Tag: Zone of Interest

Jonathan Glazer’s film The Zone of Interest, probably the most unsettling film I have seen (twice) in a very long time, ends with Auschwitz commander Rudolf Höss is in an office party in Berlin, far away from his wife and five children with whom he had been living in a luxurious villa just outside the concentration camp walls, where they could just about avoid seeing the killing, but where there was plenty of aural and visual evidence of the mass murder, with the chimneys towering over their carefully tended garden. The party is thrown in honour of Höss’s new plan for a more efficient mass extermination operation. After boasting to his wife on the phone about the new plan, Höss wanders in the darkened building and is suddenly overcome by an urge to vomit. As he holds his stomach and stumbles on the floor, a vision of the future appears at the end of the dark hallway: a glimpse of Auschwitz today, a museum commemorating its Jewish and other victims (Dowd 2024).  Vulture’s film critic A. A. Dowd wonders whether we should be reading this ending as Höss being finally confronted by his prominent role in the Nazi Final Solution and if he retched because his “sociopathic dissociation has faltered.” Or, alternatively,  what if “Höss might be experiencing a different kind of rude awakening – not so much the belated emergence of a conscience as the realization of how small he is in the grand scheme of things.”

Another film, the documentary made by a Palestinian-Israeli collective including the Palestinian documentarist Basel Adra and the Israeli journalist Yuval Avraham, No Other Land, about the ongoing harassment of Palestinian sheep farmers in the South Hebron Hills area of Massafer Yatta, made me think about Dowd’s question regarding the end of The Zone of Interest. I watched No Other Land as the Gaza genocide continues. While a growing number of people, including Jewish people, act in solidarity with the Palestinians – others, “uninvolved” people I meet casually, are telling me that my adamant solidarity with Palestine is outside their zone of comfort.

I was born in Mandatory Palestine before the birth of the racial colony of Israel but grew up in Israel in a Zionist family and society before becoming aware of the Israeli colonisation of Palestine. I moved to Ireland where I had lived for 53 years and where I became increasingly involved in Palestine solidarity activism. I suppose that in today’s Ireland I would not have met so many people for whom solidarity with Palestine would be so uncomfortable – in many ways Irish society is exemplary in its solidarity with the colonised Palestinians, perhaps because of Ireland’s past as Britain’s first settler colony. However, even in Ireland, Jewish family members had been less than sympathetic – I spent my whole married life arguing with my late partner about Palestine and Palestine solidarity, had other family members tell me I was “wrong about absolutely everything to do with Israel,” and had some acquaintances say that “I had unresolved hate issues” regarding Israel. Not to mention the profound discomfort of some of my Israeli family members – my brother, a former Israel air force pilot, has recently decided to cut our rather loose ties just because I mentioned the term “anti-Zionism.”