Tolerance Is a Wasteland

Palestine and the Culture of Denial

Saree Makdisi

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English

University of California Press
24 September 2024

History; Middle Eastern history; Colonialism & imperialism; Islamic studies; Political science & theory

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.

By: Saree Makdisi
Imprint: University of California Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 18mm
Weight: 363g
ISBN: 9780520409699
ISBN 10: 0520409698
Pages: 244
Publication Date: 24 September 2024
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Saree Makdisi is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UCLA. His previous books include Making England Western: Occidentalism, Race and Imperial Culture; Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation; and Reading William Blake.

Reviews for Tolerance Is a Wasteland: Palestine and the Culture of Denial

""Tolerance is a Wasteland: Palestine and the Culture of Denial is an incisive and provocative treatise on the culture of denial that informs a series of contemporary affects, practices, and relations about Israel and Zionism."" * Ethnic and Racial Studies * ""This is a book as much about the martial politics that structure liberalism as it is about Zionism and the settler colonial project in Palestine. Makdisi unravels the productive and destructive forces that normalize this project as part of global politics. Hence, the book is as much about us—the inheritors of liberalism sitting in Europe and North America—as it is about Palestine or the Israeli state."" * International Affairs * ""Readers familiar with and sympathetic to critiques of Israel’s history of displacement and coercive control of the non-Jewish population of Palestine can appreciate the author’s approach."" * CHOICE * ""An immensely satisfying book. . . . powerful and necessary."" * Arab Studies Quarterly * ""The work of a witty and allusive maestro at the height of his powers."" * Against the Current * ""An immensely satisfying book. . . . powerful and necessary."" * Arab Studies Quarterly *