Israel's Zone of Interest

Last year’s film, Zone of Interest, tells the story of Auschwitz Commandant Rudolf Hoss and his family who live quite normally next to the death camp. The term zone of interest comes from the German word, Interessengebiet, which means an area of interest.

The Israeli journalist Gideon Levy has written a piece - “The IDF’s own sickening zone of interest in the heart of Gaza.”

He describes an Israeli holiday resort on Gaza’s northern coast where IOF soldiers can go to unwind and be pampered after their killing sprees, so they can emerge refreshed and ready to resume the slaughter. Levy writes:

The Israel Defense Forces has built a holiday village on the Gaza coast. Sgt. Yaron Rabinovich ate some churritos and steak … earlier this week. In an adjacent room there’s a physiotherapist who gave a soldier a pleasant massage. The village is surrounded by lawns of synthetic grass, cushions for sprawling in every corner. [A] soldier … enjoying a cappuccino, while another has a glass of XL with ice cubes.

The journalist Chris Hedges makes sense of the evil perpetrated by Israel against the Palestinians in Gaza by explaining that everything Israel has done to the Palestinian people, both before and after October 7th, is because it’s a settler colonial state. While the specifics may differ from other settler colonial states - the British in India, the French in Algeria, the Europeans in North America or Australia - the story is the same. A foreign entity occupies land where indigenous people have been living for centuries and justifies its occupation by concocting and telling lies.

Israel lies that that there is no Palestinian nation or identity. It lies that the people were desert nomads of no consequence and the land was mainly empty. It lies that the Palestinians are uncivilised, barbarians, even subhuman. This makes killing them easier.

The Israelis have tried to recruit Palestinians to police their own people, another feature of settler colonialism, which is what has been happening in the West Bank under the Palestinian Authority’s Mahmoud Abbas. But it hasn’t worked in Gaza. So October 7th gave Israel the perfect excuse to unleash the full power of its military, 100% funded by the US, to finally destroy the Palestinians in Gaza. This comes after decades of Israel periodically ‘mowing the lawn,’ where the IOF would indiscriminately drop bombs on refugee camps, apartment buildings, schools and hospitals to keep the imprisoned Gaza population fearful and under control. Now the violence has escalated to a full-blown genocide.

Palestinian erasure has always been the intent. It was baked into Israel at its inception. In a 1937 letter to his son, David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first PM and militia leader who expelled 750,000 Palestinians from historical Palestine from 1947-48, wrote:

We must expel Arabs and take their place. … if we are compelled to use force – not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan, but in order to guarantee our right to settle there – our force will enable us to do so.

I don’t think Gideon Levy goes far enough. The Zone of Interest is not this one small resort established in northern Gaza, but the entire Zionist state that is hellbent on eradicating every last Palestinian and is even setting its demented sights on Lebanon and Syria.

The US, UK and EU Commission are funding and politically supporting this evil not only because their leaders and media are controlled and owned by the Zionist lobby, but also because in Israel, they recognise themselves.

And that is why the western dominated world order is crumbling.