Jonathan Glazer deserves all the fury for shaming Israel

I was at the Oscars when director Jonathan Glazer made his speech after winning a little bald man for his Holocaust film, “The Zone of Interest” — and I was furious.

Glazer stood up and in front of hundreds of celebrities said, “Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst. It’s shaped all of our past and present. 

“Right now, 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 October — whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?”, he added, with producer James Wilson and billionaire financier Len Blavatnik standing behind him.

I was enraged: Glazer, my fellow Jew, had equated the worst atrocity of the 20th century to the fight to save a Jewish homeland.

Yet in the Dolby Theatre, stars including Mark Ruffalo applauded, while Sandra Hüller, an actress in the movie, wept.

Finally, on Monday, and aside from a few outspoken Jews like Mayim Bialik and Michael Rapaport, Hollywood caught up with the anger which had burned inside me for days.

A raft of Jewish stars including Debra Messing, Eli Roth, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Julianna Margulies, put their name to a letter which eloquently tells Glazer what he got so very wrong — and turns his words against him.

“We refute our Jewishness being hijacked for the purpose of drawing a moral equivalence between a Nazi regime that sought to exterminate a race of people, and an Israeli nation that seeks to avert its own extermination,” they say in the letter, signed by 500 Jewish creatives.

“The use of 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.”

Glazer gives “credence to the modern blood libel” they say. 

“The current climate of growing anti-semitism only underscores the need for the Jewish State of Israel, a place which will always take us in, as no state did during the Holocaust depicted in Mr. Glazer’s film,” they add.

Glazer has yet to make a comment on the new letter. Indeed, he has yet to comment on his speech at all.

Even the movie’s producer, Danny Cohen, a former senior executive at the BBC, has disowned Glazer’s comments, saying he “fundamentally” disagrees.

“A lot of people feel upset and angry about it. And I understand that anger frankly,” Cohen said in an interview on the “Unholy” podcast. Cohen messaged me this week to say, “I’m keen for the focus to return as soon as possible to the remarkable film itself.”

If only the applauding celebrities had thought about what Glazer was really saying.

But was it a surprise that they didn’t?

As I looked around at the Oscars, I could see no yellow ribbons calling for the safe return of the hostages taken by Hamas on October 7.

But there were red pins, representing a bleeding hand, pushed by the Artists4Ceasefire group and being worn by Ruffalo and others: Billie Eilish, her brother Finneas and the director Ava DuVernay.

The Israel government claimed on X that the red hands were actually a reference to the lynching of Israeli soldiers. “This symbolism isn’t a coincidence,” it said.

No-one in good conscience can sanction the murder of babies, children, wives and mothers; innocents, whether in Israel or in Gaza.

But Glazer did not need to equate the Israel-Hamas war with the Holocaust.

There is no-one in Israel whom I have spoken to who wants this conflict. No-one who wants to go to bed at night and worry about the sound of the rockets screaming through the air. No one who wants more loved ones, friends, and friends of friends lost.

This is a horror show – anyone will agree.

But Glazer did not need to take the story of millions of victims and — as if it were putty in his hands — mould it into something that fitted his political vision.

Worse, in a town that was built by Jews, someone — and a Jew at that — ignored the history we know so well: that Israel’s existence cannot be severed from the death of six million Jews.

There is a meme doing the rounds that says, “A Zionist Jew and an Anti-Zionist Jew walk into a bar. The bartender says ‘We don’t serve Jews’”.

And it’s true.

I can’t wish to change Glazer’s mind — hopefully we’re still allowed our own thoughts — but what I would want to make clear is that this fight brought by Hamas against Israel is a fight to rid the world of Israel AND Jews.

Let’s not forget, as he seemed to, that Hamas called for a Jewish genocide in its original charter. 

If Hamas’ modern version of the cattle truck came to send Glazer off another Auschwitz, what would he do then?