Tony Kushner Agrees With Jonathan Glazer: ‘Looks A Lot Like Ethnic Cleansing To Me’

Jonathan Glazer has discovered robust help for his public stance on the Israel-Gaza battle.

The “Zone of Interest” director visibly trembled earlier this month as he accepted the Oscar for Finest Worldwide Movie and referred to as out Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. Whereas a whole bunch of Jews in Hollywood denounced him for it, screenwriter Tony Kushner isn’t one in all them.

When requested Wednesday on the Haaretz Podcast if he may establish with Glazer — who delivered the one Oscars speech that straight acknowledged the conflict in Gaza — Kushner answered with palpable bewilderment: “Of course. I mean, who doesn’t?”

“What he’s saying is so simple,” the Tony Award winner added. “He’s saying: Jewishness, Jewish identity, Jewish history, the history of the Holocaust … of Jewish suffering must not be used … as an excuse for a project of dehumanizing or slaughtering other people.”

“This is a misappropriation of what it means to be a Jew, what the Holocaust meant, and [Glazer] rejects that,” Kushner, who’s himself Jewish, continued. “Who doesn’t agree with that? What kind of person thinks that what’s going on now in Gaza is acceptable.”

The “Zone of Interest” depicts the lives of Auschwitz focus camp commandant Rudolf Höss and his household. Meant to discover Nazi Germany’s banality of evil with no escape for the viewer, it was extensively acclaimed — earlier than Glazer gave his speech.

“Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst,” he stated on the podium, including: “Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people.”

Glazer, who requested how “the victims of Oct. 7 in Israel” and people of “the ongoing attack in Gaza” may resist such dehumanization, has since been condemned by greater than 1,000 Jewish Hollywood figures together with Debra Messing, Eli Roth and Amy Pascal.

Kushner, whose Oscar-nominated script for Steven Spielberg’s “Munich” (2005) notably wrestled with concepts of revenge and id, stated Glazer’s phrases have been an “unimpeachable, irrefutable statement” — and rejected the conflation of antisemitism with criticism of Israel.

“The people that I know who are passionately involved in calls for a ceasefire, these are not people who are anti-Semites,” Kushner stated Wednesday, “their interest is not in destroying Israel and certainly their interest is not in pogroms against Jews elsewhere.”

Kushner argued the pushback towards Glazer stems from the “rage” of these fearing for the “millions of lives” affected by this battle however, as a longtime critic of Israel’s insurance policies and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, notably included Palestinians in that equation.

“Because before our eyes, what really looks a lot like ethnic cleansing, to me, is going on,” Kushner stated on the podcast. “I mean, I tend to believe the people on the extreme right in Netanyahu’s cabinet who say, ‘Yeah it’s ours now,’ how is that not ethnic cleansing?”

Round 1,200 Israelis have been killed within the Oct. 7 assault by Hamas. The Israeli army has since killed greater than 30,000 Palestinians — principally girls and youngsters, in accordance with Gaza’s well being ministry — and is at the moment laying siege to Gaza’s greatest hospital.