{"id":5908,"date":"2024-03-12T05:17:30","date_gmt":"2024-03-12T03:17:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/?p=5908"},"modified":"2024-03-12T05:17:30","modified_gmt":"2024-03-12T03:17:30","slug":"oscars-speech-smear-israel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/2024-03-12\/oscars-speech-smear-israel\/","title":{"rendered":"Oscars speech smear campaign shows lying for Israel is a good career move"},"content":{"rendered":"

Film director Jonathan Gazer’s acceptance speech went viral. But Jewish community leaders know there will be no professional damage for misrepresenting his words<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\"\"\n

Film director Jonathan Glazer poked a hornet’s nest with his acceptance speech this week as he won an Oscar for The Zone of Interest<\/em>, a film about the family of Auschwitz\u2019s Nazi commandant who live peacefully inside a walled garden, cut off from the horrors just the other side.<\/p>\n

Glazer says the film\u2019s point is not simply to drive home a history lesson. It\u2019s “not to say, \u2018Look what they did then.\u2019 Rather, \u2018Look what we do now.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

There could not be pithier summary of the difference between the universal moral impulse found in Jews like Glazer, and the particularist Zionist impulse found in the people who noisily claim to speak for the Jewish community \u2013 and are readily given a bullhorn to do so by western establishments.<\/p>\n

The first group says, “Never again.\u201d The second group cries, “Never again, unless it serves Israel’s interests.”<\/p>\n

And given Israel’s decades-long craving to dispossess the Palestinians of their entire homeland, that second \u201cNever again\u201d is as good as worthless. Palestinians were always in danger of erasure \u2013 not just territorially, as happened in 1948 and 1967, but existentially, as is happening now \u2013 by a state misleadingly declaring itself to be Jewish.<\/p>\n

Universal ethics sidelined<\/h3>\n

The assumption of many was that the West would never tolerate another genocide being conducted in its name.<\/p>\n

How misplaced that certainty was. The West is arming and funding the genocide in Gaza, and providing diplomatic cover at the United Nations. Its commitment to helping Israel carry out mass slaughter is such that many western states have frozen their funding<\/a> to the UN aid agency UNRWA, which is specifically charged with keeping Palestinians in Gaza fed and alive.<\/p>\n

Observers underestimated how far things had shifted. Over many decades, a universal ethics that drew on the lessons of the Holocaust \u2013 and solidified into international law \u2013 was intentionally undermined, sidelined and replaced by a particularist Zionist \u201cethics\u201d.<\/p>\n

That readjustment happened with the active connivance of western powers, which had no interest in promoting the universal lessons of recent history. For their own self-interested reasons, they preferred the particularist agenda of Zionism. It sat easily with the West\u2019s insistence that its privileges continue: the right to wage wars and steal the resources of others, the ability to trample on indigenous peoples, and the power to destroy the planet and other species.<\/p>\n

Ideology for dark times<\/h3>\n

In fact, Zionism was never centrally about Israel. It is a much broader ideology, rooted in western tradition and tailor-made for the darker times we are entering, in which systems collapse \u2013 of economies, of climate stability, of authority \u2013 poses new challenges to western establishments.<\/p>\n

Zionism started as a Christian doctrine centuries ago, and flourished in the Victorian era among British politicians. It views Jews chiefly as a vehicle to advance a brutal, end-of-times redemption in which they are to be the the main sacrificial victims.<\/p>\n

Though less conspicuously today, Christian Zionism<\/a> still shapes the climate in which today\u2019s politicians operate \u2013 as the large number of \u201cFriends of Israel\u201d in both major parties attests. Christian Zionism is the self-professed view too of many tens of millions of rightwing evangelicals<\/a> in the US and elsewhere.<\/p>\n

Whether in its Christian or Jewish incarnations, Zionism was always a \u201cmight is right\u201d, \u201claw of the jungle\u201d doctrine, drawing on Old Testament-style ideas of chosen-ness, divine purpose, and rationalisations for violence and savagery. It sits all too comfortably with the extermination of Palestinians in Gaza.<\/p>\n

No disgrace or shame<\/h3>\n

Jewish leaders and influencers in the West who champion more, not less, genocide in Gaza face neither disgrace nor shame. They are not shunned for cheering policies that have entailed so far the slaughter, maiming and orphaning of at least 100,000 Palestinian children. Why? Because they are articulating an Israel-focused version of an ideology that fits neatly with the worldview of western establishments.<\/p>\n

For this reason, Jewish influencers lost no time working to smear Glazer as a self-hating Jew by misrepresenting his speech \u2013 quite literally by editing out the parts that did not fit their particularist, anti-universal agenda.<\/p>\n

Referencing the victims both of October 7 and of Israel\u2019s attack on Gaza, Glazer told the Oscars audience: \u201cRight now we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation that has led to conflict for so many innocent people.\u201d<\/p>\n