{"id":302016,"date":"2025-09-01T12:01:39","date_gmt":"2025-09-01T11:01:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=302016"},"modified":"2025-08-27T10:30:17","modified_gmt":"2025-08-27T09:30:17","slug":"how-israelis-turned-atrocity-denial-into-an-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2025\/09\/how-israelis-turned-atrocity-denial-into-an-art\/","title":{"rendered":"How Israelis Turned Atrocity Denial into an Art"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>As Gazans document mass killing and starvation in real time, the response of much of Israeli society is: \u201cIt\u2019s all fake \u2014 and they deserve it.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

26 Aug 2025\u00a0<\/em>–\u00a0A decade ago, in the final days of the\u00a0weekly joint Palestinian\u2013Jewish protests<\/a>\u00a0against Israel\u2019s construction of the separation wall in the West Bank village of Al-Ma\u2019asara, one of our pre-demonstration rituals was a speech by Mahmoud, a local community leader. Phone in hand, he would declare: \u201cWe will not have another Nakba, because now we have this. We have a smartphone. We have Facebook. They will try to drive us away again, but everyone will see it and stop it. In \u201948 we had no smartphones, no Facebook. Now it will not happen.\u201d<\/p>\n

He repeated this mantra every Friday \u2014 to the activists beside him, to the soldiers facing us, and to himself. At the time, it felt reassuring. But he was wrong.<\/p>\n

Israel\u2019s ongoing genocidal campaign in Gaza may be the most thoroughly documented atrocity in recent history, measured both by the sheer volume of evidence and the speed of its circulation. Smartphones and social media \u2014 which were still a world away during the genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda \u2014 allow events to be captured instantly, from countless angles, and shared globally in real time, with traditional media still playing a not-insignificant supporting role.<\/p>\n

And yet, faced with an unending flood of photos and videos of dead civilians, starving children, and entire neighborhoods reduced to rubble, much of the Israeli public \u2014 and a significant portion of Israel\u2019s supporters abroad \u2014 responds in one of two ways: either it is all fake, or else the Gazans deserved it. Often, paradoxically, it is both at once: \u201cThere are no dead children in Gaza, and it\u2019s good that we killed them.\u201d<\/p>\n

A new era of denial<\/b><\/p>\n

Atrocity denial is a global phenomenon, but Israeli society has turned it into something of an art. It is no coincidence that one of the most important academic works on the subject, \u201cStates of Denial\u201d (2001) by the sociologist Stanley Cohen, was inspired by his experiences as a human rights activist in Israel during the\u00a0First Intifada<\/a>\u00a0in the late 1980s.<\/p>\n

Drawing on those experiences, Cohen describes a repertoire of denial employed by both states and societies: \u201cit did not happen\u201d (we didn\u2019t torture anyone); \u201cwhat happened is something else\u201d (this wasn\u2019t torture, but \u201cmoderate physical pressure\u201d); \u201cthere was no alternative\u201d (the \u201cticking bomb\u201d made torture a necessary evil).<\/p>\n

In Israel, this logic is rooted in the \u201cpurity of arms\u201d myth (the belief that Israel acts only out of self defense) and the age-old \u201cshooting and crying<\/a>\u201d mentality (the notion that Israelis may commit violence but remain uniquely moral because they grieve over it afterward). But as abhorrent as this mindset may be, it nonetheless rests on two important assumptions:\u00a0 that atrocities like torture, the killing of civilians, and forced displacement are essentially wrong, and thus require justification or concealment; and that the documentation and exposure of the truth has value \u2014 even if only as an obstacle to be evaded.<\/p>\n

For all its repulsion, the hypocrisy inherent in the \u201cpurity of arms\u201d myth has its uses: it leaves room, however narrow, for correction. Once the gap between rhetoric and reality is exposed, it can provoke embarrassment and even generate pressure for change. In such a world, images captured on a phone and shared instantly carry genuine weight.<\/p>\n

But this is not the world we live in today. In Israel, the instinct to dismiss any documentation from Gaza as \u201cfake\u201d has been absorbed into mainstream discourse, from the highest echelons of political power down to anonymous commenters on news sites. This reflex is rooted in a conspiratorial mindset imported from right-wing circles in the United States, much like President Donald Trump\u2019s \u201cdeep state\u201d rhetoric that has\u00a0become a favorite<\/a>\u00a0of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his supporters.<\/p>\n

One of the chief evangelists of this style of denial is fringe right-wing media figure Alex Jones. In 2012, the longtime Trump ally claimed that the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting, in which 20 students and six adults were murdered, was staged. Despite overwhelming evidence, Jones insisted that all footage of the massacre \u2014 grieving parents, even the bodies of the victims \u2014 was faked, all part of a Democratic conspiracy to undermine Americans\u2019 right to bear arms.<\/p>\n

This type of discourse began seeping into Israeli society even before October 7, first online and later in formal arenas. As the war has dragged on, it has become a widespread, often reflexive response: A video of Palestinian parents cradling the body of an infant? \u201cActors holding a doll.\u201d Photos of civilians shot by Israeli soldiers? \u201cAI-generated, manipulated, or taken somewhere else.\u201d And so on, ad infinitum.<\/p>\n

This rhetoric has often been paired with the term \u201cPallywood<\/a>\u201d \u2014 a portmanteau of \u201cPalestinian Hollywood.\u201d\u00a0Imported from U.S. right-wing circles<\/a>\u00a0in the early 2000s, it suggests that images of Palestinian suffering are not real at all, but part of an elaborate movie industry: a vast conspiracy in which Palestinians, human rights organizations, and the international media collaborate to fabricate atrocities.<\/p>\n

In an earlier era of atrocity denial, the claims of staging were at least elaborate. Many still recall the case of\u00a0Muhammad Al-Durrah<\/a>, the 12-year-old boy killed in Gaza in September 2000, whose death became a symbol of the Second Intifada. Israelis and their supporters invested enormous effort to try to discredit the footage: hundreds of hours of analysis, reports, and even documentaries, parsing shooting angles, ballistics, and forensic details to argue the entire event had been staged.<\/p>\n

Today, denial requires no such labor. The intricate conspiracy theories of the past have given way to a cruder form of denialism that scholars call\u00a0conspiracism<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 the reflexive dismissal of any evidence that contradicts one\u2019s interests as fabricated. Documentation is simply dismissed with a single word: \u201cFake.\u201d<\/p>\n

Post-truth, post shame<\/b><\/p>\n

Take, for example, the\u00a0undeniable evidence of mass starvation<\/a>\u00a0in Gaza. The logic is painfully simple: a population kept under siege, and whose\u00a0entire means of self-sufficiency has been destroyed<\/a>, will inevitably starve. Yet in Israel, from anonymous commenters online to the highest levels of government, the reflexive response remains the same: \u201cIt\u2019s all fake.\u201d<\/p>\n

Netanyahu has\u00a0spoken of<\/a>\u00a0the \u201cperception of a humanitarian crisis,\u201d supposedly created by \u201cstaged or well-manipulated photos\u201d distributed by Hamas. Foreign Minister Gideon Sa\u2019ar\u00a0dismissed<\/a>\u00a0images of emaciated children as \u201cvirtual reality,\u201d citing as proof the presence of \u201cwell-fed\u201d adults beside them. The army\u00a0claimed<\/a>\u00a0Hamas was recycling images of Yemeni children or fabricating AI-generated fakes. Ynet journalist Itamar Eichner, otherwise sharply critical of the government,\u00a0echoed the same sentiment<\/a>: \u201cThey [Palestinians] understand that photos of starved children are a soft spot. The photos are likely staged, and the children could be sick with other diseases.\u201d<\/p>\n

This pattern of denial surfaces even in academic discourse. A recent\u00a0report<\/a>\u00a0from the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University, \u201cDebunking the Genocide Allegations: A Reexamination of the Israel-Hamas War (2023-2025),\u201d included a section titled \u201cFake Sources and Others Generated by AI.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although documented proof of atrocities has always been met with evasions and denials, the situation today is wholly different. In the \u201cpost-truth\u201d era, a combination of heightened suspicion of AI manipulation, the erosion of trust in institutional media, and the collapse of democratic gatekeepers has made the instinct to cry \u201cfake\u201d at anything unwelcome far more widespread and powerful than ever before.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the\u00a0reprehensible refusal<\/a>\u00a0by the vast majority of the Israeli media to show what is actually happening in Gaza means that when images do manage to slip through, the public response is often little more than a collective shrug of dismissal. Yet almost every time, that shrug is accompanied by \u201cthey deserved it,\u201d as denial and justification intertwine in what may seem like a paradox but actually reflects two sides of the same coin.<\/p>\n

As Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu recently\u00a0declared<\/a>: \u201cThere is no famine in Gaza, and when they show you pictures of starving children, look closely \u2014 you\u2019ll always see a fat one next to them, eating just fine. This is a staged campaign.\u201d In the very same interview, he added: \u201cThere is no nation that feeds its enemies. Have we lost our minds? The day they return the hostages \u2014 there will be no hunger there. The day they kill the Hamas terrorists \u2014 there will be no hunger.\u201d<\/p>\n

After two decades of siege, during which we Israelis tried to push Gaza and its 2 million Palestinian residents out of sight and mind, the massacre of October 7\u00a0brutally forced back into view<\/a>\u00a0what we had sought to forget. Perhaps it was then that the two responses \u2014 \u201cfake\u201d and \u201cthey deserved it\u201d \u2014 fully converged. The first serves the national self-image (\u201cour children are not committing atrocities\u201d) and the demands of hasbara, buying time on the international stage. The second is a raw, visceral reaction to the pain and humiliation of being struck by those long cast as inferior. Together, they fuse into a reaction that overrides any appeal to morality, requires no pause, and demands no apology.<\/p>\n

And herein lies the second challenge to the belief that smartphones and social networks can stop atrocities. The struggle for human rights has long assumed that documenting abuses would \u201cshame\u201d perpetrators into changing their behavior. But what happens when perpetrators no longer feel shame, and openly disregard moral censure and even the very idea of truth? In that case, documentation and distribution, however rapid or widespread, lose their power.<\/p>\n

Indeed, as human rights reports and international court petitions over the past two years have shown, Israeli military, political, and cultural leaders now admit openly \u2014 and of their own accord \u2014 what in other circumstances human rights groups would have labored painstakingly to prove.<\/p>\n

After decades of denying the Nakba, even\u00a0banning the term itself<\/a>, Israeli lawmakers now proudly declare that Israel is\u00a0carrying out a second Nakba in Gaza<\/a>. Where once B\u2019Tselem volunteers had to\u00a0painstakingly film<\/a>\u00a0atrocities in the West Bank, only to be met with one excuse or another, such as that the incidents were \u201ctaken out of context,\u201d today Israeli soldiers themselves record violations of human rights and upload them to social media without hesitation.<\/p>\n

What we are witnessing is the collapse of the traditional cycle of exposure, denial, and confirmation. In such a reality, what use are smartphones and social media?<\/p>\n

Cracks in the wall<\/strong><\/p>\n

While the benefit of documenting atrocities is much lesser than we had hoped for in the past, it is still significant. As I write this, it seems as if the reflexive \u201cfake\u201d and \u201cthey deserved it\u201d responses are finally hitting solid barriers.<\/p>\n

Faced with the vast and relentless evidence of starvation in Gaza, the cries of \u201cfake\u201d are becoming more and more frenzied and desperate. The vicious allegation, endlessly repeated in Israeli discourse, that a Gazan child suffering from a pre-existing illness somehow absolves Israel of responsibility for starving them to death has, apparently, failed t o halt the growing acknowledgment in Israel of Palestinian suffering, and of its fundamental injustice.<\/p>\n

The twists and turns now common in Israeli arguments \u2014 that there is indeed starvation in Gaza but Hamas is to blame; that it is an unintended consequence of war; or that the world is hypocritical for not treating starvation in Yemen the same way \u2014 all return us to the repertoire of denials Stanley Cohen described. Yet they also suggest something else: the hesitant reappearance of embarrassment, and perhaps even shame, among at least some segments of the Israeli population.<\/p>\n

Go to Original – defenddemocracy.press<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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