Subservient Silence: A Look Back on "The Zone of Interest”
Article by Krubel Berhe | Art by Jillian Hartshorne
2 years ago, the Israeli-Hamas War began. Since this war began, more than 46,006 Palestinians have been killed and 109,378 have been wounded. Women and children make up half of these numbers. Enough nuclear air strikes have hit the Gaza Strip to surpass the level of destruction that Hiroshima faced in 1945. This isn’t a war, but a genocide of the Palestinian people. Around the same time, a film called “The Zone of Interest” was released. A film that looks down the barrel of humanity’s gun, intending to seek out its darkest corners. A film that was celebrated with various awards and accolades for its unforgiving look at the Holocaust, yet its obvious correlation to the horrors in Gaza were ignored. So rather than continue to disregard what makes this film relevant, let’s take a deep dive into why this is the most important film of this decade.
In order to dissect The Zone of Interest’s relevance, we have to understand the history behind the century-long Israel and Palestinian conflict. In 1917, The British issued the Balfour Declaration, stating “The establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”. This led to Jewish people buying land from non-Palestinian landowners and evicting the Palestinian farmers who lived there. In 1947, the UN passed Resolution 181 which separated Palestine into a Jewish and Palestinian state almost equal in size. War immediately began and resulted in Israel’s victory and more than 700,000 Palestinians fleeing their homes, becoming refugees in surrounding Arab countries. This war was remembered as the beginning of a nation for the Israelis and a catastrophe for the Palestinians as they became stateless. In the late 1980s, Palestinians began the first intifada, which saw the formation of Hamas, an organization devoted to freeing Palestine from Israel's occupation. Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip in 2007 and because of this Israel labeled it a hostile territory, closing off Gaza’s borders, which led to power cuts and restricted imports. This blockade of Gaza caused short on-and-off conflicts between Israel and Hamas for 16 years, up until October 7, 2023.
The ongoing Israel-Hamas War is nothing short of inhumane. The Palestinians have been thrown around and ignored for centuries. This is a war that started because other nations refused to grant them independence. In the first month of the war, more than half of the Palestinian population was displaced. Their food supply and access to clean water are running short, and their sanitation services are suffering as a result. Disease is running rampant and most of their shelter has been reduced to rubble. Israeli soldiers are detaining innocent Palestinians and putting them into concentration camps, one of the youngest prisoners being a 14-year-old boy. One woman who was in these camps said the following about what she went through there, “On the third day of detention, they put us in a ditch and started throwing sand. A soldier fired two shots in the air and said they executed my husband and I broke down and begged him to kill me too, to relieve me from this nightmare”. As I stated before, this is no longer a war, but a genocide. So many innocent lives are suffering on such a large scale due to Zionism. How many more children have to die to satisfy Zionist’s bloodlust? So allow me to explain how all of this correlates to The Zone of Interest.
The film follows Rudolf Höss, a German Auschwitz commander, his wife Hedwig, and their family as they live next to a German concentration camp during World War 2. Glazer masterfully utilizes the sound design in this film as a constant reminder of the horrors happening right next door. Distant sounds of gunfire, screaming, furnaces, and trains bringing more prisoners permeate throughout the film. No matter how hard they try to ignore this, it’s always there right beyond their garden wall. Think of how many times you’ve scrolled through your phone and seen a video documenting the horrors going on in Gaza. Maybe it was a video of a mother pleading for you to help her and her family by spreading awareness of her plight. Something that takes less than a minute, and you probably scrolled past it as if it were a mundane routine. Therein lies the point Glazer makes with The Zone of Interest. How can we expect things to change for the better if we’re the ones making atrocities into a mundane routine? This comes to a head in the final scene of the film. As Höss leaves his office in Berlin, he begins to profusely throw up when he stumbles upon one of the building’s many corridors. A hallway completely shrouded in a piercing darkness. The film then cuts to the present day, when janitors are cleaning an Auschwitz museum filled with the belongings of those who were dragged to their deaths in this institution decades ago. The atrocities Höss helped bring about finally catch up to him. This realization of his innate evil comes too late, as he’s now responsible for the annihilation of a people.
Each one of us can save the Palestinian people if we simply speak up about it or donate to the countless charities supporting them. A dollar could let a mother see her children grow up. Reposting a father’s plea for his children to eat could save them from starvation. We must act now and speak up because it’s our God-given right to. Listed below are some charities organized to help those in Palestine. The people of Palestine deserve to grow up, so do something now so you don’t have the same realization as Höss.
https://crisisrelief.un.org/opt-crisis
https://www.unfpa.org/donate/Gaza/1
https://www.icrc.org/en/donate
https://www.oxfam.org/en/what-we-do/emergencies/crisis-gaza
Sources
https://www.britannica.com/event/Arab-Israeli-wars#ref340996
https://www.icanw.org/commentary_nuclearweapons_israel_gaza
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Hamas
