#and who equates being against the slaughter of palestinians (including children) to being a nazi

[iowafashionweekbegins]

you know what. i was gonna get into an argument. but then i decided i need to keep my sanity so i deleted it. peace and love on planet earth.

[thatstormygeek]

These wars over universalism, proprietary trauma, exceptionalism and comparison are at the heart of South Africa’s landmark genocide case against Israel at the international court of justice, and they are also ripping through Jewish communities, congregations and families around the world. In one action-packed minute, and in our moment of stifling self-censorship, Glazer fearlessly took clear positions on each of these controversies. “All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present – not to say, ‘Look what they did then’; rather, ‘Look what we do now,’” Glazer said, quickly dispatching with the notion that comparing present-day horrors to Nazi crimes is inherently minimizing or relativizing, and leaving no doubt that his explicit intention was to draw out continuities between the monstrous past and our monstrous present. And he went further: “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 7 October in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza.” For Glazer, Israel does not get a pass, nor is it ethical to use intergenerational Jewish trauma from the Holocaust as justification or cover for atrocities committed by the Israeli state today. Others have made these points before, of course, and many have paid dearly, particularly if they are Palestinian, Arab, or Muslim. Glazer, interestingly, dropped his rhetorical bombs protected by the identity-equivalent of a suit of armor, standing before the glittering crowd as a successful white Jewish man – flanked by two other successful white Jewish men – who had, together, just made a film about the Holocaust. And that phalanx of privilege still didn’t save him from the flood of smears and distortions that misrepresented his words to wrongly claim that he had repudiated his Jewishness, which only served to underline Glazer’s point about those who turn victimhood into a weapon.

Zone offers an extreme portrait of a family whose placid and pretty life flows directly from the machinery devouring human life next door. This is most emphatically not a portrait of people in denial: they know what is happening on the other side of the wall, and even the kids play with scavenged human teeth. The concentration camp and the family home are not separate entities; they are conjoined. The wall of the family’s garden – creating an enclosed space for the children to play, and shade for the pool – is the same wall that, on the other side, encloses the camp. Everyone I know who has seen the film can think of little but Gaza. To say this is not to claim a one-to-one equation or comparison with Auschwitz. No two genocides are identical: Gaza is not a factory deliberately designed for mass murder, nor are we close to the scale of the Nazi death toll. But the whole reason the postwar edifice of international humanitarian law was erected was so that we would have the tools to collectively identify patterns before history repeats at scale. And some of the patterns – the wall, the ghetto, the mass killing, the repeatedly stated eliminationist intent, the mass starvation, the pillaging, the joyful dehumanization, and the deliberate humiliation – are repeating. So, too, are the ways that genocide becomes ambient, the way those of us a little further away from the walls can block the images, and tune out the cries, and just … carry on. That’s why the Academy made Glazer’s point for him when it hard-cut to Barbenheimer – itself a trivialization of mass slaughter – without missing a beat. Atrocity is once again becoming ambient. (One might see the entire Oscar spectacle as a kind of live-action extension of The Zone of Interest, a sort of Denialism on Ice.)