Genocide Denial

While a majority of European countries penalise Holocaust denials to certain degrees, the argument for this being an unjustifiable restriction on freedom of expression has been duly made. In fact the Spanish Constitutional Court struck down in 2007 as unconstitutional aspects of provision of the Criminal Code that penalized the denial and justification of the Nazi Holocaust, arguing that the mere expression of such views does not necessarily incite genocide.

These arguments notwithstanding, questioning episodes of massive suffering for which a considerable weight of evidence continues to pile up is usually linked to questionable motives. It at least suggests that the interlocutor does not value the lives of the victims enough. It certainly aims at undermining the claims of the victims’ heirs and defenders, calling them more or less liars and fabricators. There is an element of malice here, an attitude that shows no care about the suffering and torment of the victims, of the loss of their kin. It matters little what cruelty they have been subjected to, or whether they lived or died. Usually, it is linked to the feeling that ‘they deserved it,’ or even the claim that those defending them may also deserve the same fate.

One may argue that episodes relating to the Holocaust, or to comparable instances of mass cruelty, such as the Stalinist purges, Chinese famines, Khmer Rouge Killing Fields, Bosnian massacres, Rwandan 100 days of slaughter, and others, have been shrouded in some mystery. The perpetrators took care to hide them behind well-constructed barriers, consign them to remote areas, or even cause the evidence to vanish into smoke. They usually did not boast daily about them in multimedia platforms. There was also that barrier of constant denial. It thus usually took a long time before evidence emerged, and much more before it became believable. The US War Office, as Samantha Power points out in A Problem from Hell:America and the Age of Genocide, refused to allow reports by escapees from Auschwitz to be published, arguing that the American public would not believe their stories.

The exception is of course the illegal immigrants who flooded from the early sixteenth century onwards, into the homelands of natives of the continents the illegal immigrants called America. Those armed illegals from England, Spain, and elsewhere in Europe, were so brazen in their abuse of the locals that they glorified their theft and genocide of the locals as great victories. They continue to do so more than five centuries on. But these are a special category of perpetrators.

What happens, however, if such massacres were public, broadcast live, around the clock, in painful detail? What do you call denial in this case? If someone was dismissing this as ‘a fairy tale,’ after seeing all of this, reading multiple reports by United Nations agencies, human rights organisations, health officials and aid workers, and survivors, on every form of media outlets? And if this sustained coverage went on and on for almost twelve months, they still continued to deny, belittle, and dismiss this televised torment, taking refuge in lies and self-deception? How long can their sanity be accepted, or sustained?

I am speaking of Gaza, of course, that narrow strip of seaside land, extending from the northern borders of Egypt to the South-East border of the rest of occupied Palestine. The enclave has become the world’s most notorious killing fields after the 7 October attack by Hamas when a limited episode in the ongoing conflict between Israel and armed groups snowballed into a no-holds barred one sided assault on Gaza. The first act of denial started with calling this devastating one-sided attack on Gaza a war. From day one, the Israeli president described Gazans as ‘human animals’, while the minister of defence announced publicly that Gaza will not receive food, water, medicines, or electricity, absolutely none. American, German, British, French, and other allies poured limitless supplies of weapons, equipment, and cash into one of the world’s strongest armies, to help it fight civilians. There has never been anything like this, with the powerful states of the world assisting the wanton murder of utterly defenceless captive civilians. All tried to ‘reinterpret’ the genocidal statements of Israeli leaders extremely charitably. All shouted in unison that Israel was ‘defending itself’, and has every right to do so. Although what we kept seeing on our screens is a one-sided onslaught on unarmed civilians, mass destruction of homes, hospitals, schools, universities and every structure in Gaza. What we did not see on our screens is that the defenceless civilians were there as refugees when they were driven out from their homes by the very state firing its mighty guns into their ‘refugee camps’. They have been languishing there since 1947, and have been under a smothering siege since 2005.

Most interestingly, the 7 October attack in Gaza, which killed about 1,200 people and kidnapped over 200, was described as the resumption of the Holocaust, and a campaign to exterminate Jews. As I have explained in detail elsewhere, no matter how we describe the 7 October attack, it cannot qualify as a genocide. To start with, the bulk of genocide research theories concur that genocide is almost exclusively committed by states. More importantly, sub-state actors do not usually have the capacity to conduct genocide, which requires a capacity to identify, locate, separate, and imprison the target population so as to conduct systematic killings. In any case, Hamas could not conduct any systematic killings with the few hundred personnel it had sent into Israel, and the few hours it had there. Not against such a heavily armed garrison-state like Israel, backed unconditionally by the world’s mightiest states.

In fact, Israel was doubly responsible for the high number of killings. First, because its so-called super-army failed to wake up from its slumber quickly enough when it received information about the attack. Most Hamas attackers did not expect to survive for long, let alone conduct a number of trips into Israel and back, with hostages. The Israeli army has the capacity to thwart the attack and prevent Hamas fighters from returning home with hostages. But it did not use it. Second, it became clear within days that the bulk of the killings, including deaths at a nearby music festival, were the fault of an Israeli counterattack. The Israeli used attack helicopters and other devices to incinerate a large number of Israelis beyond recognition. Further evidence emerged when the Israeli military revised casualties from 1,400 to 1,200, admitting that 200 were in fact dead Palestinian attackers. This was a further revelation of the use of massive fire that Hamas did not have.

In any case, a besieged impoverished enclave like Gaza could not and cannot threaten Israel with destruction, even if it was fully armed with tanks and airpower, since Israel has defeated multiple Arab armies, usually within days, even without its present intensive arsenal of ultra-modern AI weapons. So, the widely accepted and disseminated propaganda that Israel needs to defend itself by conducting a genocide in Gaza cannot stand up.

What is intriguing, and very troubling, is that centres of commemoration of the Holocaust, like the Yad Vashem, were at the vanguard of denial. For example, Dani Dayan, the chairman of Yad Vashem, responded negatively to a letter sent from fifty-six leading holocaust and genocide scholars asking the Centre to condemn the genocidal rhetoric of Israeli leaders and society. According to one of the signatories, ‘over 500 genocidal public statements have been made by [Israeli] leaders, senior military officers, lawmakers, journalists, and other shapers of public opinion’. He also cited an Israeli journalist that rhetoric supporting genocide is inescapable in Israel, whether on TV, social media, in cafes, or private conversations. However, the Yad Vashem response was to claim that such rhetoric was ‘marginal’, and referring to ‘countless acts and statements’ from Israel indicating desire to comply with ‘proper moral norms’, ‘within the constraint Hamas imposes on us’. In other words, Israeli is beseeching Hamas to give it permission to be moral and relent from their genocidal rampage. ‘Look what they make us do!’, to cite a Nazi adage.

We are on uncharted territory here, with prominent scholars like German philosopher Jurgen Habermas indicating a Hegelian stance that Germany’s moral commitment is to stand behind Israel, no matter what. In other words, if Israel thinks that genocide is good, then so be it. As Israel kept murdering children on live TV, that is what Germany in fact did, supplying the weapons and ammunition, and everything else necessary, including the arrest of protestors. Many other academics, intellectuals, religious leaders, heads of states, parliaments, media organisations, and substantial sections of public opinion, thought the same. A daily dose of televised genocide was most welcome, even if it goes on for months and years.

Apparently, the bulk of Muslim nations and Palestine’s Arab neighbours, became part of the pack. Resigned to this unbearable brutality, or complicit in it. The result is a vicious genocide in which the bulk of the world is collaborative. A genocide about which the courageous dissenters who dared to point out the emperor’s missing garment were shouted down, maligned, hounded out of their jobs or their school (if they were part of the many conscientious student protesters). Even wearing the signature Palestinian keffiyeh became a sinful display of antisemitism. According to the prominent French academic, Didier Fassin, self- censorship has reached up to 98 percent among junior academics in the US, and it is not that much lower among senior academics.

Public denial became the ritual. When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told a packed Congress Hall, on July 24, 2024, that a certain self-proclaimed historian of urban conflict told him that Israel’s conduct in Gaza was the most restrained in the entire history of urban warfare, he received a standing ovation. He also told his credulous audience that the courageous and conscientious students and others protesting the Gaza genocide have been funded by Iran!

In this upside-down world, those who protest against genocide, are condemned and maligned, while those who rejoice in it become the heroes of the day. As Fassin perceptively points out, this upside-down world is based on a rhetorical repertoire that could be called the ‘rhetoric of denial’. Its components include ‘presentism’, ‘a radical de-historicization of recent events’. In this case, it imposes an assumption that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict started on 7 October, in total oblivion of the egregious crimes Israel has been committing against Palestinians for nearly eight decades. It even overlooks the very visible phenomenon of ‘refugees camps’, in which the bulk of Gazans are crammed, indicating that they have been uprooted from their homes to make room for ‘Israel’. Thus, Israel has every right to defend itself against this totally unprovoked attack that came out of the blue!

Another tool in this discursive repertoire is ‘hyperbole’, as exaggeration: 7 October attack as a ‘new Holocaust', is launched by all those Palestinian ‘Nazis’. Or as extrapolation, condemning settlements as ‘illegal’ reveals intention to destroy the State of Israel. Student protestors shouting ‘intifada!’ are in fact calling for genocide against Jews, and so on. Most effectively indicting any criticism of Israel as ‘antisemitism’.

‘Distortion’ is another rhetorical figure used to cover the visible crimes of indiscriminate killing (plainly seen in actual scenes, or in statements by army spokespersons, or admissions of former military or intelligence officers). Instead, official spokespersons spread the propaganda that ‘the most moral army in the world’ does everything possible to spare civilians, giving prior warnings and directing civilians to ‘safe zones’ (where they are of course instantly bombed). Distortion includes explicit denial of genocide occurring in Gaza by using semantics, accusing Palestinians of being the problem and aggressors, or accusing anyone who cries ‘genocide!’ as having ‘an unconscious desire to have a genocide perpetrated against the Jews’. Thus while actual televised genocide is brazenly denied using twisted rhetoric, slogans such as ‘from the River to the Sea’ are condemned as expressions of genocidal intentions.

This perceptive anatomy of the rhetorical tools of denial are crucial for discovering attempts to deny genocide and hide it within lies. There are troubling resemblances with strategies of Holocaust denial. In both cases, the denier sincerely believes the crimes have not been committed. They just do not care about the victims, and care more about the perpetrators. They in fact secretly relish the brutality meted to the victims, and believe that they deserve it.

There is another dimension to this, well-illustrated in an open letter by Habermas, considered by many as a major left-wing intellectual, and his three other colleagues, published widely on 13 November 2023. Like other deniers, their concern was indeed for the perpetrators. Their primary worries were for the rise of antisemitism in Germany, which could escalate if Israel was linked to genocide. The second, linked to this, was wishful thinking that Israel would hopefully not stoop that low. When the letter was published, this may have been marginally plausible, but only for true believers. There was a quasi-religious dimension to this partly wishful, partly precautionary assertion. It is evident in the key phrase in this open letter: ‘despite all the concern for the fate of the Palestinian population, however, the standards of judgement slip completely when genocidal intentions are attributed to Israel’s actions.’ There is an element of sacralisation of the State of Israel, an entity that could not have such evil intention. Like Jesus Christ, it is not capable of sin.That is beyond wishful thinking for a state that has been based on property grabbing, ethnic cleansing, and mounting persecution of their victims. Unlike other genocidal states, such as post-War Germany, Israel failed to repent and cease its crimes. Rather, it continues the same sins of land and property theft, victimisation of the victims, and descending into its own style of fascism.

The rhetorical aspect of denial has another important dimension to it. Apart from justifying, and attempting to conceal or underplay genocide, the rhetoric is a significant aspect of the genocide process itself. Narratives are also crucial to instigating genocide in the first place. What my colleagues and I have called ‘narratives of insecurity’ and what Dirk Moses, Australian scholar of genocide, classifies as ‘permanent security', are central to bridging the gap between ordinary political strife and the descent into brutal one-sided violence against civilians. Moses takes as his starting point the German Nazi leadership’s striving to annihilate the Jews, to the last child, as a political threat. This was necessary to achieve ‘permanent security’ for Germany, by eliminating present and future threat, and ensure that such threats would not re-emerge. Such themes were also present in treatment of Indians by European settlers in America, and other cases. Our perspective uses the broader concept of ‘narratives of insecurity’, that is stories in which certain groups or entities are embedded as existential threats. This can start from ‘terrorist’ threats to cultural threats to identity. In these cases, the mere presence of the Other poses a grave threat that has to countered. Like the rhetoric camouflaging and explaining away genocide, these narratives construct ‘threats’ (like Muslim, Communist, immigrant, Palestinian) which are cast as deadly existential threats. In the latter case, the very existence and suffering of the ‘Palestinian’ is constructed and presented as a threat. This leads to more persecution and dispossession, ironically accentuating the ‘threat’. The Palestinian is also constructed rhetorically, as an outsider, and ‘uncivilised intruder’ in her own home, a perennial ‘terrorist’, ‘backward savage’, threatening the ‘civilised’ society of the ‘advanced’ Israeli.

Gaza is the typical case where the other is constructed narratively, using hyperbole, distortion, dissimulation, and pure lies. Here, a deliberately impoverished, besieged, wholly civilian population is brazenly presented as an existential threat to one of the most heavily and thoroughly armed settlements in the world. This ‘threatened entity’ can then receive tons and tons of ammunition and munitions, more sophisticated weapons, intelligence and financial assistance, to undertake saturation bombing of this enclave. Day after day, night after night, children are blown into smithereens, families are buried in rubble, hospitals and schools are turned into killing fields. But this evident barbarism is narrated as ‘civilised’ self-defence against the ‘barbarians’.

These savage scenes, transmitted by social and unsocial media to every home around the globe, have stirred anger in many young and old hearts around the world, hearts that did not buy into the rhetoric of denial, and were not bought by the powers that be, or intimidated by bullying. This is an indication that morality and ethical integrity can survive even nuclear incinerations or equivalents. The narratives of dissimulation did not hide the naked savagery. Life is fighting death.

Speaking of narratives, there are of course limits to what narratives can distort, hide, or misrepresent. Especially in this case, where genocidal violence is graphically and painfully visible around the clock, around the world, the rhetoric of denial is too thin and lame to sustain the alternative narrative of invisible innocence, and inexistent humanity. It is interesting how evil generates its own antitheses: virtue, integrity, courage.

Movies and other forms of fiction are interesting versions of coherent and suggestive narratives. In most cases, they construct opposing contrasts of good and evil, in various shades. In each plot, there are usually heroes and villains. As the plot unfolds, the villains usually display their evil nature, and indulge in all sorts of wicked villainies and acts of depravity. The more their excesses progress, and the innocent suffer and endure, the more the audience is enraged and craves a reversal, where the innocent are saved, their injuries avenged, and their hero walks in triumphantly to vanquish evil and restore injustice. The more evil, ruthless, and wicked and wanton the villain has been, the more spectacular the ending must be.

We are approaching the finale of this action movie. The villains have shown so much depravity and bestiality that it is difficult for the scriptwriters to keep pace and imagine more evil. The innocent have suffered so much, they can barely endure more. Few of them might survive to reach the finale. A good scriptwriter would not wait too long before giving the paying audience what it is waiting for. That is always inevitable in movies like this one.

And we all know what is going to happen in the remaining minutes of this show. It is more likely to be the most spectacular finale ever.

References

Samantha Power quoted is from, ‘A Problem from Hell. America and the Age of Genocide, (New York, Basic Books, 2013P, p. 35. Didier Fassin quotes from his 5 Feb 2024 article:‘The Rhetoric of Denial: Contribution to an Archive of the Debate about Mass Violence in Gaza’, Journal of Genocide Research, DOI: 10.1080/14623528.2024.2308941; and A. Dirk Moses references are from ‘Genocide as a Category Mistake: Permanent Security and Mass Violence Against Civilians.’ Genocidal Violence: 15; and ‘Replacing “Genocide” with “Permanent Security” via Genealogy’, Global Intellectual History, (04 Sep 2023): DOI: 10.1080/23801883.2023.2253010

The open letter by Jurgen Habermas and his colleagues can be found at: https://www.resetdoc.org/story/habermas-israel-principle-solidariety/ 

See also: Abdelwahab El-Affendi,. ‘The futility of genocide studies after Gaza.’ Journal of Genocide Research (2024): 1-7; and, editor, Genocidal nightmares: narratives of insecurity and the logic of mass atrocities (Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2014).