Recently, I watched a horror movie called The Zone of Interest.
I usually have no desire to watch anything in the genre. But this one, unlike a film based on a fictional book by Stephen King, is instead based on history.
It’s not a good idea to ignore history. And sometimes, art can land on people in a way that reporting does not. Art can move people into action.
If it were up to me (and I wish it were) The Zone of Interest would be required viewing in every high school in the nation. Parents would be invited to watch it with their kids. Afterwards, there would be discussions on the dangers of silence.
My own silence is inexcusable, hence this essay. But back to the movie.
Since I’ve watched it, certain scenes have stayed with me. They float across my mind frequently.
If you know nothing about the premise, here’s a quick synopsis: the camera follows a German family in the idyllic countryside of Auschwitz, Poland, while a crematorium bellows smoke and ash next door. Occasionally the viewer hears faint screaming.
The head of the family is the commandant of Auschwitz. The commandant’s family is upwardly mobile. They live in a beautiful, walled compound next to the camp.
One scene stands out particularly:
The commandant’s wife is bursting with pride as she shows off her extensive gardens and swimming pool to her mother, who just arrived for a visit. They mention a Jewish woman, and the mother says something like,
“Maybe she’s next door.” Meaning the camp.
And then, so subtly we almost miss it, we learn the mother used to clean for the Jewish woman.
“Bingo,” I think. Hitler offered a prosperous Germany to working-class citizens and led them to believe if only their nation were rid of immigrant invaders, they, too, would be living the dream. The cleaner’s daughter has risen in Hitler’s Germany. People work for her now; the tides have turned.
Interestingly, all without dialogue, the mother puts two and two together. The glowing furnace of Auschwitz outside her bedroom window keeps her up at night. She leaves without saying goodbye, haunted by her cleaner.
We see her daughter read the note her mother leaves and watch as she throws it in the trash.
I was born 100 years after the end of our nation’s civil war. When I was a kid, 100 years was an eternity.
But my mother just died at the age of 94. A hundred years is no time at all.
One of my first thoughts after watching The Zone of Interest was that I was born only twenty years after the end of World War II, twenty years after Anne Frank perished at Bergen-Belsen.
She and my mother were the same age.
Suddenly, I understand Israel and its response in Gaza more than I did. The threat to Jewish lives is immediate, not historical.
I think of Gaza first thing in the morning.
Every time I wake up in my comfortable house in the United States, drinking coffee and listening to the birds through an open window that lets in a cool breeze, on my large cushy bed, with laptop plugged into the wall because I know the electricity is working; with my ability to go into a doctor’s office yesterday and get a steroid injection to treat my chronic pain; with my husband next to me, warm, breathing, alive and well; with a house so full of stuff my greatest luxury is giving unneeded things away and making space; with my ability to muse over what kind of fruit I want on my oatmeal this morning, I am aware of the kind of privilege I possess. I’m living an extraordinary life, and in this moment, I am safe and sound.
Over the weekend, I listened to an interview of a twelve-year-old boy in Gaza who was shot five times by the Israeli army at a food aid drop. NPR gave a warning before it started: viewer will hear sounds of a child in distress.
The boy’s body is riddled with shrapnel. He’s got a possible infection. He has episodes of pain so severe the interviewer noted his head was soaked with sweat as he cried and screamed for something to stop the pain.
There is nothing to help him. There is no pain medication available in the refugee camp.
But it’s not just pain he’s experiencing. There’s the hunger. His search for food got him shot.
Even before the war, part of his job was finding food for his family. He’s separated from his parents now and worries they don’t have enough to eat.
He picks weeds when he can, to boil them. That’s his one steady food source. Having water to boil is also a luxury.
There is no excuse for this level of suffering. It is unjustifiable.
I wish NPR hadn’t put a warning on the interview. Why on earth should we be protected from his suffering, especially as the United States just funded Netanyahu’s government with more billions for military aid?
We are a part of his suffering. And we will pay for it. It is inevitable.
When I was in sixth grade, we had to choose a religion and do an oral report. I chose Judaism. I fell in love with the religion, particularly these words,
Shema Israel Adonai eloheinu Adonai echad.
I received the highest grade in class. I thought I knew something about being Jewish.
How could I? I was living in a sleepy southern town with one synagogue so unobtrusive I still don’t know where it is. And although I may have known something about the religion, I knew nothing of the different aspects of being Jewish as an identity.
I still know nothing about what it’s like to be an Israeli.
One of the reasons I’ve been afraid to write about Gaza is my lack of knowledge about the experience of being Jewish while antisemitism is on the rise.
I did read an informative book a few years ago at the suggestion of someone titled, Jews Don’t Count. It was written by David Baddiel. His premise is that when it comes to racism, Jews are always left out.
When I was briefly on Twitter under my real name, I got an unexpected dose of it. I was attacked by a bevy of trolls for making what I thought an innocuous remark. One of them posted,
“She’s a journalist. I bet her real last name is Grau.”
Until then, I had no idea how blatant antisemitism was online. Because I never thought about it. I didn’t make it my problem.
This is where I am at fault.
I know Israelis and Jews all over the world are still reeling from the terrorist attack by Hamas. It was horrific. The relatives of the hostages captured have lived with months of unbearable worry.
And seven months into this war, how Netanyahu wages it is inexcusable. Both things exist in me at once.
I know the effect trauma has had on my brain. I know the effect of war on my father, and how he brought the war back with him, into our home. I understand what the battery acid of untreated trauma can do to people.
When my life was threatened in New York City on 9/11, some of my politics changed on a dime. I spent hours looking at the Towers burn and waiting to treat masses of injured people who never arrived.
And I had a new thought: I felt I understood why peace in the Middle East is so elusive. Fight or flight only has to kick in once to turn into a lifetime of defending yourself at all costs. I was experiencing one day—one—of what it’s like to live under attack.
Israelis and Palestinians spend their lives under threat from each other.
I didn’t have countless days of walking down the street wondering if a bomb was going to drop. I didn’t have years of wondering when the next attack would occur. Until 9/11, it didn’t occur to me I’d ever be affected on United States soil by war, unless through nuclear attack.
War made an emotional sense to me in a way it never had before.
I never voted for him, but suddenly I was willing to listen to George W. Bush. When we invaded Iraq, I supposed there was a far greater reason than could be publicly stated on the news.
I trusted the president to have our best interests at heart. I trusted he was taking actions to protect us and chose to give him the benefit of the doubt.
We all know how that turned out. I said,
“Never again.”
Never again would I be a victim of fearmongering. Fear is a powerful tool to use against citizens. And if you inspire fear in traumatized people, it’s easy for them to support anything to protect themselves.
If you prefer to turn your eye from the Palestinians in Gaza—half of them children—trying to survive while under bombardment, writhing in pain with no relief, with sewage in the streets and no food and very little water; if you’re fine with that because Hamas attacked first, and 30,000 dead Gazans don’t make up for 1,200 dead Israelis, please consider this:
It’s not working.
There are still Israeli hostages being held by Hamas seven months later. Hamas is not defeated.
But the likelihood of some of those children in Gaza turning into card-carrying members of terrorist groups bent on destroying the two governments responsible for their abject misery is very high. If you want a recipe for how to breed a terrorist, starve a child who has lost his entire family to bombing.
There are people who will point out there’s a difference between terrorism and war. Do you think it matters to a child who has lost everything and doesn’t have clean water to drink?
Nothing fueled ISIS membership more than the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Young Sunni men seeking retribution for their dead fathers joined in droves. A vacuum of leadership was created, and ISIS stepped in and scooped up their minds.
If I were a Palestinian in Gaza who happened upon a United States newspaper this week, it might occur to me that Americans care more about a governor who shot her dog than about the plight of Palestinian children.
And they’d be right.
I read with great interest the interview in The New York Times last week of the opposition leader in Israel, Yair Lapid.
My Senator, Chuck Schumer, is Jewish. He has called for new elections in Israel and believes Netanyahu has to go. He received blistering criticism for making this call.
And he’s right.
There is a way forward, but it doesn’t involve a leader who has used Hamas as a tool for arguing against the possibility of a two-state solution. It doesn't involve a leader who has illegally annexed Palestinian land for Jewish settlements. It doesn’t involve a leader who has kept the people of Gaza imprisoned with inadequate water, sewage in the streets, not enough food, and an unemployment rate at 57%,
Netanyahu is violating international law. The ICC is considering a warrant for his arrest. How do we support him in good conscience?
We cannot. Yet we do.
In the end, a solution must be practical to work.
Israelis deserve to live in safety. Palestinians deserve the same, but we must first clear another hurdle: Palestinians deserve to live.
I do not know if two groups of highly traumatized people can negotiate a settlement together for a two-state solution. But we must find a way to get there, and Lapid at least supports this solution.
Netanyahu does not. There will never be any chance of peace with him in power.
I despise colonialism, exclusion, and have no use for religion.
But art can change a person, and I understand the need for the state of Israel more than I ever have. I understand the need for safety.
But Israel cannot dish out the unbridled persecution of Palestinians in return, for perpetuity, then call foul when it’s pointed out. It’s easy to lose sympathy for Israel under Netanyahu’s leadership.
War is personal. We’ll remember this when it comes for us again.
Elizabeth, you say re: Netanyahu "it doesn’t involve a leader who has used Hamas as a tool for arguing against the possibility of a two-state solution." The two state solution has been rejected many times before Netanyahu -- with Bill Clinton, Arafat was given almost every concession and in the end, it came to light that the various Palestinian governments (Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, the Palestinian Authority) don't want a Palestinian state nearly as much as they don't want the state of Israel to exist -- how can there be a two-state solution then? I am sure you have heard the saying (originally said I believe by Golda Meir) that "if the Arabs were to put down their weapons, there would be peace in the Middle East: if the Israelis were to put down their weapons, they would be decimated in a week." So how to proceed then?
The introduction with the Zone of Interest was so powerful. The connection to Hitlers promise to his people - if we get rid of the intruders…..
Also casting the difficulty of peace within the understanding of trauma - of both populations living in fear of each other every day of their lives. Just because a two state solution has failed before doesn’t mean that it is not necessary to find a way.
Thank you for your courage to write this and for increasing our awareness of the suffering in this war and the conditions that led to this war.