Sometimes, however, local religious, historical and political culture can influence hysteria epidemics in such a way that their symptoms can be immediately identified by medics as being purely psychological in nature – when schoolyard trees begin spawning armies of living skeletons in rural Uganda, for instance. The common symptoms of mild poisoning and of mass hysteria can be extremely similar, making them hard to distinguish.

At one point, 64 inhabitants of the Palestinian town of Jenin fell ill after a ‘Jewish’ car supposedly belched poison at them, this in fact just being normal smoke from a faulty engine.

Most schoolgirls were not inventing their symptoms, just falling prey to the endemic paranoia of the period. Yet the Arab League refused to accept this, before US, UN, Red Cross and WHO staff were dispatched to the West Bank, medically confirming initial Israeli findings. Subsequent investigation by Israeli authorities concluded no poisonings had occurred, blaming mass hysteria for the panic. Unfortunately, at the time a popular regional rumor, tapping into centuries of anti-Semitic slander about supposed Jewish poisoners, had it that Israel plotted to facilitate a ‘silent genocide’ in Palestine by quietly rendering all local Muslim women infertile by devious medical means – for instance, by pumping them full of invisible gas? Soon, other pupils (and a few adults) became hospitalized, and events hit the media, causing widespread international alarm. Seeking explanation, fellow students apparently mistook the hydrogen sulfide-like smell from nearby well-used toilets for Israeli nerve-gas. The outbreak began at Arrabah Girls’ School when a 17-year-old pupil underwent genuine breathing difficulties. Interpretations range from the idea elements within the hardline Shia regime are punishing female students for their prominent role in recent anti-government protests, in which they have removed their mandated hijabs and publicly extended middle-fingers to framed portraits of the ayatollah, to the more skeptical view it is all just an outbreak of mass hysteria.Įvents strongly recall another such panic in the Israeli-occupied West Bank in 1983, when 1,000 Muslim schoolgirls fell similarly ill, something attributed by many Palestinians at the time to attacks by Jews. As recently detailed in Providence, since late November cases of alleged chemical assault using unknown poisonous gases have been endemic amongst Iranian schoolgirls, 5,000 of whom have now been hit or even hospitalized by vomiting, dizziness and fainting fits.

Give 'Em Hell by Marek McKenna