By Liel Leibovitz
Friday, April 19,
2024
Oscar acceptance speeches are to culture what tax audits
are to a small business: nasty, brutish, and somehow never short enough. And
yet, when Jonathan Glazer took the stage at the 96th Academy Awards earlier
this year to accept the statuette for Best International Film, he delivered the
rare oration that was greater even than the movie he’d written and directed. In
a few short and glorious sentences that have since launched a thousand think
pieces, Jonathan Glazer told the truth.
Let us—because it’s been a moment since this lion of
cinema rose up and roared at Hollywood—recall Glazer’s fiery words.
“Right now,” he said from the stage of the Dolby Theatre,
“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?”
Some mirthless fusspots rushed to note that Glazer was
awfully incoherent for a man who’d just won a very big award for writing a
thinky film about Auschwitz called The Zone of Interest. Did he
mean, they queried, that he and his two producers, who stood beside him, are
themselves men who refute their Jewishness? Or merely that they refute the fact
that their Jewishness had been hijacked by those who cheer on Israel’s military
escapades? The meaning, the critics noted, was unclear.
Such nitpickery is missing the point. Glazer’s speech was
stunning and brave because it demonstrated, like few addresses before it, and
in front of 19.5 million viewers, the complete, total, and utter moral,
spiritual, and intellectual bankruptcy of vast swaths of mainstream liberal
Judaism.
In a few mumbly, stumbly sentences, Glazer laid out the
credo shared by so many of our self-appointed intellectual and moral betters.
In the beginning, goes this leftist theology, was “The Occupation,” the
conflict’s cardinal sin, committed, alas, by the Jews. And The Occupation beget
The Cycle of Violence, pitting the sons of Jacob against the sons of Ishmael,
both righteous and both rightfully aggrieved and both, curses, capable of
shedding blood. Israelis and Palestinians, in this telling, are coiled together
like a big, bruised Ouroboros, with each fresh outrage prompting the snake to
chomp just a bit further on its own tail. And to stop it, we need little more
than for brave men and women to straighten the lapel of their tuxedos, smooth
the hem of their dresses, put on a pin, and demand, politely but firmly, that
the killing stop.
You could spend hours, days even, amusing yourself by
tearing this worldview to shreds. You could note, for example, that the brave
and noble struggle to end the Israeli occupation magically began three
years before the occupation itself. For Israel took control of
Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza Strip in 1967, three years after an
Egyptian con man named Yasser Arafat declared himself a Palestinian and merrily
busied himself killing Jews. Or you could speak at length about the
three-decades-old travesty known as the Oslo Accords, a strategic blunder that
left thousands of Israelis dead, set up a despotic and murderous Palestinian
Authority that pays its citizens to slaughter Jews, and saw the Palestinian
leadership consistently, even comically, reject any attempt to reach anything
resembling reconciliation.
But don’t waste your time grousing at the Glazers of this
world. Theirs isn’t a reasoned, reasonable way of seeing things. It’s an
ecstatic faith, and though it loves wrapping itself in the gilded garbs of
objectivity, rationality, and universalist compassion, it is, at its core, a
cult.
Here are the liberal Jewish cult’s core beliefs:
·
The disparate hamulas, or feuding
clans, that occupy the towns and villages of Judea and Samaria secretly
possess, despite all appearances to the contrary, a distinct and innate sense
of peoplehood. They are the Palestinian People.
·
And though they have a funny way of showing it
whenever anyone makes them a concrete and binding offer, the Palestinian People
want just one thing: the establishment of a sovereign nation in its indigenous
homeland.
·
It’s a perfect—and perfectly pleasant—idea to
understand: Palestinians and Jews, Yin and Yang, their desires and frustrations
intertwined, eager to find some way to share their narrow and too-promised
strip of earth. And the only thing standing between them and Heaven are Very
Bad Men: Bibi Netanyahu and Itamar Ben-Gvir, but also the goons of Hamas and
the Islamic Jihad. There are, of course, Very Bad Men on both sides, both
equally contemptible.
·
The solution, then, is simple: Israel withdraws
from the occupied territories, the Palestinians declare a state, both sides see
the benefits of peace and prosperity, the Very Bad Men go away.
·
And only if and when that happens can we all be
Jews again, because, otherwise, our virtuous faith will be stripped of all its
pretty talk of tikkun olam and left instead with little but
the gross bits about not eating shrimp or not marrying non-Jews. Therefore, we
can’t really be Jews until we’ve fully embraced the Palestinians. QED.
In 1956, Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley
Schachter published a book titled When Prophecy Fails. They
wanted to see what happened when members of a lunatic cult realized that the
insane predictions at the core of their worldview were proven false. The cult’s
leader, a Chicago housewife named Dorothy Martin, claimed she was receiving
transmissions from the planet Clarion, telling her, with great certainty, that
the United States would be devastated by a biblical flood on December 21, 1954.
Showing up on a very dry December 22, the researchers observed a fascinating
phenomenon: The cult’s true believers were not dissuaded by having reality
curtly and resolutely slap them in the face. Instead, they doubled down on
their kooky beliefs. They might have gotten the date a bit wrong, they argued,
but Clarion never lied. The flood was coming. It was time to build big arks.
The Glazers in our midst ought to commiserate. Did
Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza lead to the rise of Hamas and the horrors of
October 7? Well, then, the answer is more withdrawals. Did billions of dollars
in aid allow the Islamist marauders to arm themselves to the teeth while
starving their own population? Send more cash. Did the Palestinian Authority in
the West Bank turn out to be a despotic, demonic tyranny? We need another one
in Gaza.
Laugh off the above at your own peril. After Glazer
delivered his cri de coeur, hundreds of Jewish artists,
intellectuals, and writers signed a petition denouncing his words. It was a
heartfelt effort, but it failed to get to the heart of the problem: Jonathan
Glazer, c’est nous.
We perfectly respectable and warm Jews who truly care
about our faith and our community and love Israel may not stand up in wartime
and hint at some sense of equivalency between victims and perpetrators, but
many of us live in precisely the same moral universe that Glazer so perfectly
captured in his speech—a universe in which Jewish life is unthinkable unless it
cares deeply about, and proposes some practical and laudable solution to, the
conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.
As the war in Gaza rages on, and as escalation simmers on
the Lebanese border, this imagined moral universe seems very far removed from
the real one on the ground. In reality, the overwhelming majority of Israelis
have now internalized a few hard truths:
·
There’s no such thing as a Palestinian people.
·
There’s no real difference between Hamas and
Fatah.
·
The overwhelming majority of Palestinians aren’t
interested in building a robust, flourishing state where they can live and work
in dignity, prosperity, and peace. They’re interested in righting what they
believe is the fundamental wrong of their existence, the Jewish state next
door, an abomination that must be destroyed no matter how long it takes or how
many must die in the process.
·
To protect itself and secure its peaceful
existence, Israel will have to seize territories it needs to control, in Gaza
and Lebanon alike. This will involve displacing more civilians and will lead to
more international condemnation.
·
But above all, it will mean the end of the
“peace process” and an era marked by the belief that we were marching, however
haltingly, into a warm embrace with the rest of the world.
Compare these insights to the tenets of liberal American
Judaism, and you’ll see they have almost nothing in common. And that,
precisely, was the point of Jonathan Glazer’s speech. It was incoherent not
because the Brit didn’t know better words, but because he realized, as good
artists often do, that we’ve reached a point in which words could no longer
make sense of our moment in time. It was no longer about contorting yourself
into ridiculous arguments like “I support Israel but oppose its government, its
policies, and the plurality of people who elected it.” It was now about picking
sides, simply and bluntly. Pick Team Israel, and you’re siding with a country
that must now do some very difficult things to defend itself against the
rapists of girls and the beheaders of babies. Pick Team Enlightenment, and,
sooner or later, you’re going to sound more or less like Jonathan Glazer,
screaming, “Please, Lord, don’t lump me in with my savage brothers.”
For a while, many of the nice and warm liberals in our
midst will try to resist this insight with fury. They’ll argue that only
machines, small children, and zealots think in binaries, and that responsible
people must acknowledge that reality contains multitudes. They’ll spend a lot
of time and energy arguing about whether this military operation was justified
or that IDF strike defensible.
They’ll bicker about Bibi, and they’ll say that it’s
important, especially in times of war, to lament for the innocent victims on
both sides. They’ll do this because their main goal is to restore the peace and
return to the hope of Oslo, the hope of being normal, just like everyone else.
But that’s no longer the main goal of Israeli Jews.
Israeli Jews no longer want to make peace. They want to win the war. They are
increasingly disabused of the notion, which had led them to one middling
military achievement after another and did nothing to keep them safe, that you
can negotiate with Hamas and Hezbollah, which means that you must allow these
enemies their dignity and refrain from hitting them as hard as you can.
Israel’s goal now, quite bluntly, is to wipe these organizations off the face
of the earth.
Americans, including most American Jews, are asking what
Israel’s plan is for the day after. To Israelis, the question seems obscene.
They’re not focused on who will govern Khan Younis when this is all over, or on
what to do with the Gazan refugees. They’re focused on surviving, a task that,
right now, calls first and foremost for the casting off of three decades of
illusions and for the absolute annihilation of their enemies.
How many American Jews will sign on for what comes next?
Jonathan Glazer’s bet is not too many, and he is, I fear, correct.
Somewhere on the margins, a few of us—a quarter? a
third?—will double down on Judaism, not only in our support for the Jewish
state but also in realizing that if the world is forcing us to choose between a
hard life as proud Jews and enjoying illustrious careers and material comfort
and the pleasant fragrance of our peers’ approval, we’ve no doubt how we want
to live.
And the rest? The rest will skulk away, rationalizing
their disengagement by blaming politicians or policies or circumstances or just
quietly retreating from any public showing of Jewish solidarity. They will, in
other words, refute their Jewishness, just as the prophet Jonathan Glazer had
foretold.
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