Knowing and not knowing – how Israelis live in denial
JVL Introduction
Drawing particularly on the work of sociologist Stanley Cohen “States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering,” Adam Raz looks at how the “mechanisms of silence, denial and forgetfulness”, constants in Israeli history, enable the Israeli public to live at peace with their consciences while what is being done in Gaza and the West Bank continues to be done.
This strategy of denial bodes ill for the future. By allowing “the Israeli public not to feel guilt and responsibility for what their country did in their name”, affirms Raz, that public is colluding with Netanyahu in turning Israel into a pariah state.
The situation is even worse than Raz suggests, for denial is only necessary in a society that still clams to be liberal and democratic.
There are a growing number of Israeli politicians like Ben Gvir and Smotrich, and others in the wider society, who have moved beyond a strategy of denial.
They insist on naming and owning the atrocities the army is committing in the pursuit of Jewish supremacy, happily taunting Palestinians with the promise of another Nakba.
RK
This article was originally published by Haaretz on Sun 14 Jul 2024. Read the original here.
Long before the Gaza war, Israelis have been living in denial as a strategy
The Israeli public’s embrace of ignorance about the Gaza war is an extension of a stance that began in 1967. How does an open society encourage systematic denial of abuse?
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However impressive the analyses might appear to be able to explain the chronic lack of resistance among the “Israelites” against the threatening annihilation of Palestinians in both Gaza and The West Bank, I do like to point out to a much more fundamental reason behind what the author does present as a collective state of denial about the genocidal slaughterhouse-like practices in Gaza by the most moral army in the world.
The reason being, that Jewish-Zionists – for many generations now – do consider themselves highly superior to the autochthonous Palestinians. It’s that state of Jewsupremacist mind, that has been the main motivation behind the settler colonial project, of which the present “State of Israel” is a product-still-in-progress. The religiously derived assumption, that Jewish-Zionists do possess a Divine Right on Israel, and the Palestinians do not only have no right to resist that project, but have NO RIGHT to live there AT ALL.
So I really doubt, whether many Jewish-Zionist inhabitants of “Israel” are in a state of denial on the present (and historic) genocidal violence against the Palestinians. But they do rather consider that this violence is “necessary” to comply with their religious mission of recapturing/restoring “Ancient Israel” in order to facilitate the Coming of The Messiah. Instead of the Zionist-Jewish occupiers of Palestine might be unaware of the violence, I would suggest, that they do fully know about it and do fully support that violence.
Only recently I even pointed out, that the great majority of Jewish-Zionist inhabitants of “Israel” do consider Netanyahu and his genocidal clique, heroes who devotedly are working their way to a mono-ethic Jewish State by executing Nakba 2.0, and at the same time are seemingly presented the apparent denial-excuse of being officially permitted to say afterwards : Wir haben es nicht gewusst.
I agree with Robert that the indifference and lack of empathy of so many Israeli Jews towards the plight and the suffering of the Palestinians stems from a mindset of total superiority and the belief – that they were no doubt indoctrinated with from an early age – that the land is theirs by divine right….. along with the belief that Palestinians are murderers and terrorists and sub-human.
Much like Nazi Germany, Israel is founded on propaganda. There are so many parallels it’s quite astonishing.
The last Whites ruling Rhodesia (as Zimbabwe was then known) typically described Black Rhodesians (the majority population) resisting White supremacy as “terrorists”.
In the news coverage of the time, seemingly all Blacks killed during the long war against White supremacy were “terrorists”.
Outside of occasional White farmers saying their Black farm servants had been intimidated by the “terrorists”, there was NEVER any mention of deaths and injuries affecting non-terrorist Blacks (eg villagers getting caught in the cross-fire) though logically there must have been some (probably many?).
By contrast, the TV news coverage did include interviews with White farmers and their families about the fear and losses they’d experienced because of these “terrorists”.
When I heard Israeli politicians, IDF spokespersons and ordinary Israelis constantly referring to “terrorists” and never mentioning any other grouping of Palestinians, I was reminded of Rhodesia’s White supremacists. It didn’t surprise me so many of the “terrorists” the IDF claimed to have killed were obvious non-combatants (babies, children, women, the elderly and disabled).