In this essay, contributor Dennis Claxton traces the history of Hollywood’s critically important role in mythologizing Israel
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I. The 96th Academy Awards were presented on March 10, 2024 at the Dolby Theater on Sunset Boulevard in the Hollywood neighborhood of Los Angeles. I watched it for the first time in years. The few times I ever saw it before were when the gala came on while I was between terms at school. It was just the kind of insipid thing you can watch without paying attention, perfect for forgetting whatever you were avoiding working on. More recently, for a couple of years, I lived a few blocks from the Dolby. Come Oscar night I would either draw the curtains and stay inside or go spend time in another part of town.
This year I watched on my computer, foregoing the Oscar parties that range from free admission at your local spots, to a $200,000 “Actor package” offering three nights at the Beverly Hilton; starring in a short film with a celebrity; a paparazzi experience; hair and makeup done by another celebrity; private security; “and more!” Oh for old-time Hollywood decadence.
I watched this year for one reason only – to see if anyone would say anything about Gaza. To my surprise, almost shock, someone did. It was Jonathan Glazer, director of Zone of Interest, winner of the award for Best International Feature Film. The movie portrays the day-to-day family life of Rudolf Höss, the commander of the Auschwitz concentration camp, located next door to the home he shared with his wife and children.
In a brief speech that gathered more than a modicum of applause and was not booed, Glazer tried to tie the themes of the movie in with what is happening in Gaza. The backlash was quick, but toothless. Detractors undoubtedly thought they were taking a righteous and unimpeachable stance, but all they could come up with were empty cries of antisemitism, of the type that have lost most of whatever bite they ever had. Such cries are so weak we hear them more than ever now, repetition being the only thing that still gives them any stolen gravity whatsoever.
Glazer’s speech was just over one minute long. Here is what he said that drew the public response:
All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present
— not to say, “Look what they did then,” rather, “Look what we do
now.” Our film shows where dehumanization leads, at its worst. It
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. [Applause.] 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? [Applause.]
A week later an open letter was published in the trade magazine Variety. The headline read, “Over 450 Jewish Creatives and Professionals Denounce Jonathan Glazer’s ‘Zone of Interest’ Oscars Speech in Open Letter.” Variety had to struggle a bit to pull out some names from the signatories that people might recognize. Of course, Michael Rappaport and Debra Messing – technically known as actors, but now keeping busy as mouthpieces for disinformation – signed. The letter reads, in full:
We are Jewish creatives, executives and Hollywood professionals.
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.
Every civilian death in Gaza is tragic. Israel is not targeting
civilians. It is targeting Hamas. The moment Hamas releases the
hostages and surrenders, is the moment this heartbreaking war
ends. This has been true since the Hamas attacks of October 7th.
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.
It gives credence to the modern blood libel that fuels a growing
anti-Jewish hatred around the world, in the United States, and in
Hollywood. The current climate of growing antisemitism 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.
It’s all there — blood libel, antisemitism, ancestral homeland, not targeting citizens. As the edifice supporting occupation and apartheid continues to crumble day by day, it becomes ever more clear how fragile it has always been. Israeli officials lie routinely and have done for many decades. This open letter participates in the lies and the biggest here is one of omission. The only reference to Gaza and Palestinians in the letter is in the assertion that citizens are not being targeted, only Hamas. This is an absurd claim designed, as if in a confidence game, to draw attention away from ongoing mass murder — from recognizing that by late April, soon after the letter was written, more than 30,000 Palestinians had been killed, more than 77,000 wounded, and more than 10,000 missing after October 7. The vast majority of casualties were and still are women and children.
Jonathan Glazer asked, how do we resist? He could have added, how do we resist when the reality of this horror is so readily and routinely denied and dismissed.
II. Hollywood has been happy to assist in creating and perpetuating the modern myth of Israel since at least the 1960s. That Israel is dependent upon intense and ongoing controlled messaging to get away with murder and oppression for almost a century is now right out in the open. On May 3, 2024 Mitt Romney and Anthony Blinken talked with each other at a forum presented by the McCain Institute in Sedona, Arizona. Romney asked Blinken:
I mean, typically the Israelis are good at P.R. What’s happened
here? How have they—how have they, and we, been so ineffective
at communicating the realities there and our point of view?
Blinken blamed social media and said that the “emotion and impact of images” has a very challenging effect on the narrative. Blinken is such a loaf of milquetoast. Romney agreed about the challenging effect and offered that this is why there was such overwhelming support for banning TikTok. No surprise that this was not true. From 4 days later, May 7, 2024:
Overall, 51% in this ABC News/Ipsos poll say the U.S.
government should try to force a sale of the popular app; 46% say
it should not… just 39% of adults younger than 30 favor a ban,
rising steadily with age to seven in 10 seniors, the poll finds.
Young women are especially skeptical: Two-thirds of women
younger than 30 oppose a ban, compared with 52% of men in
this age group. Differences by sex disappear for people age 50
and older.
A question this exchange brings to mind is whether Romney is also wrong when he says the Israelis have always been good at P.R. Are they really saying anything now that is very much different from what they always have? One thing is certain, millions of people no longer believe them and are publicly expressing their disbelief. This is something of a bump in the road for a power structure in the U.S. that has long been accustomed to assuming no one will even faintly question their support of Israel. Problematic or no, the carnage goes on.
III. That Hollywood intentionally creates or helps create myriad propaganda efforts has never really been a secret. The U.S. military has certainly never tried to hide it. For example, in 1988 Lieutenant Colonel Bob Osborne was a student at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania. That year Colonel Osborne submitted a thesis with the title Propaganda Tool: The Hollywood War Movie and Its Usurpation By TV. The Colonel’s abstract reads, in part:
The motion picture industry, known to Americans as Hollywood,
has played a unique role in molding the American public during a
national crisis. At no other time in American history was the
Hollywood film feature used to this extent as in its role as a
propaganda machine to influence the will of the American people
in World War II. This study seeks in general examination the role
these feature films played in World War II in bonding American
public opinion into national will toward the war effort.
Colonel Osborne adds that he wants to “draft a conclusion as to the use of the motion picture as a propaganda tool in the future national crisis in America.” This last should catch our attention because it says much about military thinking. There is always an assumption that we will face a “future national crisis.” That is one indispensable way they stay in business.
Hollywood’s greatest gift to Israeli nationalists was presented in 1960. That year United Artists released Exodus, a classic Hollywood epic based on the novel by Leon Uris. The movie stars Paul Newman, who plays the Jewish hero he always wanted to be. Uris’s novel was published in 1958. It was an international hit and the biggest bestseller in the United States since Gone with the Wind 20 years earlier. These two books dance with each other in that one tries to salvage pastoral scenes of a gallant South, while the other celebrates the founding of a freshly minted country. In the movie Exodus, this theme is explicit and announced loudly and proudly at the beginning of the trailer, which describes the story in voiceover, with no trace of introspection, as “An epic of our time – the birth of a nation.”
This theme is correlated with a second one of scrappy Jewish fighters, in small numbers, emerging triumphant. The idea that Israel’s continued existence depends on a never-ending fight for survival with untold enemies is an essential part of the fabric of Israeli nationalism. Now that the mask is slipping the rhetoric begins to shift. On Holocaust Remembrance Day (May 5, 2024), Benjamin Netanyahu proclaimed:
Even if Israel is forced to stand alone, we will stand alone, and
we will continue to strike our enemies powerfully until victory.
Even if we have to stand alone, we will continue to fight
human evil.
Since 1946, two years before its official founding, Israel has been by far the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid. The total comes to about $300 billion (adjusted for inflation) in economic and military assistance. Forging ahead on their own? Delusional.
The notion that Israel’s late ‘40s militias were outnumbered, overwhelmed, and inexperienced runs throughout both Exodus and another version of the tale, released in 1966, called Cast a Giant Shadow. Again, the trailers are golden:
Outnumbered, unarmed, unprepared, they hurled back their
answer in flesh, in flame, and stunned the world (Cast a Giant
Shadow).
In one scene in Exodus Eva Marie Saint expresses doubt that Newman and Co. have any chance of success:
You can’t fight the whole British Empire with 600 people… It
isn’t possible. A scowling Newman responds, ‘How many
Minutemen did you have at Concord the day they fired the shot
heard ‘round the world?… I don’t know… seventy-seven’
This scene has classic Hollywood precision and surprisingly powerful writing, considering the overall grandiosity of the movie. The surprise goes away when you learn that Dalton Trumbo wrote the screenplay, the first he could put his name to after years of being blacklisted.
Cast a Giant Shadow has a similar scene. There, Yul Brenner is “the underground leader who had more guts than guns, more nerve than know-how.” Brenner says to Kirk Douglas, who plays a Jewish American officer sent to assist/command IDF forces in 1948, “We are outnumbered 60 to 1.” He pauses and looks Douglas over… “60 to 2 now that you are here.”
Exodus is long and ponderous, while Cast a Giant Shadow has a good portion of military humor. Different movies, same story. A story that has held sway over public opinion in the United States for 60 years and that now looks to be entering a failure process.
IV. When Jonathan Glazer made his acceptance speech, there still seemed to be some hope that the massacre/genocide would soon come to an end, simply because it was hard to believe it could continue much longer unabated. Now that we are nearing a year of ongoing slaughter with no pause in sight, it becomes easier to believe it will go on, and on, and on.
Every day we hear more horror stories and no news seems too gruesome to not be rationalized or dismissed by supporters of the onslaught. On August 5, 2024 Israeli Finance
Minister Bezalel Smotrich bemoaned the inability to starve Palestinians because of a lack of “international legitimacy”:
We are bringing in aid because there is no choice…. We can’t,
in the current global reality, manage a war. Nobody will let us
cause two million civilians to die of hunger even though it
might be justified and moral until our hostages are returned.
On the same day, B’Tselem released a 118-page report, titled Welcome to Hell. The title comes from testimony of a detainee held in an Israeli prison who said “welcome to Hell” is what a soldier said to him and others when they arrived at the prison. The summary of the report at the B’Tselem website reads, in part:
B’Tselem’s research for the report included collecting
testimonies from 55 Palestinians who were incarcerated in
Israeli prisons and detention facilities during this time. Thirty
of the witnesses are residents of the West Bank, including East
Jerusalem; 21 are residents of the Gaza Strip; and four are
Israeli citizens. The testimonies were given to B’Tselem after
the witnesses were released from prison, the overwhelming
majority of them without being tried…
Frequent acts of severe, arbitrary violence; sexual assault;
humiliation and degradation, deliberate starvation; forced
unhygienic conditions; sleep deprivation, prohibition on, and
punitive measures for, religious worship; confiscation of all
communal and personal belongings; and denial of adequate
medical treatment – these descriptions appear time and again in
the testimonies, in horrifying detail and with chilling
Similarities.
V. The gloss and glory once provided to Israel by Hollywood epics and novels like Exodus is gone. Now all that is left are the bare lies. The examples are countless. In terms of ghoulish audacity, it is hard to get worse than Benjamin Netanyahu’s claim in his speech before U.S. Congress members that — just as the letter in Variety criticizing Glazer claimed — practically no civilians have been killed in Gaza. As I.F. Stone repeatedly told us “all governments lie” and we should not be surprised that Netanyahu would lie in front of an audience of U.S. legislators who gave him multiple standing ovations – a kind of vertical groveling grovelling. But to accept this absurd claim as true requires willful blindness and a continued belief that Israelis are outnumbered and living under constant threat from enemies all around, just as they were in the movies. This perpetual underdog story is one of the biggest lies of all.
This unceasing horror show will continue until a simple truth is recognized. That truth is succinctly stated by Ronnie Barkan, an Israeli activist who describes himself as anti Zionist and “among the group of the over-privileged in this struggle for Palestinian rights, acting against a system that has at its very core the Zionist principle of differentiation.” In an interview from 2020, Barkan told Slovenian journalist Kristina Božič:
It is important to understand that there is no Israeli-Palestinian
conflict. There is no conflict. What there is, is a criminal
system of oppression and terror of one ethnic group against all
others who stand in its way. This system must be abolished.
VI. A few days ago I visited an exhibition of etchings by the Spanish artist Francisco Goya. There were three groups of works, but the one I spent most of my time looking at is called Disasters of War. The title is not Goya’s, who gave it no title but did write on an album of proofs “Fatales consequencias de la sangrienta guerra en España con Buonaparte, Y otros caprichos enfáticos” (Fatal consequences of the bloody war in Spain with Bonaparte, and other emphatic caprices). In eighty-two prints made between 1810 and 1820, Goya provides simple and powerful portrayals of the same kinds of brutality we witness now in Gaza. One takeaway is the idea that we improve over time needs to be relentlessly questioned. But, more important, the best first step people who want the madness to stop can make is to listen to witnesses who give us the truth instead of lies, and then pass it on.
Verdigris 