Why Israeli and American Veterans Differ

Someone wished me a happy Memorial Day last week. A decent person. No bad intent. I smiled and said thank you, and something moved in me that I have been sitting with ever since.

In Israel, where I grew up and where I served in the IDF, Memorial Day is not a greeting. It is a siren. The whole country stops at 11 in the morning. Cars pull over on highways. People step out and stand in the street in complete silence for two minutes. When it ends, everyone gets back in and drives away. Nobody says happy anything. There is nothing happy about it. Every Israeli family has lost someone, or knows someone who has. The silence is not symbolic. It is personal.

The “happy Memorial Day” moment is not really about etiquette. It is a window into something larger, and more worrying. It points to how far American society has drifted from the people who serve it, and I think that distance is killing veterans.

Not metaphorically. Literally.

According to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, 6,398 American veterans died by suicide in 2023. That is approximately 17 people a day. The veteran suicide rate is roughly twice that of the non-veteran American population. I want to be careful with direct comparisons to Israel because the data collection methods differ between countries and I cannot give you a clean side-by-side number with confidence. What I can tell you is that Israeli veteran suicide rates are consistently reported as significantly lower, and researchers point to social integration as a primary factor. I have known veterans on both sides. Israeli veterans who came back from Gaza or Lebanon carrying things that do not leave. American veterans I have trained and spoken with in New York who are fighting a completely different kind of war years after discharge. The difference I notice is not in how much they suffered. It is in what they came home to.

The Israelis tend to carry their struggle inside a community that understands it. The Americans tend to carry it alone.

That is not a small difference. It may be the whole difference.

Less than one percent of Americans currently serve in the military. I recommend verifying that figure against current Department of Defense data, but the broad picture is consistent across sources: the overwhelming majority of American society has no direct experience of military service. When a veteran comes home, he returns to a world that has not shared what he carried. His neighbors have not served. His coworkers have not served. His employer probably has not served. Nobody around him has a frame of reference for what the inside of that experience feels like, and most people are not being dishonest when they say they cannot imagine it. They genuinely cannot.

In Israel, that gap barely exists. Service is mandatory for most Jewish citizens. When you come back, your teacher served. Your boss served. The person sitting next to you on the bus serves, or has a kid who is serving right now. Military experience is not exotic. It is the shared ground of the society. When you say something costs you something, people around you already have some version of a map for what you mean.

Serving in the IDF means fighting for the same ground where your family lives. The city you defended is the city where your mother still makes dinner on Friday night. The border you held is an hour’s drive from your apartment. That proximity does not make trauma easier. It changes the psychological architecture of coming home. The war and the home are in the same world. There is less of a gap to cross.

An American soldier deploys to a country most of his civilian neighbors cannot locate on a map, returns to a suburb where the war never existed, and is thanked. He is thanked constantly. And then, functionally, he is left alone with it.

There is also something that does not get discussed enough, which is reserve duty. In Israel, most veterans continue serving in reserve capacity for years after active service. They get called back periodically alongside the same people they served with before. The identity does not collapse on a single day. The thread connecting a man to his unit, his purpose, and the people who know him does not get cut. He is still a soldier. The group still exists. He still matters to it.

In America, the transition out of military service can happen in a matter of days. One day, a man is inside a total institution with a clear structure, a constant sense of belonging, and an explicit purpose. The next day, he is a civilian, handed paperwork and a phone number for the VA, standing in a world that is already moving at full speed and has no particular slot for what he just spent years becoming.

I run a Krav Maga school in NYC; the philosophy we train under is built around a concept I think about often in this context: a protector does not fight because he hates what is in front of him. He fights because he loves what is behind him. That orientation, toward something worth defending, gives violence a moral and psychological container. When that container is removed and the mission ends and the community disperses, some men lose not just their job but their entire framework for understanding why they did what they did.

That is not a clinical problem. It is a human one.

I want to say something carefully here, because it matters and because I know not every reader will agree with every war America has fought. You do not have to support every policy decision to respect the people who carried them out in their bodies. The argument about whether a given war was just belongs to civilians in quiet rooms. The cost of that argument was paid by someone else, in full, in advance. The men who went did not write the policy. They bore it. And when they came home, many of them came home to a society that thanked them in the abstract and then continued not to think about them.

The fallen gave this country the freedom to be oblivious. That freedom is real. It is comfortable. It has been maintained continuously, without interruption, at a cost most people do not carry in their awareness on an ordinary Tuesday. What I notice living here, as an Israeli, as someone who grew up in a country where that awareness is not optional, is that the obliviousness is not malicious. It is structural. It is what happens when less than one percent of the population absorbs all of the exposure, so the other ninety-nine percent never have to think about it at all.

The VA exists. The research on veteran mental health is serious and growing. The public’s respect for service is genuine. None of that is nothing. The problem is that access to therapy and a grateful public are not the same thing as belonging to something. They are not the same as coming home to a community that shares your language, that knows what reserve duty means, that does not need you to explain from scratch what it costs.

What Israeli veterans appear to have, in greater measure, is a society that keeps a real place for them. Not a ceremonial one. A functional one. A neighbor who served. A workplace where the person next to you also came back from something. A national story in which your service is not exceptional or heroic or unusual but simply expected, part of the shared fabric of what it means to live here.

American veterans deserve that. Most of them would not describe what they are missing as therapy, recognition, or a better benefits package. They would describe it the way people describe most things they are missing. They want to belong to something again. They want to matter to someone who understands why.

That is not a complicated need. It is the most human need there is.

When the siren sounds in Israel and the whole country stops, it stops because everyone has someone to stop for. That shared weight is also shared strength. It is what holds people together when the weight gets heavy enough that a man might otherwise choose to disappear.

America has not found its version of that yet. I do not know exactly what it would look like. I do know that seventeen veterans a day is not an acceptable price for a society’s convenience.

They deserve more than a long weekend.

Do something amazing,
Tsahi