The prizewinning film "The Zone of Interest," written and directed by Jonathan Glazer (and loosely based on a novel by Martin Amis), focuses on the life of one family, the Hösses: Rudolf (Christian Friedl), his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) and their five children. Theirs is quite an ordinary, even boring existence, not really the stuff of movies. But what turns the life of the Höss family into a film – into "the zone of interest" – is the viewer's knowledge that the family's handsome home abuts the fence of the Auschwitz annihilation camp. The head of the household is the camp's commandant.
Any zone can be called a "zone of interest" when it has three attributes: It is in proximity to a place where appalling actions are occurring; it bears direct or indirect responsibility for appalling things that are happening in that place; and its inhabitants pursue a more or less regular life while turning a blind eye to what is going on in that place. "Zones of interest" can be arranged along a continuum, according to their physical proximity to the place where atrocities are taking place, the extent to which they (i.e., their army or citizens) are responsible for those events, and the degree to which they ignore what is happening. The Höss family house adjacent to Auschwitz is at the very edge, and along it are more moderate "zones of interest."
Since Israel's ground forces' entry last October – the "maneuver," in army jargon – into the Gaza Strip, the State of Israel has also become a "zone of interest." There is, of course, a context that renders our "zone of interest" more moderate, as it were: The troops entered Gaza after the horrific massacre perpetrated by Hamas in western Negev communities on October 7. Of course life in Israel is definitely not ordinary; the country is being bombed on several fronts and its soldiers, and sometimes civilians, are being wounded or killed almost every day. Still, despite these ostensibly mitigating circumstances, Israel is well endowed with the three attributes of a "zone of interest."
First attribute: Israel is very close to the Gaza Strip, although most Israelis see it as lying "beyond the hills of darkness." However, the Strip is extremely close to the center of the country; an hour's drive (without traffic jams) and you're there. It is also close to Israel in terms of mentality, not only geographically. Many Israelis visited it before Hamas' rise to power in 2005, and knew and employed workers from there. Some Israelis even share a language and certain cultural similarities with its residents. And as Rachel Edry, aka "Rachel from Ofakim," related in a recent documentary about the hours she spent with a terrorist who barricaded himself in her home with her on October 7, "He sang me songs of Lior Narkis and I sang him songs in Arabic to pass the time."
Second attribute: Israel is directly fomenting tremendous "collateral damage" in the Gaza Strip. It is killing and wounding immense numbers of noncombatants, destroying homes and infrastructure and inflicting terrible suffering on the inhabitants. More than 70 percent of the private and public buildings in Gaza have reportedly been damaged or destroyed by attacks from the air and from the ground, and most of its roads have been torn up. Thousands of children have been killed by army bombings and bullets, and hundreds of thousands of pitiable refugees are wandering from place to place, not knowing how they will survive the approaching winter.
The horrific suffering Israel is bringing down upon the inhabitants of Gaza is not only "collateral" – it's intentional. It serves the declared intentions of certain figures in the government to carry out a population transfer of the Palestinians and to populate the northern section of the Strip with settlements. And the Israel Defense Forces' operations provide an outlet for the lust for revenge of soldiers and commanders alike.
Third attribute: Despite bombings by Hamas and other Iranian proxies of the home front and the other active fronts, most Israelis are leading an almost normal life – working and going out, being profligate with their purchases (buying 15 percent more than they did before the war), watching TV shows in the evening and going on vacations abroad. Life is disrupted and stressful, yes, but it is being conducted in a generally routine way.
What makes it possible for Israeli citizens to live in such a way is the fact that they are ignoring what's happening "close to home." They're not only ignoring it, but also actively denying it – most notably by means of self-victimization: constantly recounting the atrocities of October 7 and talking about the "human beasts" and "Nazis" who perpetrated them. The phenomena of ignoring and denying are being encouraged by politicians across the political spectrum (those on the right are doing it in a more vulgar way, with the exception of Arab politicians, who talk about what Israel is fomenting but do it quietly, for fear of a backlash from Jewish terrorists. The media – especially our "Arab affairs correspondents" – is actually a senior partner in the ignoring and denial. After all, it's concerned with looking after the national morale, aka ratings.
Another partner in ignoring and denying the goings-on across the southern border is our education system, which is of special interest to us – veterans in the field of education. Our education system is "the zone of interest" within "the zone of interest," as it observes the deepening deterioration of Israeli society into the realms of haughty, insensitive and cruel ethnocentrism while maintaining silence. Not only is it silent; it is encouraging the process of decay.
How is it possible that those in charge of the wellbeing and development of our children are essentially complacent in the face of killing by our forces on such a terrible scale?
The national-religious state school system is occupied with extracting from "the Jewish sources" justification for crimes that Israel is committing in the Strip. For its part, the state education system is conducting itself in an apparently normal way – "managing classes" and preparing students for matriculation exams. Both frameworks prepare students for "meaningful" and "gung-ho" military service, students who will be oblivious to the possibility, indeed the necessity, of raising a black flag in certain situations, of the kind the war in the Strip is providing in spades. How is it possible that those in charge of the wellbeing and development of our children are essentially complacent in the face of killing by our forces on such a terrible scale?
While processing the trauma of October 7 and the war that has followed, our school system, whose humanistic foundations are shaky to begin with, is liable to surrender even more to the nationalistic, force-driven frame of mind that has taken root in Israeli society, and to neglect its most basic educational goals and duties. In his book "An Existential War," journalist Ari Shavit calls for post-October 7 Israeli society to transform itself into a "society of struggle" whose educational institutions will foster "new pioneering, which promotes values of service, grit and sacrifice. All youths will receive semi-military training from age 16 and up." And that's just the beginning…
In his 1919 book "How to Love a Child," Janusz Korczak, the Jewish Polish children's rights activist, wrote that the goal of education is for children to "be assured the freedom necessary for harmonious development of their mental powers, allowed fully to expand their latent powers." However, in the background wait "the state, the church and the future employer. The state demands patriotism, the church – faith, the employer – honesty, and all demand mediocrity and submission."
The October 7 war, we fear, will give the state, the church and the employer license to complete their takeover of our educational system and to transpose it and Israeli society as a whole to a more extreme place along the continuum of "zones of interest."
Nimrod Aloni and Yoram Harpaz, along with Avi Ofer, recently authored an online petition titled "No to war crimes in Gaza!"