Denial as a Strategy
JVL Introduction
Barrister and Law Professor Conor Gearty engages with Stan Cohen’s exploration of South Africa’s use of denial as a strategy for blunting criticism of apartheid.
Conor applies this analysis to Israel’s hasbara policy on Gaza. He argues that Israel has refined the approach so that now Hamas has to struggle to get its denial of Israeli false claims of events heard.
He goes beyond Cohen’s Interpretative denial: defined as reliance ‘on construing an event in a way that casts doubt on its obvious explanation’. he adds implicatory denial; 18 deaths in a church ‘explained as being the result of what was described as a legitimate effort to kill a Hamas commander in a nearby ‘command and control’ centre.’
The article concludes with, ‘Denial in Israel is a means of keeping supporters abroad on message. We in the Global North need lies so that we can continue to see our support for Israeli action as morally possible.’
MC
This article was originally published by London Review of Books on Thu 25 Jan 2024. Read the original here.
Versions of Denial
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Maybe the European countries should stop idealising their land grabs as bringing civilisation. And accept that Woodrow Wilson’s USA was Hitler’s template.
So simple and yet so grim. Admitting guilt seems to be a horror to be avoided at all costs. We need to tread very carefully indeed…accusations only entrench the problem further. Softly, softly catchee monkey..
It’s a bitter-sweet experience to read something so well argued and expressed, so carefully researched and so certain to be largely ignored by what we used to call “the powers that be.”
Whether it’s the British Parliament, the US governmental apparatus or the EU’s panoply of bureaucracy the message is the same: the premise is that Israel represents us and truth and so whatever it does or says must be accepted and defended.
In a demonstration outside our local Barclays bank, an Asian man – not part of the demo but just passing through the crowd – said (not shouted) the word “Hamas”; he was arrested by the police and taken away in a van despite the fact that several of us tried to explain that he was not in the demonstration and had only said the one word. We don’t know him so I don’t know whether he was charged with anything later or just removed from the town centre.
Contrasts!
‘… The past shall never be forgotten… but the present, it seems, can be denied.’
Perceptive article on how Israel and its allies create and spread the myths and lies to justify the most atrocious crimes against humanity while pursuing another crucial lie about Hamas being a terrorist organisation which negates them as a recognised government, and a valid resistance force against an occupier, and legitimises them being eliminated as part of the ‘war on terror.’
This gives Israel carte blanch to kill and destroy at will and for as long as it likes, while itself pursued terror to push the British out in 1947 and ever since, as an unquestionable terror entity, to steal wholesale Palestinian land while holding the indigenous population in a state of subjugation, second class citizenship, or as in the case of the West Bank and Gaza, in concentration camp conditions and siege, all comprising unrelenting apartheid, and incremental genocide. We now have Israel’s final solution that has always been premeditated, aided and abetted throughout by the US and UK and Europe, creating a holocaust, a genocide, a man made catastrophe of uniginable proportions, breaching every crime of humanity and international law, and which will go down as one of the great crimes of the 21st Century, but portrayed as ‘Israel’s right to self defence’.