Albert Einstein once noted, “The reason we Jews survive is that the cowards leave us.”  One can, however, find plenty of cowards among Jews themselves.

One such coward, imbued with self-hatred, is the writer and director of the film The Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer.  During his acceptance speech of an Oscar for the best foreign full feature film, he said, “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 — whether the victims of October 7 in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization.”

The moral equivalency Glazer made — between the murdered Jews of the Nova Love Fest and the people of the kibbutzim and Sderot, next to Gaza, who were killed because they were Jews, and Palestinians in Gaza, who are now victims of a war initiated by Hamas, wherein they were used by Hamas as human shields — is abominable.  Hamas was and is intent on killing as many Jews as possible.  Israel is fighting a defensive war, with “Never Again” in mind, to prevent Hamas from being able to perpetrate more such massacres — which Hamas leaders have threatened to execute again and again given the opportunity.

Glazer, in his pandering to the enemies of Israel, made a mockery of the Holocaust.  Did he not read of the young Gazan who called his parents after killing ten Jews and was praised by them?  There is simply no moral equivalency between this and an outraged nation defending Jewish lives in order to prevent the wanton spilling of Israeli and Jewish blood.

Glazer may know something about directing a movie, but he has much to learn about the Middle East and occupation.  Israel left the Gaza Strip with its greenhouses and agricultural infrastructure back in 2005.  Gaza could have become a sort of Singapore.  Instead, it became a murderous enclave led by a violent Hamas dictatorship.  For Hamas, Jew-hatred superseded economic, political, and social consideration.

David Schaechter, president of the Holocaust Survivors’ Foundation, who survived the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps, condemned Jonathan Glazer’s acceptance speech.  He wrote an open letter to Glazer saying, “I watched in anguish Sunday night when I heard you use the platform of the Oscars ceremony to equate Hamas’s maniacal brutality against innocent Israelis with Israel’s difficult but necessary self-defense in the face of Hamas’s ongoing barbarity.”

While Glazer and company fall into the category that Einstein labeled as the “cowards who leave us,” there are still national governments that foster and fund antisemitism, especially Iran.  Antisemitism is pervasive in the Muslim world, especially since the rise of political Islam.  In the Western world, while the governments have not encouraged antisemitism, they have done little to eradicate it in their societies with a pertinent educational campaign and severe punishment for violent Jew-hatred — especially true in France and the United Kingdom.  Government policies that often demonize and single out Israel provide fertile ground for antisemitism.

In America, in recent months and particularly since the war in Gaza began, Jew-hatred has been exploding at an unprecedented level, along with violent antisemitic demonstrations in major cities and on campuses.  Frustrated college students who learned to hate America are using Jews as scapegoats, albeit under the guise of anti-Zionism.  Ignorance has made such students “useful idiots” for leftist professors and Islamist groups on campus.  When students chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and are asked, “What river and what sea?,” they have no clue, nor do they grasp the fact that it calls for the elimination of Israel; the denial of Jewish self-determination in their ancestral home; and, ultimately, genocide.

It is sometimes said that antisemitism has, in its ugliness, united the Jewish people.  But the Holocaust experience demonstrated that abandoning Judaism by conversion didn’t spare the lives of Jews.  This war has given the people of Israel a clearer understanding of who they are, the level of Jew-hatred worldwide, and a determination to survive as Jews in a united Jewish state.

Image via Pxfuel.