Israel and the culture of denial
By Angela Smith
Sep 30, 2024
There will be no peace and security for Israelis until Palestinians enjoy freedom, justice and equality from the river to the sea.
Dedicated to promoting tolerance, human dignity, Jewish unity and universal respect, the Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem, built in the shape of a dove, promotes itself as an “international embassy” for peace. The museum’s website describes the outdoor amphitheatre as being flanked by a Second Temple aqueduct, originally constructed by King Herod and discovered when the foundations were being laid. The website omits to mention what else was discovered when workers were excavating the site: human remains.
The remains of Palestinians and other Muslims were being quietly removed in cardboard boxes when news of the desecration was leaked to the media. Despite protests by Muslims and Palestinians and a High Court challenge, construction continued. Opened in 2022, the museum was built on top of the largest, most important Muslim cemetery in Palestine, in continual use for hundreds of years until Palestine’s uprooting in 1948.
Building a museum purporting to promote tolerance and universal respect on the site of a graveyard exposes the erasure at the heart of the project. At the time of writing, the two exhibitions on display are “Documenting Israel: Visions of 75 Years” which tells “Israel’s story”, and “From Darkness to Light” which unveils “the unfathomable depths of evil that occurred on October 7th”, and highlights the empathy and civic unity that emerged from those events. As Franz Fanon observed, “The colonist is not content with physically limiting the space of the colonised … the colonist turns the colonised into a kind of quintessence of evil.” Evil in the form of “human animals” as Israel’s Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, declared on 9 October when announcing that Israel would impose a complete siege on Gaza: no food, water, fuel or electricity.
The Museum of Tolerance is but one example of what American literary critic, Saree Makdisi, terms “the architecture of erasure”, or what is occluded in the story that Israel and its supporters, including the leaders of Western governments, tell themselves. A state founded on a premise of ethnic exclusion and land theft is supported as an exemplar of democracy, equality and tolerance. Our leaders remain shamefully indifferent to the plight of Palestinians and Lebanese even as Israel continues its live-streamed, genocidal assault on Palestinians in Gaza, and inflicts carnage in Lebanon where its terrorist attacks cause mass mutilation of civilians.
It is difficult to fathom how Australian Jews, who are liberal on other issues, fail to condemn Israel’s flagrant violations of international law over many decades, and its constitutive and ongoing privileging of Jews over non-Jews in its laws, policies and practices. For example, they support Israel, while also calling for justice for Aboriginal Australians, whose history of colonialist killing, land theft, displacement, discrimination and incarceration finds echoes in the Palestinian experience. They cast Palestinians as the roadblock to peace and a two-state “solution”, perceiving their suffering as self-inflicted, disconnected from their original and ongoing dispossession and discrimination.
Makdisi argues that this cognitive dissonance is made possible not simply by the occlusion of Palestinians’ presence, but by the manner in which the effects of Israel’s destruction and repression are reframed, inverted into affirmations of liberal virtues. Hence, a Museum of Tolerance built on a desecrated Muslim cemetery champions human dignity and universal respect.
Scattered throughout Israel are sites that occlude Palestinian history and lives. Examples of active interventions to erase Palestinian existence include the following: a museum built on a Muslim cemetery; the replacement of a biodiverse ecosystem, which included olive and citrus groves, with monocultural forests planted on the ruins of Palestinian villages (a greenwashing of Israel’s origin story of terra nullius, praised by Kamala Harris as “Israeli ingenuity that has truly made a desert bloom”); the illegal wall annexing part of the West Bank; and the re-naming of Palestinian towns and villages to Hebrew names.
One initiative that seeks to reverse this psycho-geographical erasure is Zochrot, meaning “remembering” in Hebrew. Founded in 2002 by a group of Jewish-Israeli activists, who reject the Zionist paradigm of suppression and repression, Zochrot calls for Palestinian refugees’ right of return, and recognition of the Nakba as an ongoing process to deprive Palestinians of their land. Zochrot’s website maps “the invisible country” in the colonised landscape of Israel, identifying the hundreds of towns and villages that were destroyed in 1948 and subsequently, and hidden from view so that the land would be “read” as Israeli. Zochrot also makes material, de-colonising interventions on the sites of former Palestinian settlements by constructing signs with the former Palestinian name. Zochrot’s intervention in the digital space includes its iReturn App, which reveals Israel’s hidden landscape of ethnic cleansing and forced expulsions.
In a recent address to mark the UN International Day of Peace, an edited version of which was published in Pearls and Irritations, Louise Adler suggested that collective amnesia must enable diasporic Jews to ignore the reality of Israel’s occupation. Perhaps a more accurate explanation is denial, buttressed by legislation such as the law colloquially known as the Nakba Law which authorises the withholding of state funds from entities that commemorate Israel’s Independence Day as a day of mourning. A deep-seated culture of denial — a common trait of colonisers — shadowed by anti-Palestinian sentiment is facilitated by the state’s literal, figurative, and discursive erasure of Palestinians.
Israel’s apologists project onto Palestinians all the blame for Israel’s insecurity instead of acknowledging the reason for Palestinian resistance: Israel’s illegal occupation and ongoing, violent settler-colonialism, and the discriminatory laws, practices and policies that maintain the hegemony of Jewish settlers at the expense of its indigenous inhabitants.
The violence won’t end until the conditions that produced it end. There will be no peace and security for Israelis until Palestinians enjoy freedom, justice and equality from the river to the sea.
Angela Smith is a former lawyer with broad legal experience including in refugee law and the university sector. Her writing has been published widely and can be found in such places as The Guardian (online), Griffith Review, Meanjin, New Philosopher and Overland.
