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Photo: Robyn Beck/AFP via Getty Images
The reaction against Even the mildest protests over Gaza at the Oscars were predictable. Artists, musicians and actors who wore a pin symbolizing a call for a ceasefire in Israel-Palestine are being called anti-Semites.
However, “Zero Zone” director Jonathan Glazer went further in his Oscar acceptance speech: He actually said something. After winning the Academy Award for best international film, Glazer objected that his own Judaism and the memory of the Holocaust were “being hijacked by an occupation that has driven so many innocent people into conflict. “Whether it’s the victims of October, whether it’s the victims of October 7 in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza.”
The biggest offense here, if the reaction is to be believed, was that Glazer dared to talk about the context: the Israeli occupation. He was bold enough to suggest that history did not begin on October 7.
As a letter signed by more than 900 people, described as “creatives and professionals” from Hollywood, and published on Monday made it clear: the word “occupation” was prohibited.
“Using words like ‘occupation’ to describe an indigenous Jewish people defending a homeland that dates back thousands of years and has been recognized as a state by the United Nations distorts history,” the letter said, regardless of whether The military occupation of the Palestinian Territories of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, as well as the Syrian Golan Heights, has been recognized as such by the United Nations since 1967.
But the letter goes on to say that the “occupation” did more than simply distort history, but invoked the worst anti-Semitic tropes in history: “It gives credence to the modern blood libel that fuels growing anti-Jewish hatred around the world, in the United States, and in Hollywood.”
The indisputable fact of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land is now apparently a “blood libel”: an ancient anti-Semitic rumor, which rose to fame in the Middle Ages, according to which Jews murder Christians to use their blood in rituals of worship.
Being against virtually any policy that Israel might seek to justify as self-defense would be anti-Semitic.
According to the logic of the letter, it would therefore be “blood defamation” to oppose practically any Israeli policy, from the permanent control of all Palestinians.”from the river to the sea”—which is what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said he wants—to what human rights groups have recognized as an apartheid system. Being against virtually any policy that Israel might seek to justify as self-defense would be anti-Semitic.
If that were not enough, the letter is extraordinary for the magnitude of its denialism. “Israel is not attacking civilians. It is directed at Hamas,” the authors wrote. However, what is not mentioned is that Israeli forces have killed more than 31,000 people, including 13,000 children, decimated all types of civilian infrastructure, brought Gaza to the brink of mass famine, and displaced more than 1.7 million. of people, not to mention credible reports from journalists. and academics being individually managed.
Of course, these people are Palestinians: a word that the Hollywood letter does not explicitly prohibit, but which is not mentioned anyway.
The best known among the “creatives” are the horror film director Eli Roth and the actors. Debra Messing and Michael Rapaport, who have openly expressed their support for Israel’s war in Gaza.
More notable is the list of executives and producers who have added their names, unknown to most of us not in the industry. They included Spyglass Media Group head and former MGM CEO Gary Barber, former Paramount Pictures CEO Sherry Lansing, producer and major television executive Gail Berman, as well as former president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Producers Guild of America, Hawk Koch. .
Many on the list are screenwriters and showrunners. However, the agents, producers and executives who are calling out Glazer are engaging in nothing less than a campaign of intimidation, leveraging their Judaism specifically against their own, in large numbers, to make extreme and unsubstantiated claims.
The Jewish writer Sarah Schulman, commenting Regarding the signatories of the letter, he said that the reaction betrays a “strange infantilism: an inability to imagine that they could be part of something bad.” A total inability to be self-critical.”
It is the Zionist equivalent of what the late Jamaican-British philosopher Charles Mills called “white ignorance,” by which he did not mean things that white-skinned people do not know. Rather, it is “a cognitive tendency” that functions as an epistemic block, resistant to events that challenge white supremacy and expose its violence. It leaves the person “a priori intending to deny what is before him,” no matter how impregnable the thing. Mills noted that “what makes such denial possible, of course, is memory management.”
Glazer’s film – about how the family of SS officer and Auschwitz commander Rudolf Höss built a domestic idyll at the gates of the concentration camp – portrayed this kind of ingrained, ideological and willful ignorance. The knee-jerk reaction to Glazer’s speech exposes this once again.