Wijsgerig Perspectief - Volume 65, Issue 3, 2025

In this brief essay, we posit the thesis that contrary to what liberalism promised the world, genocide is enabled by liberalism by means of denialism. What we mean by denialism is the ability to minimize, deny, or distance itself from responsibility for its material and discursive harm. We argue the roots of liberal denialism are to be found in Protestant political theology and specifically in three central concepts: individualism, intentionality and privatization. These are key features of liberal ideology, institutionalized in the law, enabling the downplaying of the genocide that Israel and its allies are inflicting on Palestinians. The promise of an end to genocide is post-Shoah liberalism’s ‘non-performative performance’ (S. Ahmed), a cruel illusion which gave false hope to liberal innocence after the Shoah. This phenomenon is first demonstrated by means of the post-Shoah international legal order in relation to the genocide in Gaza. Secondly, in order to understand liberal denialism we analyse its ideological foundations and consider its roots in Protestant political theology that privileges individualism, intentionality and privatization as a form of depoliticization. Finally, by way of conclusion, we return to what has led us to write – the genocide of Palestinians – in order to unmask liberalism’s role and responsibility for it.

The unconditional military, financial, diplomatic, economic and academic complicity of the colonial West, led by the U.S., is the main factor enabling Israel’s livestreamed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, but it is not the only one. Epistemic complicity, the obsessive amplification of Israel’s repetitive falsification of and illogical justifications for its atrocities against Palestinians – whether discursive, argumentative, or otherwise – is another. Yet another factor is the enormous influence of the special interest (lobby) groups that ensure the flow of arms and money to Israel no matter whether it serves US interests or not. But there’s another foundational factor: the entrenched shared ‘ethics’ stemming from the centuries-old history of European and Euro-American dehumanization, colonial subjugation, even extermination of non-European nations. On the other hand, millions in the West have expressed meaningful solidarity with Palestinian liberation, motivated by a planetary ethics that realizes that the most profound ethical obligation is to do no harm and to stop and repair harm done in their name. They are contributing to a counter-ethics needed to resist the monopolization of ethics and knowledge by oppressive groups and to chart a more ethical path to freedom, justice and unmitigated emancipation.

This essay argues that the ongoing genocide in Palestine must be understood as part of a broader historical continuum of neocolonial violence and indigenous resistance across the Middle East. It challenges hegemonic conceptual framings of genocidal violence that dominate academic and public discourse in the Global North by discussing how they obscure the structural entanglement between genocidal violence and neocolonial interventions in the region. Grounding its analysis in a perspective from the Iranian Independent Left, the essay highlights a longstanding tradition of resistance that has confronted not only imperialist and neocolonial powers but also regional ethno-religious despotisms. The essay advances three central claims. First, hegemonic frameworks of genocide rely on idealized binaries of victims and saviours, erasing the political agency of the oppressed. Second, these frameworks conceal the role of neocolonial interventions in producing and sustaining genocidal warfare. Third, dismantling these structures requires centring the ethics and politics of indigenous liberation movements across the region. The essay, rather than offering abstract solidarity, amplifies a critical voice grounded in the region’s enduring struggles and calls for a radical rethinking of how genocide, resistance, and liberation are theorized and confronted.