Dehumanization: a Past and Present for Jews, Israel, and Gaza

A flag of Palestine is pictured at a protest at McKeldin Mall at the University of Maryland on October 7, 2026.

Photo by Josh Hananel

In Jonathan Glazer’s Oscar acceptance speech for winning Best International Feature Film in 2024, he says of The Zone of Interest: “Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst.” Rudolf Höss is the main character of the film, written and directed by Glazer, and also serves as commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, where his family lives next door. The question underpinning the film, a question that has echoed since the Nuremberg Trials, seems to ask “how could human beings do this to other human beings?” 

The Zone of Interest’s answer is dehumanization. As Glazer continued in his Oscar’s speech, the choice to focus only on Nazis was intentional, aiming to “confront us in the present, not to say ‘look what they did then,’ but rather ‘look what we do now.’” He recognized both those affected by the October 7th attacks and the ongoing attack on Gaza as “victims of this dehumanization.” 

With the recent release of the documentary NAZA, where Glazer is an executive producer and James Wilson produced both films, I decided to look back at The Zone of Interest for connections on this shared theme. I believe it is a key element to understanding Israel’s targeting systems (the focus of NAZA) in Gaza following the October 7th attacks. 

NAZA is a documentary born from the investigative journalism of Israeli directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, who interviewed 24 anonymous military and intelligence officers in the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF). The film is structured around these interviews, seeking to understand the processes of mass killing in Gaza that occurred at the hands of the Israeli military.

The Guardian reported that Abraham and Szor “stressed the film’s focus was not on ‘sporadic war crimes committed by rogue soldiers.’ ‘It is on the orders themselves, the policies, the accepted practices, the language and logic that make those practices possible, and the people who operate within them,’ they said. ‘The system and its cogs.’” 

A still from NAZA, perched atop a building in Tel Aviv where director Yuval Abraham interviews anonymous officers in the IDF. (Credit: The Guardian)

First, I want to make clear that I am not making a historical or moral comparison of the two events from these films. Rather, I’m looking through the lens of how dehumanization is interwoven into the systems of mass killing, regardless of their scale or historical context.

Dehumanization is the process of treating or portraying a group of people as lacking human characteristics, and therefore excluding them from moral concern; this process can be done overtly or subtly. 

Hannah Arendt was a German-American philosopher who wrote about the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a key architect of the Holocaust. Arendt, who was Jewish, coined the term “banality of evil” to describe Eichmann’s seeming “normalcy,” as opposed to having a sadistic fanaticism for murdering Jews. This was what the general public had expected of someone who helped organize the deportation logistics of more than a million Jews to concentration camps. Arendt argued that this Eichmann was motivated more by thoughtlessness than fanaticism, which would explain his “banality.”

The banality of evil is explored deeply in The Zone of Interest. Popular interpretations of this emphasize how Höss and his family were able to live next door to the camp, but the film goes deeper than this. A commonplace, business-style meeting between Höss and other Nazis on the logistics of a gas chamber is terrifyingly mechanical. Höss perches on a banister overlooking an extravagant Nazi party while he reflects on his preoccupied mind, noting to his wife that he “was too busy thinking how I’d gas everyone in the room.”

Arendt’s theory of the banality of evil is Glazer’s answer to how, in The Zone of Interest, the Höss family is able to live directly next door to a concentration camp, where screams of anguish from beyond the wall are heard in their garden and by their pool.

NAZA depicts a technological disconnection from war through its voyeuristic cinematography, peeking in windows in Tel Aviv as inhabitants do everyday activities and news broadcasts stream in the background. This made me think of French philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s 1991 essay collection, “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place.”

Baudrillard’s essay can further explain how technological disconnection can lead people to commit atrocities that appear as mere statistics or data. The average viewer of CNN’s twenty-four-hour-a-day news coverage saw the 1991 Gulf War operations as a “clean war, like that of a clean bomb or an intelligent missile, this whole war conceived as a technological extrapolation of the brain is a sure sign of madness.” By “clean war,” Baudrillard means how the media and military can present a sanitized account of war through selective imagery and statistics, while ignoring or hiding an on-the-ground devastating reality. 

This is seen in Baudrillard’s analysis of how American audiences spectacularized the Gulf War through mass media. Douglass Kelner, an academic and professor of philosophy at UCLA, describes the Gulf War as “one of the first televised events of the global village in which the entire world watched a military spectacle unfold via global TV satellite networks.” 

I was especially unsettled by one of the NAZA interviewees describing the bombing as feeling like a “video game.” The soldiers could bomb buildings 60 kilometers south of them (some able to hear screams), and then go out to eat minutes later, likely exiting the HaKirya military base located in the center of Tel Aviv.

Baudrillard’s lens into the Gulf War depicts how the systematization and abstraction of war can lead people to become cogs in a machine that serves ulterior interests of those in power. Even how the word for “collateral damage” is used distances the act from the actor. In NAZA, an IDF soldier says, “We say 15 NAZA. We don’t say 15 people will be killed, and certainly not that 15 children and women will be killed.” The term NAZA is a Hebrew acronym for “nezek agavi,” which means “collateral damage.” The word NAZA attached to a number refers to the number of acceptable civilian casualties in a military action.

The New York Times reported in December of 2024 that a baseline of 20 NAZA (also discussed in the film) was followed after the October 7th attacks, following a direct order from Israel’s military leadership that loosened the restrictions to bomb, immensely increasing civilian deaths. IDF Maj. Gen. Aharon Haliva was also reported as endorsing this type of ratio-killing justification, even for children, further justifying and fueling an atmosphere of rage.

Other terms like “mowing the lawn” (kisuach desheh) serve as a metaphor for the intermittent periods of military action necessary to control and limit Palestinian society. At the root is the perceived irreconcilability between Israel and Palestine.

The Höss house and family adjacent to Auschwitz concentration camp in The Zone of Interest. (A24)

I think the banality of evil characterization works for some of the interviewees in NAZA, especially when describing their role as merely technical. Baudrillard has real insight into how technology can disconnect audiences and desensitize perpetrators of violence. However, there is no one theory that explains all of NAZA’s interviewees. While the two I have presented may offer more insight into preventing how systems of mass killing anywhere can perpetuate, ideology and political culture undeniably play a role in the real animosity found in the rhetoric of dehumanization.

The Israeli response to the documentary has been an eruption of anger and declarations of “libel” and misinformation. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself is backing an investigation into the interviewees and called for their prosecution, along with seeking to strip the directors of their Israeli citizenship. In response, a petition was signed by over 1,500 Israeli filmmakers in defence of Abraham and Szor. 

The IDF released a 10-page response to the film that rejected essentially all claims from the documentary as “distorted.” One claim they made was that “the distinction between military operatives and civilians is fundamental to the IDF, its commanders and its binding directives during the fighting in Gaza.” This is in response to the claim that there was a belief in the IDF that there “are no uninvolved civilians in Gaza,” which is, in essence, a key part of the dehumanization I’m describing. However, this response from the IDF contrasts with evidence that I will list here:

Israeli government accounts on social media have posts that include rhetoric that blurs this distinction and implies that there are “no innocents.” Isaac Herzog, the president of Israel, said in an infamous statement following October 7th that “It’s an entire nation that is out there that’s responsible. It’s not true, this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true.” He later walked back the statement and said it was taken out of context.

Israel’s defense minister Yoav Gallant said on October 9th, “We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.” A statement that Dr. Omer Bartov wrote in The New York Times was a “statement indicating dehumanization, which has genocidal echoes.” Bartov, an Israeli-American and the Dean's Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University, wrote an opinion piece in The New York Times on why he originally didn’t see Israel’s actions as a genocide until the actions of the IDF consistently aligned with rhetoric of genocidal intent made by Israeli leaders.

In a 2025 investigative report by Haaretz, a senior reserve officer of the IDF was quoted as saying, “This thing called killing innocent people – it's been normalized. We were constantly told there are no noncombatants in Gaza, and apparently that message sank in among the troops.” The repetition of this dehumanizing message and atmosphere of collective punishment is corroborated among the interviewees in NAZA. But what is its effect?

A retired Major General of the IDF, Giora Eiland, wrote after the October 7th attacks that, given Hamas’ military threat to Israel, “the State of Israel has no choice but to make Gaza a place that is temporarily, or permanently, impossible to live in.” 

My point in showing just a few of the genocidal and dehumanizing language from influential Israeli figures is that an atmosphere of animosity for collective punishment was, in fact, clearly existing despite the IDF’s contrary claim. These statements also seem to be corroborated by the anonymous interviewees in NAZA. One interviewee puts the atmosphere simply, saying to Abraham that “After October 7th, everyone kept saying: There are no innocent people in Gaza.”

This idea of collective punishment, action taken against a group in retaliation for action taken by individuals perceived to be a part of the same group, is deeply rooted in cyclical violence. Ahmed Yassin, the founder of Hamas, said during the Second Intifada that “Israel is targeting Palestinian civilians, so Israeli civilians should be targeted. From now on, all Israeli people are targets.” This rhetoric describes a similar concept of retaliation, but from the opposing perspective in an asymmetric conflict. This cycle of dehumanization also serves the extremist stance that peace and reconciliation is never possible.

So why am I writing this? The first elections since the October 7th attack took place on October 27 with no real improvements from a far-right government in sight, and I have barely any connection to Israel. Though I’m not as connected to my Jewish community as I would like to be, I’ve been lucky to meet Jews on campus who’ve helped me fill in gaps in my essentially secular childhood, or as some have said, “off the derech” (path). As I meet Jews identifying as anti-Zionist and fighting for the liberation of Palestine, I also enter situations where awkwardly silent nodding is essential after someone mentions “Israel.” 

When I do hear other Jews on campus say verbatim that they support “collective punishment,” I feel a responsibility to challenge that idea. I also feel disappointment in the rhetoric responding to criticism of Israel, especially the open letter that denounced Jonathan Glazer for his Oscar speech, which was signed by over 1,000 Jewish creatives and Hollywood professionals. Jewish actress Maggie Gyllenhaal, at the Venice Film Festival where NAZA screened to a 25-minute standing ovation, was denounced by many Jewish creatives because she compared NAZA to The Zone of Interest, as I do here.

The open letter and those criticizing Gyllenhaal misunderstand their purpose as drawing a “moral equivalence,” rather than an analysis of the systems of killing, and they may misunderstand mine, too. What I feel is misunderstood, or rather, refused to be seen, is that the pattern of dehumanization can not only affect anyone, but is also always wrong. One can always make a choice to recognize injustice when it appears, even if —especially if— it comes from your own community. 

Arendt was not a determinist about the evil she saw in Eichmann. She went on to argue that making a moral choice still exists even under conditions of terror or totalitarianism: “is that under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not, just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that, "it could happen" in most places, but it did not happen everywhere.” 

Arendt foresaw the deep divisions that would exist between Israelis and Palestinians. The Palestinian-American academic Edward Said, in a 1999 New York Times article, recognized Arendt as an important Jewish thinker who understood the nature of these divisions, but also believed in reconciliation through a binational state between Israelis and Palestinians. He wrote that reconciliation is an idea “alive today here and there among Jewish and Arab individuals frustrated with the evident insufficiencies and depredations of the present.” 

The exigence of this essay wasn’t finding sources to support a conclusion, but how the sources kept finding me, and I realized this underlying current of dehumanization within my community was unavoidable. The Jewish community in America is sharply divided, and I’ve felt that division deeply, though differently from many. This is because, though I’m not sure exactly by who, I feel lied to. A lie that made many of us feel indignation toward the wrong injustice.

Lied to that we learned from what Arendt saw in Jerusalem. Lied to that we learned from centuries of being dehumanized. Lied to that the idea of reconciliation and coexistence is not alive today despite extremists. Lied to by those who said by having one Jewish parent I was less Jewish, but that whatever Jewishness was allowed to me by them should be directed blindly toward this dehumanization.

These are the same ones who looked at The Zone of Interest and prompted us with the question: “How can you justify treating another human being like this?” And if I’ve learned anything from The Zone of Interest and NAZA, I know the answer to that question means that “never again” truly means never again for anyone. 

NAZA will be free to watch in late November on The Guardian’s website.