New York Times Opinion Piece Paved Way for Oscar Night Comparison of Israel to Nazis

On Oscar night, British director Jonathan Glazer used his movie about the Holocaust to condemn Israel’s “ongoing attack on Gaza” as an example of the same “dehumanization” that characterized the Nazis’ genocide against the Jewish people.

Glazer was widely — and appropriately — condemned by Jewish leaders, thinkers, and organizations who found his remarks while accepting the Oscar for Best International Feature Film at the 96th Academy Awards in Los Angeles on Sunday repugnant.

Less noticed, but just as outrageous, was a New York Times op-ed published on Saturday previewing Glazer’s argument.

The opinion article came from David Klion, a writer whose views are so loathsome that I have long had him blocked on X/Twitter.

Klion writes about Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, contending that it “finds something new and profoundly unsettling to say about the Holocaust” and “also accomplishes something more relevant to the present, forcing viewers to confront difficult questions about our own proximity to atrocity, and succeeding as a bracing reminder of how art can alert and sensitize us to the historical moment we inhabit.”

Klion writes that the movie “depicts the life of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, and his family at their handsome estate just outside the walls of the death camp.”

He continues: “Watching The Zone of Interest as US-made bombs rained down on civilian neighborhoods in Gaza, I couldn’t help but dwell on the banal acceptance of these mass civilian casualties that I’ve witnessed closer to home.”

The op-ed goes on to complain about “Israel’s military siege against the Palestinians.”

It goes on further: “For Jews like myself, who publicly oppose Israel’s actions in Gaza, one of the hardest realities to confront is the fact that plenty of people in our communities are aware that the Israeli offensive is killing tens of thousands of Palestinians, many of whom are children. But in the wake of the gruesome Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israelis that touched off the war, many people we are close to are not just incurious about Israel’s assault on Gaza but are willing to justify it without apology.”

In case anyone missed the point, Klion spiked the football about his piece in a March 9 post on X: “Proud that my first print appearance in NYT is, among other things, an argument that what Israel is doing in Gaza amounts to a genocide.”

The widely adopted International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism includes as an example “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.” That practice — also known as “Holocaust inversion” —is deeply problematic.

As the World Jewish Congress (WJC) has explained, “Any alleged wrongdoings on Israel’s part cannot be compared to Nazi crimes during the Holocaust. The Israeli–Palestinian conflict is a territorial and political one, whereas the Holocaust was the attempt to systematically annihilate European Jewry. Despite the unfortunate outbreak of violence during the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, the Palestinian population has grown by all metrics, and is projected to continue doing so. To compare this to the murder of millions of Jews during the Holocaust is preposterous and diminishes the pain of those who have suffered during the conflict.”

The WJC also quotes Deborah Lipstadt, now the State Department’s special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism: those who accuse Israel of genocide and other such crimes “are making a false comparison which elevates by a factor of a zillion any wrongdoings Israel might have done, and lessens by a factor of a zillion what the Germans did.”

It should be obvious that the Nazi-perpetrated Holocaust and Israel’s just war of self-defense against Hamas are nothing like one another. In the Holocaust, the Nazis intentionally set out to kill all the Jews, who had done nothing wrong. In the Gaza war, the Israelis are being careful to minimize civilian casualties in an operation aimed at uprooting an evil terrorist militia that is dedicated to killing the Jews and wiping Israel off the map. If there’s a parallel to be made with the Nazis, the parallel is with Hamas, not with Israel.

Glazer’s comments generated substantial pushback. Klion’s New York Times piece, on the other hand, published on the Jewish sabbath, went widely unremarked upon in the mainstream Jewish community. Perhaps the Times opinion pages have gone so far off the anti-Israel deep end that they’ve lost their capacity to shock anyone. Or perhaps all the pro-Israel readers have already canceled their subscriptions. Whatever the reason, Klion and whatever Times editor made the bad decision to publish his article deserve a place with Glazer among the “Jews like myself, who publicly oppose Israel’s actions in Gaza.” I guess it’s better to know who these people are than to have them lurking unidentified in our midst. May they come to realize their errors, speedily and in our days.

Ira Stoll was managing editor of The Forward and North American editor of The Jerusalem Post. His media critique, a regular Algemeiner feature, can be found here.

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