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........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)