Secret to Israel’s success is a sense of service — and belonging

In the October 7 war, Israel has a secret weapon: the spectacular solidarity of its people.

The roots of this societal resilience did not grow overnight.

They are the product of a culture of service unique in the West, a culture that carefully nurtures a sense of belonging and purpose.

The mobilization of Israeli society, both military and civilian, is unprecedented.

Religious and secular, Ashkenazi and Mizrahi, right and left, tech CEOs and the socioeconomically challenged periphery, and even Arabs and Jews have come together, not just in sentiment but in action.

Everyone is doing their part, embracing the families of the killed, wounded, kidnapped and evacuated.

The ‘meritocracy’ mistake

What makes Israeli society so able to mobilize? We wrote our new book, “The Genius of Israel: The Surprising Resilience of a Divided Nation in a Turbulent World,” to try to answer this question.

We set out to understand how the wellsprings of Israel’s social strength are directly relevant to treating the deepening maladies of modern societies, not least in the United States.

One lens with which to view this is through the very different visions and values that shape the elites of Israel compared to other liberal democracies.

In America, the coin of merit and advancement is the university degree, creating a stark “diploma divide.” The consequences of not having a university degree are profound.

A high school diploma was once sufficient to earn a respectable living and to provide one’s children with the opportunity for a better life, but that is no longer the case.

In 1990, the US median wage for college graduates was over one-third higher than for those with only a high school diploma.

By 2021, the gap had almost doubled — college graduates had two-thirds higher median incomes than high school graduates.

Young adults without a college degree are almost four times as likely to live in poverty as college graduates.

In the United States, if you are a middle-age man without a college degree, you are three times more likely to die from suicide, alcohol abuse or a drug overdose.

At the same time, the extraordinary lengths young people go to to apply to elite colleges create their own dysfunctionality.

Real community service, according to Harvard professor Michael Sandel, has been supplanted by “internships and good deeds in distant lands designed to impress college admissions committees — all supervised by anxious hyper-parents.”

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Education systems have become “sorting machines.” “Where did you go to school?” is a question people ask to place each other in their mental status hierarchy.

It has become the job of education systems — particularly those that guard the gates of higher education — to determine who has merit and who doesn’t.

Universal enlistment, shared sacrifice

Israel also has a meritocracy, but with an important difference: Merit is judged by service.

In most meritocracies, the criterion to reach the pinnacle of merit is individual academic excellence.

In Israel, the most meritorious are those who seek and are chosen for the most challenging military service. This changes everything.

It means merit is determined by something that is not about you, but about how you can contribute to your society and country.

It is a communal value that builds solidarity, rather an individualistic value that contributes to moving up the ladder.

What it takes to be chosen is also very different than in other societies.

No matter how impressive your individual talents are, you cannot be of much use to the top military units if you can’t work with others. Individuals don’t carry out missions; teams do.

In addition, the mission is not for the benefit of individual soldiers or even just the unit. Soldiers must be willing to sacrifice everything for something larger than themselves.

What happens when a society selects those willing and able to do the toughest service rather than those who have the perfect academic record?

A society that selects for service changes everything, from what young people aspire to as they grow up, to how they structure their lives throughout adulthood.

The more you look, the greater the differences.

Everyone doing their part

When we spoke to Nadav Zafrir, a successful Israeli entrepreneur and the commander of an elite tech unit in the IDF, he was in the process of moving his family back to Israel after spending a few years in the United States building his business.

A major reason for returning to Israel was so his children could go into the Israeli army rather than to an American university.

“I looked at my kids and I said, ‘This is what I want for them,’ ” Zafrir told us. “Not because I’m a Spartan, but because I honestly think it’s a better education.”

The IDF values many traits and talents, such as high motivation, problem-solving skills, determination, the ability to self-criticize, and a capacity to work in teams.

What is clear, as former IDF chief of staff Gen. Aviv Kohavi told us, is that many of the IDF’s star performers would have been quickly weeded out by meritocracies that require perfect academic performance.

A meritocracy based on service draws from a much larger talent pool. But is this just switching one elite for another? What about those who don’t make it to the top in either system?

The prestige of universities is measured in part by how many applicants they keep out. The IDF’s job is different. It can’t just think about the top. It has a strong incentive to maximize the human potential of every draftee. Often it understands that potential better than the teenagers understand themselves.

“Everybody is screened with a superior prediction model that’s been optimized over decades,” Zafrir said.

This process is hardly perfect. There are plenty of stories of people who could have had a more “meaningful service” than they did. The boring jobs need filling, too.

But there are also many stories of young people who were given challenges and responsibilities that they could never have imagined.

In other countries, meritocracies select for individual achievement. This is having cumulative effects.

Over time, it has become harder to get into top schools, higher education costs have soared, and a glut of college grads has led to more competition for jobs that require a degree.

Fighting polarization

At the same time, individualism has been increasing, which has led to smaller families and greater emphasis on work as a source of meaning.

Having a place where young people can not only meet each other but live and work closely together means that whatever differences there are — political, socioeconomic, cultural, ethnic — there is some underlying commonality that limits how far people can turn on one another.

What kind of common ground do other countries have to hold them together? It’s not clear.

What does seem clear is that polarization within countries has been increasing over time.

“Look, there’s a big problem of polarization in the world today,” Kohavi told us. “In any other country, leaders have to look for some way to bring people together. Here we have it for free, for two years, three years, and sometimes 30 years,” alluding to his own military career and also to the experience of Israelis who have reserve duty through much of their adult lives.

If solidarity is the antidote to polarization, it must be built around something.

Being part of humanity is not enough, and even being part of the same country, culture, or religion seems to provide less protection than it once did against spinning apart.

Many Israelis across ethnic, political and socioeconomic lines have something even stronger than a common experience: a sense of belonging.

“What happens in the belly of the ship? In the hull of the tank, or in the warehouse on a base?” Kohavi mused. He went on to argue that it is not just about forming lasting friendships.

“The intensity of military service helps create a strong feeling of belonging,” he said. “Any soldier who has contributed to his or her country feels that this country belongs to them more than ever. And the importance of belonging doesn’t stop there. It also has a profound impact on the individual level.”

The power of belonging is not just about keeping a society together. It is also a critical component of our personal well-being.

According to a Mayo Clinic study, “We cannot separate the importance of a sense of belonging from our physical and mental health. Depression, anxiety and suicide are common mental health conditions associated with lacking a sense of belonging.”

If modern societies are to survive and thrive, they must build something in common. Individualism is an important value, but it must be balanced by the idea of service to the collective.

Humans are not built to be alone, they need to be part of something larger than themselves.

As war correspondent Sebastian Junger put it, “Humans don’t mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.”

Israel has perfected the art of making people feel part of a larger whole, and that they are needed to play their part.

Dan Senor and Saul Singer are the co-authors of “The Genius of Israel: The Surprising Resilience of a Divided Nation in a Turbulent World,” published this week.