Israel’s battle for survival is no Hollywood production
No one doubts that the warfare in Gaza is horrific. The deaths of innocents are monstrous. But did a speech at the Academy Awards by Jonathan Glazer, the Jewish and English director of the Holocaust film “The Zone of Interest,” serve in any way to bring that awful bloodshed to a reasonable and enduring end?
In tortured and confusing language, Glazer lambasted Israel for “an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people, 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?”
Noting that his German-language film showed where dehumanization leads at its worst, he suggested that Judaism and the Holocaust were being “hijacked” by that occupation, saying he and his fellow filmmakers “refute” such an expropriation.
But is the battle against Hamas really such a “hijacking?” Is it, in fact, rather a battle for the survival of the state of Israel against a group that would kill far more Jews than the 1,200 murdered on Oct. 7th, given the chance? In that sense, isn’t the fight against a repeat of the Holocaust?
For that matter, is the fight against Hamas really a fight, as well, for Palestinian innocents who would rather not have this ISIS-like group running their lives? For Palestinians in Gaza who have lived under the group’s thumb for nearly two decades?
Depending on his meaning, Glazer may have been correct in one respect: it is not within the psychology, the religion and the tradition of Judaism to dehumanize people, much less to kill noncombatants. Every human life is invaluable, Jews are taught, and the shedding of innocent blood is forbidden.
However, the monstrousness of Hamas – as demonstrated on October 7th, in the group’s ongoing imprisonment of hostages, and in its perverse and suicidal interpretation of Islam – has made it all but impossible for Israeli soldiers to avoid killing innocents. Israel faces a terrible choice: it either vanquishes Hamas or it will see the end of Israel, if not now then in time.
And the problem is that Hamas so immersed itself in Gazan society, since it was elected in 2006, that rooting it out has led to the deaths of thousands of innocents. The group burrowed into the social fabric in much the way it tunneled into the geography of the land, controlling all aspects of life in Gaza, from the medical establishment to all governing entities. Its grip has been reminiscent of the Nazi hold on Germany – a grip that took in even innocent Germans and that gave us WWII.
In the face of that burrowing, Israel’s military has done what it could to avoid civilian casualties, telling people to evacuate from areas that were to be attacked. Hamas stopped many from doing so, no doubt driving up the death toll.
In this, Israel has behaved far differently than some of its neighbors. For instance, the leader of Syria in 1982, Hafez al-Assad, killed tens of thousands of fellow Arabs in besieging the rebellious city of Hama as he sought to exterminate the Muslim Brotherhood (ironically, the philosophical parent of Hamas). The bloodletting led New York Times journalist Tom Friedman to coin the term “Hama rules” to describe the Syrian regime’s savagery.
It is possible that the death toll in Gaza will top the 25,000 believed to have been killed in Hama and may already have. But we may never know the true cost. The reported numbers of Palestinian deaths – more than 31,000 at this point – are suspect, as a Wharton statistics professor has argued.
Wharton Prof. Abraham Wyner, in a piece in Tablet, contends that the amount of regularity in the figures the Hamas-controlled ministry reports shows that the “numbers are not real.” By plotting out recent reported tallies, he shows that a “graph of total deaths by date is increasing with almost metronomical linearity.”
Rather than the steady ascent of figures that we’ve seen, there should be daily variations and the lack of them suggests that Gaza authorities are fabricating their numbers, Wyner maintains. Moreover, he contends that the numbers of women and children killed – based on an estimate of 70% of the overall tally –are overestimated.
“Most likely, the Hamas ministry settled on a daily total arbitrarily. We know this because the daily totals increase too consistently to be real,” Wyner writes. “Then they assigned about 70% of the total to be women and children, splitting that amount randomly from day to day. Then they in-filled the number of men as set by the predetermined total. This explains all the data observed.”
In all wars, it’s been long observed, truth is the first casualty – a military maxim attributed to ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus. And in the Israel-Hamas war, Hamas weaponizes reported “facts” to build sympathy around the world — including in Hollywood. As many commentators have observed, the climbing death tolls serve the group’s propaganda ends (see here and here for a couple commentaries). And, pathetically, the group’s lack of value for human life seems based in its perverse interpretation of Islam: its glorification of martydom.
Wyner says the true death figures may never be known. Even the Gaza health ministry admitted in November that the collapse of the health system and the numbers of bodies buried in rubble made it unable to count the dead precisely. The actual figures could be higher or lower.
Indeed, the Gaza ministry’s own numbers suggested in January that the daily counts then were shrinking. As The New York Times reported late that month, the “number of Gazans dying each day ha[d] fallen almost in half since early December and almost two-thirds since the peak in late October.” The newspaper attributed the decline to a reduction in Israeli troops and a shift in military tactics.
Whatever the actual number, the toll in death, injury and destruction is unquestionably awful. If Israel mounts a major move on Rafah, as expected, and if Palestinian civilians are unable to find safe harbors, the number could climb anew.
Tragically, the deaths of thousands of civilians are not unprecedented. Along with Hama, consider the WWII firebombing of Dresden (perhaps 25,000 deaths, perhaps more) and, worse, the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (perhaps 214,000 deaths together). With some justification, Israel’s defenders have argued that it’s hypocritical for the world to accept that such tallies from WWII were tolerable in destroying the Nazi and Japanese military regimes, but not in Israel’s efforts to destroy Hamas.
Supporting the Israeli military view, Wyner maintains that Israel is doing much to prevent civilian deaths. “By historical standards of urban warfare, where combatants are embedded above and below into civilian population centers, this is a remarkable and successful effort to prevent unnecessary loss of life while fighting an implacable enemy that protects itself with civilians,” he holds.
That may be so. But one has to wonder how much misery it will take for Hamas’ murderous mentality to be extinguished, much as Naziism was almost entirely stamped out in Germany. Can the awful bloodletting that Glazer suggested he couldn’t stomach give way to some sort of peaceful coexistence someday?
It is a tragic irony that Israel, in continuing to try to eliminate Hamas, is doing the group’s bidding in killing civilians, in creating “martyrs” the group can showcase to the world. And yet, does Israel have much choice? Can the Glazers of the world not see the bind that a terrorist group — one no other nation would tolerate — has put Israel in?