A culture of denial

JVL Introduction

Saree Makdisi’s Tolerance Is a Wasteland: Palestine and the Culture of Denial, published in 2022, preceded October 7th but helps us understand how Israel’s narrative of victimhood has been constructed in the months that followed.

For Israel’s strategy has always been a mixture of resistance, denial, making excuses and outright inversion of the truth – a kind of Orwellian doublethink in which Israel’s moral impeccability always shines through.

In this book, reviewed here by Steve France, Prof Saree Makdisi takes on a number of prominent themes in Israeli hasbara: Israel’s greenwashing, “making the desert bloom”; its self-image as a “beacon of democracy; its “theatre of ‘pinkwashing’; and claims to “tolerance” (with the building of a “Museum of Tolerance” on top of Mamilla Cemetery, the largest and most important Muslim burial place in Jerusalem, on which Makdisi goes to town!).

Makdisi believes that the credibility of all of these claims has worn very thin. Denial works best, he says, when deniers believe what they’re saying. But, apart from the ignorant or wilfully ignorant, “no one believes the old platitudes any longer; no one listens to them”.

Those in power affirm the nakba, previously vigorously denied by liberal Zionism, and openly promise to complete the dispossession of the Palestinians.

RK

This article was originally published by Mondoweiss on Sat 22 Jun 2024. Read the original here.