Mailbox: "Israel derangement syndrome" - Distortion, outrage, and the Gaza war
Key topics:
Rise of "Israel derangement syndrome" in global discourse
Criticism of distorted narratives on Gaza conflict
Selective outrage fuels antisemitism and misinformation
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By Ilan Preskovsky
If you have even the slightest interest in international news, you will no doubt have heard of this strange phenomenon called “Trump derangement syndrome” – a pseudo-mental-illness whereby “sufferers” exhibit an irrational fear and/ or hatred for President Donald Trump that extends well beyond his (many) actual flaws as a president or as a person. Sentiments like “Trump is literally Hitler” or a complete inability to view anything he has ever done in a positive light are sure-fire signs of this derangement. I would know. I’ve suffered from it in the past. It isn’t even just Trump, though. The term was first coined as “Bush derangement syndrome” to describe the more unhinged criticisms of George W Bush and there was certainly an even more vicious variant of the syndrome during Obama’s two terms as president.
But however absurd these “[current US president] derangement syndromes” ever get, they’re nothing in comparison to what is a far wilder and more extreme case of mass hysteria: something that I can only call “Israel derangement syndrome” – or IDS for short. Over the past two years, we have seen legitimate criticisms of Israel’s policies turn, very rapidly, into a cavalcade of lies, distortions, exaggerations, and blood libels meant to discredit not just Israel’s defensive war against the radical Islamist terrorists of Hamas that invaded Israel on 7 October 2023 and massacred her citizens (among others), but the Jewish state’s very existence.
And no, this “derangement” is not a two way street. Yes, some on the “pro-Israel” side can go well beyond the pale in their rhetoric and some seem incapable of lobbing even the softest criticisms towards Netanyahu and his government for its conduct during and before this war, but they are the exception rather than the rule, and even they can’t match the perverse mental gymnastics regularly engaged in by those who will deny any reality and trample on any truth to paint Israel as the Greatest Evil on Earth.
I can think of no greater example of this than Oscar van Heerden’s latest anti-Israel hit piece on News24: “Never forget: For the sake of the children, stop the war in Gaza too” The gist of the article is that van Heerden calls out world leaders – and all of us really – for focusing so much on the suffering of the children affected by Russia’s unlawful invasion of Ukraine that we have been negligent in talking about the Palestinian children who have been victim to Israel’s armed forces in Gaza. It presumably goes without saying that our hearts should break for the suffering of any child and not least those living through this hellish war in Gaza, but the idea that the war in Ukraine has diverted the public’s attention away from what’s happening in Gaza isn’t just ridiculous, it’s a literal inversion of what’s actually happening.
Protests against Israel have been ongoing since Hamas’ invasion of Israel on 7 October 2023 (some could barely even wait until the 8th to declare Israel’s future military action a “genocide”), and the children of Gaza have been an ever-present concern in the media – legacy, new, and social – ever since. The war in Gaza has been the subject of so much focus, in fact, that the war in Ukraine has largely faded in the public consciousness, while those untold thousands of children and innocent civilians affected by often far worse conflicts in places like Sudan, Myanmar, Syria, Haiti, Ethiopia and the DRC seem to merit barely a second thought.
Those same “peace advocates” who have vilified every action Israel has taken from the morning of October 7th on, couldn’t even muster so much as a half-hearted condemnation a couple of months ago when just a few kilometres away from the Israeli border, Syrian Islamists massacred hundreds of innocent Druze - in a manner that directly mirrored Hamas’ massacre of Israelis on October 7th, as it so happens.
This isn’t a question of “whataboutism” – though I suppose one could accuse it of that - but of moral consistency, hypocrisy, and a selective outrage that is reserved entirely for the Jewish State. It’s also about how Israel derangement syndrome seeks to remove any sense of context, nuance and critical thinking when it comes to the war in Gaza. It’s a bizarre hysteria that can turn smart, perfectly reasonable people into brain-dead zombies who see red at the merest mention of Israel.
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Examples of this are too numerous to mention, but they can be found in every corner of anti-Israel activism. You see it when privileged, middle class Westerners call standing with the oppressive Islamic Republic of Iran being “on the right side of history”, effectively repositioning the monstrous Ayatollah as being a victim rather than chief persecutor of terror.
You see it when people blindly accept Hamas’ casualty figures as gospel and when they “yada yada yada” (to quote a classic Seinfeld episode) over Hamas’ part in starting, prolonging and exacerbating the war to such an extent that you’d think the terror organisation either vanished completely after October 7th or never actually existed in the first place.
And you see it every time someone misrepresents the ICJ’s current ruling on the war in Gaza as a “plausible genocide” when they said absolutely nothing of the sort, and in every attempt to rewrite the definitions of “genocide”, “famine” or “apartheid” in order to find Israel guilty of them – as has been done even by once-lauded institutions like Amnesty International. I realise, incidentally, that claims of genocide are omnipresent at this point, but the way these finding go out of their way to ignore the greater context of the war and the nature of Hamas only supports the existence and prevalence of Israel derangement syndrome. Though that, of course, is a whole other article in and of itself.
Where Israel derangement syndrome is arguably most pernicious, however, is when it is mixed with a malicious intent to distort reality. Nowhere is this more obvious than the question of hunger in Gaza. Whatever the extent of it and whoever is ultimately to blame, it is an absolutely horrific situation that should never ever have reached this point. And yet, the simple, heartbreaking truth is never enough for those suffering from Israel derangement syndrome. Nor are valid criticisms of Israel’s conduct in this matter.
On 20 May, United Nations Under-Secretary-General Tom Fletcher told BBC Radio on May 20 that “there are 14,000 babies that will die in the next 48 hours unless we can reach them,” only for the BBC itself to follow-up and discover that the actual UN report was referring to possible starvation of this number of children (not just babies), not over the next couple of days, but over the next eleven months. In July, while running an expose on the real food shortage in Gaza, The New York Times chose to illustrate this widespread suffering with a photo of a child with a severe genetic disorder, doctored to remove his healthy-seeming brother from the original photo. At the same time, the cover photo of Time magazine showing dozens of Palestinians crying out for food itself turned out to be staged.
There is enormous suffering in Gaza. This is undeniable. So why exactly do even some of the most revered institutions in the world feel the need to present it as even worse than it already is? And more to the point, how exactly does Israel derangement syndrome actually help anyone? It helps Hamas, certainly, and by extension Hamas’ fellow Jihadis, but it doesn’t help quell the rising tide of worldwide antisemitism and it certainly doesn’t help actual Palestinians.
There are valid criticisms and concerns to be lodged against Israel and its conduct during this war, but by couching even the most valid of them in bald-faced lies, you guarantee that no one in Israel will pay any attention whatsoever to any of it. That’s not great for Israel, but it’s really, really not great for the Palestinians and especially not for those Palestinian kids that IDS sufferers like Oscar van Heerden claim to care so much about.