By Norman Solomon
Given all that has happened, I recently contacted some signers of the open letter to ask whether they still fully believe in its contents and whether their perspective on Israel has changed since then. Ten responded to my questions.
If you understand that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, why read an article focusing on the viewpoints of people who vehemently deny it? I wasn’t sure how to explain why, until I remembered something that screenwriter Frédéric Krivine said when I interviewed him in Paris eight years ago. He was the head scriptwriter of the brilliant film series Un Village Français, dramatizing the Nazi occupation of France during World War Two.
“People who do horrible things are human beings,” Krivine said. “We have to find a way to talk about them without hiding what they do and without treating them as nonhuman people, nonhuman beings. They are human beings; like us they belong to, we are in, the same species, human species…. It’s humans who kill now everywhere in the world where people are killed. It’s because they are human beings that we have problems – because if they were just extraterrestrial or monsters we could just erase them.”
When director Jonathan Glazer gave the acceptance speech for his film The Zone of Interest at the 2024 Academy Awards, these words caused an uproar: “All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present. Not to say, ‘Look what they did then,’ rather ‘Look what we do now.’ Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst. It shaped all of our past and present. 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 the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization. How do we resist?”
Quick reactions included a furious open letter that identified its more than 1,000 signers as “Jewish creatives, executives and Hollywood professionals.” The letter declared, “We refute our Jewishness being hijacked for the purpose of drawing a moral equivalence between a Nazi regime that sought to exterminate a race of people, and an Israeli nation that seeks to avert its own extermination…. The use of words like ‘occupation’ to describe an indigenous Jewish people defending a homeland that dates back thousands of years, and has been recognized as a state by the United Nations, distorts history. It gives credence to the modern blood libel that fuels a growing anti-Jewish hatred around the world, in the United States, and in Hollywood. The current climate of growing antisemitism only underscores the need for the Jewish State of Israel, a place which will always take us in, as no state did during the Holocaust depicted in Mr. Glazer’s film.”
The Gaza war was then in its fifth month. At the time, citing information from UNICEF, Reuters reported that “over 13,000 children have been killed in Gaza in Israel’s offensive,” and “many kids were suffering from severe malnutrition.” The United Nations issued a statement saying, “This war is a war on children. It is a war on their childhood and their future.”
Deaths and injuries mounted swiftly for another 19 months, until an ostensible ceasefire in October 2025. Assaults by Israeli forces have continued at lower levels, with no letup in miserable conditions for 2 million Palestinian people living in Gaza.
Given all that has happened, I recently contacted some signers of the open letter to ask whether they still fully believe in its contents and whether their perspective on Israel has changed since then. Ten responded to my questions.
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