How denial sustains the liberal imagination of a progressive and
democratic Israel.
The question that this book aims to answer might seem simple: how can
a violent project of dispossession and discrimination be imagined,
felt, and profoundly believed in as though it were the exact
opposite––an embodiment of sustainability, multicultural
tolerance, and democratic idealism? Despite well-documented evidence
of racism and human rights abuse, Israel has long been embraced by
the most liberal sectors of European and American society as a
manifestation of the progressive values of tolerance, plurality,
inclusivity, and democracy, and hence a project that can be
passionately defended for its lofty ideals.
Tolerance Is a Wasteland argues that the key to this
miraculous act of political alchemy is a very specific form of
denial. Here the Palestinian presence in, and claim to, Palestine is
not simply refused or covered up, but negated in such a way that the
act of denial is itself denied. The effects of destruction and
repression are reframed, inverted into affirmations of liberal
virtues that can be passionately championed. In Tolerance Is a
Wasteland, Saree Makdisi explores many such acts of affirmation
and denial in a range of venues: from the haunted landscape of
thickly planted forests covering the ruins of Palestinian villages
forcibly depopulated in 1948; to the theater of "pinkwashing"
as Israel presents itself to the world as a gay-friendly haven of
cultural inclusion; to the so-called Museum of Tolerance being built
on top of the ruins of a Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem, which was
methodically desecrated in order to clear the space for this monument
to "human dignity." Tolerance Is a Wasteland reveals
the system of emotional investments and curated perceptions that
makes this massive project of cognitive dissonance possible.