Hollowing the Holocaust

Rating: Null/10 (2 July 2009)

Edward Zwick, like Steven Spielberg, constantly mistakes "history" for "serious art". His new film, "Defiance" (aka "Jews Strike Back"), centres on a small group of Jewish rebels who mobilised and fought against the Nazis during WW2, wreaking divine justice on Hitler's henchmen like a gang of Yiddish superheroes. While the film fails as both action movie and historical piece, it is mildly interesting in the way it aligns itself with Hollywood's current trend of re-branding and repackaging the Jew.
Over the past 6 years, the portrayal of Jews in cinema has drastically changed. With films like "Munich", "Defiance", "Don't Mess with the Zohan" and "Inglorious Bastards", we're seeing the Jewish identity shift from feeble, perpetual victims (the bespectacled scholarly Jew) to technocratic ministers of death (vengeful warriors of God). It's like a weird shift from New Testament to Old Testament values.
This growing empowerment itself reflects Israel's national switch from victims to oppressors. Gaza, a middle Eastern version of the Warsaw ghetto, is now a calculated experiment in provocation. When you squeeze one million Palestinians into a walled space, stifle their access to water, electricity, food and medical treatment, destroy their livelihoods, mock and debase them regularly, don't act surprised when they turn hostile.
But of course hostility is what you want. With the emergence of violence you can then play the role of victim, bringing out your helicopter gunships, your tanks and missiles and beating the battered remains of Palestinian infrastructure into non-existence. With no infrastructure, no education, no social services or amenities, you can then further deny the existence of a Palestinian Government. Afterall, how can you have a government when there is nothing to govern? And so the rag-tag Palestinian leaders are labelled "terrorists", an act which permanently shuts down all hope of political exchange, freeing Israel to "claim" yet more and more land, expanding outward in the name of, not God, but Hegemony.
Even if one ignores Israel's role in US politics and in its actual and attempted maneuvers in various Middle Eastern countries (Lebanon, Iran etc), it is clear that Israel has become a force to be reckoned with. It is now armed with the deadliest, most technologically advanced military in the region, and so is perhaps finally comfortable enough to flex its muscles. Today's archetypal Jew, cinema or otherwise, answers to no one and defiantly does as pleases.
This change, though, has been taking place over a number of decades. Israel never had any intention of allowing a sovereign Palestinian state on its borders. It had no intention of allowing it in 1948 when it grabbed 24 per cent more land than what it was allotted legally, had no intention of allowing it throughout the massacres and ploys of the 1950s, had no intention of allowing two states when it conquered the remaining 22 per cent of historic Palestine in 1967 (and reinterpreted UN Security Council Resolutions to its own liking), had no intention of acknowledging Palestinian national rights at the United Nations in 1974, and had no intention of working toward a two-state solution in 1978 or 1982 when it invaded, fire-bombed, blasted and bulldozed Beirut (so that it might annex the West Bank without hassle).
Couple that with Israel's deliberate support of Hamas (so that it might undermine the strength of the more secular-nationalist factions), and you have a country which has slowly been casting aside the role of victim. The result: Hollywood's "new Jew", vengeful, deadly, armed and mad as hell.
And of course, Daniel Craig, the blonde haired, blue eyed James Bond of "Munich", will personify this sexy new Jew. Hollywood has always had an aversion to the fact that most Jews in the region are dark skinned.
And so the core problem with Zwick's "Defiance" is that in reversing the historical stereotype of Jewish passivity, the film ends up affirming them. "Defiance" implies that only if more Jews had been tough warriors and fought against the Nazis, then more Jews would have survived. This has the unintentional effect of making the timidity of the Jews, rather than the barbarity of the Nazis, the centre of the Holocaust. Like the heroes of the film, the Jewish ideal is now that of the survivor who not only stands up to victimization, but takes the fight back to those who deny his power. "Defiance" celebrates strong men (who in real life sought no glory) at the expense of those whose inability to fight back was NOT a moral failure but a fact of history. This trivialises the Holocaust, and paints a wholly untruthful picture.
4/10 – There have been a glut of Holocaust movies recently ("The Counterfeiters", "The Reader", "Valkyrie", "Good", "The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas" and Paul Schrader's weird "Adam Resurrected"). Why is this?