Something very strange happens to otherwise sensible people when Israel enters the conversation.

Reason loosens its tie, orders another drink and quietly leaves through the side door.

People who would struggle to find Haifa on an unlabelled map suddenly acquire startling expertise in Ottoman land law, counter-insurgency doctrine, the Geneva Conventions and the precise moral obligations of a country at war. Proportion disappears. History becomes infinitely elastic. Cause and consequence exchange places. Terrorism develops a complicated backstory deserving several seminars and perhaps a sympathetic documentary.

Israel, meanwhile, is expected to explain itself before breakfast.

One hesitates to call this a medical condition. Doctors have quite enough to contend with. So let us settle for a political one: Israel Derangement Syndrome.

The first thing to establish is that criticism of Israel does not qualify. Israelis criticise Israel with an enthusiasm few foreigners could hope to match. Anyone who has spent time among Israelis knows that placing three of them around a dinner table is usually sufficient to produce five political parties, two constitutional crises and an argument about who ruined the country.

That is democracy. IDS is something else.

It begins when Israel is subjected to rules invented especially for Israel, revised whenever Israel appears to have met them, and usually administered by people safely removed from the consequences.

For years we have been told that Islamist terrorism must be understood in context. We must consider alienation, colonial history, economics, foreign policy, identity, grievance, trauma, discrimination and perhaps the weather.

Then Israelis are murdered and context develops an entirely different function.

Now it explains the murderer.

A terrorist may possess an ideology, a religious worldview, weapons, financiers, military commanders, foreign patrons, political objectives and published statements explaining what he intends to do. Yet much Western commentary treats him like a tropical storm. Unfortunate. Destructive. Probably caused by atmospheric conditions.

Israel, by contrast, acquires almost supernatural agency.

Israel causes the attack against it.

Israel causes the response to the attack.

Israel causes the anger generated by the response.

Israel causes the radicalisation produced by that anger.

Give social media another forty-eight hours and somebody will have blamed Israel for the price of avocados.

October 7 offered a particularly grim demonstration.

For a few hours, murdering Israeli civilians was widely agreed to be bad.

A promising beginning.

Then came the qualifications.

There was “context”. There were lectures about history. There were attempts, sometimes astonishingly rapid, to place the massacre inside a political narrative spacious enough to accommodate........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)