Israeli journalist and author Ari Shavit describes a “dangerous bacteria.” A bacterium so malign that it infects virtually every Israeli – hobbling Israeli politics, even threatening the Israeli state. Shavit calls it “Bibisis.” It refers to Israelis’ obsession with one person. With their longtime leader and Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, widely known as Bibi.
Shavit describes Netanyahu as a leader who is, and has been for years the axis around which everything in Israel turns. And who is, and has been for years the individual around whom everyone in Israel pivots. Every Israeli has a fiercely held view – either they are for Bibi or they are against him, either they are forever Bibi or never Bibi.
To Americans the symptoms of Bibisis are familiar. Since 2015, when Donald Trump first declared his intent to run for president, we suffer from a similar syndrome. We have been as obsessed with Trump as Israelis have been with Netanyahu. For a decade now near everything in American politics has been seen through the prism of Trump. He has dominated the American political landscape, and opinions about him are fiercely held. Either for Trump or against Trump, either forever Trump or never Trump.
For all the similarities among most liberal democracies – such as the sharp swing to the right in virtually every country in Europe as well as in the United States – among their leaders are enormous differences. While Netanyahu and Trump are similar – they share traits and characteristics of standard strongmen – they have little in common with most of their European counterparts. Leaders like Britain’s stolid Prime Minister Keir Starmer, or France’s elitist President Emannuel Macron, or Germany’s colorless Chancellor Friedrich Merz. The Brits, for example, are no more consumed by Starmer than Americans were with Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden.
No less a connoisseur of consciousness than Sigmund Freud was baffled by our capacity to become obsessed with a single individual, a single leader. “How is it possible,” Freud asked in his final book, Moses and Monotheism, “that one man can develop such extraordinary effectiveness… can stamp [his] people with [their] definite character and determine [their] fate for millennia to come?”
Bibisis might then be unhealthy, even dangerous. But it is not an anomaly. Anymore than what Americans call “Trump derangement syndrome.” The syndrome is not an official medical diagnosis. But the term does get its own Wikipedia entry, and it does describe an obsession of sorts. A negatively held view of Trump that is so strong, and so persistent, that the person who holds it is seen by some, especially those who don’t share it, as deranged.
Which it is not. Instead, Trump derangement syndrome is like its approximate Israeli counterpart, Bibisis. Both testify to our capacity to be in thrall to our leaders. To the capacity of some leaders to dominate and subordinate their followers beyond what seems to those not similarly disposed to be sensible or maybe even sane.