The film "Zone of Interest" by the British director Jonathan Glazer, winner of this year's Oscar, has caused considerable controversy among writers and professionals in the fields of culture and cinema in Britain and America. Not because of its content, cinematography, or character construction, but because of what its director said when he received the Oscar.
Glazer (who is Jewish by birth) stated that the understanding of his film is not only achieved by dealing with the past or historical atrocities, but also by viewing it in the context of what is happening in Gaza today. He expressed his rejection of the use of the "Holocaust" to justify ongoing wars, dehumanization, and the perpetration of crimes.
In response, more
than a thousand cinema personalities who identified themselves as Jewish
rejected the comparison they said he made between the Nazi Holocaust and the
war in Palestine since October 7, 2023.
On the other hand, intellectuals and progressive Jewish organizations defended Glazer, arguing that the refusal to confront the past with the present and the attempt to confiscate the memory of the "Holocaust" are nothing but attempts to hide the crimes and the "genocidal war" waged by Israel against the Palestinians.
Naomi Klein, the Canadian feminist journalist and academic, wrote a powerful article in The Guardian in which she compared people's habit of living close to the genocide they know is happening (separated from its horror by a wall), as depicted in the film, with our lives today, just a few walls away from Gaza, where acts of genocide have been occurring for almost six months now, yet no one has intervened to stop them.
