English director Jonathan Glazer poses within the press room with the Oscar for Greatest Worldwide Characteristic Movie for “The Zone of Curiosity” in the course of the 96th Annual Academy Awards on the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, Calif., on March 10, 2024.
Photograph: Robyn Beck/AFP by way of Getty Pictures
The backlash in opposition to even the mildest-mannered protests for Gaza on the Oscars was predictable. Artists, musicians, and actors who wore a pin symbolizing a name for a ceasefire in Israel–Palestine are being known as antisemitic.
“The Zone of Curiosity” director Jonathan Glazer, nonetheless, went additional in his Oscars acceptance speech: He truly stated one thing. After successful the Academy Award for finest worldwide movie, Glazer objected that his personal Jewishness and the reminiscence of the Holocaust have been “being hijacked by an occupation which has led to battle for thus many harmless folks. Whether or not the victims of October — whether or not the victims of October the seventh in Israel or the continuing assault on Gaza.”
The most important offense right here, if the backlash is to be believed, was that Glazer dared converse of context — of the Israeli occupation. He was so daring as to counsel that historical past didn’t start on October 7.
As a letter signed by greater than 900 folks, described as Hollywood “creatives and professionals,” and revealed Monday made clear: The very phrase “occupation” was off limits.
“Using phrases like ‘occupation’ to explain an indigenous Jewish folks defending a homeland that dates again hundreds of years and has been acknowledged as a state by the United Nations, distorts historical past,” the letter stated, by no means thoughts that the navy occupation of the Palestinian Territories of the West Financial institution, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem, in addition to the Syrian Golan Heights, has been acknowledged as such by the United Nations since 1967.
However the letter went on to say that “occupation” did extra than simply distort historical past, it invoked historical past’s worst antisemitic tropes: “It offers credence to the trendy blood libel that fuels rising anti-Jewish hatred world wide, in the USA, and in Hollywood.”
The undeniable fact of Israeli occupation on Palestinian land is now apparently a “blood libel”: a millennia-old antisemitic canard, which rose to prominence within the Center Ages, that Jews homicide Christians to make use of their blood for cultish rituals.
To be in opposition to just about any coverage that Israel can declare to justify as self-defense could be antisemitic.
By the letter’s logic, it might subsequently be “blood libel” to oppose just about any Israeli coverage, from everlasting management of all Palestinians “from the river to the ocean” — which is what Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has stated he needs — to what human rights teams have acknowledged as an apartheid system. To be in opposition to just about any coverage that Israel can declare to justify as self-defense could be antisemitic.
If that weren’t sufficient, the letter is extraordinary within the sheer extent of its denialism. “Israel will not be focusing on civilians. It’s focusing on Hamas,” the authors wrote. Unmentioned, nonetheless, is that Israeli forces have killed over 31,000 folks, together with 13,000 kids, decimated each type of civilian infrastructure, introduced Gaza to the brink of mass hunger, and displaced over 1.7 million folks — to say nothing of the credible stories of journalists and lecturers being individually focused.
After all, these individuals are Palestinians: a phrase that the Hollywood letter doesn’t explicitly bar, however that nonetheless goes unmentioned.
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Essentially the most well-known among the many “creatives” are horror movie director Eli Roth and actors Debra Messing and Michael Rapaport, who’ve been outspoken of their help of Israel’s warfare on Gaza.
Extra notable are the record of executives and producers who’ve added their names — unknown to most of us trade outsiders. They included Spyglass Media Group head and former MGM CEO Gary Barber, former Paramount Photos CEO Sherry Lansing, producer and main tv government Gail Berman, in addition to former president of the Academy of Movement Image Arts and Sciences and the Producers Guild of America Hawk Koch.
Many on the record are screenwriters and showrunners. The brokers, producers, and executives denouncing Glazer, nonetheless, are participating in at least a bullying marketing campaign, leveraging their Jewishness particularly in opposition to his, of their numbers, to make baseless and excessive claims.
The Jewish author Sarah Schulman, commenting on the letter signatories, stated that the backlash betrays a “unusual childishness — an lack of ability to think about that they could possibly be a part of something flawed. A complete lack of ability to be self-critical.”
It’s the Zionist equal of what the late Jamaican-British thinker Charles Mills known as “white ignorance” — by which he didn’t imply issues folks with white pores and skin have no idea. Slightly, it’s “a cognitive tendency” that features as an epistemic block, immune to info that problem white supremacy and expose its violence. It leaves the individual “aprioristically intent on denying what’s earlier than them” — regardless of how unassailable the factor is. Mills careworn that “what makes such denial attainable, in fact, is the administration of reminiscence.”
Glazer’s movie — about how the household of SS officer and Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss constructed a home idyll on the gates of the focus camp — depicted this form of entrenched, ideological, and willful ignorance. The knee-jerk backlash to Glazer’s speech exposes it as soon as once more.