Universalism vs Nationalism In Hollywood
The "Jewish creatives" letter pillorying Jonathan Glazer shows the corrupting influence of nationalism on the mind and the soul
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Some day we will know that humanity has progressed because nationalism will be recognized as a mental illness. Few conditions can match nationalism for warping not only people’s thinking but also their moral compass.
Nationalism erases facts and reality and substitutes mythology in their place. Nationalists are not blind to these processes, as long as they are the products of someone else’s nationalism. This is what leads so often to supremacist thinking, grievance-based politics, and, ultimately, to the support for some of the most heinous acts humanity is capable of.
Sadly, a large portion of the Jewish people have fallen victim to this disease and, as the violent nature of Zionist nationalism becomes more and more apparent, it brings with it a sharp split between those who fight for universal values and side with the oppressed and those who double down on their attachment to the nation, as it is defined by the most aggressive and hateful of demagogic leaders. Those leaders are not only politicians, but also the civil society leaders of entrenched Jewish institutions.
We can see how the disease of nationalism manifests in the responses to Jonathan Glazer’s brief speech at the Academy Awards. Hollywood has given us a prime example of what nationalism looks like to the masses who fall prey to its mendacious mythmaking. The letter that has been signed by over 1,000 Jewish professionals in the entertainment industry illustrates what nationalism looks like among those who follow it rather than lead it.
It’s worth taking a look at the letter piece by piece because it is an incredibly hateful and radical piece of work.
The letter starts with this:
“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.”
The childish wordplay of using Glazer’s own words (he “refuted” his Jewishness and the memory of the Holocaust being used to justify the dehumanization of the Palestinians) is a shameful display, but what’s worse is the blatant distortion of his words, which goes even further than many of the most mendacious lies about him.
Glazer made no direct comparison between the Nazis and the Israeli genocide (my term, not Glazer’s) in Gaza. He pointed out that his film’s message was about dehumanization and what it can lead to. He didn’t make a documentary about the Holocaust to be taught as a history lecture. He made a film about how the Nazis had so successfully dehumanized entire groups of people that members of the supremist group could happily go on with their lives and ignore what was happening literally next door to them.
Perhaps it is that point—that Glazer was showing how dehumanization desensitized ordinary citizens not directly involved in atrocities to the suffering of others—that touches a nerve among these entertainment professionals. Perhaps it hits a little too close to home in reminding them of how blithely they accept or refuse to see the complete devastation of homes, hospitals, schools, universities, hospitals, mosques, churches, and every other piece of civil infrastructure that Gaza had. Perhaps it rings a little too true for these people that they ignore the entire families that have been wiped out, the tens of thousands of orphans that have been created, or the over 12,000 children that have been killed.
Then there is the complaint of “hijacking” their Judaism. Here, one can also question Glazer’s choice of that word. There is, and has always been, a tension in Judaism between universalism and particularism. For a long time, Jewish communities were isolated in most of the societies we lived in, and, as such, the tension between universalism and particularism was largely a matter of theory. And, due to that isolation –more physical in Christian societies, but also due to certain rules even in Muslim ones—particularism was more prominent.
After the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) brought a steadily increasing Jewish participation in the broader societies in which we lived, universalism became a much more prominent part of Jewish ideology and thinking, and many Jews embraced universalism and solidarity with other marginalized groups as the path toward liberation.
Zionism, like all nationalisms, set itself up as a particularistic ideology. And that’s fair enough as far as it goes. But if we are being serious about talking about the Jewish community as a whole, we need to acknowledge this tension and recognize that the division between a universalism that considers the rights of Jews and Palestinians to be equal and a particularism that elevates the rights of one group over another is part of what is being played out in this debate.
The entertainers’ letter continues:
“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.”
This is classic nationalist argumentation, making statements that are demonstrably false and backing them up with counter-factuals that can’t be proven or disproven. And it is a talking point straight out of the AIPAC playbook.
First, the only basis on which to argue that Israel is not targeting civilians is the ontological belief that Israel—the expression in the real world of Jewish nationalism—would never do such a thing. There is, of course, decades of evidence showing that Israel does, in fact, target civilians as a matter of course. In the current conflict, this has become even more widespread. On multiple occasions, Israel has targeted areas packed to bursting with civilians which the Israeli military itself had directed Palestinians to flee to. Israeli snipers have been picking off Palestinian children, they have targeted civilians on routes they told them to take to move south. This is on top of the hundreds of civilian structures Israel has intentionally targeted consistently from the beginning of the Gaza onslaught.
The brilliant thinker Sarah Schulman put it this way: “What all these people have in common is a strange childishness- an inability to imagine that they could be part of anything wrong. A total inability to be self-critical.”
The nationalist mindset cannot accept these realities, nor even examine the evidence of them. Instead, they find comfort in propaganda that reinforces their existing beliefs. And in this, American nationalists go farther than many Israelis do.
While most Israelis understand, and even protest, that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has dragged his feet and stalled on hostage negotiations because he does not (to a great extent, due to his personal interests) want anything to stop the war on Gaza, American nationalists cannot accept this reality.
The United States and its allies have been trying to negotiate a deal according to Israel’s parameters, where the hostages would be released in exchange for a brief pause, after which Israel would resume its slaughter. That’s an unworkable proposal, and everyone knows it, and even the Biden administration has been forced to change tactics and seek a more lasting ceasefire, a change that has been greeted with intense pushback by Netanyahu.
The letter goes on:
“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.”
This might have been the most radical and stunning part of the letter. To claim that the occupation doesn’t even exist is about as denialist as anything notorious Holocaust-denier David Irving ever wrote. Even Israeli Prime Ministers and the High Court of Israel have affirmed that Israel holds the West Bank and Gaza under belligerent occupation. To deny this basic reality is to deny the sun rising in the east.
The issue of Jewish indigeneity to the land of Israel-Palestine is an incredibly fraught issue, and one that is also injected with a heavy dose of nationalism. A brief explainer, in comic form, of why this concept is problematic can be found in Jewish Currents here. But neither the history of the Jewish people nor of that land is so simple.
Prof. Nur Masalha’s authoritative, meticulously documented history of Palestine over the course of 4,000 years, Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History, tells the story of a land that has been home to a great many peoples throughout history. This is unsurprising, given the land’s proximity to three continents, several major waterways, and cities that have been major capitals in antiquity right through to present day.
Further, indigeneity is defined legally as “the earliest known people of a region or country. It is often used to describe the remaining population of a place that was colonized by a now-dominant group.” More commonly, it is also defined as a group’s connection to the place where it developed as a “nation.”
This touches on significant questions about Jewish history and identity, particularly how much of our culture actually developed in that land rather than in Babylon and Persia, where much foundational Jewish literature and culture were created. Indeed, the self-definition of Jews as a diasporic people waiting in exile for a messiah—out primary self-definition for most of recorded Jewish history—makes this issue a complicated one.
What we can say is that the undeniable Jewish connection to the land does not justify the expulsion, dispossession, and denial of rights to the Arab population (among a few others) who had been living in that land for many, many centuries until the 1948 war. The argument that Jews needed a homeland after the Holocaust has merit (though whether that is the ideal remedy is debatable), but for that homeland to have come at the expense of a population that had been there for countless generations and which had—despite the utter nonsense about the Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini’s links to the Nazis which, though real, had no significant impact on the history of Palestine and the Yishuv at the time—is unjustifiable on a moral and a political level, as over 75 years of violence have proven.
The Hollywood letter is a great example of people who have never seriously studied these questions but have had the nationalist myths drilled into their heads. The chutzpah they display is not in being wrong but in that they have the audacity to speak with authority when they have clearly never taken the time to really learn about these matters and then to accuse others of denying a history that they demonstrate themselves to be largely ignorant of.
The letter closes with the sort of hysterics that have become the stock in trade of Jewish nationalism and its mythmakers, but also with a classic rhetorical trick of ending with a truth:
“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.”
Breathtaking. They just called a Jewish man who just won an award for a film about the Holocaust an antisemite. One shouldn’t be surprised. Chuck Schumer, who has been a devoted “Israel right or wrong” zealot his whole career was just called the same for expressing his view (which, in my opinion, he certainly should not have done) that Netanyahu is leading Israel to becoming a pariah state and that Israelis should stop him before it’s too late by holding new elections as soon as he completes his genocide in Gaza (not, obviously, the way Schumer put it).
Similar criticisms have been aimed at other Hollywood figures for wearing buttons that support the call for ceasefire. They call it antisemitic to object and call for a halt to an onslaught that has killed over 12,000 children in Gaza. That is where zealous, particularistic nationalism leads.
Also straight out of the nationalist handbook is the oft-repeated falsehood that a rise in antisemitism shows the need for the State of Israel. It shows nothing of the kind. On the contrary, Israel, as an aggressive, settler-colonialist ethnocracy whose very structure leads inexorably to a system of Jewish supremacy, foments antisemitism by insisting that its aggressive, racist actions are done in the name not only of its Jewish citizens but of Jews around the world. When nationalists support the worst of Israeli crimes and consider holding Israel to the standards of human decency, human rights and international law a “blood libel” it not only weaponizes the fight against real antisemitism into a cudgel to defend Israel’s crimes but it trivializes actual antisemitism even while it simultaneously promotes it.
Schulman put it this way: “What is actually happening is that you (who are trying to cast yourselves as persecuted because people are loudly objecting to your support for Israel’s crimes) are supporting a genocide and history will understand this as a genocide, and your selfish, shallow self-conception, your refusal to see yourself realistically, your endless agreement with brutality - these crimes will follow you for the rest of your life.”
But they do end with a truth, one that is spoken far too rarely, but one I try to remind audiences of any time I speak publicly. That is that the trauma of the Nazi genocide of Europe’s Jews might have been the worst such occurrence in our history, but it was not the only time we faced genocide. It was, however, the only time in that history that we were prevented from escaping to other places.
The refusal of the so-called “civilized” west to allow Jews to find refuge from the rising Nazi slaughter was the unique thing about the Holocaust in our history. We had nowhere to go. Europe, North America, everywhere the doors were slammed shut in our faces.
When non-Jews think of the Nazi crimes, they too often forget this crime of their own parents and grandparents. And that crime has been compounded ever since by making the Palestinians foot the bill for the Nazis and for all those who shamefully refused to help.
That was what Glazer was actually talking about. Jews were not only dehumanized by the Nazis. We were dehumanized by the Americans, the British, the Russians, the whole world. And it’s happening again, this time to the Palestinians in Gaza, as the world allows Israel to continue with its campaign of genocide, as well as in the West Bank where, lest we forget, Israel has been emptying Palestinian towns with settler pogroms, expanding settlements and building new outposts, launching regular, and deadly, raids in West Bank towns and villages.
That was what Glazer was saying. He was right. And the signatories on that “Jewish creatives” letter, who now number over 1,000, are absolutely desperate to deny it. Their nationalism compels them to do so.
Jews of conscience and the many allies we bond with will not allow them to.
News Roundup
War on Gaza: How Israel's leftists quickly lost their compassion for Palestinians
By Orly Noy, Middle East Eye, March 16, 2024, https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/war-gaza-israel-leftist-lost-compassion-palestinians
'Flat-out lies': US senator slams allegations against UNRWA
The New Arab, March 18, 2024,
https://www.newarab.com/news/flat-out-lies-us-senator-slams-allegations-against-unrwa
How Israeli settlers are expanding illegal outposts amid Gaza war
By Virginia Pietromarchi and Mohammed Haddad, Al Jazeera, March 19, 2024, https://www.aljazeera.com/features/longform/2024/3/19/how-israeli-settlers-are-expanding-illegal-outposts-amid-gaza-war
The Zone of Interest is about the danger of ignoring atrocities – including in Gaza
By Naomi Klein, The Guardian, March 14, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/14/the-zone-of-interest-auschwitz-gaza-genocide
Why Chuck Schumer’s Speech Matters
By Peter Beinart, The Beinart Notebook, March 18, 2024,
https://peterbeinart.substack.com/p/why-chuck-schumers-speech-matters
GAZA STRIP: Famine is imminent as 1.1 million people, half of Gaza, experience catastrophic food insecurity
Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, March 16, 2024, https://www.ipcinfo.org/ipcinfo-website/alerts-archive/issue-97/en/
My Latest Articles
I’m proud to announce that Deluge: Gaza and Israel from Crisis to Cataclysm, the first book on Israel’s war on Gaza is about to be published by OR Books and is available for pre-order. I contributed a chapter to this book, as did many other renowned and respected thinkers, including Nathan Brown, Mouin Rabbani, Khaled Hroub, and Sara Roy. Edited by Jamie Stern Weiner and with a forward by Avi Shlaim, this promises to be a book well worth reading.
Preorder at https://orbooks.com/catalog/deluge/
It isn’t Netanyahu who is acting against the will of his people, it’s Biden
From Kamala Harris to Chuck Schumer, Democrats are pulling out all the stops to try to convince voters that the problem isn’t Israel, it’s Netanyahu. Unfortunately, Israel’s own data doesn’t back up the assertion.
https://mondoweiss.net/2024/03/it-isnt-netanyahu-who-is-acting-against-the-will-of-his-people-its-biden/
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