What an Op-Ed, and Its Aftermath, Teaches Us about War Derangement

I’d planned to write on war derangement last Thursday, but when the news dropped that Israeli soldiers had killed Hamas-leader Yahya Sinwar, I knew it was best to let the news cycle play out before touching this with a ten-foot pole.

My heart went out immediately, though, to the people who entertained a sincere hope that Sinwar’s death might actually lead to a change in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s mission objectives: that a ceasefire couldn’t be far off now; that the hostages would finally be released; that a change would come upon the land as powerful as that scene in Children of Men (2006), when the cry of a newborn lays low all of warring humankind, and everyone can see themselves and their condition clearly again, and a new day dawns with a chance at peace finally at hand.

Oh, my sweet summer children, I was tempted to say—even though many of the folks who’d ventured to talk of peace right after Sinwar’s death are my elders. But it wasn’t naivete, exactly, that led these people to utter such a hope. It was the fact that most people are experiencing this war at a remove that allows all its players to be seen as having far more simplistic motives and pressure points than they really do.

I read widely on this nightmare. I follow the forums and musings of warmongering extremists, and the work of humanitarians and humanists who ache and rage over how dishonest and gamified this whole situation has been, and the writings and videos of people in the region, suffering agonies beyond all description. I study news analysis within the Western context (US and European) and the Middle Eastern context (Israeli, and from neighbouring Arab states). I pay attention to which details each group decides are important, and which details each group decides don’t exist. And I think about how these selection mechanisms shape the human beings in each info silo: how each bit of curated intel fuels a “logic” of war and/or catastrophe that many cannot understand why others do not share.

This past weekend, for instance, I noted all the ways that groups have spun the visual evidence of Sinwar’s death. One set of political positions was quickly able to find a ferocious fighting spirit in the video, in part because regional propaganda had long depicted Sinwar hiding for months behind children, in tunnels; and yet, he was killed above ground, alone, in a position that could be read (and has been read) as engaged in resistance to the last. But concurrently, another set of political positions was able to depict that same video as a mark of frailty and cowardice: look at this pathetic old tyrant, diminished and alone in rubble; only above ground because he was on the run!

What interests me more than specific interpretations, though, is the fact of interpretation: the fact that nothing in this nightmare ever gets to lie still. Everything is treated as propaganda. Everything has to serve a side or be discarded. And so, Sinwar’s death is spun one way to serve the war for some, and another way to serve the war for others. And everyone deeply involved in this context expects no less.

Meanwhile, most people in the West are receiving a frightening, confusing, deeply demoralizing set of media reports depicting nothing but death, death, and more death.

Which brings us back to our main topic today: a look at an op-ed article, and its fallout, that highlights the state of war derangement in which we find ourselves.

Now, I’ve discussed this concept before, but usually through commentary on collective behaviours: how groups of humans respond to stressors that range from immediate peril to life and limb, to everyday existence in countries where media messaging leaves citizens in a heightened emotional state, easily ruled by anger and fear. In these extreme psychological states, many of us manifest more extreme points of view than we usually would. Bombarded by such traumatic inputs, many lose their sense of empathy, their capacity for calm, and their ability to think beyond binaries.

And those who don’t?

Well, we’re war-deranged, too—just differently. We look at our friends, coworkers, and family members with a dawning sense of horror and ache of betrayal. Do we really share our neighbourhoods, our schools, our homes, and maybe even our beds with people who could be that cruel in their talk of fellow human beings?

(For many feminized people, I should add, there’s a touch of déjà vu here, because we first learned a great deal about our loved ones and communities when a certain US politician was on the upswing ahead of the 2016 presidential election. I don’t think most of us ever fully recovered from the realization that a latent admiration for vulgar, brutal, and vindictive state politics existed in our vicinity all along.)

War derangement makes it easy to fall prey to zero-sum thinking, in which it is impossible to imagine a “win” condition for oneself without others losing. Everything, in this state of mind, becomes a matter of “us” versus “them”.

If they’re getting attention, we’re not.

If they’re getting sympathy, we’re not.

So, we have to stop them from getting attention, and sympathy.

We have to fling out as many counter-narratives as we can, to turn attention and sympathy back on us. Our people. Our stories. Anything less, and we lose.

And yet, the moment we start to dehumanize others, we dehumanize ourselves.

After all, if we accuse others of doing horrible things, and argue that these horrible things prove that a whole demographic doesn’t deserve to exist, what “out” have we left for ourselves when people in our own circles do those same horrible things?

What We Have Done to Our Children

It’s such a maddeningly self-defeating behaviour, this mental derangement in times of war—which is why I wanted to share one case study in how it shatters moral clarity.

And also, how we can begin to bring it back.

This example comes to us from Howard Jacobson, a novelist who published an op-ed in The Guardian two weeks ago that caused a great deal of pain and yielded a prompt response in the form of another Guardian op-ed, by Louise Adler, followed by an interview with Isaac Chotiner in The New Yorker. Taken together, this is not just an example of disturbed, confused thinking—but also of the importance of centring the human, when trying to address one and the same.

Jacobson’s op-ed argues that the media focus on dead Palestinian children, when reporting on deaths in Gaza, is a recapitulation of the hateful “blood libel” myth: an ancient and horrific claim that Jewish persons kill Gentile babies to use their blood for baking and worship. This nasty, malignant idea in Christendom has ranged in form over the centuries: from direct brutality toward nomadic populations (for fear that they might steal and eat village children), to telling stories about grand cults using the blood in rituals to sustain money and power. And although Jacobson halts his history in 1928, the “blood libel” myth was most certainly advanced by Father Coughlin in US media in the 1930s; and as Tony Judt noted in Postwar (2005), echoes of it saw Jewish persons lynched when returning home in the wake of World War II.

Jacobson then looks at the coverage of deaths in Gaza—tens of thousands of civilian lives, including thousands of small children (100 of 649 pages of the fully identified roster of 34,344 released in September are for victims under 10)—and confesses that to him it looks like “those pictures from Gaza will confirm your conviction that Jews are the devil’s confederates” because “[t]he litany of dead children corroborates all those stories of their insatiable lust for blood.”

This is probably why Adler starts her rejoinder, published the following Sunday, with the words “Dear Howard, I write more in sorrow than in anger.”

With great care amid her firmness, she writes:

One should not ignore the horror of the atrocities committed on 7 October in the left-wing kibbutzim that Netanyahu and his cronies assiduously and cynically ignored for the last 15 years, nor should one ignore the nightmare for families who await, with dread, news of loved ones still held hostage in Gaza. But Howard, I wonder how you can push to one side the 40,000-plus Gazans murdered in the last 12 months because you’re preoccupied by what you describe as that most ancient hatred.

Louise Adler is not a Zionist (a differentiation that also came up last week, when we looked at Hannah Arendt—another person who did not question her Judaism while holding herself at a critical remove from the political movement and its manifestation in Israeli governments), so she comfortably closes the piece with these remarks:

You seamlessly conflate Jewish­ness and Israel. I assume for you that connection is obvious as it is for the majority of diaspora Jews. So I assume you don’t mind being held accountable for the actions of the current government, given your essay evidences no dissent. However, if you are uncomfortable with the reality of the Israeli state today, then perhaps you should reconsider your allegiance to Zionism—rather than asking to enjoy your nightly viewing without being exposed to its deadly manifestation in the form of maimed babies, among other things.

Almost as ancient as the hatred that preoccupies you is the rhetorical question: will this war on Gaza be good for the Jews? I think not.

And that’s a healthy conversation for most of us to see stated plainly in Western media, since most Westerners of a Christian-cultural background are abysmal at differentiating between Jewish religious divisions, ethnic subgroups, and political range. In a desperate appeal not to seem antisemitic, many Westerners fall prey to a “polite antisemitism” of treating Jewish persons as a hivemind, and credulously accept only the most strident claims as obviously the One True Position for an ethno-religious demographic that (checks notes) has no history of deep political and theological debate within itself whatsoever, nope, none at all!

But Chotiner’s interview was perhaps even more important, as an exercise in bringing people back from a level of war derangement that usually leaves them caught in moral turpitude: speaking and acting, that is, in ways that might horrify them under other circumstances. After all, people like Jacobson are plainly upset at the sight of dead children. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t be reacting so vehemently to its mention. They just don’t know how to square the trauma they’re seeing with broader state politics, let alone a deep store of fear that has roots in real, horrific histories of persecution.

Isaac Chotiner is a famed interviewer for being able to talk calmly and productively with controversial figures in a way that allows them to outline the (in)coherence of their positions all on their own. He doesn’t trick his subjects; he is present with their position in a way that allows him to paint an excellent, if grim picture of their logic.

Take the answer to his very first question, in “Rationalizing the Horrors of Israel’s War in Gaza”:

IC: What is it that you have wanted to get across to readers since October 7th?

HJ: I was in such a confusion of fear and stress and upset and then rage. The fear and the upset—and the heartbreak—was the massacre itself. And then the speed of the response to the aftermath of the massacre was so hideous, so unexpected, such a kind of topsy-turvy version of what we normally expect a response to a catastrophe to be, that it just threw me into half confusion, half fury. What the hell was going on that people could turn like that on the people who’d been attacked? All those people who said, “No, no, hang on, don’t talk about antisemitism. This is anti-Zionism.” All that went as the people attacking Israel couldn’t remember if they were attacking Jews, Israelis, Zionists. I thought, The world that I live in is not the world I knew. It’s changed and I still feel that. I’m living in a world I don’t recognize and find it very hard to comprehend.

That one paragraph says a whole lot more about the psychological damage of this situation than all of Jacobson’s original op-ed.

I’ve written on this extensively: how October 7 was different than 9/11, because average people in pain and distress didn’t get three weeks, like the US, between the shock and savagery of the initial attack and their country’s response; instead, Netanyahu’s government started adding to the death toll with Gazan casualties right away, so the world was crying “stop stop!” in relation to Gazan civilians, even as casualty counts grew in Israel. This split focus left many Israelis and Jewish persons in diaspora feeling abandoned by all but the strongman of Netanyahu/the state.

But Jacobson described that whole experience perfectly: he’s living in a world he doesn’t recognize and finds very hard to comprehend, and he has been for the last year.

This is also the case for a lot of people in the West, who consider themselves good and decent and moral, yet who fell quickly and deeply for the retributive rhetoric of warmongers who were ready and waiting to capitalize on this atrocity for other ends.

(And Adler wasn’t kidding, either, when she referenced the left-leaning kibbutzim and other such victims of October 7, as the type treated for years with disdain by Israel’s right-wing government. Many family members came out immediately after their loved ones’ deaths or kidnapping, emphasizing that their loved ones would not want war or blood in their name, because they had dedicated their lives to the spirit of peaceful coexistence. Rather than those messages being heard, though, their deaths were treated by right-wing extremists as further “proof” that war was the only answer—and then bandied about, or lied about, in those furious first few days, weeks, and months after October 7, to keep the war drum beating hard.)

Chotiner’s steady approach, though, really gives Jacobson a chance to reflect on how much of what he’s said and believes comes out of that confused mess of pain.

It’s a little like reading the transcript from a therapy session:

IC: I asked you about the specific intentional denial of humanitarian aid, and your answer was something like “Well, I don’t know what to believe anymore when I read the news, so I can’t really comment on that.” Is that right?

HJ: Put quite like that it sounds as though what I said was stupid and ignorant. One got accounts and accounts and accounts and it was very hard to know what was the truth.

…

IC: You compare this with Ukraine, and asked why there is more coverage of children in Gaza. About two thousand children in Ukraine have been injured or killed in two and a half years of war. This year, in Gaza, more than fifteen thousand children were killed.

HJ: How do we explain that?

IC: Some Ukrainian children were able to leave many of the front-line areas. Gazans, including children, are not allowed to leave. And Israel has fought an incredibly intense war that has killed a ton of children because they’re not trying to avoid civilian casualties as well as they should. That’s how I would describe it.

HJ: And how careful do you think the Russians are to avoid civilian casualties?

IC: I don’t think they’re being careful. And in fact, a lot of Ukrainian children have been kidnapped and taken to Russia. But you were talking about the media. And way more children have been killed in Gaza. So that could explain some of the discrepancy.

HJ: Why should this be a matter of numbers? I’m not saying that the media should underestimate the number of Palestinian children killed. It’s a question of whether you choose to lead every story with children killed. Forty-five children were killed today. Thirty children were killed today. Fifteen children were killed today. It became an obsession. It became, and still is.

IC: What should be the lead story on days when lots of children are killed?

HJ: I’m not talking about those days. This was every single night. I’m telling you I saw a dead baby every single night.

You couldn’t look at a child, pictures of a child being killed every single night without thinking this is making my people, my kin, out to be child murderers. I’ve got two options for you. I can believe it’s true. O.K., it’s true. It’s true. That’s what we do. That’s what the Israelis, not us, but the Israelis, do. But we feel a kinship with the Israelis. That’s what they do. And so maybe there we are again. Maybe everything that they said about us in 1200 and 1300 was true. This is what the Jews do—kill children. I’m not going to buy it. I’m not going to buy it.

IC: Howard, I think maybe we’re in a bit of a worrisome place if you see photos of dead children on television and your first thought is, They’re trying to make me, a Jew, hate my people.

HJ: You’ve twisted what I’ve said. That’s not my first thought. That’s not my first thought.

IC: Second thought?

HJ: And it’s not my second thought. It all depends on how often you see them, and when you see them. You see them and you see them and that’s all you see, and then you feel, Is this what the war means to the media? This is what they want to stress again and again and again?

I am not saying that if all those children were being killed that we should not know about it. But it’s perfectly possible now for people to call Jews in the streets of London child-killers. Child-killers. Exactly as we would’ve heard seven hundred bloody years ago.

It’s not, by the way.

I feel like I should stress that—it is absolutely not okay “to call Jews in the streets of London child-killers.”

What is necessary, though, is to understand that human beings did not evolve to be able to manage these moral and tribal complexities.

Historically, all that has been necessary for H. sapiens is to be able to stick to our tribe, as our best chance at personal survival and the continuation of nearby family lines.

The idea of a nation-state that we don’t belong to, but also sort-of-kind-of-do-belong-to by virtue of ideological/religious/ethnic allegiance, even while living on other soil, is not the sort of thing we small, fleeting mammalian critters can process with ease.

Add in the fact that many of our notions of community are formed by resilience in the face of hate from external sources—like how Jewish persons have had to defend against the horror of blood libel for centuries—and of course that’s going to contribute to one’s fear and self-preservation instinct when faced with violent news.

Nor do I mean to focus solely on the Jewish position, because this is a human matter: Arab persons, Palestinian persons, Muslim persons—all of us are born into a complex weave of overlapping identities in conflict with others. And then somehow we’re supposed to be able to “think rationally”—that is, above all the fears and allegiances bound up in our personal identities—when faced with a nightmare like this one?

To abandon, at a pin drop, a lifetime of conviction that our “side” is more or less right, and remains more or less morally superior to any other “side” we might face?

Louise Adler, of course, has no qualms holding to her Jewish identity while also living in an agony of grief over the deaths of so many children during a war that she strongly feels does the future of the Jewish people no favours. And she’s not alone in that.

But just because some people are able to keep their focus on humanity writ large, and to retain a sense of horror at the killing of children without leaping to fear of what it might mean for “their” side if all that killing makes it into the mainstream press, doesn’t mean that most can or will, under similar duress.

In a few years’ time, many humans alive today might very well look back with confused horror on the rationalizations they’re currently making for their moral positions: their choice to look away, or to doubt the veracity of everything they read that isn’t favourable to their “side”; their choice to spin news media aggressively, even, in service to that “side” and its war objectives above all else.

They might even try to explain themselves to the next generation: “You have to understand… It was the times we were living in! All the information we received! There didn’t seem to be any other choice! Not if we wanted to survive!”

And they won’t be wrong, exactly, when they say such things down the line, because one truly needs to live in a society afflicted by war derangement to understand the pressures driving people to their current ideological extremes.

I, for instance, didn’t anticipate how much people would turn against free speech and assembly for fear that the nightmare in Gaza might sink the US’s chances of escaping an authoritarian president this November. I still marvel at how much Westerners now pathologize democracy, even when they claim that it’s the reason the US is in this war in the first place. And I will never forget when people thought that I was engaged in psy-ops for Iran, back when paranoia about US antiwar protesters was running hot, fresh off Netanyahu’s failed effort to goad Iran into a fuller regional conflict.

War derangement is a heck of a drug!

When the Media Makes Context Harder

Which leaves me torn, then, when it comes to the overall benefit of an op-ed like Jacobson’s. This piece was so clearly the work of a disturbed human being, and yet, it prompted good work in response: an open conversation, in which Louise Adler tried to call in Jacobson across the spectrum of Jewish political and moral belief, and in which Isaac Chotiner gave him space to name his deepest fears more plainly.

But Jacobson was still given an extraordinary platform from which to exacerbate other people’s trauma, fear, and confusion in the first place. Are we expected to do that across the board? To be this gentle and obliging with everyone suffering from war derangement right now? To hold the hands of people upset to see dead babies on the news, instead of focusing more on the people losing babies?

Unfortunately for many of us, we’re more likely to be surrounded by people who have the kind of war derangement that Jacobson has—so yes, this “bridging work” is precisely what many of us in Western contexts have to do.

War derangement is all around us. It lives in our communities, our families, our neighbourhoods, our homes. Poorly articulated personal fears and general geopolitical confusion are currently shaping (and limiting) the moral courage of our peers.

And is it maddening that this is the quality of conversation we often have to start with? Oh, of course—especially since we know that we can’t change everyone’s hearts and minds, so we have to advocate for a better world around these folks, too.

But at the end of the day, the Jacobsons in our families, our neighbourhoods, or our online communities will still be there. We are surrounded, whether we like it or not, with people struggling to maintain a sense of geopolitical pride and moral certitude while so much of the news casts their givens under a shroud of horror and disgust.

Can we be good Adlers and Chotiners to the Jacobsons in our lives?

Can we coax our fellow human beings out of war derangement?

The question might be made even simpler:

Can we keep people “human” in our thoughts and actions—even when dehumanization is at the fore of their own? Even when the moral wound they carry, under war derangement, is such that they cannot bring themselves to see some other people’s humanity, so terrified are they that doing so might mean an end to theirs?

I wish I could answer “yes” with any great conviction, but I think we’re living in deeply stressed-out times, which are only going to get worse under climate change: its rising displacement pressures, and its resource wars.

I’ll only say that I feel more human, at least, when I try.

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Be well, be kind, and seek justice where you can.

ML