The myth of Israeli democracy died in Gaza and Israel’s hasbara will never recover
The construction of the Israeli Museum of Tolerance in 2015 on top of the age-old Mamilla cemetery in Jerusalem’s Old City
Steve France writes in Mondoweiss on 22 June 2024:
Miscreants, as we know, tend to resist accusations that they’ve done wrong: they invent alibis, deny key facts, plead confusion, or make other excuses for their conduct. But Israel’s distinctive form of “affirmative denial” runs deeper, and sweeps more broadly, Saree Makdisi shows in Tolerance Is a Wasteland: Palestine and the Culture of Denial. Beyond merely covering up or refuting allegations, Israel has always promoted comforting counter-images — fairy tales, in effect — about its moral impeccability. The effect is to impugn critics’ motives and displace factual specifics with loud and emotional “affirmation of values such as tolerance, [and] diversity” – all to get away with “unspeakable – and unspoken of – crimes.”
Wasteland came out in 2022, on the eve of Israel’s most ambitious attempt to “finish the job” of ending Palestinian resistance in the land between the River and the Sea – or even their physical presence.
Cover of Saree Makdisi’s book
But the sands, tunnels, and sumud of starved and battered Gaza refugees have withstood the bombs and forced the world to pay attention in real time as Israel slaughtered tens of thousands of unarmed Palestinian civilians. Today, the intentionality of its crimes and the falsity of its claims to innocence and victimhood are exposed as never before.
Makdisi didn’t predict the game-changing events of 2023-24, but he did herald the twilight of Israel’s classic hasbara (Hebrew for propaganda or spin). Well before October 2023, Israelis were already, in his view, shifting from virtue signaling to “the outright embrace of explicit racism,” led by newly dominant ultra-hardliners. The shift was an implicit admission that the affirmative forms of denial explored in his book were no longer effective, even if some milder Israelis still clung to “affirmations of sharing, equality, cooperation and solidarity – Birkenstocks and granola and Amos Oz on a kibbutz in the Galilee.”