While Canada celebrated the holidays, Israel expanded their colonial project.
We distract ourselves in a zone of interest while aiding in war crimes.
I recently rewatched the film The Zone of Interest this week, a film I wrote about after Jonathan Glazer’s infamous (but in my opinion, admirable) acceptance speech at the 96th Academy Awards this past March.
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The Zone of Interest is a film about those who perpetrate atrocities while living an idyllic lifestyle next door. The Höss family pioneer a settler-colonial community for the Schutzstaffel who run the Auschwitz concentration camp complex, annexing Polish land as Lebensraum (“living space”) for Germany.
This is an extremely important film, transcending the realm of art; it is a living, breathing work of Holocaust remembrance. Glazer was explicit in his intent to accurately depict the actions of the Höss family:
So much cinema, particularly to do with the Holocaust, shows the perpetrators as almost mythologically evil. I realized I wanted to make a film about these people and their ordinariness. I didn’t want to glorify or fetishize them by accident.”
For countless people across the globe who will never be able to visit the Auschwitz Memorial in person, Jonathan Glazer’s work will ensure that the lessons it seeks to teach will still be communicated.
And the most significant lesson? The people who commit genocidal acts are not inhuman monsters; they are ordinary human beings, and every person has the capacity to exist within a “zone of interest” while being complicit in the atrocities next-door.
So I really wasn’t too surprised by Jonathan Glazer’s speech at the Academy Awards. Glazer explicitly condemned the hijacking of his Jewish identity and the Holocaust, which have been used as the justification for an ethnonationalist regime with expansionist aims towards their neighbours.
Canadian author and journalist wrote for The Guardian that “if Jonathan Glazer’s brave Oscar acceptance speech made you uncomfortable, that was the point.” British writer and filmmaker Juliet Jacques put forward that “in the age of the internet, we are all the Höss family: the genocide in Gaza is being broadcast in real-time, its continuation dependent on our preparedness to ignore it.”
And for his part, Japanese video game designer Hideo Kojima, critically acclaimed for the depth of his narratives, and considered a peer by Hollywood auteurs such as Jordan Peele and George Miller, offered perhaps the most incisive take:
“The sounds that plead to the audience through the wall, and the torture of deliberately not showing anything at all, are used to draw images from the audience's minds.”
“The film tests your own 'zone of interest' and, paradoxically, questions the present day's fading memory of the Holocaust.”
In Israeli newspapers such as Haaretz, the debate continues over whether Israel constitutes a “zone of interest” outside of Gaza. David Issacharoff wrote a column prompted by a haunting photo, of a blooming sunflower field in Israel, with the ruins and rubble of Gaza as the backdrop.
David makes the argument, rightly in my opinion, that the hostage families and the peace activists are not part of the zone of interest; they have not turned their eyes away from the wanton slaughter of the Palestinian people, and indeed as the main proponents for a ceasefire they are seeking to end that slaughter.
But David also writes of the various ways in which Israeli media has downplayed or suppressed reporting on the genocide in Gaza, or even further, manufactured consent for those actions. And he sees very clearly that the psychology of the settler-colonial movement in Israeli is the same mentality that enables a zone of interest to form.
Truthfully, Canada exists in a zone of interest relative to Israel’s war crimes. While we issue half-hearted criticisms, and have ceased the supply of some armaments, Canada’s actions have been extremely limited.
Not only has Canada failed to place sanctions on Israel, we have maintained an illegal free trade agreement which allows Israeli companies operating in occupied Palestine to launder goods from the settlement enterprise into Canadian markets.
We should contrast our current reluctance to hold Israel accountable in 2024, to our bolder responses to their military adventurism in previous decades. During the Tripartite Aggression led by Israel, Britain, and France in 1956, the three countries invaded Egypt, and attempted to seize the Suez Canal for their own control.
Canada’s then-Secretary of State for External Affairs, Lester B. Pearson, responded to the aggression of these three powers by leading the creation of the UN Emergency Force, the first UN Peacekeeping mission in history.
For his efforts in ending the Suez Crisis sparked by the Tripartite Aggression, Pearson earned himself the 1957 Nobel Peace Prize; he would later become Canada’s 14th Prime Minister in 1963, but his legacy as the forefather of UN Peacekeeping is his greater achievement.
Today, the Canadian government refuses to take the same actions against Israeli irredentists that Pearson took seventy years ago. Canadians have distracted ourselves with holiday celebrations, while we aid and abet colonial expansion on the other side of the globe.
Here’s what the Israeli government has recently done, while you and your family were distracting yourselves in your own zone of interest these past few months:
Sde Teiman Concentration Camp
Earlier in 2024, reports were verified of systemic torture at Sde Teiman, a detention camp located on an Israeli military base in the Negev desert.
In this camp, Palestinians are detained without charges or evidence of any crime. They are beaten, raped, tortured, and killed, with the explicit legal backing of the state.
Walid Khalili was a paramedic and an ambulance driver, arbitrarily arrested by Israeli solders after witnessing them committing a war crime. By the time he was released from the camp, after repeated rounds of torture and starvation, he had dropped in body weight from 80 kilograms down to only 60 kilograms.
When a small group of Israeli soldiers were detained by Military Police for their actions at Sde Teiman, convicted terrorist and Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir demanded their freedom. Further, he said that it was legitimate and permissible to rape Palestinian detainees.
Since then, Sde Teiman has continued to operate; while some Palestinians have been relocated to other camps due to international attention, the same practices of torture, rape, and killing are reportedly carried out at these satellite locations.
Most notably, however? It was revealed only this past October that the United States government has been regularly visiting the Sde Teiman concentration camp.
The Guardian reported that the US Agency for International Development (USAid) has sent two officials daily to Sde Teiman to meet with Israeli and UN officials, ostensibly for the coordination of humanitarian aid into Gaza.
Internal USAid documents intended to brief those visiting Sde Teiman include references to the Wikipedia article for the camp, which features extensive documentation and photos of the abuse of Palestinian detainees.
Detained solely on the basis of their identity as Palestinians, those living under Israeli occupation are forcibly removed from their homes, and placed in what I as a Jew can only recognize as concentration camps, where they are tortured extensively.
The United States government is fully aware of these crimes, and is fully complicit. The Israeli public is fully aware, and a disturbingly large swath of the population protested in support of what was done at Sde Teiman.
But this is just the most extreme aspect of the Israeli government’s genocidal plans for Gaza.
Massacres and Genocide in Gaza
Ultimately, the majority of the killing of Palestinians is carried out through IDF massacres on Palestinians living under military occupation, not through the organized concentration camps which Israel operates within their borders.
The wide consensus of civil society, and the international community, is that the actions of the Israeli government in Gaza are genocidal in nature. On the one-year anniversary of October 7th, the International Court of Justice criticized Israel for their repeated failure to comply with the measures ordered by the ICJ to protect civilian life.
On November 21st, 2024, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, alleging that they have committed both war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Arrest warrants were also pursued for the Hamas leadership who masterminded October 7th, but the ICC withdrew those warrants for Ismail Haniyeh and Yahya Sinwar after confirmation of their deaths was received by the public.
Both Amnesty International and the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights released separate analyses in early December, establishing comprehensive legal arguments that the State of Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.
On December 19th, two reports also accused Israel of genocide, with focus on specific measures:
Human Rights Watch articulated how Israel has deliberately and comprehensively attacked water and sanitation infrastructure in Gaza, depriving Palestinians of the conditions necessary for life.
Médecins Sans Frontières (known in English as Doctors Without Borders) describes “clean signs of ethnic cleansing”, and lambastes Israel for not only restricting aid, but actively targeting and killing medical staff, including MSF’s own doctors.
Of course, it is easy for the Israeli government and Israeli society to brush away the United Nations, The Hague, and all the civil society NGOs, because it can be characterized as the world being against them, a compelling narrative for nationalists.
What is much harder for Israel to grapple with, however, is when the criticism comes from inside Israeli society.
Haaretz, which translates to “The Land”, is the longest running Israeli newspaper currently in print, founded in the current iteration back in 1919. In 1935, the paper was purchased by Salman Schocken, a German Jewish refugee who fled the Nazi regime.
The Schocken family continue to own the paper, which espouses Salman’s principles of Jewish-Palestinian coexistence and equality. And Salman’s grandson, Amos Schocken, certainly shares those principles.
At a conference in London this October, Amos gave the following remarks:
“The Netanyahu government doesn’t care about imposing a cruel apartheid regime on the Palestinian population. It dismisses the costs to both sides for defending the settlements while fighting the Palestinian freedom fighters that Israel calls terrorists.”
“The Palestinian state must be established, and the only way to achieve this, I think, is to apply sanctions against Israel, against the leaders who oppose it, and against the settlers.”
This gave the Netanyahu government the excuse that Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi had been seeking for at least a year to target Haaretz, which has regularly criticized the actions of Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet, not only on Palestine but on Netanyahu’s personal criminal charges.
As such, the Israeli cabinet unanimously approved a measure in late November, ordering that everybody who works for the government, or works for a government-funded body, is required to boycott Haaretz, and may not purchase a copy or subscribe.
And when Haaretz is the last mainstream voice in Israeli media willing to publish these headlines about Gaza, all of which are from just the current month alone, it is no wonder that Netanyahu is desperate to silence them:
'No Civilians. Everyone's a Terrorist': IDF Soldiers Expose Arbitrary Killings and Rampant Lawlessness in Gaza's Netzarim Corridor (December 18th, 2024)
'When You Leave Israel and Enter Gaza, You Are God': Inside the Minds of IDF Soldiers Who Commit War Crimes (December 23rd, 2024)
The Hunger Strikers Camped Outside the Knesset Are Waiting for the Hostages – and for the Public (December 24th, 2024)
The Schocken family, and the newspaper they have owned for almost a century, refuse to isolate themselves within a zone of interest. As Israel’s newspaper of record, Haaretz forces Israeli society to confront the reality of the occupation, and what it does to the Palestinian people.
It is no wonder this makes Haaretz unpopular. And yet, as the Netanyahu government acts so desperately to crush dissent, I would say this bold voice is exactly what makes Haaretz necessary.
The Colonial Pursuit for Lebensraum
It is well understood at this point that Netanyahu’s Revisionist Zionist government, including the Kahanists like Itamar Ben-Gvir, are actively realizing their plans to settle and colonize Northern Gaza.
While this revanchist desire to reverse the 2005 disengagement was previously a fringe perspective, Netanyahu’s governing coalition has used the war with Hamas as rationalization to justify this colonial enterprise.
An illegal settlement known as Elai Aza has already begun to form near Kibbutz Erez, which is the namesake of the Erez Crossing into Beit Hanoun in Gaza. Over the past year, the entirety of Beit Hanoun has been ethnically cleansed of Palestinians by the Israeli military.
And now, the lack of international pushback against the expansion of Israel’s settlement enterprise in Palestine has emboldened them to go even further; the Israeli military has seized land in Lebanon and Syria, and they do not plan to leave.
The United Nations has stationed two peacekeeping forces along Israel’s de facto borders with Lebanon (the Blue Line) and Syria (the Purple Line). The United Nations has stationed peacekeeping forces at both these zones, the UNIFIL for Lebanon and the UNDOF for Syria.
Neither the Blue Line nor the Purple Line are true borders in the legal sense, but rather withdrawal lines for the UN peacekeeping forces to observe. Israel illegally occupies the Golan Heights, but they lie within their side of the Purple Line.
In Lebanon, Israel has directly attacked UNIFIL peacekeepers despite those peacekeepers being in known, established bases and clearly self-identifying to Israeli forces.
Israel’s pager attack operation, which former CIA Director Leon Panetta called “a form of terrorism,” indiscriminately set off explosives in crowded areas, killing civilians and children.
Eventually, a ceasefire agreement was reached for Lebanon, in which Israel promised to withdraw back behind the Blue Line within a sixty-day deadline. But now, Israel says that they will violate that deal and remain in Lebanon if they decide that they don’t trust the Lebanese military.
We remember what Israel once did in Lebanon. We remember the Sabra and Shatila Massacre. We remember how Israel backed a proxy state in an attempt to rip Lebanon apart through civil war. This is much in the same fashion that Russia has partitioned away Donetsk and Luhansk from Ukraine.
And indeed, such a plan is further along in Syria, where Israel has seized advantage of the chaos after the fall of Assad’s regime. On December 8th, the Syrian opposition seized control of Damascus from Bashar al-Assad; Assad fled to Moscow that same day, where he was granted asylum by Putin’s regime in Russia.
The transitional government is largely controlled by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a Sunni Islamist paramilitary led by Ahmed al-Sharaa, currently the de facto Leader of Syria.
A former al-Qaeda fighter who fought under the nom de guerre Abu Mohammad al-Golani, al-Sharaa has since pursued international legitimacy by distancing himself and HTS from their past with al-Qaeda, and focusing on the overthrow of the Assad regime. And this strategy of moderating himself to gain Western support does appear to be working.
The United States has rescinded their US$10 million dollar bounty for al-Sharaa, and Assistant Secretary of State labelled him as “pragmatic”, in the first formal US diplomatic appearance in Damascus in over a decade. There are still serious concerns to be had, but forward momentum is a good thing.
While HTS contains problematic figures who have pushed against al-Sharaa’s moderation, there is hope that after a new constitution is drafted, Syria will hold democratic elections, and form a free republic which respects the rights of women and minorities.
But Israel has put that fragile hope under threat. At the same time that the Assad regime fell to the interim government, Israel violated the Purple Line established by UNDOF peacekeepers, and crossed the UN buffer zone to enter Syrian land, launching Operation Arrow of Bashan.
The map included at the beginning of this section demonstrates that Israel has now illegally occupied additional Syrian territory beyond the portions of the Golan Heights they already controlled by 1974; Israeli-occupied territory is now within a stone’s throw of the new government in Damascus.
Through Syria’s Ambassador to the United Nations Koussay Aldahhak, the Syrian transitional government has requested that the United Nations Security Council compel Israel to end their military incursion into Syria, and withdraw behind the Purple Line established by the UNDOF.
Associated Press journalists in Jerusalem and Damascus report that Israel is enforcing curfews upon villagers, preventing them from farming, or entering or leaving their villages.
Al Jazeera reports that Israeli forces have “fired stun grenades, tear gas and live bullets at demonstrators unhappy at their encroachment into Syria”, including incidents in specific villages in Quneitra Governorate.
Israel previously occupied a much larger portion of the Golan Heights prior to the withdrawal in 1974; the governorate’s eponymous capital city of Quneitra was razed to the ground by Israeli settlers before it was returned to Syrian hands.
The Syrian people clearly fear, with these military incursions, that Israeli revanchists seek to reclaim Quneitra once more. With Netanyahu making a recent promise to double the settler population in the illegally occupied Golan Heights, this fear appears well grounded.
Ahmad al-Sharaa decried Israel’s opportunistic invasion of Syrian territory, but admitted that he is forced by circumstance to ignore Israel’s violations:
"Israeli arguments have become weak and no longer justify their recent violations. The Israelis have clearly crossed the lines of engagement in Syria, which poses a threat of unwarranted escalation in the region,"
"Syria's war-weary condition, after years of conflict and war, does not allow for new confrontations. The priority at this stage is reconstruction and stability, not being drawn into disputes that could lead to further destruction."
al-Sharaa and HTS must focus on restoring internal stability to Syria; they do not have the capacity to fight a war against the Israeli military, and Israel knows this, which is why Netanyahu has cravenly seized the opportunity to colonize more of Syria.
And in a piece of propaganda released by the IDF on social media, would you believe what the military spokesperson called the land they’ve seized beyond the Purple Line?
Their “zone of interest”.
The Syrian transitional government has made their appeal to the international community to protect the rules-based international order, and the rights of the Syrian people; the international community has ignored their plea.
In Palestine, in Lebanon, and in Syria, Israel is taking steps to liquidate local populations, and replace them with colonial settlements. And repeatedly, Western countries such as Canada have either ignored these flagrant crimes, or outright assisted Israel in perpetuating them.
But the failure in Canadian society goes beyond the government, and beyond the media. Yes, politicians like Marco Mendicino have attempted to criminalize protest against Israeli war crimes.
And yes, Canadian journalists have either obscured reports of these crimes, or mischaracterized the protests against these crimes as antisemitic.
But ultimately, if they don’t care about what is happening, it’s because you, the voting public, don’t care either. You have isolated yourself within your own zone of interest, ignoring the reality of what we have become complicit in.
Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, and pursuing an expansionist policy against Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon. And when the Jerusalem Post starts manufacturing consent with columns about ancient Israelite populations in Jordan, I imagine the Jordanian people start to fear that they will be the next target of Israeli settlers.
I am a Canadian Jew, but I do not need to be personally victimized by Israel’s actions to understand that they are wrong, and that I have a basic responsibility to do my part in opposing these crimes against humanity.
And whatever your background is, the same applies; you have to do your part in fighting these heinous acts, too. None of us are allowed to turn a blind eye to the suffering of the Palestinian or Syrian or Lebanese peoples, or to Canada’s complicity in that suffering.
So whether you participate in a boycott, or attend a public protest, or change your vote in the next federal election, you need to do something. You need to do anything.
But if you want one of the most constructive things you can do for Palestinians? Something that will make a material difference, right now?
Donate to UNRWA at the link below, and help keep a Palestinian family alive.
Great piece, Jake