Israel Derangement Syndrome

By Andrew Fox

Friday, September 12, 2025

 

When a state is singled out, demonised, and judged by standards applied to no one else, we have entered the realm of pathology. “Israel Derangement Syndrome” is a real, spreading sickness, and it is fully metastasised across the West.

 

Some truly telling examples. Ireland and others threaten to boycott Eurovision if Israel performs. Spain’s prime minister casually comments that his country should have nuclear weapons to launch at Israel. The Netherlands descends into parliamentary chaos over Gaza. Flouncing Hollywood stars performatively announce that their virtue will not allow them to work with Israeli companies. At first glance, these stories seem trivial, almost absurd, laughable—Eurovision tantrums, political posturing, virtue-signalling, and the Western obsession with grandstanding over the Middle East.

 

However, none of this is random. Each reflects deep domestic histories of terrorism, antisemitism, and postcolonial guilt that are now exploited by Hamas propaganda and rechannelled against the Jewish state.

 

It’s not funny.

 

Ireland’s Eurovision stance is wrapped in the language of moral conscience. However, Ireland’s domestic history with terrorism, particularly the IRA and the long-standing sympathy with insurgency, has fostered a political culture sympathetic to violent “resistance” movements abroad. Hamas resonates instinctively within the Irish imagination. The response is not solidarity with Israeli civilians under attack, but with those who committed murderous rape and slaughter, and who have declined multiple offers of statehood.

 

Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, meanwhile, wishing his country had nuclear weapons to use against Israel, sounds utterly unhinged. Yet Spain possesses one of Europe’s longest and ugliest traditions of antisemitism. From the Inquisition to Franco, Jews were expelled, silenced, and erased. Israel’s existence today reawakens a latent national pathology: a state that is Jewish, sovereign, and unbowed—precisely what Spain tried to erase.

 

Of course, alongside state-based antisemitism, there is lawfare on the global stage: the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the International Criminal Court (ICC), and endless “commissions of inquiry”. The Hague has become a theatre for persecution. False charges of genocide are hurled at Israel even as Hamas openly declares its intention to wipe Jews from the river to the sea.

 

It does not end there. The Hind Rajab Foundation now hunts Israeli social media, tracking down IDF soldiers abroad in an attempt to expose, harass, and destroy their lives. Online mobs sift through LinkedIn and Instagram to find young Israelis on gap years, students in Europe, or businesspeople in America. The goal: to make being Israeli a global liability.

 

None of this is solidarity with Gaza. It is the persecution of Jews.

 

The most dangerous front in this war is not in Gaza but in Washington, D.C. A Gallup poll earlier this year found that Israel’s support among Democrats has collapsed to just 7%. That is a political earthquake.

 

If bipartisan backing for Israel dies in the United States, Israel’s strategic environment changes overnight. Its enemies know this, and Hamas, Qatar, Iran, and Russia all target American opinion just as much as Israeli soldiers. Every viral video of rubble, every tear-jerking TikTok about “starving children”, every doctored UN statistic is aimed less at Tel Aviv than at university campuses and Democratic Party caucuses.

 

The plan is working.

 

It must be stated: Israel has done very little legally wrong in Gaza. That statement will make the usual candidates foam at the mouth, but it is the truth.

 

The IDF has undertaken unprecedented measures to protect civilians: warning leaflets, phone calls, text messages, humanitarian corridors, and pauses in fighting. There is no precedent in modern warfare for this level of effort, especially in a combat environment like Gaza, where the civilians cannot flee and Hamas aims to maximise the numbers killed. Not in Iraq, not in Afghanistan, not in Syria, not in Ukraine, and yet Israel is the one accused of genocide.

 

The starvation narrative is the most grotesque example. UN officials claim a famine stalks Gaza, yet food aid continues to flow in daily. There is substantial evidence showing markets are still operating. Hamas and others have repeatedly stolen, hoarded, and resold aid. The accusation of “deliberate starvation” is a weaponised lie, not an empirical assessment.

 

Where Israeli soldiers have committed crimes, they are sporadic rather than systemic. Every army has bad actors. The difference is that Israel investigates and prosecutes its own. Hamas, by contrast, builds tunnels under hospitals, fires rockets from schools, and films its own war crimes for propaganda.

 

The double standard is staggering.

 

Hamas understands the West better than the West understands itself. Its strategy is not primarily military. It knows it cannot defeat the IDF head-on. Its approach is psychological and driven by storytelling: exploiting Palestinian suffering as a weapon, flooding the media with images, and distorting reality until Israel is portrayed as the aggressor and Hamas as the victim.

 

The method is brutally effective. One child’s body on camera outweighs a hundred Hamas fighters off-screen. Every explosion becomes content. Every funeral is theatre. Hamas has turned death into PR, and the world swallows it whole.

 

What we are seeing is not “criticism of Israel”. It is a new, globalised antisemitism.

 

When Israeli athletes are shunned, when Jewish students are harassed on campus, when faeces are smeared on London synagogues, when kosher restaurants are vandalised in Paris, Berlin, New York — it is not about Gaza. It is about Jews.

 

BDS was always about this. Its founders admitted openly that their goal was not two states but the erasure of Israel altogether. Now, through lawfare, media manipulation, and social media swarming, they have normalised antisemitism as progressive chic.

 

This is why the language of “genocide” is so dangerous. It is not simply inaccurate; it is incitement. It primes populations to view Israel (and by extension Jews everywhere) as perpetrators of the greatest crime imaginable. That narrative does not just delegitimise Israel; it endangers Jewish communities worldwide.

 

The only thing being genocided in this conflict is the truth itself.

 

The fact that Israel did not initiate this war. Hamas did, with the most brutal massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. The fact that Israel has gone to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties in a conflict that Hamas deliberately embeds within civilian populations. The fact that the international system, from The Hague to the UN, has been weaponised to persecute one state, and one state only, because it is Jewish.

 

Israel is not perfect. No state at war is. However, to pretend that it is guilty of genocide while Hamas openly proclaims its genocidal intent is to invert reality itself. This inversion is the sickness of our age. It is Israel Derangement Syndrome, and it is spreading fast.

 

Some might say: so what if Europeans complain about Eurovision? So what if campus radicals shout about genocide? Israel remains strong, armed, and resilient.

 

My reply is that history shows us to take such disturbances seriously. Demonisation always comes before violence. Look at the USA, where political violence is becoming normalised. Lies always lead to persecution, and when Israel loses bipartisan support in the United States, when antisemitism becomes mainstreamed in global institutions, when Jewish life is once again made fragile in Europe and America, the consequences will not be minor.

 

This is not about Gaza. It is about the future of the Jewish people.

 

We are living through the largest propaganda assault in modern history. Hamas’s 7th October massacre was designed not only to kill Israelis but to unleash a narrative war that would isolate Israel, fracture its alliances, and inflame antisemitism worldwide. It has succeeded far beyond Hamas’s wildest dreams.

 

The danger extends beyond Israel. It threatens the very integrity of truth. If lies can be weaponised to label the most targeted, scrutinised, and restrained military campaign in modern warfare as “genocide,” then words mean nothing, facts mean nothing, and law itself becomes a pogrom.

 

That is the world Hamas wants. That is the world antisemitism demands. Unless the sickness of Israel Derangement Syndrome is confronted head-on, that is the world we will all be forced to live in.