Knowing and Not Knowing about Israel’s Genocide in Gaza.

In an Anthropocene characterised by the instantaneous flows of monumental amounts of information, when knowing about the world has become possible for the majority of the world’s population, how is it possible for Israel and its allies to sustain genocide denial in the face of copious amounts of evidence of war crimes and violations of international law, that even the International Court of Justice could not ignore in its ruling of a plausible case of genocide in Gaza perpetrated by Israel? How has the UK navigated its own arms export regime, which prohibits the sale of arms where there is a clear risk that the arms could be used to commit or facilitate violations of international humanitarian law, to continue selling arms to Israel whilst it is perpetrating a genocide in Gaza? In short, how is it possible to simultaneously know and not know?

In this paper, I use Cohen’s (2001) ‘culture of denial’ to analyse the multifaceted ways in which not knowing about Israel’s genocide in Gaza is deliberately cultivated. As an active practice, not knowing was cultivated by European colonial states to deny and rationalise colonial crimes and to sustain a civilised image of Europe. As a settler colonial state, Israel has, out of a necessity to justify its existence as a free and democratic westernised nation, refined the practice of genocide denial, despite continuously perpetrating atrocities. In this paper I analyse various practices of denial used by Israel, from the destruction of evidence, the politicisation of language, to the spiral of denial.