A State of Denial

 

A State of Denial

 

In June 2024, I visited Israel for the first time since the 7th October Hamas attack and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) assault on Gaza that followed. Since then—at the earliest—I have been appalled, but also intrigued, by the extraordinary ability of so many Israelis to simultaneously justify, deny, ignore or deliberately avoid speaking and thinking about the ongoing systematic obliteration of the Gaza Strip and the Palestinians who live there.

This is not a unique response. And it’s certainly not surprising for a population that perceives itself as a victim even as it is collectively complicit in a genocidal undertaking carried out in its name (and by soldiers who are sons and daughters, grandchildren, spouses and parents of a vast proportion of its citizenry). But because I was raised in Israel, served in the IDF and have family and friends in the country, my sense of shock and dismay is painfully intimate.

Having spent most of my career studying collective denial, I am able to see how such Israeli responses are part of a historical pattern. During the 1980s, my research confronted the last remaining major denial of postwar Germany: the myth of the purity of the Wehrmacht, or Nazi military. Forty years after the Second World War, Germans had gradually “come to terms” with their responsibility for the Holocaust—after initially perceiving themselves as Hitler’s main victims. But they still bought into the argument that, unlike the Gestapo and the SS, regular German soldiers had conducted a decent war, if not a necessary and justifiable one, against the Red Army on the Eastern Front, in order to protect Europe from a “Bolshevik-Asiatic flood”. According to this thinking, the German military had little to do with terrible crimes, which were perpetrated behind the soldiers’ backs. – Prospect Magazine

Our Take: Is Mark Levin saying it’s possible to fake a genocide? Well, that certainly opens new territory for exploration, doesn’t it?

Mark Levin: “It’s not possible Israel killed so many women and children in Gaza. During the Holocaust, we had film after film—you don’t have that in Gaza.”
[Clip Link] – Chris Paul