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?
The Israeli public is currently in a position in which its ignorance about what’s been happening in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict fuels the strategy of denial it’s been holding on to for a generation. This also works the other way around: Denial fuels ignorance.
The mechanisms of silence, denial and forgetfulness are constants in Israeli history. And note: denial is not absolute ignorance, but rather another form of organizing knowledge. Studies show that the Israeli public is bereft of basic facts regarding the history of the occupation and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This ignorance, it should be stressed, is also the outcome desired by the regime. Unfortunately, ignorance and denial are busy at work in Israeli consciousness regarding the current war in the Gaza Strip.
The fact that many Israelis deny many aspects of the violence and crimes taking place in the current war in Gaza (that the airstrikes in the first days were “purely vengeful” – to use the phrase coined by former Mossad chief Tamir Pardo – to a policy of starving a civilian population) is an extension of the strategy of denial that, for many years now, has allowed Israelis to be at peace with their consciences.
This strategy of denial has, since 1967, helped the entrenchment of the Israeli occupation and brought about a moral deterioration of the Israeli public. One of the expressions of this deterioration is the curtain of ignorance Israelis hung before their eyes. This is a pincer movement: on the one hand, the government machine acts to preserve the general ignorance (the regime controls public discourse, closes down archives, prevents access to historical documentation, enforces censorship, etc.); on the other hand, the individual enjoys the comforts offered by the strategy of denial.
That is, life without moral dilemmas, the choice to forget. After all, the various forms of oppression, robbery and physical violence constantly practiced have been reported to Israelis through various means, and most chose to remain entrenched in their apathy in the face of catastrophe. This catastrophe was carried out just a stone’s throw away, and they trained themselves to ignore what was done right in front of them. That is, Israelis did something within themselves to ignore the violence unleashed in their name. This is an indication of a fundamental moral problem.
Eva Illouz writes that the integrity and morality of peoples may be gauged by the way and extent they face up to wrongs done and recognize them. The Israeli case, on the face of it, poses a dilemma: “Though Israel is an open society, I do not believe,” writes Illouz, “that there is any way to describe Israeli policy in the occupied territories other than as systematic, daily, multi-dimensional denial.” She calls this “denial on a mysterious level” that has become “The single most important political strategy.”
She pointed out one outcome of this strategy of denial, that is materializing in front of our eyes: Israel will become “a prodigal state, that will develop like a solitary military fortress, will subsist on arms and defense sales, and will be characterized by growing poverty, social chasms, religious fanaticism and ignorance.”
In his book, “States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering,” sociologist Stanley Cohen discussed the “special case” of Israel. He was pondering the readiness of many Israelis to take in official propaganda, mythology and self-justification – disseminated and maintained by establishment antennae – through no physical enforcement (unlike other regimes, where repression is done with the help of truncheons and automatic firearms). In Israel you don’t throw dissidents into a damp dungeon, researchers are not tossed into trenches to die, there is no secret police to bring the full might of the law against citizens in the dark of the night.
“Many topics are known and not-known at the same time. Israel is a country full of ‘open secrets,'” writes Cohen. Indubitably, the facts regarding what Israel has been doing to the Palestinians for years have been largely available to the Israeli public: violence and killing, administrative detentions, robbery of property and banishment from lands, daily attacks by settlers and the Israeli military, systematic violations of international law, torture and more. To be precise, they are “available” to those who wish to know.
How does Israel being an open society go hand in hand with systematic denial of the abuse of Palestinians? With the half-coma Israelis are in? Cohen writes that the liberal public in Israel is experiencing a dissonance between its values and deeds on the ground. The individual denies in public what he personally knows the military is doing. The “military,” after all, are his children, neighbors, friends.
On the general social level, one of the mechanisms that allows Israelis to deny the crimes being perpetrated – or, rather, to reorganize knowledge – is the myth of “the purity of arms” which was born out of the concept of “the most moral army in the world,” originating in pre-state days. But what of the regime’s interests?
Anthropologist Michael Taussig wrote of the “public secret,” defined as something generally known by the public, yet not easily utterable. The secret is a certain type of knowledge that shapes the character of a given society. The “public secret” and the strategy of denial are states of consciousness that the regime uses for its own ends and that allow it to appease the people’s conscience and to mobilize the public for tasks that need to be carried out – such as occupation, such as the destruction of Gaza.
From documentation in Israeli archives, we learn of the manipulative way in which the regime achieved its goals. The leadership gives no outright order to do this or that (ethnic cleansing, or killing, for example), yet created conditions that allow perpetrators in the field to operate according to the “proper” line. The perpetrators, for their part, are ready to carry out the orders and hints given to them, in the name of some “patriotic” interpretation.
Even now in Gaza, to the best of our knowledge, the leadership gave no outright order to disregard “non-involved” civilians or ignore so-called “collateral damage” – but this was what happened in practice, and this allows it to deny the results. On the other hand, those who follow orders can also deny their responsibility by invoking the excuse that they were obeying verbal orders. This Mephistophelian deal is an integral part of Israeli history since 1948, and is reflected and documented in archives.
Immediately following the October 7 massacre, Israel began to attack Gaza from the air in a massive air campaign, the results of which drew considerable attention around the world – much less so in Israel. For 20 days – before ground forces went into the Gaza Strip – the air force carried out Prime Minister Benjmain Netanyahu’s instructions, which were not only unconcealed but publicly declared: Gaza will become “rubble.” The air force immediately began a process of turning Gaza into Dresden 2. No less important than Netanyahu’s declaration is the legitimization given by the various political strands of the Israeli public to a strategy of revenge, intended to push back the option of peace and a partition of the land. Thus, the strategy of denial allows the Israeli public not to feel guilt and responsibility for what their country did in their name.
In practice, society at large adopted Netanyahu’s policy of revenge. Non-indictment – that is, public legitimization of the Dresdenization of Gaza – is the outcome desired by Netanyahu, and has a role in determining Israel’s place in the regional and global sphere during and after the war. The Israeli public assisted Netanyahu in turning Israel into a pariah state. This is an essential matter, not an exercise in philosophy. A future settlement requires the two parties to recognize wrongs that were done, and to strive to amend and heal. The world may tell Israel what it will, and accords and cease-fires will be signed, but the internal challenge of confronting the strategy of denial can only be done by the Israeli community. This is an internal soul search that cannot be forced from the outside. One of the current tragedies is Israelis’ idleness in this regard.
Meanwhile, it is evident that even among more liberal publics, a severe moral apathy prevails, which strengthens the policy seeking to increase the walls of hatred between the two peoples. One expression of this is that in both Israel and Palestine, support for the two-state solution is collapsing. In this sense, the policy of Netanyahu and Hamas, a policy that opposes the partition of the land, has only been strengthened by the war in Gaza.
It unraveled and redrew the boundaries of what’s done and what’s not done; it redrew the outlines of the future. You could say this: A future confrontation of the Israeli public with the strategy of denial, that was brought to bear in great force during the current war, is not an exercise in confronting “historical memory,” but rather a talk about future possibilities. It is, therefore, entirely political. This is what the hour demands of the citizens of Israel.
Adam Raz is a researcher at Akevot Institute for Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Research. His latest book is “The Road to October 7: Benjamin Netanyahu, the permanentization of the conflict and Israel’s moral deterioration” (Pardes Publishing)
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My Comment
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-ethnic 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.
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