In Plain Sight

Atrocity Denialism and the Destruction of Gaza

It’s more than two decades since I read the late Stanley Cohen’s ground-breaking States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering (2001). In the introduction, Cohen recalls his own experiences growing up in apartheid South Africa, when he asked himself why his own outrage at the injustice he observed all around was not reflected in the society around him:

Why did others, even those raised in similar families, school and neighbourhoods, who read the same papers, walked the same streets, apparently not “see” what we saw. Could they be living in another perceptual universe - where the horrors of apartheid were invisible and the physical presence of black people often slipped from awareness? Or perhaps they saw exactly what we saw, but just didn’t care or didn’t see anything wrong.

Cohen went on to become a sociologist and a lifelong human rights activist. States of Denial was a valiant attempt to bring his discipline to bear on the subject of why people become become ‘everyday bystanders’ of atrocities who ‘block out, shut off or repress’ troubling or disturbing information to the point when they ‘react as if they do not know what they know.’

Some of these observations related to Israel, where Cohen moved in 1980. A Zionist in his youth, Cohen opposed the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and became a strong critic of Israeli repression of the Palestinians. In his book, he describes his work with the Israeli human rights group B’Ttselem on the torture of Palestinian detainees and the obstacles it encountered:

Our evidence of the routine use of violent and illegal methods of interrogation was to be confirmed by numerous other sources. But we were immediately thrown into the politics of denial. The official and mainstream response was venomous: outright denial (it doesn’t happen); discrediting (the organization was biased, manipulated or gullible); renaming (yes, something does happen, but it is not torture); and justification (anyway ‘it’ was morally justified). Liberals were uneasy and concerned. Yet there was no outrage.

Cohen returned to the UK in 1996, and died in 2013, but were he alive today, I suspect he would have recognized the ongoing devastation of Gaza as a textbook example of the ‘politics of denial’. According to the latest figures from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the IDF has killed more than 31,988 people, most of whom are women and children, with another 7,000 buried in the rubble, and wounded 74, 188. To put these figures in perspective, this February civilian casualties in Ukraine were estimated at 10, 582 dead and 19, 875 injured since the Russian invasion began on 24 February 2022.

So in just under six months, Israel has killed more civilians in Gaza than Russia has killed in two years. It has destroyed or damaged more than 60 percent of Gaza’s housing stock, 3 churches, 224 mosques, 155 health centres, 126 ambulances. Nearly 2.3 million Palestinians have been displaced, and 1.1 million people are facing ‘catastrophic levels of food insecurity,’ which threatens to become a famine.

All this has been done with the indirect support or direct collusion of the United States government, the European Union, and the British government. Despite the outpouring of rage and horror on the streets of so many cities across the world, liberal democracies that claim to uphold an international order based on human rights and universal moral norms have ‘known and not known’ what has been taking place in front of their eyes.

Many of these governments once railed against ‘dictators killing their own people’, and used atrocities and human rights abuses as a moral lubricant for liberal ‘interventions’ and ‘ humanitarian’ wars to prevent ‘massacres’ and ‘bloodbaths.’ Apart from a few tepid words of condemnation, when the obscenity of what is unfolding became too much to ignore, these same governments have enabled Israel to inflict incredible carnage on a mostly unarmed and defenceless population.

None of is taking place in secret. In February, Amnesty claimed that ‘Fresh evidence of deadly unlawful attacks in the occupied Gaza Strip…demonstrates how Israeli forces continue to flout international humanitarian law, obliterating entire families with total impunity.’ Israeli soldiers routinely post tweets and TikTok videos of themselves gleefully blowing up Palestinian homes, wearing Palestinian lingerie and women’s dresses, humiliating Palestinian prisoners made to strip down to their underwear, and generally exulting in the destruction.

They have done this without any criticism or sanction from their own government, or from the governments that support what Israel is doing. When Israel accused 14 UNRWA workers of being Hamas operatives in January, nine of the countries that fund UNRWA immediately cut their funding even though Israel has still not provided any evidence to support these allegations. The US has just announced that it will not resume funding to UNRWA until 2025 - regardless of the fact that UNRWA is more necessary now than at anytime since 1948.

This is not ignorance, but complicity, and no amount of handwringing or piecemeal, performative drops of emergency aid can conceal the collusion of these governments in the dismantling of Gazan society and the destruction of its people. Biden recently warned Israel not to attack Rafah on the grounds that ‘[We] cannot have another 30,000 more Palestinians dead,’ - the first thirty thousand are tax-free - yet Netanyahu has declared that Israel will carry out its planned assault on Rafah that is clearly intent on turning Gaza into a Palestinian-free zone.

There is clearly no red line that Israel’s allies are prepared to impose, and no outcome they will not tolerate. It is an epic moral failure that will resonate for decades, and whatever the strategic and geopolitical calculations behind this collusion, it is matched by a consistent refusal to recognise or acknowledge the full dimensions of the horror that is unfolding in front of our eyes.

All the factors that Cohen analyses in his book have contributed to the ‘atrocity denialism’ in Gaza: ‘normalization’; ‘defence mechanisms and cognitive errors’; ‘collusion and cover-up’; the ‘discourse of official denial’; ‘lies and self-deception.’

There are many reasons why we have reached this point, not the least of which is a well-honed and effective Israeli propaganda machine, supported by a range of organizations from the Anti-Defamation League to the Jewish Board of Deputies that deny everything Israel is accused of, accuse its critics of ‘blood libels’ and antisemitism, or use the word ‘Hamas’ as the explanation for everything that is happening, and for everything that Israel is doing.

Why did Israel attack a hospital? Because Hamas operatives are there. Why have civilians been killed? Because Hamas killed them. Why are Palestinians starving? Because Hamas is starving them. Why have doctors been killed? Because many of them are Hamas operatives or members of NGOs linked to Hamas. Why is UNRWA criticizing Israel? Because UNRWA is a proxy for Hamas. Why are demonstrators across the world criticizing Israel? Because they are ‘hate mobs’ and antisemites who support Hamas.

Why has the UN Security Council just agreed on a (non-binding, according to the US) resolution calling for a ceasefire? Because, according to Israeli minister of national security, Itamar Ben Gabir, the Security Council ‘is an anti-Semitic institution, with an anti-Semitic Secretary General, who is encouraging Hamas towards total victory.’

If you believe that, you will believe anything, and too many are prepared to believe whatever Israel tells them: social media trolls, rightwing influencers, celebrity Zionists, and politicians who are too cowardly to admit to their own hypocrisy and complicity directly, but prefer instead to give lectures on ‘extremism’ from the Downing Street podium, or use the war in Gaza to accuse Sadiq Khan of handing over London to Islamist radicals, or cut off funding to German pro-Palestinian artists and cultural organizations.

There is no doubt that there are extremists and antisemites who have rallied to the Palestinian cause, some of whom have used the Gaza war to spread antisemitic conspiracy theories. As I write, Twitter is awash with people citing the Moscow terrorist attacks to prove that Mossad is behind Islamic State, and behind the attacks in Moscow as well.

There is more where this came from. At the same time, there is a vast protest movement that does not ‘support Hamas’ or approve of Hamas’s actions on October 7th, and which sees the ongoing slaughter in Gaza as another dire chapter in the oppression and dispossession of the Palestinians that began in 1917. But Israel and its supporters have spread the antisemitism net so wide that it is virtually impossible to criticize the actions of the Israeli government in Gaza without being accused of it.

The few public figures who do this can instantly expect to have these accusations flung at them. Charlotte Church is just the latest example. Church can speak for herself, and she has done, with far more eloquence than the legions of outraged trolls who called her stupid, naive and a Jew-hater.

Such manufactured outrage is also part of Gaza atrocity denialism . And regardless of the messages emanating from pro-Palestinian street protests, the mainstream political and media conversation continues to downplay Israeli atrocities, or refers continuously to October 7th as if the horrific events of that day somehow cancel all the horrors that have unfolded afterwards or - to those who have followed the ‘Israeli-Palestinian conflict’ - to those that came before.

As a result , Israeli newspapers like Ha’aretz and less mainstream outlets like +972 Magazine often present a far more nuanced understanding of the war - and a more honest assessment of the Israeli government’s actions - than you are likely to find in any British or American news report, especially when such reports rely on the likes of Douglas Murray.

In the last five months, Murray has been a ubiquitous figure in the British and American media, even though his view of the ‘conflict’ is firmly aligned with the most extremist sectors of the Zionist movement that call for the complete annihilation of the Palestinians. Murray claims to be ‘covering’ the war in Gaza, but it is his willingness to relentlessly recycle IDF talking points that has made him something of a hero to the Israeli far-right and to legions of internet trolls, as a February article in the Spectator makes clear:

Hamas’s own figures – not to be relied upon – suggest that around 28,000 people have been killed in Gaza since October. Most of the international media likes to claim these people are all innocent civilians. In fact, many of the dead will have been killed by the quarter or so Hamas and Islamic Jihad rockets that fall short and land inside Gaza

These are standard component of Israeli atrocity denialism: If Palestinian civilians die, it’s because Hamas killed them or used them as ‘human shields.’ If you can’t prove that, or the statistics reach a point when that argument looks flaky, you simply cast doubt on the casualty figures by suggesting that Hamas made them up. And if some other organization cites these statistics, you say that it got them from Hamas. This what Stan Cohen would call ‘the discourse of official denial’, and if that fails, there is always another smear to fall back on, as Murray does again and again:

I suspect it is a moral explanation which explains the situation so many people find themselves in. They simply enjoy being able to accuse the world’s only Jewish state of ‘genocide’ and ‘Nazi-like behaviour’. They enjoy the opportunity to wound Jews as deeply as possible. Many find it satisfies the intense fury they feel when Israel is winning.

The fact that this preening apologist for mass slaughter thinks that Israel is ‘winning’ is another example of why Israel’s rightwing friends are not necessarily the kind of friends that Israel needs. An article in Ha’aretz recently worried that ‘the mass killing in Gaza will poison Israeli souls forever.’ Even the Economist recognises that an Israeli ‘victory’ in Gaza has already become a moral defeat, and warned recently that the failure of ceasefire talks ‘ could leave Israel locked in the bleakest trajectory of its 75-year existence, featuring endless occupation, hard-right politics and isolation.’

You will find more facts in the courageous and comprehensive testimony on the destruction in Gaza by the Hebrew University professor Lee Mordechai, than anything from Murray’s ‘moral clarity.’ Mordechai is a historian who specialises in Byzantine environmental history, and he wrote his piece as a personal response to ‘the disappointing general silence on this issue among many international and Israeli academic institutions, especially those that are well-positioned to comment on it.’

The information Mordechai has collected is all in the public domain. Murray could have found it too, were it not for the fact that his icy Etonian bloodlust is matched by such complete indifference to the deaths of Palestinians whose ‘innocence’ is always questionable. And he isn’t the only one. Take this recent tweet from the week the renowned ‘defence intellectual’ Edward Luttwak:

Yes, how dare a newspaper write an ‘uncritically sympathetic’ article about the ‘missing’ youth in Gaza who look like ‘us’, instead of the ones who look ‘Arab or Muslim’, and can presumably be killed with impunity? For Luttwak, like Murray, there is no Palestinian who cannot be killed, and no such thing as an Israeli atrocity.

This dehumanisation has always been present in media depictions of the Palestinians, and the Gazan Palestinians in particular, but Hamas’s ISIS-style rampage on October 7th has deepened and intensified it, to the point when Hamas’s atrocities have become both a justification and a smokescreen for limitless Israeli retaliation, and a rhetorical device with which to attack anyone who criticizes the scope of such retaliation.

The Zone of Disinterest

Consider the response to Jonathan Glazer’s Oscar speech earlier this month, following his award for The Zone of Interest. For those who haven’t seen it, Glazer’s film is a mesmerising and disturbing study of the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his family, and of the normalization of atrocity that makes its possible to live an everyday domestic existence only a few yards away from a place where the most unspeakable horrors are unfolding.

Hoss’s family live in the shadow of genocide, in precisely the state of knowing-but-not-knowing that Cohen discusses. Their collective compartmentalisation enables them to go through the motions of normality, even as machinery of mass murder snarls and churns in the background, and the occasional body part floats down the river in the midst of a picnic.

Though they rarely speak about what is going on next door, the film subtly makes it clear that most of them are aware of or sense what is taking place beyond their ‘zone of interest’; they have simply decided to screen it out. Before the Oscars, The Zone of Interest had mostly been praised, but that abruptly changed when Glazer stood on the podium, and read out a speech saying the unsayable:

All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present, not to say look what they did then, but rather look what we do now. Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst. It’s shaped all of our past and present. Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people. Whether the victims of October — whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?

Though the speech was applauded at the ceremony itself, it generated a chorus of horrified indignation elsewhere. László Nemes, the director of the Holocaust masterpiece Son of Saul, said that Glazer should have ‘stayed silent’ and accused him of disseminating ‘propaganda intended to eradicate all Jewish presence.’ The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) tweeted that Israel was ‘hijacking Judaism or the Holocaust by defending itself against genocidal terrorists’ and claimed that Glazer’s’ ‘factually incorrect & morally reprehensible’ comments ‘minimise the Shoah & excuse terrorism of the most heinous kind.’

At no point did Glazer ‘excuse terrorism.’ On the contrary, he explicitly referred to the ‘victims of October 7th in Israel’ as well as the ‘ongoing attack on Gaza’ as an example of the mutual ‘dehumanisation’ at the heart of the moral complicity he analyses in his film.

But to Israel and its supporters there are only ever victims on one side, and any public figure who suggests anything to the contrary will always be attacked, or find their words distorted. An open letter with 1,000 signatories from Hollywood creatives tried to use Glazer’s own words against him

We refute our Jewishness being hijacked for the purpose of drawing a moral equivalence between a Nazi regime that sought to exterminate a race of people, and an Israeli nation that seeks to avert its own extermination. Every civilian death in Gaza is tragic. Israel is not targeting civilians. It is targeting Hamas. The moment Hamas releases the hostages and surrenders is the moment this heartbreaking war ends. This has been true since the Hamas attacks of October 7th.

The use of words like “occupation” to describe an indigenous Jewish people defending a homeland that dates back thousands of years, and has been recognized as a state by the United Nations, distorts history. 

This response goes a long way to answer the question of how the ‘dehumanization’ that Glazer describes becomes possible, and makes the victims of Israeli violence invisible.

Firstly, there is the idea that the atrocities carried out by Hamas of October 7th had no other purpose, context or motivation beyond the extermination of all Jews - thereby making any response, no matter how violent, seem like a legitimate act of self-defense. Then there is the faux-war-is-hell anguish (‘every civilian death in Gaza is tragic’, ‘heartbreaking war’), which pays lip service to the idea that there are victims on both sides, while simultaneously ignoring the shocking discrepancy in the death toll and the devastation.

This is followed by the downright lie that ‘Israel is not targeting civilians. It is targeting Hamas.’ And lastly, but by no means least, the open letter refuses to even accept that there has ever been an occupation, deliberately conflating ‘homeland’ with ‘state’, and ignoring the differences between the two, while also suggesting that Jews, unlike Palestinians, are ‘indigenous’.

All this belongs to the nationalist playbook that Orwell once described, in which ‘Material facts are suppressed, dates altered, quotations removed from their context and doctored so as to change their meaning. Events which, it is felt, ought not to have happened are left unmentioned and ultimately denied.’

The result is the denialism that we are seeing now: the denial of atrocities and the denial of Palestinian humanity; the denial of history; the denial of occupation; the denial of everything except Israel’s seemingly unique right to engage in limitless violence.

It seems a long time ago now, since Tony Blair told the Labour Party in 2001, in a speech dripping with nineteenth century imperial moral fervour that ‘The starving, the wretched, the dispossessed, the ignorant, those living in want and squalor from the deserts of northern Africa to the slums of Gaza, to the mountain ranges of Afghanistan: they too are our cause.’

Now - and this was clear even at the time - it turns out that the ‘slums of Gaza’ are not ‘our cause’, after all, and that there are some massacres that are tolerable, and some states that are allowed to commit them, without complete license and impunity. And when this happens, the same governments that once wanted to bomb the world into a new moral order, will fold their arms, shake their heads, and look away, and they expect everybody else to do the same.