The Oscars as a whole, and director Jonathan Glazer’s speech in particular, showed exactly how distorted the anti-Israel rhetoric surrounding the war has become, from apathy at best to outright calls for violence against Jews across the world at worst.
British-Jewish Glazer’s film The Zone of Interest is a German-language film about the family of the commandant at Auschwitz living on the death camp grounds during the Holocaust. The film won Best International Feature.
Reading from a written statement – standing next to the film’s producer James Wilson, who is also Jewish – Glazer said onstage in his acceptance speech that, “All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present: not to say ‘look what they did then,’ [but] rather ‘what we do now.’ Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst; it shaped all of our past and present.
Glazer continued: “Right now, we stand here as men who refute [both] their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people...” After pausing for applause, the winning director continued: “...whether the victims of October 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza – all the victims of this dehumanization. How do we resist?”
A short memory when it comes to Israel
That humanitarian aid is essential and that the people of Gaza are suffering is undeniable – but that’s not what Sunday night was about. What happened at the Oscars exemplifies how twisted it is that the world’s memory is so short: How did this start? Who started it? Who broke a ceasefire, killed 1,200 people and took innocents captive?
What Glazer does here, and what many do, is equate the October 7 attack – and Israel’s military offensive in response – under the umbrella of “dehumanization.” One of the worst acts of dehumanization the modern world has witnessed in recent history is precisely the calculated act of genocide carried out against the Jewish people during the Holocaust.
The difference is that during the Holocaust, the Jews, who were specifically targeted, had no fighting army, no tunnels, no ideology of a destruction of another people, and no way to prevent the attempted genocide carried out against them. October the 7th was intended to be a second such genocidal attack against Jews. A tragic and costly war is what followed – one that can end if Hamas frees the hostages, but nobody called for that at the Oscars.
Another thing Glazer did was identify the root cause of the suffering in this war as being the “occupation,” dumbing down a complicated regional conflict to a word thrown around way too easily and irresponsibly.
What this speech in particular, and the night in general lacked, was nuance. There was not a single hostage pin present at the Oscars, but there were plenty of red ones, symbolizing “Artists4Ceasefire.” Ramy Yousef, a writer, actor and producer, said that the pins called for “an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Palestine” to ensure safety.
While well-intentioned, this is lacking the nuance and knowledge necessary to carry this discussion. The fighting needs to end, but calling for a unilateral ceasefire helps nobody – except Hamas and other haters of Israel and the Jews. It leaves the hostages in Gaza in the hands of the genocidal terrorist group, as well as the rest of Palestinian society there, under a dictatorship that has been there for the last 16 years since it violently took over the Strip from the PA.
You can and should argue about Israel’s methods, about the power dynamic, about all of it, but you can’t argue that what was is what should continue to be.
It is not about convincing the world that Israel is right. There is room for debate on that, there are questionable acts carried out by individual soldiers, there are accounts – we can’t and shouldn’t ignore that.
But equating the Israel’s actions with those of Hamas is factually wrong, morally bankrupt, and empty apologetics.