A recent spate of Holocaust-themed films,
like the terrific new thriller The Debt,
may encourage an anti-Zionist interpretation.
After the demise of Apartheid South Africa in the early 1990s, the world sought a new villain to fill the bête noirerole. The self-styled morality police, led by mainstream media, academics, activists, NGOs and others who in the West identify themselves as liberal and progressive, quickly cast Israel as the bad guy. Their default position is that Zionism is inherently racist and colonialist, Israel is always on the wrong side of justice, and Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza—and in Israel itself—are victims of Israeli human rights abuses.
As Alan Dershowitz recently wrote in the Huffington Post: “Israel’s existence and right to defend itself should be bipartisan issues… The reality, however, is very different. The Jewish state is demonized by the hard left in America, [and] by virtually the entire left in much of Europe…”
This is especially evident in Great Britain. As Hadar Sela reported in a 2010 article for the Gloria Center, the U.K. “acts as a major ‘hub’ in moves to attack the legitimacy of Israel’s existence,”led by the websiteof left-leaning newspaperThe Guardian. While Brits on the right may not feel the same, last year even Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron jumped on the Israel-bashing bandwagon, calling Gaza a “prison camp.”Similar sentiment can easily be found in other British media, such as the BBC, and on the continent.
Even in the U.S., those on the left increasingly attack Israel with impunity. In a 2009 article for the Institute for Global Jewish Affairs, Adam Levick cited a disturbing number of anti-Israeli—often demonstrably anti-Semitic—blog postings on self-defined liberal websites like Huffington Post, Salon and Daily Kos. These incitements clearly contravene the sites’ anti-racism rules, yet have been left untouched.
Yet paradoxically, during this very same period, there’s been a noticeable influx of Western European-produced, Holocaust-themed fiction films, including Sarah’s Key (France, 2011), The Round Up (Le Rafle, France, 2010), The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (U.K. and U.S., 2008), Good (U.K. and Germany, 2008), The Reader (U.K. and U.S., 2008), and Eichmann (Hungary and U.K., 2007). Hollywood has kicked in with Defiance (2008) and now The Debt, a newly released version of the 2007 Israeli film, HaChov.
The appearance on North American screens of these movies, I believe, definitely positive. Any fiction or nonfiction film or book that depicts or refers even casually to the Holocaust—and that includes The Reader, whose forgiving portrayal of a Nazi concentration camp guard is highly troubling—adds to the accumulated Holocaust archive. That will make it that much harder in future to dispute the Shoah as historical fact, something increasingly important as Holocaust survivors die out, Jewish numbers in the West dwindle and the Arab and Muslim population—which includes many Holocaust deniers—grows.
So how can we explain the contradiction of a simultaneous revival of interest in the Holocaust and increasing hatred of Israel? Why are the leading purveyors of the new anti-Semitism—the U.K. and France (and, to a lesser extent, left-leaning Hollywood)—illuminating the ultimate anti-Semitic act, supporting a vital Jewish cause and even depicting Jews as noble?
The answer is that the two stances are not mutually exclusive; indeed, reminding the world that Jews were the victims of the worst genocide in history allows filmmakers to imply—subtly or not, intentionally or not—the supposed irony that Israelis and their Jewish allies now are responsible for an equally terrible abuse of Palestinians. In other words, they seem to be saying, Jews are not only guilty of genocide (as described by UN General Assembly president Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann in 2009, among many other instances), but of hypocrisy.
Which brings us to The Debt. The thriller tells the story of threeIsraeliMossad agents who must confront the truth behind their capture of a former Nazi doctor in East Berlin 30 years earlier.
The Hollywood-produced Debt boasts a British director, John Madden (Shakespeare in Love), and an impressive list of stars that includes U.K. natives Helen Mirren (The Queen), Ciarán Hinds (Munich) and Tom Wilkinson (Michael Clayton).
Given this pedigree, I worried how the movie would portray Israelis. Also, prior to seeing the film, I had read a review in The Jewish Daily Forward that stated the remake altered the original movie’s focus, “shifting from the quest for justice in the face of unspeakable evil to Israelis feeling bad about their own wrongdoing.”
In an interview for the Forward a few days later, Madden claimed otherwise: “I see that [the Mossad agents are] led into or allow themselves a misguided decision… It’s the same choice they make in the original movie.” He added, “The Debtis not a political story; it’s about human behaviour.”
Ultimately, I agree with Madden about what’s onscreen: the movie questions the ethical choices made by the protagonists but not the existence of Israel as a whole. And the film as an entertainment is terrific, as Madden and his actors ably balance action and suspense with difficult personal and moral challenges.
As such,The Debt stands in contrast to Steven Spielberg’s film Munich (2005), about the Mossad agents who hunted down the masterminds of the slaughter of 11 Israelis at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Munich was based on George Jonas’s book Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team. In a lengthy 2006 article for Maclean’s magazine, Jonas questioned the intentions of Spielberg and at least one of its screenwriters, Tony Kushner: “Spielberg’s movie worries about the moral trap of resisting terror; my book worries about the moral trap of not resisting it.”
While Munich and The Debt avoid Israeli-Palestinian issues, past or present, I wouldn’t have had a problem if they did deal with them, in an honest way. Certainly, filmmakers must be allowed free rein: the thriving Israeli film industry itself has tackled thorny moral issues in many recent movies, including Ajami (2009), Lebanon (2009), Waltz with Bashir (2008) and Beaufort (2007).
As much as I enjoyed The Debt, however, its problem, as with and other recent Holocaust-related movies, lies with what is not on display. These offerings may avoid direct criticism of Israel, but that does not mean they are harmless. As I wrote above, The Debt does not portray an anti-Zionist message, and it is difficult to ascertain the filmmakers’ attitude toward modern Israel. (Unlike Good, whose star, Viggo Mortensen, was a signatory of the notorious letter protesting the Toronto International Film Festival’s decision to feature the city of Tel Aviv in 2009.) Yet not taking a clear stance does, in effect, prompt viewers to ask, “Is Israel doing to Palestinians today what Germany did to Jews 65 years ago?”—that is, inverting the Holocaust. And just to pose the question, without providing an answer, may provoke audiences to come to their own insidious conclusion.
