02/09/2025
The State of Denial. In psychoanalysis, denial is defined as ‘a defence mechanism in which an individual refuses to recognize or acknowledge objective facts or experiences. It’s an unconscious process that serves to protect the person from discomfort or anxiety.' Freud also referred to it as ‘disavowal’ - the rejection of a reality on account of its potentially traumatic associations. It’s also a speciality of the left brain, as McGilchrist has shown ('denial is a left-hemisphere speciality. Note that it is not just a blindness, a failure to see – it’s a wilful denial.’) What we are currently witnessing in Israel is not an individual with denial, but a whole society in wilful denial.
'Netanyahu claims there is “no starvation in Gaza” in extraordinary denial of growing hunger crisis’, reported the Independent in July. ‘“Beyond comprehension" for Israel to claim there is no starvation crisis in Gaza, Australia PM says' reported the Guardian. The deputy Israeli ambassador, Amir Meron, told journalists ‘We don’t recognise any famine or any starvation in the Gaza Strip’. Last week, Israeli brigadier general Amir Avivi told Channel 4 News that hunger in Gaza ‘Doesn’t exist at all.’ https://www.channel4.com/news/pictures-of-starving-gaza-children-are-fake-claims-former-israeli-general
'According to the Freudian description, the sufferer of denial knows the truth deep down but unconsciously pushes it away, out of awareness, because it’s too painful to deal with. This pushing-away is a process psychoanalysts call repression.'
Jung was familiar with this psycho-political phenomenon. He explained that projecting the ‘shadow’ – the negative aspects of the psyche – onto an enemy not only dehumanizes them but also creates a dangerous collective illusion that shields society from its own destructive tendencies, a phenomenon exploited by propaganda and mass media. ‘All human relationships swarm with these projections’, he observed. ‘Anyone who cannot see this in his personal life need only have his attention drawn to the psychology of the press in wartime’ (‘General Aspects of Dream Psychology', 1948).
He was largely referring to the Berlin Wall and the shadow-projections of West onto East, and vice versa, but he could just as well have been talking about that other great, dreadful, nefarious, evil, Wall of our times, the Gaza–Israel barrier (sometimes called 'the Iron Wall'). No one who has ever seen this structure can ever forget its ominous, dark, brutal character - that it was built at all is a sign of an already advanced pathology.
‘Our world is dissociated like a neurotic’, Jung observed, ‘with the Iron Curtain marking the symbolic line of division’ (in ‘Man and his Symbols’, 1964). 'It shows an alarming degree of dissociation and psychological confusion. What [man] fails to see is that it is his own vices, which he has covered up by good international manners, that are thrown back in his face … It is the face of his own evil shadow that grins at Western man from the other side of the Iron Curtain.’ Denial leads to repression, and we all know what repression leads to - the eventual Return of the Repressed.
We have seen yet another mark of that shadow this week, with the publication of the IPC’s ‘Famine Report’, confirming that there is now catastrophic famine in Gaza. In his moving and compelling speech announcing the findings, Tom Fletcher (Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator) confirmed that the UN has declared the highest level of famine in Gaza. It was, he said, ‘a famine caused by cruelty, justified by revenge, enabled by indifference, and sustained by complicity.’ Cruelty, revenge, indifference, complicity. What are these if not fundamental motivating psychological aspects to an ostensibly political war, again drawing attention to how - as both Jung and Freud knew - the inner and outer world constantly merge, form each other, invade each other. It's a powerful and eloquent speech, only 3 minutes long but encapsulating everything: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjVOnrnFxHo
Fletcher is also surely right to say that word ‘complicity’. Israel has acted with astonishing - dumb-founding - impunity, but it has only done this because it knows that neither America nor Europe will ever do anything to significantly - materially - stop it. Indeed both America and Britain have been facilitating the genocide by sending military equipment and aid to Israel, knowing the arms would be used in Gaza. Complicity in war crimes is also technically a war crime under international law (see the International Review of the Red Cross’s 2003 ‘Enforcing international humanitarian law: Catching the accomplices’). Keir Starmer, David Lammy, Joe Biden, and Donald Trump should all technically be standing trial in the Hague for what they’ve done.
Each new week of the criminal military occupation of Gaza seems to reveal a new low to Israel’s already broken and battered international reputation, a new war crime piled blithely onto the previous one. Just to list a few - from the BBC’s own chronicling of Israel’s atrocities, in Jeremy Bowen’s piece ‘Israel is accused of the gravest war crimes - how governments respond could haunt them for years to come’ (June 2025):
• According to Unicef, by January this year 14,500 Palestinian children in Gaza had been killed by Israel; 17,000 are separated from their parents or orphaned; and Gaza has the highest percentage of child amputees in the world.
• Israel has put severe restrictions on food and aid shipments into Gaza throughout the war and blocked them entirely from March to May this year. With Gaza on the brink of famine, it is clear that Israel has violated laws that say civilians should be protected, not starved.
• A British government minister told the BBC that Israel was using hunger "as a weapon of war". The Israeli Defence Minister, Israel Katz, said openly that the food blockade was a "main pressure lever" against Hamas to release the hostages and accept defeat. Weaponising food is a war crime.
• Mirjana Spoljaric, president of the ICRC, has been in Gaza twice since 7 October and says that it is worse than hell on earth. "Humanity is failing in Gaza," Ms Spoljaric told me. "It is failing. We cannot continue to watch what is happening. It's surpassing any acceptable, legal, moral, and humane standard. The level of destruction, the level of suffering.”
• More importantly, she says, the world is watching an entire people, the Palestinians, being stripped of their human dignity. "It should really shock our collective conscience … It will haunt us. We are seeing things happening that will make the world an unhappier place far beyond the region.”
• "It is no justification for a disrespect or for a hollowing out of the Geneva Conventions," she said. "Neither party is allowed to break the rules, no matter what, and this is important because, look, the same rules apply to every human being under the Geneva Convention. "A child in Gaza has exactly the same protections under the Geneva Conventions as a child in Israel.”
• The International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague: A panel of ICC judges decided that there were "reasonable grounds" to believe that Netanyahu and Gallant [his defence minister for the first 13 months of the war] bore criminal responsibility. "As co-perpetrators for committing the acts jointly with others: the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.”
• On 5 June, the US sanctioned four judges from the ICC in retaliation for the decision to issue arrest warrants.
• Lord Sumption, the former Supreme Court justice, noted that "Genocide is a question of intent. It means killing, maiming or imposing intolerable conditions on a national or ethnic group with intent to destroy them in whole or in part. Statements by Netanyahu and his ministers suggest that the object of current operations is to force the Arab population of Gaza to leave by killing and starving them if they stay. These things make genocide the most plausible explanation for what is now happening.”
• Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip, saying: "There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.”
• At least 181 journalists and media workers have been killed since the war started, almost all Palestinians in Gaza, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Israel won't let international news teams into Gaza.
• The latest figures from the ministry of health in Gaza record that Israel killed at least 54,607 Palestinians and wounded 125,341 between the 7 October attacks and 4 June this year.
• Ralph Wilde, UCL professor of international law, points out that an advisory opinion of the ICJ has already determined that Israel's presence in Gaza and the West Bank was illegal. - BBC, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0r1xl5wgnko
It’s an astonishing list of atrocities and war crimes - the deliberate targeting of civilians, of hospitals, of health and education infrastructure, of journalists, not to mention the constant mass bombing of women and children, sometimes even as they queued for the pittance of aid that Israel allows in, in a ludicrous, criminal venture that international aid organisations have described as ‘an utterly disturbing example of how humanitarian relief can be exploited for covert military and geopolitical agendas in serious breach of international law’ (‘UN experts call for immediate dismantling of Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’, August 2025)
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/08/un-experts-call-immediate-dismantling-gaza-humanitarian-foundation
Of course what the international community - the UN, the IPC, the International Criminal Court (ICC), the Geneva Convention - think is utterly irrelevant: Israel has demolished not only Gaza but the whole post-war liberal consensus, with the old, impotent structures left gaping open-mouthed at the horror and impunity Israel has entered into in the last two years, just as the civilians of Gaza are no doubt gazing in disbelief at how this has been allowed to happen.
It is easy, and right, to criticise Israel for their multitude of human rights violations, but we must not be guilty of denial and projection ourselves. The whole thing could have been stopped a year ago if Britain and America had cut all military ties with Israel, and stopped sharing intelligence information, as international law demanded. ‘UK Labour approved more weapons to Israel in three months than Tories did in four years’ reported the Middle East Monitor in May. https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20250517-uk-labour-approved-more-weapons-to-israel-in-three-months-than-tories-did-in-four-years/
And as Oxfam reported earlier this month, ‘The UK is supplying millions of pounds worth of arms to Israel. This makes it complicit in the killing of civilians taking place every day across the occupied Palestinian territory.’ https://www.oxfam.org.uk/get-involved/campaign-with-oxfam/gaza-israel-crisis-sign-petition-call-for-ceasefire-now/does-the-uk-sell-arms-to-israel/