Even Mentioning “Occupation” at the Oscars Is Antisemitic, Some Jewish Hollywood Figures Say

The backlash against even the mildest-mannered protests for Gaza at the Oscars was predictable. Artists, musicians, and actors who wore a pin symbolizing a call for a ceasefire in Israel–Palestine are being called antisemitic.

“The Zone of Interest” director Jonathan Glazer, however, went further in his Oscars acceptance speech: He actually said something. After winning the Academy Award for best international film, Glazer objected that his own Jewishness and the memory of the Holocaust were “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.”

The largest offense here, if the backlash is to be believed, was that Glazer dared speak of context — of the Israeli occupation. He was so bold as to suggest that history did not begin on October 7.

As a letter signed by more than 900 people, described as Hollywood “creatives and professionals,” and published Monday made clear: The very word “occupation” was off limits.

“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,” the letter said, never mind that the military occupation of the Palestinian Territories of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem, as well as the Syrian Golan Heights, has been recognized as such by the United Nations since 1967.

But the letter went on to say that “occupation” did more than just distort history, it invoked history’s worst antisemitic tropes: “It gives credence to the modern blood libel that fuels growing anti-Jewish hatred around the world, in the United States, and in Hollywood.”

The indisputable fact of Israeli occupation on Palestinian land is now apparently a “blood libel”: a millennia-old antisemitic canard, which rose to prominence in the Middle Ages, that Jews murder Christians to use their blood for cultish rituals.

To be against virtually any policy that Israel can claim to justify as self-defense would be antisemitic.

By the letter’s logic, it would therefore be “blood libel” to oppose virtually any Israeli policy, from permanent control of all Palestinians “from the river to the sea” — which is what Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said he wants — to what human rights groups have recognized as an apartheid system. To be against virtually any policy that Israel can claim to justify as self-defense would be antisemitic.

If that were not enough, the letter is extraordinary in the sheer extent of its denialism. “Israel is not targeting civilians. It is targeting Hamas,” the authors wrote. Unmentioned, however, is that Israeli forces have killed over 31,000 people, including 13,000 children, decimated every form of civilian infrastructure, brought Gaza to the brink of mass starvation, and displaced over 1.7 million people — to say nothing of the credible reports of journalists and academics being individually targeted.

Of course, these people are Palestinians: a word that the Hollywood letter doesn’t explicitly bar, but that nonetheless goes unmentioned.

The most well-known among the “creatives” are horror film director Eli Roth and actors Debra Messing and Michael Rapaport, who have been outspoken in their support of Israel’s war on Gaza.

More notable are the list of executives and producers who have added their names — unknown to most of us industry outsiders. They included Spyglass Media Group head and former MGM CEO Gary Barber, former Paramount Pictures CEO Sherry Lansing, producer and major television executive Gail Berman, as well as former president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Producers Guild of America Hawk Koch.

Many on the list are screenwriters and showrunners. The agents, producers, and executives denouncing Glazer, however, are engaging in no less than a bullying campaign, leveraging their Jewishness specifically against his, in their numbers, to make baseless and extreme claims.

The Jewish writer Sarah Schulman, commenting on the letter signatories, said that the backlash betrays a “strange childishness — an inability to imagine that they could be part of anything wrong. A total inability to be self-critical.” 

It is the Zionist equivalent of what the late Jamaican-British philosopher Charles Mills called “white ignorance” — by which he did not mean things people with white skin do not know. Rather, it is “​​a cognitive tendency” that functions as an epistemic block, resistant to facts that challenge white supremacy and expose its violence. It leaves the person “aprioristically intent on denying what is before them” — no matter how unassailable the thing is. Mills stressed that “what makes such denial possible, of course, is the management of memory.”

Glazer’s film — about how the family of SS officer and Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss built a domestic idyll at the gates of the concentration camp — depicted this sort of entrenched, ideological, and willful ignorance. The knee-jerk backlash to Glazer’s speech exposes it once again.

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