Seeing Jews and Israel as being at the centre of things causes us to misunderstand reality

The phrase ‘main character syndrome’ seems to have been coined in 2013 in relation to Role Playing Games (RPGs), to describe a situation when a player views their character as the centre of the game’s narrative and plays accordingly. From around 2021 it gained its current meaning on social media to refer to real-life; individuals who see themselves as the main character and everyone else as the supporting cast. It’s commonplace; my daughter certainly suffers from it, but she is primary-school age so it’s understandable, even charming. On social media it’s even more widespread; you literally create a feed that centres you and your interests, or at least you did before Musk and Zuckerberg decided to fix the algorithms to show you the things they want you to see.

From my perspective, I feel it’s an apt descriptor of current attitudes amongst Israelis and diaspora Jews over the last two years. We tend to see Jews at the centre of things, and it causes us to misunderstand a whole range of events. Let’s start with October 7. This has been widely understood as a pogrom; a massacre of Jews, the largest in a single day since the Holocaust. It’s clearly not wrong to describe it in such terms: around 1200 Jews were killed that day. But that fails to explain the motivation for the attack; what Hamas thought it was doing. It saw itself as engaging in anti-colonial violence, primarily hoping to force the release of most Palestinian prisoners through the capture of an unprecedented number of Israeli hostages. Such swaps have been the aim of most historic Palestinian terror attacks and hijackings. Hamas targeted Israelis (and foreign nationals who happened to be in Israel), not because they were Jews but because they were the occupiers, the enforcers of the siege, the soldiers shooting at them when they marched towards the border (as in the Great Return March of 2018-2019). If another group had been oppressing the Palestinians, they would have attacked them in much the same way. Yes, the original Hamas charter (in contrast to the 2017 revision) did contain conspiratorial antisemitism. But even then, it was hardly the focus of what is primarily a Palestinian nationalist document. None of this is to condone October 7^th which represented a deeply unethical and unacceptable targeting of civilians.  But it wasn’t about Jews, it was primarily about Palestinians – trying to obtain political goals and put their cause back on the agenda. Believing that it’s all about us leads us to serious misunderstandings.

Secondly this syndrome led us to misinterpret the global response to October 7. Because it was quickly followed by pro-Palestinian demonstrations around the world, many Jews and Israelis saw them as blind to Israeli suffering, or worse, as celebrations of the Hamas attack. But this ignores the fact that the Israeli military reprisals to October 7 began on October 7. As I have written before on Torat Albion, the bombing of Gaza begun just hours after the initial Hamas attack, long before the Kibbutzim and towns in Southern Israel had been secured. The death toll in Gaza very quickly equalled and then surpassed that in Israel. That was the focus of the early protests: the death toll in Gaza, not some macabre rejoicing at the death of Israelis. Because we were so immersed in our own suffering, and the suffering of our people, we often didn’t know what was happening in Gaza. Putting ourselves at the centre of the narrative caused us to misunderstand the reality.

This misunderstanding continued unabated over the last two years, abetted by social media’s polarising algorithms. For Israelis, and for Israel-connected Jews (which is far from all Jews nowadays) the only things happening were ongoing trauma over October 7 (stoked by Israeli media) and the ongoing captivity of the hostages. To the extent that Gaza registered it was simply a place where the Israeli army was battling Hamas terrorists, trying to ensure October 7 could never happen again, and attempting to free the hostages (it eventually dawned on many that the hostages were low on Netanyahu’s priority list, far behind keeping the war going and keeping his career afloat). Of course, social media users connected to the Palestinian cause (which I would increasingly say categorises most non-Jewish people) were receiving an inverse picture; they were only seeing the suffering in Gaza, the deaths, the injuries, the bombings, the starvation. When the two groups encountered one another on the streets and on social media there was mutual incomprehension and antagonism. From the Jewish side, the lack of interest in the hostages was galling, the focus only on Gaza shocking, the accusation of genocide inevitably rooted in antisemitism. Because they were only aware of Israeli suffering and were told that the claims of mass Palestinian death were all Hamas propaganda, they were unable to process the idea that most people round the world were motivated by humanitarian concern at the situation in Gaza.

Our main character syndrome led us to see all the protests in negative terms; as anti-Israel rather than pro-Palestinian. Because we see Israel as the centre of the story, we assume everyone else does too, and that their criticism must be motivated by a pathological hatred of the Jewish state. There are critics who are Israel-obsessed to be sure, the David Millers of this world who see Zionism everywhere and use dangerously violent rhetoric against ‘Zionists’ everywhere. But most people care about Palestinians much more than they hate Israelis. Most neutral observers see in Israel/Palestine a deep imbalance, where Palestinians suffer far more than Israelis, and where one side in the conflict holds the vast majority of the land and the power. Most people are thus pro-Palestinian rather than anti-Israel.

The syndrome has continued to influence interpretations of the recent agreement. For most Israelis and Jews, it was an agreement to bring home the Israeli hostages, both the living and the dead. That is what it is essentially about; anything that Israel had to agree to facilitate this cause is seen as unfortunate and perhaps, in the case of releasing Palestinian prisoners, even distasteful. But for most Palestinians and their supporters, the agreement is essentially about the ceasefire; stopping the bombing of Gaza. The mutual incomprehension between these two groups continues; violations of the agreement are seen through this prism. The only violations that Jewish and Israeli opinion notices are those of Hamas; the delay in returning the bodies of hostages, and then the apparent guerilla attack in Rafah on October 19th. But there are a host of violations by the Israeli side – such as not fully allowing aid in and the small matter of having killed 97 Gazans (at the time of writing) since the ceasefire came into force. People only notice the violations that fit their narrative and that maintain their understanding of where the main story resides.

The issue of the bodies is revealing. The only way you would be surprised – and infuriated – about Hamas’ difficulty in swiftly locating all the hostages’ bodies is if you don’t think much else has been happening in Gaza over the past two years. That the only real story has been Hamas continuing to hold the hostages; that of course Hamas know where they all are because they are imagined in conspiratorial terms as this all-powerful, all-knowing foe. Gaza has become a graveyard, with huge numbers of dead bodies buried under the rubble. Finding them all, let alone identifying them, would be a gargantuan task for a normal society, a near-impossible one for a place that has been bombed to the point of total destruction. It’s very likely that some of the hostages were killed in Israeli bombing raids, their bodies will thus lie deep under rubble, alongside the bodies of Palestinians. This ought to be a prompt for empathy; that it is difficult to ascertain the national identity of dead bodies; that we are all fundamentally alike in death. Our main character syndrome – and that of pro-Palestinian activists – prevents us from seeing the fundamental similarity between Israeli and Palestinians victims, that they are all victims of the same war and of the same century-long conflict.

The recent breakdown of the ceasefire (which I hope turns out to be temporary) exhibited a similar dynamic. All the attention – from Western media as well as Jews – was on Hamas’ violation of the ceasefire from the claimed guerilla attack that killed two soldiers (for which Hamas denied responsibility), almost none on Israel’s renewed bombing raids that killed 18 people. ‘Israel strikes southern Gaza, accusing Hamas of ‘bold violation of ceasefire’ read the bizarre BBC headline, implying that Israel’s strikes were not also a violation. Because people only read about Hamas’ violations, they assume that they happened in a vacuum, and likely attribute them to ongoing antisemitism, rather than inevitable consequences of a flawed agreement that leaves Israel in continued occupation of over half of Gaza.

Some will say that Jewish main character syndrome is nothing new; that this is all a secularised version of chosenness, that most dangerous of Biblical ideas. And indeed, the idea that a particular people is special has proved so intoxicating that many other peoples have adopted it too, seeing their nation as special, at the centre of history, the key protagonist of the narrative. But Jewish chosenness always exists for a purpose; to redeem the world, to be a light to the nations, to bring the messianic age, to spread knowledge of divinity, to practice ethical monotheism. To quote Adam Sutcliffe’s ingenious book title, the question is always; what are Jews for? Today’s main character Jewishness in contrast is wholly lacking in purpose; it simply engages in ethnic cheerleading and commiseration. I don’t deny that expressing solidarity and concern for other Jews has been a part of Judaism – see piyyutim in memory of the victims of the crusades, or the customs of local Purims to mark a moment of reprise from catastrophe – but these were historically the exception rather than the rule that they have become today. If all we do is mourn Jewish loss and celebrate Jewish success then we empty Judaism of the capacity to actually mean something; to bring wisdom to bear on the deep issues of existence and the eternal question of how we should live.

Ironically, early Zionism sought to overcome main character syndrome and turn Jews into a nation like all others. Judaism, with its notion of chosenness was to be left behind in the galut. It was the 1970s turn towards Holocaust memory and renewed concern about antisemitism that restored Jewish particularism – but now shorn of its outward-looking elements. Israel became portrayed as ‘the collective Jew’, in Antony Lerman’s felicitous phrase, and international criticism of its action seen as rooted in hatred of Jews rather in than humanitarian concern for Palestinians. Jewish attention turned inward, and lacked awareness of the Palestinian condition, but it would take the social media era for Jews to utterly misinterpret reality in Israel-Palestine because they are only seeing one side of the story.

This solipsism is not good for us. It leaves us vulnerable to conspiratorial beliefs; that antisemites around the work are forever collaborating against us. It’s psychologically unhealthy, stopping us from seeing ourselves as normal and much like everyone else (if perhaps, more so, as Lionel Blue’s bon mot goes). And as I have tried to spell out above, it causes us to get so much wrong, leading us to make bad political judgements. Let’s change the dramatic metaphors. Enough of the hero’s journey, where we see ourselves as protagonists having to tread a perilous path, surrounded by antagonists at every turn. Let’s see ourselves instead as part of an ensemble piece; bit-players in the multicultural chorus, one small scene in the Purim schpiel of human liberation. There’s no shame in having a minor role; the key is to play it well.