Saree Makdisi’s “Tolerance Is a Wasteland: Palestine and the Culture of Denial” shows just what a sham Israeli liberalism always was and continues to be.
BY STEVE FRANCE JUNE 22, 2024. MONDOWEISS.
TOLERANCE IS A WASTELAND
Palestine and the Culture of Denial
by Saree Makdisi
244 pps. University of California Press, 2022.
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 counterimages — 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. 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.”
Zionist liberals in the U.S., led by Biden, Blinken, and the Democratic Party establishment, still trot out the familiar Fairy Tale genre of propaganda to Americans, few of whom are well informed on Israel-Palestine. They keep singing the same schmaltzy tunes about brave David-like Israel miraculously overcoming Arab aggression. But the world sees Israel dancing and singing to genocidal death metal.
Makidisi — a professor of literature at UCLA, and a nephew of Edward Said – offers a grim prognosis for many standard Zionist tropes and exposes many true-crime realities of Israeli society as he examines four themes of the marketing of Israel as something “imagined, felt, and profoundly believed in [as] the embodiment of ecological regeneration, multicultural tolerance and democratic idealism.”
First, he takes on Israel’s greenwashing, wherein Israel supposedly “made the desert bloom” and brought the hills alive by planting millions of trees. Next is Israel, “beacon of democracy” and the “only democracy in the Middle East.” Third is “the theater of ‘pinkwashing,’ in which Israel presents itself to the world as a gay-friendly haven of cultural inclusion,” in contrast to an allegedly ultra-homophobic Palestinian culture. The fourth chapter shines light on American Zionists’ prolonged efforts to build a flashy “Museum of Tolerance” right on top of Mamilla Cemetery, the largest and most important Muslim burial place in Jerusalem.
In this last chapter, Makdisi gives “an encapsulated version” of the book’s overall argument: detailing a monumental expression of American Zionists’ emotional and political investment in affirmative denials however delusional they may be. The Museum of Tolerance project, for which then-California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger broke ground in 2004, is finally close to completion. In May, the museum, which styles itself an “International Lighthouse for Human Dignity,” mounted an exhibit called “From Darkness to Light,” which “explores the events of October 7 . . . a journey through hope and tragedy.”
The existence of Muslim graves on the worksite was at first simply denied. Then attempts were made to cover them up. Later some graves were surreptitiously removed. Their presence finally beyond dispute, the Supreme Court of Israel nonetheless greenlighted construction in 2008 with an only-in-Israel “suggestion” that the builders include an underground, horizontal, separation barrier between the foundation of the museum and the remaining graves below. (This may have been more to protect the Jewish “purity” of the site than to respect the graves.)
Having been caught desecrating graves and lying about it didn’t stop the sponsors, the Los-Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, home of the original Museum of Tolerance, but they had to rely heavily on a “hyperbolic and absurdly theatricalized investment in a discourse of ‘tolerance.’” Housed in hyper-modern buildings, the museum makes no mention of the old cemetery – thus effecting a perfect cultural erasure.
Also distorted in the museum’s discourse has been the very meaning of tolerance, a concept that generally describes people in power showing acceptance of people with little power themselves. Makdisi traces “a remarkable slippage” in the discourse whereby “the Jewish people” take the place of “the world,” and “threats facing humanity” are exclusively the threats facing “the Jewish people,” or more exactly the Zionist state. The hatred targeted by the museum is not hate in general it turns out but hatred of Jews, as it proudly claims to “put into practice the essential values of Judaism” by confronting “radical ideologies, global terrorism, and the resurgence of antisemitism.”
Tolerance, according to the museum and its admirers “isn’t about the Other at all, it’s about the self,” Makdisi says. Nonetheless, he rejects the idea that just hypocrisy (or hyper hypocrisy) is in play. Rather, he insists that museum supporters “must be seen as absolutely sincere” (his emphasis). More broadly, he assumes that most people who support Zionism and Israel are “decent people motivated by the best intentions and by what they believe to be a just cause.”
He notes that American Zionists who still buy into “affirmative denials” that drown Palestinian reality tend to react to “even the most principled criticisms of Israeli policy” with “eruptions of blind rage.” That’s because they have been “wrapped up in the most debilitating form of denial,” which leaves them blind to how horrifying the actions of Israel have become to most of the world. To Israelis, the reaction of horror is antisemitic. Simply put, clinging to the Fairy Tale, whether cynically or sincerely, makes a person stupid.
A foundational form of affirmative denial that took place in Israel in the years following the 1948 expulsion of most Palestinians was the planting of fast-growing, non-native trees to create dense forests that would conceal the ruins of more than 500 Palestinian villages destroyed during and after the Nakba. The Israeli obsession with tree-planting caused Mahmoud Darwish to quip, “My absence is entirely trees,” but to Westerners – especially Jewish communities regularly tapped for funding – it seemed dramatic proof of the Israelis’ love of nature and determination to beautify land allegedly neglected by the previous inhabitants. This is the most concrete example of what Makdisi calls “occlusion,” whereby Israel’s apparently virtuous tree-plantings were part and parcel of its vicious ethnic cleansing.
“Emptied of all otherness, the dreamed of space is necessarily seen as Self,” Uri Eisenzweig once observed and Makdisi cites. But many architectural and other remnants of the expelled Others can still be seen – a poignant reality explored in Israeli American Linda Dittmar’s 2023 memoir, Tracing Homelands.
Many ruins may outlast the trees, especially the water-guzzling, fire-prone European pines and Eucalyptus. Makdisi draws from A.B. Yehoshua’s story, “Facing the Forests,” which likens them to “A forest of solitudes. The pines stand erect, slim, serious, like a company of new recruits awaiting their commander,” having supplanted 40,000 acres of indigenous olive trees, and vast tracts of citrus and fruit trees cultivated for generations by Palestinians.
In brisk, sharp detail, Makdisi demonstrates how definitively delegitimized the claim that Israel is a “Jewish and democratic state” has been by the wave of authoritative apartheid reports published in the wake of Israel’s brazen reveal of its true agenda during the Trump presidency. Because Israel — unlike apartheid South Africa — has worked hard to obscure its apartheid nature, supporters still hide behind various token democratic features of its system, such as that Palestinian citizens of Israel can vote, or there is an “Arab” judge on the Supreme Court. But neither Israel, nor the U.S., nor any Zionist organization has dared to rebut the specific factual proofs of apartheid marshaled in thick reports from Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem, Amnesty International, et al. An attempt at a substantive refutation would not only fail, it likely would reveal to many that Zionism in Palestine “aimed from its very origins not to exploit but to eliminate indigenous Palestinian labor,” as Makdisi writes.
Israel has always been eager to show itself as unbeholden to non-Jews, as it fulfills the supposed “eternal longing” of Jews for a state of their own. Makdisi’s third chapter, on diversity, however, shows the state frantically trying to “pinkwash” its image. Thus, in 2019, Tel Aviv sought to win the title of “the gayest city on earth,” by hosting the Eurovision Song Contest, to “rebrand” itself as diverse and progressive, Palestinians be damned. The pinkwashing campaign was lavishly funded by the government and driven by market research in response to Israel’s sinking popularity in opinion polls of young Westerners. But far from certifying Israel’s pinkness, the 2019 Eurovision show flopped financially and failed to boost the polls – and the whole campaign spawned an anti-Zionist “decolonial queering” movement.
A “central element of Israeli pinkwashing” was to portray Palestinians, and Arabs in general, as stuck in a backward Orientalist past. So, the pinkwashers “asserted either that there are no queer Palestinians,” or if there are, “they think of Israel as their salvation.” Problem is, “no Palestinian, queer or otherwise, is allowed to enter and seek shelter in Israel.”
Makdisi shares many choice, cringe-worthy incidents. Israeli gay pornographer Michael Lucas is quoted as saying, for example, that “Porn is the only way to get attention to Israel . . . Nobody goes to Israel for Golda Meir.” As for Palestinians, Lucas says, “It’s common knowledge that Palestinians are violent murderers of gay people, so support for Palestine [is] support for the deaths of gay people.”
Denial works best when deniers believe what they’re saying. Likewise, denial works best when those listening want to believe what they’re hearing. While Israeli denials aim to convince, or frustrate outsiders, many Zionists, especially Americans, have an emotional need to believe that Israel’s counterfactual tales are true, or at least “truthy” enough as a national “narrative” or a representation of Israel’s supposedly modern and liberal ideals.
Apart from the ignorant or willfully ignorant, however, “no one believes the old platitudes any longer; no one listens to them,” Makdisi says. The disbelief has grown partly because critics, more numerous by the day, have totally debunked the myths. But the worst blows have come from Israel itself as it has “unpeeled one layer after another of the forms of denial . . . that formerly gave it cover.”
These blows multiplied with the ascent to power of fundamentalist, right-wing settlers in late 2022. They disdain liberal values and have encouraged fellow Israelis to ditch “the trappings of liberalism and progressivism and just come out as the violent racial enterprise it has been all along.” Their government immediately attacked icons of democracy and notions of diversity. Secular and non-right-wing Israelis launched massive protests but fixated on nostalgia for the era of fairy tales, rather than move toward real democracy and diversity, which would include Palestinians. Once Hamas stunned Israel’s military on October 7, Israelis of all stripes signed on to genocide as the correct response – no more talk of tolerance.
Israel today seems very far from finishing off the Palestinians but appears to have finally destroyed any hope that it will evolve toward honest history, or true democracy, diversity, or tolerance. Tolerance Is a Wasteland shows just what a sham Israeli liberalism always was and continues to be.
One Democratic State 