Israel” pamphlet. These are the invisible instincts you only absorb by living here.

photo: Levi Meir Clancy/Unsplash

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In 2013, I moved from Los Angeles to Israel. I was barely 24 years old — still forming my identity, still pressure-testing my values, still figuring out how I understood life.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that Israel wouldn’t just challenge my day-to-day life; it rewired my instincts. Through Israeli culture, contradictions, and daily demands, I absorbed habits that reshaped how I think about entrepreneurship, responsibility, optimism, morality, risk, and even politics.

This isn’t a list of banal, cliché habits you’ll read in an “Introduction to Israel” pamphlet. These are the invisible instincts you only absorb by living here, often without realizing it, until they start reshaping how you think and act.

1) Politics is personal, and that’s exactly the point.

In Israel, politics isn’t an abstract sport or a distant performance. The country is small enough that the government shows up in your daily life — at the grocery store, on the road, in your kids’ schools, and of course in times of war, which is more frequent than you think. Since 2013, there has been five wars (most smaller and shorter than October 7th and its aftermath, but nonetheless wars).

Because of that, Israelis don’t engage with politics as entertainment; they engage with it as something that directly affects their lifestyle, safety, income, and future. When policy touches your life so clearly, you learn to distinguish between what truly matters and what’s just noise. Living here taught me to stop consuming politics the way people consume, say, sports commentary. Not every headline deserves my emotional energy. Not every outrage deserves my attention.

Ironically, being closer to politics made me less obsessed with it. I learned to ask a simple question: Does this materially affect my life, or the people closest to me? If the answer is no, I let it go. That habit alone freed up enormous mental space, making me calmer, clearer, and more grounded.

At the same time, most Israelis don’t become over-indexed in foreign politics the way many people do. They don’t debate every election, dissect every scandal, or get caught up in the endless drama of leaders who have no impact on their daily lives.

When Israelis do pay attention to foreign leaders, it’s with a single guiding question in mind: Does this person, this policy, this decision, help or hurt Israel? Everything else is secondary. It’s not apathy; it’s focus.

This perspective is radical if you’re used to seeing politics as a form of entertainment or identity-signaling. Living with it taught me to apply the same principle in life: filter out what doesn’t matter, focus on what does, and invest energy where it produces real impact.

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2) Arguing With Authority

In Israel, questioning authority isn’t rebellion; it’s participation. You see it everywhere: junior employees challenging CEOs, students pushing back on teachers, soldiers asking “why” instead of blindly following orders. The assumption is that authority must earn legitimacy continuously.

This creates friction — productive friction. Ideas are tested early. Bad assumptions are exposed fast. Silence is not confused with loyalty. What surprised me most is that disagreement doesn’t end relationships. Israelis argue fiercely and then wish each other a “Shabbat Shalom.” Conflict exists inside commitment, not as a reason to abandon it.

From a young age, Israelis are taught to ask why. To challenge. To debate. A soldier might question an order; a student might challenge a teacher; a junior employee might push back against a manager. The default assumption isn’t “follow blindly.” It’s “engage critically.”

This habit reshapes how you relate to power. You learn to see leaders as collaborators rather than untouchable figures. You stop deferring to rank or status and start evaluating ideas and decisions on their merit.

What’s most interesting, though, is that authority in Israel isn’t as pronounced as in other societies. There’s a popular phrase many Israelis say: b’gova einayeem — literally, “at eye level.” It means people relate to one another on the same plane, not with one looking up in deference or down in dominance.

This contrasts sharply with how authority often functions elsewhere, where hierarchy can be rigid, unquestioned, and insulated by layers of bureaucracy. In Israel, whether it’s a CEO, a teacher, a military commander, or a politician, authority is provisional. It exists to serve a purpose, not to be revered for its own sake. Leaders are expected to explain themselves, defend their decisions, and withstand challenge. Titles carry responsibility, not immunity. Questioning authority isn’t seen as disrespect; it’s seen as engagement.

This dynamic creates friction, and often volume. Conversations are loud. Debates are intense. But beneath the noise is a shared assumption: No one is above scrutiny, and no one is beneath participation. Living in a culture shaped by b’gova einayeem taught me to stop mistaking hierarchy for wisdom. It rewired how I interact with power—less intimidated, more curious, and far more willing to speak up when something doesn’t make sense.

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3) When Morality Meets Reality

Israel is one of the most ethically grounded societies on the planet, not because it is perfect, but because it refuses moral confusion, even in war. Especially in war. Israelis have a clear understanding of the difference between self-defense and self-destruction, between tragic necessity and moral collapse, between restraint and surrender.

War in Israel is never abstract. Nearly everyone knows someone who has served, become injured, or been killed. The consequences are not theoretical, and the costs are never distant. That proximity forces moral seriousness. When the price of decisions is measured in lives — your neighbors’, your children’s, your friends’, your colleagues’, your own — you cannot afford slogans or self-deception.

This is why Israelis speak about war in the language of tragedy, not glory. There is grief, argument, and relentless self-examination, but also clarity about why force is often unavoidable. Defending life (a mainstream Israeli principle) is not the same as celebrating violence (a mainstream Palestinian principle). Moral restraint is not mistaken for moral paralysis.

Living inside that reality taught me something profound: Ethical clarity is not about pretending war is clean or painless. It is about refusing to let tragedy erase the difference between right and wrong. It is about acknowledging loss without surrendering the obligation to protect life.

In a world that often judges conflict from a safe distance, Israel’s moral posture is shaped by the opposite condition: decisions made close to the ground, under real threat, with no luxury for confusion. And once you’ve lived in a society that carries that burden daily, you never look at war or morality the same way again.

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4) Improvising First, Formalizing Later

Israel runs on improvisation. People assume responsibility before permission and fix problems before processes exist. This isn’t chaos; it’s speed. When something breaks, the instinctive question isn’t Who’s at fault? but What needs to be done, right now?

You see this mindset most clearly in places where hesitation costs lives. In the IDF, junior officers, and often soldiers themselves, are trained to adapt in real time when conditions shift. Plans are guides, not commandments. If reality changes, initiative matters more than obedience. Saving lives and completing the mission takes precedence over rigid adherence to orders written for a different moment.

The same logic governs emergency medicine. MDA paramedics and emergency room doctors are trained to stabilize first and perfect later. With limited resources and overwhelming pressure, they improvise, adjust, and solve — often inventing solutions on the fly until formal protocols catch up. The goal isn’t procedural purity; it’s survival.

I’m reminded of an epic story about how Alex Gilady put Israeli television on the map. Following a law passed in 1990, the State of Israel authorized the creation of its first commercial television channel, with the stated goal of increasing pluralism and competition. To win the decade-long broadcast license, applicants were required to submit detailed proposals to the government demonstrating both technical capacity and creative competence.

The bid prepared by Gilady, representing Keshet Media Group, stood out immediately. When government officials arrived at Keshet’s Tel Aviv offices to evaluate the proposal, they were met with what appeared to be a state-of-the-art operation: cutting-edge broadcast equipment, professional editing suites, and a fully outfitted studio.

Impressed, the officials selected Keshet as one of the three companies granted the right to operate Israel’s new commercial channel, sharing airtime under the new framework. Over time, Keshet would go on to secure its own dedicated channel — and today it is widely regarded as Israel’s premier television network.

What the officials never knew was that much of the advanced equipment they saw had been flown in from the U.K. specifically for the inspection — and quietly shipped back out as soon as the visit ended. It was a quintessentially Israeli move: build the future first, prove the vision, and formalize the infrastructure later. And it worked.

That same improvisational muscle became painfully visible after October 7th. In the weeks following the massacre and kidnappings, Israeli communities and civilian groups moved faster than the government. Everyday people organized food deliveries for displaced families, housing for evacuees, childcare for reservists, equipment for soldiers, and emotional support networks — often within hours. WhatsApp groups replaced bureaucracy. Action preceded permission.

This is reinforced early in life. In Israeli schools and homes, outcomes matter more than rigid plans. Teachers adapt lessons on the fly. Parents adjust expectations on the fly. Children grow up learning that systems exist to serve people, not the other way around.

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5) Radical, Unshakeable Optimism

Israelis say Yehiyeh beseder (“It’ll be okay.”) the way others say hello.

This is because Israelis don’t have time to panic. Panic is for people who expect life to be fair; Israelis expect life to be hard. And they meet it with a shrug, a curse word, and a cup of coffee. As Michael Dickson and Naomi L. Baum wrote in their book, ISResilience: “By any rational analysis, Israel should not exist at all, let alone be a thriving powerhouse of a country. Yet … Israel defies reason, logic, and historical precedent.”

This is a nation built by people who had every reason to believe it wouldn’t work — and did it anyway. That’s what Yehiyeh beseder really means: not that everything will magically fix itself, but that we will fix it. Or survive it. Or laugh about it later.

Because Jewish history is full of impossible situations. And Jewish survival is full of impossible perseverance. Yehiyeh beseder. It always is. Eventually.

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