Motaz Azaiza had to leave the Gaza Strip this week. This 24-year-old Palestinian photographer was flying for the first time in his life. When the war began more than three months ago, his Instagram account, followed by around 25,000 people, exploded to more than 18 million followers. He was the eyes of this bloody conflict, documenting daily the lives of Palestinians under the bombs.
Every day I went to see his images and also to check if he was still alive, because many journalists were killed in Gaza.
Between photos of my cat and funny videos, I have never seen so many corpses. The contrast is more than enormous between the levity common on Instagram and the stories nightmares of Motaz Azaiza which had the power to prevent us from sleeping. Cognitive dissonance threatens us.
Watching the chilling film this week The Zone of Interest by Jonathan Glazer, I couldn’t help but make a connection. Awarded at Cannes and selected for the Oscars, The Zone of Interest shows the quiet life of a Nazi family, the Höss, who live in a pretty house adjoining the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. We never see the horrors of the camp, only bucolic shots in the countryside or in the flower garden carefully tended by the wife, who refuses to move when her husband gets a promotion for his murderous zeal. Here she has the life she always dreamed of for her children. Even if on the other side of the wall an extermination factory is operating at full capacity.
We sometimes hear screams, gunshots, dogs barking in the distance, we see smoke coming from the chimneys where the bodies are burned, without this in any way disrupting the family’s daily life.
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen such a grim and effective film, which goes beyond the subject of the 39-45 war. Because sometimes, seeing the state of the world, we feel a bit like the Hösses, quietly cultivating their garden.
I never expected in my lifetime to see such a rise in anti-Semitism in our society, a direct consequence of the war in Gaza. It’s something that I take very seriously, having been an avid reader of the writings of the camps, of the Shoah, of Hannah Arendt, after having seen dozens of films and documentaries since the shock of Night and Fog by Alain Resnais. I desperately wanted to understand how we got to this point, and I hope one day to visit the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial, which surprisingly appears in the film. The Zone of Interest. As high-ranking SS officer Höss disappears into the darkness of a stairwell, as if relegated to the depths of history, we see employees today cleaning up the memorial, which shows the crime that the family willfully ignored.
Recently, billionaire Elon Musk went to visit Auschwitz, after retweeting anti-Semitic comments. He took the opportunity to say that if social networks had existed, we might not have been able to hide the Shoah, which I find terribly ironic on the part of the boss of X, this platform which is far from countering hatred and misinformation.
The Holocaust, which continues to haunt Western memory, is gradually fading from young minds as time passes and survivors of the camps disappear. The horrors in Gaza are fresher, it’s happening now, and we can’t blame the current generation for being more disturbed by what they see on Motaz Azaiza’s Instagram account than by the black and white documentaries about the Second World War.
I must admit that my conscience, deeply and lastingly trained to raise awareness about anti-Semitism, was not ready to see the words “extreme right” and “genocide” associated with the Jewish people. At the same time, it is because I have been made aware of this crime against Humanity that I cannot, like the rest of the world, look away from what is happening in Gaza.
The Hamas attack on October 7 completely horrified me, and I completely understand that it has rekindled the trauma of Jews around the world, but Israel’s response is so disproportionate – and drawn-out – that it extinguishes sympathy towards the victims of this disastrous day. We cannot see civilians, including a terrible number of children, being massacred day after day without it affecting us.
In a report by Céline Galipeau produced in Jerusalem and broadcast on Thursday, journalist and writer Charles Enderlin explains that Israelis are “totally preoccupied with their own tragedy without being able to have empathy for the tragedy of others” and that they see on their screens a war other than the one that reaches us. “Israeli channels very quickly discovered that as soon as they show images of Palestinian suffering in Gaza, the audience drops. »
While democracies falter while far-right parties gain popularity, while demographics enter into the many hot topics of a planet that is heating up and reviving debates on immigration, while we hear metaphors again worrying about “demographic rearmament” which does not bode well for women called to a war of stomachs, are we going to blindly retreat into our areas of interest?