Last week, Variety reported that “more than 1,000 Jewish creatives, executives and Hollywood professionals have signed an open letter denouncing Jonathan Glazer’s ‘The Zone of Interest’ Oscar speech.” The angry letter is a tight script for a real-life drama of defending Israel as it continues to methodically kill civilians no less precious than the signers’ own loved ones.
A few ethical words from Glazer while accepting his award provoked outrage. He spoke of wanting to refute “Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation, which has led to conflict for so many innocent people,” and he followed with a vital question: “Whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?”
Those words were too much for the letter’s signers, who included many of Hollywood’s powerful producers, directors and agents. For starters, they accused Glazer (who is Jewish) of “drawing a moral equivalence between a Nazi regime that sought to exterminate a race of people, and an Israeli nation that seeks to avert its own extermination.”
Ironically, that accusation embodied what Glazer had confronted from the Academy Awards stage when he said that what’s crucial in the present is “not to say, ‘Look what they did then,’ rather, ‘Look what we do now.’”
But the letter refused to look at what Israel is doing now as it bombs, kills, maims and starves Palestinian civilians in Gaza, where there are now 32,000 known dead and 74,000 injured. The letter’s moral vision only looked back at what the Third Reich did. Its signers endorsed the usual Zionist polemics – fitting neatly into Glazer’s description of “Jewishness and the Holocaust” being “hijacked by an occupation.”
The letter even denied that an occupation actually exists – objecting to “the use of words like ‘occupation’ to describe an indigenous Jewish people defending a homeland that dates back thousands of years.” Somehow the Old Testament was presumed to be sufficient justification for the ongoing slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, most of whose ancestors lived in what’s now Israel. The vast majority of 2.2 million people have been driven from their bombed-out homes in Gaza, with many now facing starvation due to blockage of food.
Hellbound and Down 