Take a look at population and population density. Israel is 9M and change; Sweden is 10M and change. Consider the size of the country (and desert). Population density of Israel is 401 people/sq km; Sweden is 25/sq km. Pack people more closely together and you get higher disease transmission rates. Sweden (outside Stockholm) more like the US in the 50s - entirely different from a country like Israel. US is 36/sq km; in all cases the distribution between rural and urban areas is highly skewed; but in a much smaller country like Israel, there's little opportunity to spread out.
Contagion can multiply at an exponential rate (1 person can infect many - each of those can infect many) while mandates are more linear. There's a significant time lag between disease growth and corrective measures - more infected people than known (because of the delayed onset of symptoms if people are symptomatic) are already in the pipeline and have the potential to affect others. Feedback and control and system dynamics are the real studies that would give a real handle on all this if people really responded more uniformly, but even mask wear varies both in quality of the mask and user compliance.