From Ground Zero: Stories from Gaza

The uniqueness of the film, From Ground Zero: Stories from Gaza (2024), goes well beyond it being a documentary that includes an animated short made by children and a puppet show. Footage of a Palestinian being pulled from the rubble twice—one with the head of his dead friend very close to him and the other with his account that he could see body parts of his parents near him—is nothing short of chilling. Perhaps less so, yet equally stunning, are the close-ups of the legs and arms of children on which their respective parents had written the names so the bodies could be identified after a bombing. That the kids had dreams in which they erased the black ink from their skin because they refused to fathom the eventuality of having to be identified is chilling in a way that goes beyond that which film can show visually. Moving pictures can indeed go beyond the visual in what film is capable of representing and communicating to an audience. The same can be said regarding the potential of film to bring issues not only in ethics, but also in political theory and theology to a mass audience.

The movie is a collection of 22 short films made in Gaza by 22 filmmakers there who wanted to inform the world of the atrocities being committed there by the Israeli government. Interestingly, in none of the short stories is Israel mentioned by name. Only once is there a mention of “the occupier.” This may point to the depth of the hatred once the infliction of suffering and even death has reached a threshold of sorts. In the short story, “Out of Frame,” a woman says, “There is no longer a possibility of peace.” Not even a possibility. This may mean that a significant number of Gaza residents would rather die than make peace with Israel. This could also mean that in over-reacting in punishing a collective so much, rather than just the individuals who had taken hostages on October 7, 2023, the Israeli Netanyahu misjudged out of hatred and thus unwittingly triggered much more hatred against Israel. The prime minister obviously had not consulted with the European philosopher, John Locke, who had written that one rationale for government is that victims cannot be trusted to use fair judgment in acting as judge and jury in sentencing the victimizers.  Indeed, the descendants of victims of another century can themselves become victimizers, and the cycle can indeed intensify rather than dissipate, even for seven generations.

Two other ways in which ethics, political theory and theology can be discerned in the film also relate the two domains. In the short story, “No Signal”—this title itself resonating with the filmmakers’ intent to inform the world of what was really going on in Gaza—someone says that “martyrs” were being dug out of a collapsed building nearby. Throughout the 22 stories in the film, the dead are repeatedly referred to as martyrs. The sheer consistency may mean that the residents of Gaza were viewing the atrocity as being committed by Jews against Muslims, rather than as a secular political conflict between an occupier and the occupied. Mirroring the helplessness of a subjugated people not allowed to have weapons even to defend themselves from rogue (or organized) military commanders, the film reveals a sense of fatalism among all the fatalities. In the story, “Echo,” a woman on a phone says in the midst of bombing, “Get in a house; any house!” The other person replies, “God will protect us.” Well, obviously that was not true, considering the number of fatalities, so the insistence itself may reveal a sense of utter helplessness. Ironically, in his book on the human need for meaning, Victor Frankl provided as support the search for meaning by Jews in Nazi concentration camps in the mid-20^th century. So in the film’s short story, “24 Hours,” the man who had been dug out of debris three times, and had been stuck for hours near the dead bodies of a friend and his parents, could only say, as if in utter futility, “It’s God’s will.” The filmmaker could have gone further on that point—thus showing the potential of film to stimulate viewers to think theologically without being indoctrinated—by bringing in the obvious question of theodicy: how is it that a benevolent deity allows the innocent to suffer? A friend of the man could have said, “If it is Allah’s will, then how could it be said that Allah protects us from evil?” Contrary to the claim made by Israel’s president, I am assuming that not every resident of Gaza was culpable in the October incursion into Israel proper to kill Israelis and take hundreds of hostages. The intent of the filmmakers to show the world the physical and mental suffering being inflicted by the Israeli military for more than a year renders the theological question especially salient, especially as the recurrent use of the word “martyr” evinces a distinctly religious interpretation by a significant number of the residents of Gaza (though perhaps not all of them, as glossing over an entire collective is often contrived and thus artificial).

The psychological toll itself begs the theological question. In the first short story, a Gazan refugee in a camp near Egypt has a sense that her life is over. Her father had been killed by the Israelis in 2014, and more recently her sister’s entire family was killed in a bombing. In the short story, “Sorry, Cinema,” a filmmaker who was barred from leaving Gaza to receive a film award at a festival says, “Time has become my enemy.” In “Flashback,” a young woman says she keeps a bag packed because she might have to leave her house at a moment’s notice. “My mind stops because of the drones,” she says. In “The Teacher,” a man waits for his phone to be recharged but there are no unused sockets, water has just run out when he is next in line for it, and the same occurs when he is in line to get food. In “Overburdened,” a woman admits, “I am very surprised that we survived” walking north to get out of Gaza. In “Hell’s Heaven,” a man sleeps in a body bag that he took from a morgue because he has no blanket and it is cold in his tent at night. “Nothing remains of this city except the sea,” he laments. In “Offerings,” a writer says of infliction of suffering and death, there is “no recognition of human beings.” This resonates with statements in the media by Israelis referring to the Palestinians as dogs. Such dehumanizing sentiment had ironically been inflicted on the Jews in Nazi Germany. In fact, in the short story, “Fragments,” one of the charcoal drawings could be assumed to be of Nazi concentration-camp survivors being liberated. The psychological toll and the natural reaction of intense hatred may go beyond the comprehension even of psychologists.

The physical, psychological and even spiritual toll being inflicted by human beings on other human beings could bring victims to question whether God exists as a personal being rather than there being what in Hinduism is called brahman, which is impersonal ultimacy as conscious infinite being. In terms of political theory, both the human toll and the extent of bombed, collapsed buildings shown throughout the film may mean that the residents of Gaza were living in something akin to Hobbes’ state of nature, in which life is short and brutish. This state, however, pertains to the relation between Israel and Gaza, rather than between the residents of Gaza, as a sense of solidarity among them is evinced throughout the film. For example, the bread-lines filmed were orderly; people were not fighting each other for food.

In spite of Jeremy Bentham having written that the notion of natural rights (i.e., in a state of nature) is ridiculous, and Hobbes’ social-contract theory being short an explanation for why people in a state of nature would feel obliged to enter into a social contract instituting a government before it is up and running, the scenes of order documented by the film even though the people in line may be close to starvation may point to the natural fellow-feeling of which humans are capable even when a police presence is lacking, though the threat of an onslaught of Israeli troops may be a sufficient motivator to keep the peace while standing in line for food, water, and medical care. The filmmakers could have explored the peaceful atmosphere in the cities in Gaza—whether it was due to a shared sense of camaraderie from having lost martyrs, and thus a shared “brotherhood” as Muslims, a psychological or religious sense of futility and even numbness, or a fear that disorder would incite even more ruthlessness from interlarding Israeli soldiers. The question of whether Gaza resembled the Hobbesian state of nature could also have been explicitly asked and explained without viewers being lost in the midst of philosophical jargon and a de facto mini-lecture.

 

Return to Haifa

Return to Haifa (1982) is a film in which the political element of international relations is translated into personal terms on the levels of family and individual people. The establishment of Israel by the UN is depicted in the film as being accomplished not only incompetently, but in negligence of likely human suffering. In fact, the suffering of the indigenous population may have been intended, given the operative attitude towards those people as animals. That the human being can be so dehumanizing in action as well as belief ultimately makes victims of all of us, even across artificial divides. This is precisely what the film depicts, with the victims being the active characters while the real culprits remain for the most part off-camera. The viewer is left with a sense of futility that can be undone by widening one’s view to include the antagonists, who are not passive. It is not as if fate inexorably brought about the Nakba (or even the scale of the atrocities in Gaza in the next century, which, as the film was made in 1982, cannot be said to be anticipated by the filmmaker—though perhaps it could have been).

In the film, Saeed and Safiyya, a Palestianian couple expelled from Haifa in the Nakba that took place in 1948, return in 1967 to what had been their house in Haifa. Recognizing that furniture does not make a home, Saeed and Safiyya are particularly interested in whether their now-grown son, Khaldun, whom they abandoned when they fled from their house in the Nakba, would now want to live with them in the occupied territory or remain with Miriam, the Israeli who lives in the house and adopted Khaldun. To the twenty-year-old Khadun, whom Miriam had named Dov, Saeed and Safiyya are strangers. All of them are victims.

That Miriam had survived the Holocaust and is empathetic to the Palestinian couple having lost their house keeps her from being the film’s antagonist. That, in a flashback, she criticizes the Israeli soldiers for throwing a dead Palestinian boy like a piece of wood into a truck during the Nakba also goes to her character, especially given that, in a flashback further back, she witnesses Nazi troops shooting her own son. Moreover, not only is it inappropriate to blame her for leaving Europe to live in the Jewish state after the Holocaust and even for moving into the empty house in 1948, she is worthy of praise for adopting an infant and raising him. To be sure, she is blameworthy for having lied for years to Dov about the circumstances of his infancy, and Saeed rightly makes this point. Even so, Saeed, Safiyya, and Miriam, and even Khadun/Dov, share the experience of victimhood even if the son is not aware of his own and he lacks empathy for his birth parents, who had lost not only their house, but their son too. In fact, he blames them for having abandoned him in the house when they (and everyone else in the town) was fleeing gun-fire without notice. Lest it be thought that he, or even Nazi Germany is the prime antagonist, I submit that squalid role goes to the nascent state of Israel, with the UN as the negligent accomplice.

With home, belong, and return arguably being the three concepts that underlie the film’s narrative, the thesis can be described in the following terms: Macro-political decisions and resulting societal-level events have social and psychological impacts that are destructive and even ruinous to individuals and families. The film’s thesis resonates with Israel’s disproportionate reprisals against Palestinians in Gaza—rendering over a million homeless and short of food for months on end as of early 2025, when I saw the film. It is one thing to read that 55,000 Gaza residents were dead or missing and to look at photographs of the demolition of cities in the occupied enclave, and quite another to be there and see the horrendous impact on individuals there. Put another way, it is one thing to read of Israel’s president claiming that every resident of Gaza was guilty (and thus deserved to suffer) after Hamas’ foray into Israel proper in October of 2023, and quite another to comprehend the scale of the subsequent devastation in Gaza. Upon assuming office in 2025, U.S. President Trump characterized Gaza as a demolition zone. Relative to that, the Nakba that is portrayed in the film can be regarded as tame.

In the film, Saeed and Safiyya arrive by ship with other European Jews in 1948. In spite of having suffered atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis, the human beings arriving in the new state of Israel felt empathy for strangers. “All we know,” one migrant says, “is that we are going to homes owned by others.” Not even having suffered in Nazi Germany gives those new arrivals any presumption. I submit that this attitude is in start contrast to Israel in how it needlessly aggressively managed the Nakba in 1948. Even the UN, which left it to the Israelis to uproot the indigenous residents, can be blamed, especially considering the reference in the film to the Israeli attitude in which Palestinians are regarded as though animals to serve the Jews. From such an utterly dehumanizing attitude, not only the Nakba, but also the huge atrocities in Nazi Germany, almost a century later, in Gaza, are all to easy for the aggressors to justify to themselves. Furthermore, if indeed the attitude was held by the new government of Israel in 1948 and its military, the UN can be reasonably judged as woefully negligent in failing to supervise on the ground the transfer of land in the process of the creation of the state.

Such a momentous political decision as creating a state in a territory which is already populated and the indigenous population has not consented has the potential for abuse against families and individuals, as the results of the Milgram and Stanford psychological experiments confirm; humans given power have an excessive inclination to harm others. This fact is hardly limited to the Nazi and Israeli governments, and international governmental infrastructure should be up to the task of being able to safeguard our questionable species from its own nature. Return to Haifa can be viewed as making the point through narrative that people across divides can all be regarded as victims from political decisions being taken without considering the possibility (or probability) that one group might view another as consisting of service animals rather than as other human beings, who having a rational nature (Kant) and sentiments (Shaftsbury), are worthy of being treated as not merely means, but also ends in themselves.

Farha

The establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, being in the wake of the Nazi atrocities, was arguably viewed generally then as something that the world owed to the Jewish people. Perhaps for this reason, the UN did not take adequate measures on the ground to safeguard the Palestinian residents. In retrospect, the possibility, even likelihood, that people who group-identify with (or even as) victims consciously decide to become victimizers should have been better considered. The film, Farha, made in 2021, illustrates the sheer indeterminacy, and thus arbitrariness, of human volition when it issues orders to the body to be violent against other rational beings. Channeling Kant, it can be argued that the decision to shoot a family that poses absolutely no threat impurely out of hatred based on group-identity fails even to treat other rational beings as means—to say nothing of as ends in themselves. The unadulterated deplorability in being unwilling even to use another person as a means to some selfish goal, preferring instead to kill rather than respect the otherness of another person, grounds the verdict of the culprit being less than nothing. In another film, The Brutalist (2024), Laszio, the Jewish protagonist, erroneously concludes that Jews must surely be less than nothing, given how they were treated not only in Nazi Germany, but also in Pennsylvania even after the news of the Holocaust had reached the other shore. Whether brutality or passive-aggressive prejudice is suffered, however, turning one’s victimhood into victimizing is ethically invalid, for such a callous reaction fails to treat other rational beings as ends in themselves, and may even be so severe as to fail to treat them even as means.

Near the beginning of Farha, an Islamic teacher of girls looks on approvingly as one of the girls reads that the words of an unbeliever are the lowest. I submit that this line sets the tone for the film, and underlies how the Israelis and Palestinians have treated each other as groups historically, and most egregiously in how the Israeli government killed and decimated in Gaza in 2023-2024, interestingly just after Farha had been made. The unprovoked willfulness, or volition, that the film depicts of an Israeli commander deciding to have two of his subordinates shoot an unarmed Palestinian family and leave the just-born infant to die because a Palestinian baby is not “worth a bullet,” can be interpreted as the prima causa that, aggregated, lead to Hamas’ attack on October 7, 2023, which in turn led to the disproportionate Israeli decimation of Gaza, with as many as 55,000 killed and over a million residents rendered homeless and suffering a famine. In other words, the pivotal incident of the film can be heard has the proverbial first shot. As it was not heard around the world, the filmmaker of Farha performed that service for the world.

Myopia circling self-identification based on groups perpetuates cycles of hatred and violence. In Farha, the Islamic teacher objects to Farha’s father, who decides to allow his daughter to attend school in the city. She already knows the Koran, the teacher says. “What else is there to learn?” Closing the loop, as it were, can lock in antagonism based on group-identity, for the Koran not only states that the words of the unbeliever are lowest, but also that if a nonbeliever living in the same village refuses thrice to convert, it is better that that person be killed than risk that one’s false beliefs pollute the believers. I read this line while I was spending a Spring Break at Yale reading the Koran for a term paper. In Christianity, the Apostle Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 6:14-18 that Christians should avoid close contact with people who do not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. To be sure, merely avoiding contact is ethically superior to killing, but an Islamicist could point ironically to the story of Abraham as teaching that divine commands (and thus revelation) trump even universally-accessible moral principles.[1]

In Farha, the Israeli group-commander is not following a divine command when he uses his free will to give the order to shoot the Palestinian family; he is thus culpable. He even knowingly breaks the promise he made to Farha’s uncle, who was anonymously helping the Israeli commander, that women and children would not be harmed. Even though the commander’s group-identification-saturated paradigm backs up his volition, he is blameworthy as an individual, for his volition is his alone and so, as the Americans say of the U.S. President, the buck stops with him.

Coming away from the film, a viewer might wonder why it is that the village had to be evacuated immediately. The loud-speakers repeatedly threaten that any (Palestinian) villagers who do not leave the village immediately will be shot. Why such a hurry?  Ironically, the Israeli military could cite Paul’s no-contact dictum; the possibility of sharing the village is never brought up in the film. The dire urgency is undercut visually in the last scene, as Farha sits on a swing next to that which her friend had sat—that other swing is now broken. The village is deserted—no Israelis have moved in. Flies swarm the dead baby in the courtyard—the corps not having been worth even a bullet.

Is it such an Augustinian, Hobbesian, Pascalian, and Machiavellian world that peace is only possible once all humans have been removed from the equation?  For only finally, at the end of the film, is the village at peace; Farha walks away in silence and no one is left. She leaves the village in desolate peace. If the Age of Reason did indeed fall to the Holocaust and Gott ist tot as Nietzsche claimed, such that all we have left is human subjectivity, as the decimated philosophical phenomenologists of the decadent twentieth-century erroneously concluded, how will humanity pull itself together, especially if group-identification is permitted to continue to have such staying power in human consciousness?  Until her world was needlessly turned upside down, Farha just wanted to be a teacher; she wanted to break through constrained knowledge and help others to do so too. She ends up just trying to survive long enough in a small pantry-room to escape the arbitrariness of an antagonistic human will. Perhaps a little Buddhism might be helpful in dissolving the grip of group-identification; a group’s name can be understood as just a label, rather than as corresponding to an actual group-self, which does not really exist. In other words, “Israeli” and “Palestinian” may be interpreted as labels in a nominal rather than a realist way in terms of whether anything existent corresponds.  

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1. See Soren Kierkegaard’s book, Fear and Trembling, on this point: namely, the divine command to sacrifice Isaac trumps the ethical charge of murder even though only Abraham knows of the command whereas the ethical principle not to murder is accessible to anyone.

The Brutalist

It is easy to conclude that Adrien Brody “steals the show” in his depiction of Laszio Toth in The Brutalist (2024), a film about a Jewish architect (and his wife and niece) who emigrates to Pennsylvania from Hungary after World War II. As I was stretching my legs after watching the very long yet captivating film in a theater, a woman doing the same declared to me that Adrien Brody had definitively stolen the show. I wasn’t quite sure, though I perceived Guy Pearce’s acting out Harrison Van Buren to be emotionally fake, even forced. In understanding the film, it is vital to go beyond the obvious characters (and actors) to acknowledge the roles of two silent yet very present characters as definitive for the meaning of the film. Before revealing those characters, the proverbial elephant in the room must be discussed: Being Jewish even in the modern, “progress”-oriented world.

It is not long after Laszio sits down to talk with his initial host—Attila, the cousin—that the religious question comes up. Although Attila is Jewish, his wife Audrey is Roman Catholic and Attila has converted. Laszio shocked not only at this, but that Attila has changed his last name to the Americanized Miller. In the next scene, set outside, we see a large “Jesus Saves” lit sign in the background; in the foreground is bread-line, which is out of bread. Jesus may save souls, but apparently not hungry bodies. The implication is that Attila sold his soul in giving up his religion to fit in.

It is not that Laszio carries any grudge against Christianity; it had not been the force behind the Nazi’s Final Solution, and thus behind the concentration camp where both he and his wife Erzsébet had (separately) been sent. “Dreams slip away,” Harrison observes. Laszio can of course relate; he says at one point that he had no choice but to come to America. No longer a working architect, and unfairly deprived of housing by his cousin once in Pennsylvania, Laszio must stay in homeless shelter and shovel coal for work. To him, America is no shining city on a hill; he tells his wife at one point, “They don’t want us here. We are nothing; we are worse than nothing.” He has internalized the external prejudice against Jews, and perhaps may feel on some level that his internment in a concentration camp to have been justified. The Brutalist is not a light film.

To be less than nothing may be justified by the infliction of suffering and even death on others, as the Nazis did; to be forced to endure the sting of such intense hatred is on the contrary not to be less than nothing. Interestingly, we could say that the innocent civilians in Gaza in 2023-2024 were not less than nothing; less than nothing is applicable instead to the Israelis who can be implicated in and killed 55,000 Gaza residents and made more than a million homeless (even bombing in a tent camp). As these numbers far exceed the 1,200 Israelis who died and the couple hundred Israeli hostages, justified natural justice was also far exceeded by vengeance. That the Jewish deity saves that for itself makes this verdict all the more damning.

Just the president of Israel was wrong in his insistence that every resident of Gaza was guilty and thus deserved to suffer, so too it would be wrong to conclude that every Jewish person was culpable for the horrendous over-reaction in killing tens of thousands of Gaza residents and making many, many more homeless and facing famine and a shortage of medicine. Jewish people generally need not be in the awkward psychological position of both presuming to be the chosen people and a people that is worse than nothing.

Just as Laszio suffers wrongfully in interiorizing the sentiment of prejudiced people that Jews are worse than nothing, he does not have to carry his memory of the death-camp into his architecture. A drawing of one of his buildings is labeled, “The past in the present,” which conflicts with his intention that his buildings not only endure stylistically, but are apart from time. The underlying problem is that a human artifact cannot both hold on to the past and yet have an ambiance of eternity. The huge, cement building that he designs for Harrison looks like a giant tomb, such as the ones constructed in ancient Egypt. At the same time, the dark, hard-solid walled rooms could pass for the gas chambers used by the Nazis to kill people at the concentration camps. Laszio carries his dark past into his architecture in the “new world.” That he intentionally uses light to show a Christian cross in the distinctly Christian chapel in the building may connote the hope that had been utterly absent in the death camps. Laszio’s pride in this architectural achievement is ironic, given both his skeptical reaction to his cousin’s conversion to Catholicism to fit in, but it is not as if Laszio might convert to Christianity. After all, “Jesus Saves” is associated in the film with no bread left in the bread-line.

I submit that Christianity and the Holocaust are the two silent partners, or characters, in the film. That the consulting architect is a Protestant is no accident, for the city wanted assurance because Laszio is Jewish. Christianity is also present in Attila and Audrey’s bedroom in the form of a crucifix on a wall, and perhaps most explicitly in Harrison’s insistence that the chapel be distinctly Christian, rather than a prayer room as Laszio initially proposes. The light shown in the chapel from the cross on the ceiling cannot be missed in the otherwise gray tomb-monstrosity of a building.

As for the Holocaust, its subtle imprints can be found throughout the film. Perhaps that character is most felt—most present—not in the tomb-like rooms in the partially constructed community center—and it is odd that the public would want to spend leisure time surrounded by walls, floors, and ceilings of cement—but when slabs of cement are loaded onto a freight train. The heavy, almost deafening thuds on a drum, the iron tracks, and the train itself conjure up the trains on the way to the Nazi death-camps. When the train crashes, the fire may even evoke the ovens in the camps. It is perhaps no accident that the film has Harrison fire and evict Laszio (recall that his own cousin, the Christian Attila, kicked Laszio out earlier). The sudden freight of having to fend for oneself (and one’s family) is felt existentially, and such a fear must have been felt by the victims of the Holocaust. To subject anyone to such freight is to render oneself, rather than the victim, as worse than nothing.

Both Christianity and the Holocaust are very much present in the film, and yet obliquely so. The implicit message may be that as much as we want to be free of the past, it’s imprint can be found all around us. Why didn’t Christianity come to the rescue of the Communists, Jews, and gays in the Holocaust? Both hope and despair seem to coexist without cancelling each other out. What lies beyond Laszio’s attraction to the cross in the context of the tomb, and his unconscious interest in reimaging the dingy inner sanctum of a death camp? Why didn’t “Jesus Save” as the neon sign in the film insists?  To be free of the past does indeed lie in Laszio’s free-will, as it does for the rest of us, even though existential trauma, if left to its own devices, can reverberate through time if the severity is sufficiently intense to leave imprints in not only the human mind, but also its constructed artifacts. The human mind is perhaps too fragile for what people are all too willing to inflict on others. Not even our religions seem to be enough.

The Lion in the Desert

In 1929, after nearly 20 years of facing resistance in Libya, Benito Mussolini, the Fascist ruler of Italy, appointed General Graziani as colonial governor to put down the military resistance of Libyan nationalists led by Omar Mukhtar. Graziani was ruthless, and fortunately he was arrested when Mussolini was toppled. His foremost atrocity was putting over a million Libyan civilians in a camp in a desert, with the intent to starve them in retaliation for the guerilla fighters objecting to the Italian occupation. The film, The Lion of the Desert (1980), faithfully depicts the historical events that took place in Libya from 1920 to 1931. The sheer arbitrariness other than from brute force in the occupation and the impotence of the League of Nations are salient themes in the film.

Both in peace negotiations, which Gaziani posed merely to given him more time with which to build up his army in Libya, and after Mukhtar’s capture, the direct refusal of Mukhtar to accept the legitimacy of the presence of the Italians on Libyan soil combined with the inability of the Italian brass to furnish a legitimate justification for the occupation leaves the viewers with the sense that overwhelming modern military power was the reason in search of justification. At one point, Graziani admits to Mukhtar that the fact that Italy is there is what justifies the presence. The Libyan’s guns and horses are no match for the Italian metal tanks and machine guns. The result is a foregone conclusion. Yet Mukhtar holds to his principles rather than accepts bribes to turn on his cause.

The want of any international constraint on the fascists was also clear. At one point, the Italian delegation to the peace talks remind Mukhtar that the Libya is not a nation and thus the fighters don’t even have a voice in the League of Nations. No one would care, anyway. Yet even if a world does care, such as in the case of Israel’s atrocities in Gaza in 2023-2024, not even the World Court’s verdict and the United Nations itself had any teeth. At one point, Israel’s ambassador to the UN shredded the UN charter document in front of the General Assembly. That it had created Israel apparently made no difference to the Israeli government. As a concurrent case in point, Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine triggered resistance from the E.U. and U.S., but pushing back the aggressor was difficult. Russia’s bully-threat of using nuclear bombs just showed how dangerous it is for the world being unable to provide a check against aggressors.

General Graziani’s mass camp for Libyan civilians is eerily similar to Israel’s camps for Gazans nearly a century later. In both cases, the world was not able to defend even such numbers of innocent civilians. In the film, an Italian military man admits that the Geneva Convention is not being followed. The same could be said of Israel in Gaza. The 9000 Palestinian hostages being held in Israel and the reports of the torture of at least some of them did not dissuade the U.S. from passing $24 billion in aid to Israel. Clearly, having the U.S. as the “global policeman” was not an effective basis for a peaceful global order. Similarly, the League of Nations is depicted as impotent in the film.

From the vantage point of more than 40 years since the release of the film, viewers could be excused for feeling utter frustration at the lack of political development since 1929. The advent of nuclear bombs just makes the lack of international political development all the more striking. At some point, humanity will likely pay dearly for its refusal to cede any governmental sovereignty to an international force with teeth. To be sure, back in the eighteenth century, Kant claimed that world peace would only be possible, rather than probable, if a world federation exists. But his notion of such a federation we would call confederal, rather than a case of modern federalism, as he makes no mention of ceding some sovereignty to the federal level. The UN, rather than the E.U. and U.S., is akin to Kant’s federation. I contend that the shift from confederal to (modern) federal would be decisive in shifting the chances of world peace from possible to probable.

In short, a film can indeed be useful in terms of depicting the need for further development in political theory. With all the advances in technology and medicine during the twentieth century, the lack of any international political development is all the more perplexing, especially given the brazen military atrocities against even civilians in Ukraine and Gaza. A look back to 1929 just shows how static the international system has been.

The Zone of Interest

It is, unfortunately, all too easy for the human brain to relegate the humanity of other human beings—to dehumanize them. This is the leitmotif of The Zone of Interest (2023), a film whose release took place in the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Gaza in which civilians, including women and children, were targeted as if they were culpable for the break-up of the U.S.S.R. and the Hamas attack in Israel. Under the fallacy of collective justice, dehumanizing carnage can run wild. In The Zone of Interest, the banality of evil is evident even though it is subtle under the protection of the status quo. To be sure, other films depict such banality of the ordinary; what distinguishes The Zone of Interest is how it shows us the rawness of human violence ironically by now showing it.

In the film, Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, his wife Hedwig, and their children live in a house next to the camp. Eerily, the house and its outdoor garden and pool have come to be home to them so much that Hedwig fights tooth and nail to stay when Rudolf is transferred. It is as if Hedwig could no longer see the ubiquitous gray smoke billowing from the chimneys, even as her mother has trouble sleeping because of the “factory” noise and the distant smoke. There are two degrees of separation between Hedwig and her mother their reactions to what is going on inside the camp. Of course, Hedwig is proud of her garden and does not want to leave what she has worked so hard on. Interestingly, the close-ups on the red flowers can be interpreted as standing for the purity of nature or, especially in light of her children swimming among human bones and ashes in the river, as intimating a funeral, and thus death itself. That the flower means one thing to Hedwig and quite another to the viewers shows us just how warped the human brain can be without realizing it. Although not arbitrary, our social realities are hardly objective, and we can be so dreadfully clueless on just how warped one’s own can be.

The language of dehumanization in the film is spoken as Rudolf meets with a few men to discuss the efficiency of adding another furnace, and later when as an inspector he compares the “yields” of different camps. Referring to the human victims as “pieces” and to “loads” to be gassed chills the ears as watching the Höss kids playing with teeth of the cremated does to the eyes. In being able to tug at our ears and our eyes, movies can make real ethical problems in ways that singular-dimension books cannot reach.

As much as “moving pictures” are visual in nature, the choice to turn the camera away and focus only on sound can be very effective in conveying sordid human interactions. In Inglorious Basterds (2009), SS Col. Hans Landa demonstrates just how quickly and starkly humans can become savagely violent once courtesy is given up. In The Zone of Interest, we glimpse with our ears only the sheer roughness in the violence with which the camp’s guards manhandle the people as they came off the trains. We hear the thuds of guards shoving the people disembarking from the cattle cars and the moans and grasping for air of the "herd animals." The sounds are raw; they depict us humans as animals, both as birds of prey and prey. 

Human beings in the state of nature, Hobbes would say. Unlike Locke's claim, there are no natural rights in such a state. That the viewers can only see Rudolf’s stoic looking-on as if above the fray only dramatizes the extent of human versatility from stoic self-discipline to unconstrained violence, the latter perhaps going even beyond the unethical to being raw nature as it is rather than how it ought to be. Whereas the Nazi policy to exterminate enemies of the state can certainly be reckoned as unethical, the raw violence itself points to our genetic makeup as animals. 

Concerning nature itself, we might say that it is problematical to get ought out of is, which is what Hume calls the naturalistic fallacy. Does it even make any sense to say that the lion should not kill and eat its prey? I abhor people who shed polite society so easily in order to instantly become violent. The experience of being in raw violence is so unique, and so different from anything ordinary, that it is perhaps the only way we have of getting in contact with what life might have been like for our prehistoric ancestors. Contending with a violent person does not lend itself to ethical analysis; even though the attacker can be deemed unethical after the fact, ex post facto, the experience itself, after the choice, seems to break through the wall into raw experience, which is beyond good and evil. 

So, we are not completely divorced from our primitive ancestors after all. For another fallacy is to suppose that reasoning, including the impersonal business calculus that can act as a cover for the banality of evil, and techological progress can sever us from our own animal nature. As Locke points out, it is possible to find oneself in the state of nature in the experience of violence even amidst being in a civilized society (e.g., before the police arrive). It is the sheer distance between our rational nature and the experience of unrestrained violence that is so well depicted in The Zone of Interest." 

Golda

In introducing a screening of Golda (2023) at Yale, Shiri Goren, a faculty member in the university’s Near Eastern Languages department, told the audience that “the non-Israeli, non-Jew Helen Mirren” plays Golda Meir in the film. Rather than evincing gratitude that the excellent actress would play an ugly character, the implication is that an actor can, or even worse, should only play characters of the actor’s own background. Goren’s basic ignorance of the craft of acting belies her credibility in teaching a course called Israeli Society in Film. That another of her courses was Israeli Identity and Culture may explain why her knowledge of film was eclipsed, namely by an ideological agenda or orientation. I contend that underlying her delusion concerning acting (and film, moreover) is a much larger problem: that of the artificial monopolization by one group identity. In actuality, each of us has more than one group-identity, so to allow one to envelop one’s very identity is problematic.

The craft of acting lies precisely in being able to inhabit a character in spite of the fact that its background is other. Hence actors do research in advance on a character to be played, whether it is fictional or nonfictional. Such research includes, for example, the character’s occupation and even the location where the character lived or is set to live in the film. Emotional work is also involved as an actor considers what within oneself can be drawn on in playing a given character. Johnny Depp, for instance, said in an interview that he regularly draws on more than one person (or character) in coming up with how to embody a character. To claim, therefore, that an actor can only inhabit characters having the actor’s own background is to deny what acting is, namely, inhabiting someone else. No one would criticize Depp for not having grown up in a crime family in Boston in playing Whitey Bulger in Black Mass (2015). In fact, quite the contrary. That I realized that Depp was the actor playing the role only well into the film attests to the actor’s skill precisely in inhabiting a character of a personality and background so different from Depp’s own. Moreover, that Depp had such versatility as to be able to play a pirate, the owner of a chocolate company, and a serious mobster demonstrates just how wrong it is to claim that an actor can only play a certain kind of character—one in line with the actor’s own background. This is such an obvious point concerning acting that that any claims to the contrary must surely involve false-belief and even delusion: qualities that ideology can have, according to Raymond Geuss in his book, The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School.

An ideology, such as one stemming from a suffocating group-identification that seeks to foist itself over a craft such as acting, can be “dependent on mistaking the epistemic status of some of [the ideology’s] apparently constituent beliefs.”[1] In other words, an ideology may hinge on a false-belief. Indeed, the human mind seems to be vulnerable to circuit-failures as an ideologically important false-belief is presumed to be true as if it could not be false. In other words, the mind doesn’t seem to do a good job at flagging its own false beliefs especially if an ideology being held is dependent on them. Hence, a group-identification ideology can get away with utterly misconstruing the craft of acting. Geuss even includes delusion as pertaining to ideology pejoratively.

I contend that delusion pertains to an ideology in which one group-identification is established monopolistically for an individual. To be sure, Geuss insists that “(h)umans have a vital need for the kind of ‘meaningful’ life and the kind of identity which is possible only for an agent who stands in relation to a culture.”[2] The kind of identity is here that which is informed by a person’s relationship to a culture. Each of us is connected to more than one cultures, and, relatedly, more than one group-identity applies.

I’m a Midwesterner; that’s my ethnicity. Identifying as an American in terms of culture is a looser or more general and even secondary ethnicity for me, whereas my group-identity as an American is foremost politically. My vocational group-identity as a scholar goes beyond vocation, and I have more than one religious group-identifications informing my religious identity. Other group-identifications apply to me as well. My racial group-identification as a Caucasian, or “White,” is actually not one that I an conscious of very often, so other people who are constantly referring to themselves and others by race strike me as unnaturally obsessed with the racial group-identification at the expense of others.

Seldom do we realize that one’s group-identification and that of another person may be different not only on the same axis (e.g., being of different racial groups), but also in emphasizing different types. One person might say, “I’m a Black person,” and the hearer might reply, “I’m a Catholic.” The types, or bases, of the two group-identifications are different: race and religion, respectively. This essentially relativizes a person’s favorite basis because others could alternatively be the person’s favorite. The choice seems arbitrary. The hearer could have replied, “I’m an American.” It is not self-evident that a Black person should view oneself primarily in terms of race rather than nationality (or religion or ethnicity, which is yet another category rather than isomorphic with race). More than one Black person has told me that only in leaving the U.S. and living in the E.U. has that person been able to de-prioritize his race-identity to other bases on which to self-identify. It seems to me, however, that a person has more control over which basis upon which to predominately group-identify, even if one basis is foisted upon oneself by a group to which one is accustomed to identifying with primarily.

Because each of us has several group identifications, any one of which a person could perceive as primary, allowing one to monopolize one’s group-identity temporally or geographically can be seen as dogmatic in the sense of being arbitrary. In getting into character, a good actor does not ignore the subordinate group-identifications. In the case of Golda Meir, she was actually from the Ukraine in the Soviet Union, so the claim Helen Mirren’s portrayal suffers because the actress was not Israeli can be understood to be fallacious. In the film, Golda tells Henry Kissinger, the U.S. Secretary of State, that during her childhood in the Ukraine, people would beat up Jews in the streets with impunity. The character doesn’t even identify mostly as an Israeli. Furthermore, her ethnic and religious group-identity as a Jew, while salient, does not monopolize her self-identity.

In fact, the film shows actual television footage of Golda Meir and Anwar Sadat in which Golda says, “As a grandmother to a grandfather, . . .” She could have said, “As a Jew to a Muslim,” or “As an Israeli to an Egyptian,” or “As a politician to a politician,” but her group-identification as a grandmother is on top at that moment. I submit that in her depiction of Golda Meir, Mirren draws significantly from her own group-identity as a woman and a mother.

Three times in the film, Golda empathizes with the typist whose husband is fighting in the war. It is clear from her facial expressions that Mirren is having the character react as a woman to another woman’s experience. Golda is even crying when she watches her assistant inform the typist that her husband has been killed. In listening to a soldier being attacked in battle, Mirren has Golda react as a mother would: to the boy’s anguish. Even in urging Henry Kissinger to eat borscht, a Ukrainian soup, Mirren portrays Golda as a mother—admittedly, as a very Jewish mother. But even in that scene, Golda’s Jewish group-identification is not the only one in play.

To be sure, Mirren does a great job in playing Golda’s specifically Jewish group-identity.  In a scene in which Golda is talking with Ariel Sharon, then a general, she tells him that all political careers end in failure. She even adds fatalist, “huh,” at the end of the sentence. Mirren portrays Golda’s Jewish ethnicity most stridently and explicitly along with Golda’s identification as a mother in the scene in which Kissinger is eating the soup.  As an immediate context, Golda makes explicit the primacy of being Jewish in Israel to Kissinger (e.g., “In Israel, we read right to left”) and even says that her cook is a survivor (i.e., of the Holocaust. It is the posture that Mirren adopts while watching the Jewish American eat the Ukrainian soup that may be Mirren’s most Jewish statement, and, given her skill as an actress, she didn’t need to be Jewish herself.

So, the rather pedestrian, non-intellectual comment of the faculty member at Yale that the non-Israeli, non-Jewish actress would be playing Golda Meir in the film says more about the sordid motive to impose an ideology containing a false-belief (and a delusion) as a weapon than it does about the actress or her (ability to play the) role. The group-identifications of Golda Meir that Helen Mirren uses most are actually as a woman and a mother. Even in this respect, whether Mirren was a mother at time of filming is not terribly important because her craft would have included the ability to play a mother regardless. To be sure, being able to draw on a common background or group-identity is an asset for an actor, but the viability of the craft does not depend on having a common background. That any given character has more than one group-identity makes it more likely that an actor can draw on personal experience in some respect and thus have an experiential connection with the character. This is not to say, however, that such experience is necessary, and even less that experience in one of the several group-identifications of a character is necessary. Besides, the most obvious group-identification of a character to an observer may not actually be primary either to the character (or the historical person on which the character is based) or to the actor in portraying the character. Part of Mirren's talent may be to assess which of a character's group-identities really drives the character, and, relatedly, which is decisive in pulling off the role. As observers, we bring our own ideological agendas, and this is especially problematic if we allow one of our group-identities a monopoly over our self-identity.

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1. Raymond Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 13.
2. Ibid., p. 22.