Great film, terrible speech

The Zone of Interest is one of the best films ever made about the Holocaust. It is intelligent, subtle, nuanced and thoughtful. It is not a film for beginners: it assumes a decent level of knowledge of what went on beyond those high, barbed wire topped walls of Auschwitz, and it defiantly forces its audience to think deeply about ourselves.

In contrast, the acceptance speech by Jonathan Glazer, the film’s creator and director, for the film’s Oscar win was trite, superficial and apologetic. As with so many attempts to compare the Holocaust to present day events, it misled where it sought to enlighten. He has been accused of betraying Holocaust victims and survivors; rather, I think he has betrayed his own film.

If you haven’t seen the speech, this is what Glazer said, reading from a prepared script:

"All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present, not to say look what they did then, rather what we do now. Our film shows where dehumanisation leads at its worst. It's shaped all of our past and present. Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people. Whether the victims of October 7th in Israel, or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanisation, how do we resist?”

The Zone of Interest is set in Auschwitz, the ground zero of human evil. The moral questions raised for humanity by that site of industrialised mass slaughter, the epicentre of a continent-wide system of camps, ghettos, train lines, factories, round-ups and mass shootings, all in the service of erasing an entire people from the face of the earth, will always fascinate and challenge. The philosopher Theodor Adorno declared that humanity is compelled “to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen.” This is what Glazer was trying to do, and he is far from the only person who reaches for the Shoah as a moral and political frame of reference to understand and explain the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But his message wasn’t so different from this placard, and I expect the person carrying it felt vindicated by Glazer’s speech. That’s hard to stomach.

The idea that the current Israeli military assault on Hamas is another Holocaust is everywhere. It is ubiquitous on every anti-Israel protest and on social media, and most of the people doing it do not have the same high motives as Glazer. For some, it is an exercise in finger-wagging at the Jewish people, as if we failed to learn the right lessons from our own near miss with extermination. For others, there is gleeful relief that they no longer need to listen to Jews going on about the Holocaust, because now those same Jews are behaving just like the Nazis did. Then there is the sheer visceral pleasure of doing something so monumentally offensive in the name of anti-racism and human rights. The only place a person of the left can wave a swastika around without losing their progressive status is on a march against the world’s only Jewish state. It’s how self-identifying anti-racists get to enjoy the transgressive thrill of pretending to be Nazis for a day.

Into this miasma of bad faith Holocaust comparisons steps Jonathan Glazer, with his carefully written and considered appeal to all of us to resist dehumanisation of each other. Let’s take him at his word: he said his film looks at “what we do now”. But there is no Holocaust now, no Auschwitz for us to ignore as we tend our gardens, and nothing remotely close. He said that the Israeli dead of 7 October and the Palestinian dead since are all victims of “this dehumanisation”, as if the killing and suffering in Israel and Palestine are due to a failure of human spirit: but there are real, material causes, a struggle over territory and sovereignty that cannot be solved by simply recognising the humanity of the other.

I have an allergic reaction to any comparison of the Shoah to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, whoever does it. I objected when Israeli diplomats at the United Nations wore yellow stars in a debate in October last year. I thought it demeaning when supporters of Israel tried to argue that Hamas are even worse than the Nazis, because the Nazis supposedly did not enjoy killing Jews. It’s historically incorrect and inevitably diminishes the Shoah. And I feel the same way about Glazer’s speech.

It is a paradox of the Holocaust that it weighs so heavily in our moral world that we are compelled to draw lessons from it, yet it was such a singular crime that any comparisons are bound to mislead. They inevitably simplify and flatten, encouraging people to ignore fundamental differences and draw false conclusions.

For example, Israel’s enemies - Hamas, Hizbollah and behind both Iran - are pursuing a project to eradicate Israel. This is not a controversial claim: they speak about it openly and proudly. “The Zionist regime is a deadly, cancerous growth and a detriment to this region. It will undoubtedly be uprooted and destroyed”, Ayatollah Khamenei promised in 2020. There was no comparable Jewish project to destroy Germany in the 1930s. No Jewish Hamas, no rockets, no mass murder and rape of German civilians by Jewish terrorists. The idea that the Jews wanted to destroy the German nation was a mainstay of Nazi antisemitic propaganda, but it was a vile, lethal fantasy. To suggest that the same dehumanisation that led to the Holocaust now shapes Israeli attitudes to Palestinians is to imply that this, too, is informed by a baseless conspiracy myth similar to the antisemitism that animated Nazism. But Hamas, Hizbollah and Iran do pose a military threat to Israel. You might argue that Israel’s response to this is unjustifiable and indefensible, but it’s still a real threat. The circumstances and causes of the current war are fundamentally different from those that led to Auschwitz.

This is not to deny that Israelis dehumanise Palestinians and that Palestinians dehumanise Israelis. That clearly happens, as it does in so many conflicts. But to glibly argue that this is all just the same, that the things that drive Israelis and Palestinians locked in this brutal, tragic war are just like the ideas that led to the Holocaust, is - ironically - to dehumanise Israelis and Palestinians. It ignores the specific motivations and sentiments of each and turns them into cyphers for our own moral and political quandaries.

It is telling that you do not see any other historical comparison being made to Israel and Gaza. The marches are not replete with placards comparing it to genocides in Armenia or Srebrenica. Glazer did not use his platform to warn against dehumanisation in the displacement of millions in Sudan or the civil war in Ethiopia. It’s obvious why: the primary victims of Auschwitz were Jews, Israel is Jewish, and so is Glazer. For all the appeals to universalism, if those three things were not all true, that speech would not have been made, and nor would all the other linking of Israel and the Holocaust that goes on.

Glazer didn’t refute his Jewishness in his speech, as some out-of-context quotes have claimed; but he did apologise for it, in a roundabout, unspoken kind of way. It was as if a film about Jewish victimhood and where anti-Jewish hatred leads cannot stand on its own, even at at time of surging global antisemitism, without its Jewish creator reassuring the world that this is not all about us. But in doing so, that’s exactly what it became.