The Israeli building program known as E1 (East-1), situated between Jerusalem and Maale Adumim, has been on the Israeli and world agenda for twenty years. It is subject to a severe Israeli-Palestinian dispute and prompts strong international opposition. As a result, it has yet to be implemented.
On November 30, 2012, after long years in which Israel had almost completely frozen the program, a scaled-down forum of nine ministers of the Israeli government met and decided to renew the planning, approval, and construction processes in the E1 area. This decision was part of Israel’s reaction to the UN General Assembly resolution on recognizing the State of Palestine as an observer state that is not a full member of the United Nations.
The arithmetic also has issues. Around 80 percent of the buildings in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed. The death toll, which includes Hamas fighters, is roughly 3 percent of the population. Those two numbers don’t sit together without the evacuation warnings. An army trying to kill the people inside those buildings would have brought them down on them.
On top of the allegations in the film, the Holocaust parallel the filmmakers themselves draw is just as disturbing. Several pro-Israel advocates have spoken about the letters NAZA, but that is a weak argument when there is a substantial one available.
Jonathan Glazer is the executive producer, and the filmmakers cite Glazer’s line about his award-winning film The Zone of Interest: “victims out of sight but never out of mind,” as shaping how they approached Israelis who did the killing. Zone of Interest was Glazer’s film that told the story of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, and life next to the death camp. Their own festival statement asks how one group of people allows the total dehumanization of another, and invokes their grandparents’ generation.
That Holocaust comparison always has an audience. The ultimate crime committed against Jews, reversed and handed back. Israelis who object are usually told the parallel is being forced on them by their enemies. In this case, two Israeli Jews built it in Israel, and the audience ate it up.
Stephen J. Williams 