Netanyahu Derangement Syndrome
It’s not Israelis who are struggling with challenges to their values but Jews in the Diaspora.
By Melanie Phillips
JNS
Jan 30, 2025
Sir Mick Davis and Mike Prashker, the co-founders of The London Initiative, blame Netanyahu for the “erosion of Israel’s standing and legitimacy within the community of nations.”
Making only glancing reference to the “scale and brutality” of the Hamas-led massacre in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the “prolonged war” that has followed and the fate of the hostages, they then proceed to blame Netanyahu for the “erosion of Israel’s standing and legitimacy within the community of nations.”
They write: “The savage realities of the continuing conflict, the widespread destruction of Gaza, growing settler violence, the continuing erosion of Israel’s democratic foundations and a range of anti-pluralistic policies, reinforce long-term trends that should alarm every Zionist. Namely, deteriorating relations between Israel and world Jewry and the free-fall of Israel’s international standing among most Western allies and democracies.”
But the mass demonstrations against Israel started on Oct. 7 while the atrocities were still underway. Before the Israel Defenses Forces even started their attack on Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Israel was being condemned for overreacting.
Davis and Prashkar make no mention of what then ensued to produce the savage turn against Israel, which has had little to do with “anti-pluralism” or “growing settler violence.”
No mention of the thousands of violent and sometimes fatal assaults against Jewish residents of the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria, vastly outnumbering the unprovoked and violent actions by a minority of those residents and yet almost never reported in the West.
No mention of the grotesque misrepresentation of Israel’s just war of defense against genocide as genocide by Israel. No mention of the branding of the IDF as wanton child-killers, a libel straight out of the medieval antisemitic playbook.
No acknowledgment that this mass derangement has been whipped up by ancient tropes of Jew-hatred pouring out of Palestinian society, which have now been accepted into a West that’s made an article of faith out of support for the Palestinian cause.
Instead, Davis and Prashker, who describe themselves as “passionate Zionists,” are inadvertently deploying one of the most disgusting features of antisemitic discourse: blaming the Jews for their own persecution. More specifically, in this case, one particular Jew.
According to them, Netanyahu has betrayed the founding principles of the State of Israel in “an increasingly unbridled assault” on the essential elements of its 1948 Declaration of Independence.
They write: “The Declaration’s aspirational vision of Israel, as a national homeland for the Jewish people, delivering ever greater fairness and equality to all its citizens and striving for peace with its neighbors, has been badly set back.”
What on earth are they talking about? The Declaration says:
“The state of Israel will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.”
Israel has carried out every aspect of this to the letter.
The suggestion that Netanyahu has prevented peace with the Palestinian Arabs is risible. As is by now overwhelmingly obvious to all who are not blinded by prejudice, the Palestinian Arabs remain implacably committed to wiping Israel from the map, as they always have been.
In a conspicuous display of amnesia, Davis and Prashker omit the fact—so inconvenient to their Netanyahu-bashing—that the Palestinian Arabs have rejected numerous offers of a state of their own and chosen instead to renew their war of extermination against the Jewish homeland.
David and Prashkar write: “Isolated by war and collective trauma, many Israelis struggle to come to terms with how far we have traveled from our foundational values.”
This bears precious little relation to a country that, devastated by trauma and collective grief, believes in itself because it affirms the enduring values of the Jewish people—a country whose heroic young soldiers have galvanized and inspired it by their blazing love of and admiration for the nation they are defending.
But, of course, the people whose discomfort Davis and Prashkar are really talking about are Jews of the Diaspora who “struggle to process or acknowledge the shifts threatening the Israel they cherish as a source of pride and identity.”
These shifts, they claim, have been such that it was “currently more acceptable in widening circles for a government minister to advocate ‘voluntary emigration’ and the resettlement of Gaza than it is for an opposition leader to assert that secure peace with the Palestinians is in Israel’s strategic interests.”
Since they wrote this, U.S. President Donald Trump has suggested that Jordan, Egypt and other countries might be “persuaded” to take in more than 1 million Gazan Arabs who want to leave. The reason for that suggestion is precisely the impossibility of envisaging a “secure peace” ever coming from Gazans who have been brainwashed from birth to slaughter Jews and steal their land.
Having internalized many of the lies told about Israel, Far too many Diaspora Jews, unfortunately, “struggle to process or acknowledge” the fact that their assumed British or American identity relegates their Jewish identity to a marginal add-on now being used against them by people they so unwisely assumed regarded them as one of their own.
It’s perfectly possible to dislike Netanyahu and believe he should step down, and yet recognize the realities of Palestinian rejectionism and the enduring attempt to destroy Israel. Blaming the prime minister for this and for resurgent antisemitism is beyond perverse. It resembles the obsessional demonization of the newly installed American president known as Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Blaming Netanyahu for the Western war against the Jews is a pathological displacement exercise by people who refuse to acknowledge what is in front of their eyes. It’s easier to scapegoat Netanyahu on the assumption that if you get rid of him, then you get rid of the problem.
Of course, it’s entirely legitimate to criticize Netanyahu or his government’s policies. But accusing him of betraying Zionism and Israel’s foundational values is not just criticism. It’s Netanyahu Derangement Syndrome on steroids.
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