deny it and it will go away

Good morning all. I’ve not written for a while as so many people are writing so well, more informatively and on the same concerns and thoughts that I have (you can follow Peter Beinart and Jonathan Cook here on substack, or simply see Al Jazeera and Mondoweiss for a wider take).

But I’m drawn dangerously to writing on the subject of genocide and holocaust in these days where the ICJ has pronounced it ‘plausible’ that Israel is committing genocide, and in these days around International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

The term genocide was coined in the 1940s by a Polish Jewish lawyer, Raphael Lemkin, and came to be enshrined in the 1948 UN Genocide Convention. Lemkin was firm that genocide was an infectious and recurrent global disease and not a single mid century occurrence:

“I became interested in genocide, because it happened so many times. It happened to the Armenians and after the Armenians, Hitler took action.” Raphael Lemkin

Since I was a child I have been horrified and fascinated by the questions raised by the Holocaust. As a gentile, my focus was on the question of what would you do as you watched your neighbours taken away, killed and disappeared? How does a society like Germany move in such a short time from the end of the first world war to a near general acceptance, to the point of wholesale enabling, a fascist and racist ideology?

It seemed then the central political question of the twentieth century and it seems so again now, horrifically and immediately. I’ve widened my understanding of that question. How did we live with the (man made) famines we watched over the years on our televisions? How do we live now with a government (in the US and in the UK) which disregards the need for honesty and law? How do we watch our government attempt to send those seeking asylum to a third country, Rwanda, so manifestly unsafe that we have actually accepted refugees from there, or to load them onto barges? How do we continue to buy cheap clothes and plastic bottles as if a deus ex machina will come to save our ecology? How have we watched (or not watched) what has happened to the Palestinian people over decades as Israel subjected them to occupation and slow mounting oppression, killing, disenfranchisement, land theft and ethnic cleansing? How quickly does normality assert itself? When do we stand up? What does standing up cost?

These questions are all linked in my mind with the concept of denial outlined in Stanley Cohen’s book States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering. Brought up a Jewish Zionist in South Africa, Cohen rejected apartheid and became a sociologist in the UK, moving to Israel in 1980 only to find that he needed to analyse Israeli society with the same framework with which he had critiqued the South African regime. He moved back to the UK and wrote his last book, States of Denial.

I read Denial some years ago and it has inflected my thinking ever since. It is not only societies and states that practice denial, but all of us as individuals. If we faced every reality we could face in our personal lives and our public lives we would undoubtedly go mad. As individuals we build up stories that protect our mental health (or attempt to); as societies we build up stories that enable us to face what is unpalatable (or we simply don’t tell them). More than this, we enshrine such stories in our mythologies, our creation myths, our education systems. More than this, as societies (even those describing themselves as democracies) we discourage and punish narratives which cause discomfort. So people need not face the realities they do not like. And if faced with them they have an education, an upbringing and a media and a community which can tell them this cannot be possible. Dissonance is painful but not as painful as realisation.

Next month the film The Zone of Interest will open in the UK. It presents the wholesome family life of Rudolf and Hedwig Höss, who lived in the precincts (and within hearing distance) of the daily events of Auschwitz, where Höss was camp commandant. It was filmed in a private residence still standing within the concentration camp wall (and still inhabited). As one of the actors said ‘This is a film to make us unsafe in the cinema. As we should be.’ And Glazer has said ‘This is not about the past. It’s about now.’

Still from The Zone of Interest

But linking the Holocaust and Gaza is a punishable act. Using the word genocide for the assault on Gaza at all is dangerous in public life. Biden and the White House have doubled down on calling the International Court of Justice finding of genocide ‘meritless’, even after it has made the judgement, rendering its respect for international law at nil. Denial is alive and well in all of us, and it has never mattered more.

Go and see Zone of Interest. Remember the Holocaust. But don’t say it’s not about now.