The Eiland syndrome is spreading in Israel. Those who suffer from it are barbarians who think they are the voice of reason
We have before us a dangerous detachment from reality, but these people speak normally and sound reasonable. And the whole thing has been completely normalised. This is collective madness, which is the new-normal in Israel
By Rogel Alpher • Translated by Sol Salbe
Since the beginning of the war, Major General (res) Giora Eiland has been advocating starving the residents of Gaza. He is not a fascist. Nor is he an extreme nationalist and racist who advocates Jewish supremacy. And he’s not a psychopath, or a sadist either. His purpose is not to make the residents of Gaza suffer. For him, their suffering is simply the only effective means to get Hamas to release all the abductees. According to him, the famine affecting Gaza’s residents of Gaza is not a visceral act of revenge. On the contrary. It is a calculated, intelligent, utilitarian, and rational action; it even makes sense.
Eiland’s basic premise is that the only thing that scares Gaza Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar is a hungry mob of Gazans attacking the Hamas headquarters, carrying out a coup and ousting the organisation from power. Something like the Gaza version of the French Revolution. Conclusion: the Gazan throngs must be starved. This what’s required. Elementary, my dear Watson. Eiland convinced himself that the shocked world can be told that the goal is not to starve the residents of Gaza, but to return the abductees, and that if the world wishes to prevent a famine in Gaza, it should by all means take care of the return of the abductees, a trifling request by all accounts. Something like that.
Then the world would watch horrifying images of starving Gazans, while the Israeli television screen would remain devoid of them (actually, the world is already watching them, and the Israeli screen is already totally bereft of them). And the Israelis would say to themselves: we have a moral right to starve the residents of Gaza, because this is the only thing that will bring our abductees home. In other words, the suffering of the abductees justifies the suffering of the Gazans, their deliberate starvation at the hands of Israel. This is the (a)moral code. It must be said straight away, that if you remove the moral aspect from the equation Eiland’s tactic does sound like an effective solution. But once you bring the moral aspect back into the equation, it sounds like a war crime, barbaric behaviour. And it also sounds like a tried and tested recipe for complete Israeli political isolation, including the loss of the US alliance.
Eiland exhibits an Israeli symptom, you can call it the “Eiland Syndrome”, which has been pervasive during the war and has been spreading rapidly through television: the people afflicted by it seem to believe that they are decent people but their thinking is barbaric. The post-trauma from the massacre, from the disappearance of the state and the IDF from the Gaza border region for many hours, is expressed in unconscious barbaric thinking. It seems that its role is to compensate for a feeling of helplessness that instils terror in them. This is an omnipotence fantasy. They are allowed everything. They will run the world. We have before us a dangerous detachment from reality, but these people speak normally and sound reasonable. And the whole thing has been completely normalised. This is collective madness, which is the new-normal in Israel.
