Terrific piece. What did you think of the ending sequence? It seems under-discussed in reviews.
On Goldhagen - I vividly remember reading this dissent in the New Yorker, and thinking 'wait, *that* Clive James?", and knowing then I'd have to read everything he'd written.
The human propensity to overlook horror is disturbing to me, personally. This is because I notice that I am completely indifferent to the suffering that Gazans are undergoing. Outraged people can think what they like about what this callousness says about me, but something hard to pinpoint exactly has shifted for me with this conflict. I could make all the correct noises about it, were I to care about my status in polite society, but I am not even inclined to do that. I genuinely feel nothing about that body count. I wouldn't want to personally kill a Hamas sympathiser, but I can see that I'm somewhere on a path taken by all those ordinary German people.
It may not be genocide, yet the sight of very young Palestinian children and even babies shot by IDF snipers suggests an indifference not just to Palestinian lives but also to the perception of Israel by the outside world. This Millwallian sense of "we don't care what you think of us now" leaves the West horribly impotent in what will unfold.
‘Civilised’ people look away because it’s too hard to believe that people who look like ‘us’ (in this case white and not Muslim) can think and act like ‘them’ (Muslims irrespective of colour)
Some of your examples, the ones without links, regarding Hamas atrocities in the last paragraph all seem to be from one source: the Jewish Chronicle. I’ve looked it up and can’t find the report it references for those allegations or the names of the people who allegedly worked on it.
The one about the sliced foetus has since been shown to be an old (horrific) video of a Mexican cartel killing. Unless there’s a different one?
A decade maybe two decades from now, someone will produce another sad movie like this one. About the Palestinians dying across from someone’s backyard. Or maybe not.
I haven't done any kind of research on the level of support of ordinary Germans to Hitler's atrocities. I also haven't seen the film yet but I don't doubt the story is true. But I also remember our guide in Auschwitz telling us about how many German soldiers serving in the camps committed suicide, especially those taking people to the gas chambers. Indeed everybody knew what was happening in the camps, including the rabbi of New York who did nothing. Shocking, no? About the killing squads, would they be equivalent to those of settlers now randomly killing ordinary Palestinians in West Gaza that prompted even the US to impose sanctions? Genocide or not, Palestine was an open prison turned graveyard.
Anti-semitism had been an enduring aspect of European culture at least since the 15th century, if not longer. What sets Germany's response to this "problem" was their decision to implement their increasing technical prowess to devise killing on a mass scale, especially in the use of gas chambers. This demonstrates the acceptance by the German chemical industry--a world leader in industrial chemistry--to take up the challenge to develop effective killing agents. Yet, most Jews were killed, not by gas, but guns. As the historian Timothy Snyder has written "It's not possible that many Germans did not know about the mass murder of Jews...In the East, where tens of thousands of Germans shot millions of Jews over hundreds of death pits over the course of three years, most people knew what was happening." (Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, 2015, p. 207). This exemplifies "the banality of evil" characterization of the German response made by Hannah Arendt. Yet, there was a collective denial about the Holocaust itself and historians did not come to grips with it for decades. Snyder's Bloodlines: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, 2010 demonstrates the Germans were not alone in their desire to eradicate the Jews in the territories they controlled, but there is something unique in Hitler's animus.
I haven't seen this film but have read a large number of books revealing the Germans' willing complicity in the Nazi enterprise. Notable is Thomas Harding's Hanns and Rudolf (i.e. Rudolf Hoss). Also Claudia Koonz' Mothers in the Fatherland. She believed her research would show that German women had been led by their men but, horrifically, far from it. And Gitta Sereny reveals appalling complicity also.
I watched ("experienced" might be a better word) The Zone of Interest yesterday morning and it has really stuck with me., I can't stop thinking about it.
Your excellent piece is an equally worrying extension of it. Thank you.
On the same theme, this week I watched “Judgement at Nuremberg” (1961) on BBC iPlayer - how did I not know about this film? Spencer Tracey plays a judge from America assigned to hear the cases against 4 German judges participation in authorising atrocities. While off duty, the Germans he encounters in daily life all insist they knew nothing of the genocide. There are some extraordinary scenes that I found challenging and thought provoking as well as horrific footage of extermination camps. The film has been “selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress”. Anti semitism was entrenched in German society, but the Nazis nurtured and weaponised it.
I haven't seen The Zone of Interest just yet. I did read the novel but without much recollection at the moment. The recent film its release has reminded me of is Son of Saul, which is an astonishing piece of work. As well as the Clive James piece your mention of Goldhagen brought to mind, the book Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning is essential. I think since reading it I've never really needed to look at the question of what makes normal people do appalling things. The better question is what stops us? This is the vibe of Jordan Peterson's answer to the interviewer who asked (when he first reached the public eye) what he most wanted his students to remember. And he said, after some seconds of pause, 'that if they were the Germans of the 1930s and 40s they'd have at the very least shrugged their shoulders at the Nazi's actions just the same way as everyone else did.' There's much in that.
I don't quite know why Israel's present behaviour comes up in a discussion of Nazi activity, other than the obvious poor taste and grubby agitation that anti Israel types like to indulge in. Hamas prizes Jewish death more than it prizes Palestinian life, by orders of magnitude. There is a sickness in Palestinian society which is barely altered since 1948 because no Arab society can bear Jewish neighbours. Israeli behaviour is often terrible, but the way the state of Israel behaves has no bearing at all on the Palestinian worldview. All the polling data shows that Palestinians both in Gaza and in the West Bank, and large majorities of Arabs elsewhere, hold highly extreme views which are absolutely incompatible with peace. Extreme views which have prevented several peace deals. You could remove every settler from the West Bank and east Jerusalem tomorrow, and maybe that would be a good idea. But the Palestinian sickness would not be ameliorated one bit. You could even grant two states tomorrow on 1967 lines, and maybe you could fantasise that free Palestine might buck the Arab world trend and actually be functional, but the Palestinian sickness would not be ameliorated one bit. I see no path forward except that Israel continues to do its best to wipe out Hamas in totality, crush the dreams of it and its supporters, and Egypt allows the Gazan civilian mass to live over the border. This is not advocacy of the latter proposition, but no-one has a better one which does not involve Israel tolerating the repeats of Oct 7th which Hamas keeps promising and promising and promising, whereas what it could do instead is free the hostages and bring this current chapter of the conflict to a halt at a stroke. But again, we see that Hamas values Palestinian life far less than the IDF does, which has lost hundreds of ground troops in this war in the direct and deliberate pursuit of protecting civilian Palestinian life. They could have done all this by air, as Syria and Russia did in Aleppo, and it not cost a single drop of IDF blood.
Prior to October 7th Israel had killed around 5000 Palestinians in the last 30 years. Some of those deaths are a stain on Israel, no doubt. But it is a tiny number, relatively speaking. If being more restrained would make Palestinians less angry and conditions less conducive to Hamas, it would already have happened. The very existence of Jewish neighbours, never mind a Jewish state, in the Middle East is what primarily agitates the Arab street in Gaza, the West Bank and elsewhere in the region. So what exactly is the point of Israeli restraint? Short of ceasing to exist, nothing will be good enough. By regional standards Israel, and indeed by the standards of the US campaigns in Fallujah and Raqqa and Mosul, has behaved extremely moderately for its entire history, including since Oct 7th. The difference is that Palestinian society is uniquely hateful. The only useful comparator with the Nazi genocide is with Hamas, not Israel.
Terrific piece. What did you think of the ending sequence? It seems under-discussed in reviews.
On Goldhagen - I vividly remember reading this dissent in the New Yorker, and thinking 'wait, *that* Clive James?", and knowing then I'd have to read everything he'd written.
https://archive.clivejames.com/books/hitler.htm
The human propensity to overlook horror is disturbing to me, personally. This is because I notice that I am completely indifferent to the suffering that Gazans are undergoing. Outraged people can think what they like about what this callousness says about me, but something hard to pinpoint exactly has shifted for me with this conflict. I could make all the correct noises about it, were I to care about my status in polite society, but I am not even inclined to do that. I genuinely feel nothing about that body count. I wouldn't want to personally kill a Hamas sympathiser, but I can see that I'm somewhere on a path taken by all those ordinary German people.
It may not be genocide, yet the sight of very young Palestinian children and even babies shot by IDF snipers suggests an indifference not just to Palestinian lives but also to the perception of Israel by the outside world. This Millwallian sense of "we don't care what you think of us now" leaves the West horribly impotent in what will unfold.
I have been thinking about this phrase since I read it yesterday:
“But I do not believe that Israelis are killing Palestinians because they are Palestinians.”
It is very clear to some Israelis why they are killing Palestinians.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/C3qzrKaOIu_/?igsh=MXZ3N3V2aTNyY29odg==
‘Civilised’ people look away because it’s too hard to believe that people who look like ‘us’ (in this case white and not Muslim) can think and act like ‘them’ (Muslims irrespective of colour)
Some of your examples, the ones without links, regarding Hamas atrocities in the last paragraph all seem to be from one source: the Jewish Chronicle. I’ve looked it up and can’t find the report it references for those allegations or the names of the people who allegedly worked on it.
The one about the sliced foetus has since been shown to be an old (horrific) video of a Mexican cartel killing. Unless there’s a different one?
I’m using Oct7factcheck.com to check sources.
A decade maybe two decades from now, someone will produce another sad movie like this one. About the Palestinians dying across from someone’s backyard. Or maybe not.
I haven't done any kind of research on the level of support of ordinary Germans to Hitler's atrocities. I also haven't seen the film yet but I don't doubt the story is true. But I also remember our guide in Auschwitz telling us about how many German soldiers serving in the camps committed suicide, especially those taking people to the gas chambers. Indeed everybody knew what was happening in the camps, including the rabbi of New York who did nothing. Shocking, no? About the killing squads, would they be equivalent to those of settlers now randomly killing ordinary Palestinians in West Gaza that prompted even the US to impose sanctions? Genocide or not, Palestine was an open prison turned graveyard.
Anti-semitism had been an enduring aspect of European culture at least since the 15th century, if not longer. What sets Germany's response to this "problem" was their decision to implement their increasing technical prowess to devise killing on a mass scale, especially in the use of gas chambers. This demonstrates the acceptance by the German chemical industry--a world leader in industrial chemistry--to take up the challenge to develop effective killing agents. Yet, most Jews were killed, not by gas, but guns. As the historian Timothy Snyder has written "It's not possible that many Germans did not know about the mass murder of Jews...In the East, where tens of thousands of Germans shot millions of Jews over hundreds of death pits over the course of three years, most people knew what was happening." (Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, 2015, p. 207). This exemplifies "the banality of evil" characterization of the German response made by Hannah Arendt. Yet, there was a collective denial about the Holocaust itself and historians did not come to grips with it for decades. Snyder's Bloodlines: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, 2010 demonstrates the Germans were not alone in their desire to eradicate the Jews in the territories they controlled, but there is something unique in Hitler's animus.
I haven't seen this film but have read a large number of books revealing the Germans' willing complicity in the Nazi enterprise. Notable is Thomas Harding's Hanns and Rudolf (i.e. Rudolf Hoss). Also Claudia Koonz' Mothers in the Fatherland. She believed her research would show that German women had been led by their men but, horrifically, far from it. And Gitta Sereny reveals appalling complicity also.
I watched ("experienced" might be a better word) The Zone of Interest yesterday morning and it has really stuck with me., I can't stop thinking about it.
Your excellent piece is an equally worrying extension of it. Thank you.
On the same theme, this week I watched “Judgement at Nuremberg” (1961) on BBC iPlayer - how did I not know about this film? Spencer Tracey plays a judge from America assigned to hear the cases against 4 German judges participation in authorising atrocities. While off duty, the Germans he encounters in daily life all insist they knew nothing of the genocide. There are some extraordinary scenes that I found challenging and thought provoking as well as horrific footage of extermination camps. The film has been “selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress”. Anti semitism was entrenched in German society, but the Nazis nurtured and weaponised it.
I haven't seen The Zone of Interest just yet. I did read the novel but without much recollection at the moment. The recent film its release has reminded me of is Son of Saul, which is an astonishing piece of work. As well as the Clive James piece your mention of Goldhagen brought to mind, the book Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning is essential. I think since reading it I've never really needed to look at the question of what makes normal people do appalling things. The better question is what stops us? This is the vibe of Jordan Peterson's answer to the interviewer who asked (when he first reached the public eye) what he most wanted his students to remember. And he said, after some seconds of pause, 'that if they were the Germans of the 1930s and 40s they'd have at the very least shrugged their shoulders at the Nazi's actions just the same way as everyone else did.' There's much in that.
I don't quite know why Israel's present behaviour comes up in a discussion of Nazi activity, other than the obvious poor taste and grubby agitation that anti Israel types like to indulge in. Hamas prizes Jewish death more than it prizes Palestinian life, by orders of magnitude. There is a sickness in Palestinian society which is barely altered since 1948 because no Arab society can bear Jewish neighbours. Israeli behaviour is often terrible, but the way the state of Israel behaves has no bearing at all on the Palestinian worldview. All the polling data shows that Palestinians both in Gaza and in the West Bank, and large majorities of Arabs elsewhere, hold highly extreme views which are absolutely incompatible with peace. Extreme views which have prevented several peace deals. You could remove every settler from the West Bank and east Jerusalem tomorrow, and maybe that would be a good idea. But the Palestinian sickness would not be ameliorated one bit. You could even grant two states tomorrow on 1967 lines, and maybe you could fantasise that free Palestine might buck the Arab world trend and actually be functional, but the Palestinian sickness would not be ameliorated one bit. I see no path forward except that Israel continues to do its best to wipe out Hamas in totality, crush the dreams of it and its supporters, and Egypt allows the Gazan civilian mass to live over the border. This is not advocacy of the latter proposition, but no-one has a better one which does not involve Israel tolerating the repeats of Oct 7th which Hamas keeps promising and promising and promising, whereas what it could do instead is free the hostages and bring this current chapter of the conflict to a halt at a stroke. But again, we see that Hamas values Palestinian life far less than the IDF does, which has lost hundreds of ground troops in this war in the direct and deliberate pursuit of protecting civilian Palestinian life. They could have done all this by air, as Syria and Russia did in Aleppo, and it not cost a single drop of IDF blood.
Prior to October 7th Israel had killed around 5000 Palestinians in the last 30 years. Some of those deaths are a stain on Israel, no doubt. But it is a tiny number, relatively speaking. If being more restrained would make Palestinians less angry and conditions less conducive to Hamas, it would already have happened. The very existence of Jewish neighbours, never mind a Jewish state, in the Middle East is what primarily agitates the Arab street in Gaza, the West Bank and elsewhere in the region. So what exactly is the point of Israeli restraint? Short of ceasing to exist, nothing will be good enough. By regional standards Israel, and indeed by the standards of the US campaigns in Fallujah and Raqqa and Mosul, has behaved extremely moderately for its entire history, including since Oct 7th. The difference is that Palestinian society is uniquely hateful. The only useful comparator with the Nazi genocide is with Hamas, not Israel.