The government of Israel condemned Oscar winner Jonathan Glazer’s comment Sunday evening that he and fellow filmmakers “refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being used to justify an occupation.”
As Breitbart News reported, Glazer made his incendiary speech while accepting the Oscar for Best International Feature for a Holocaust drama, The Zone of Interest.
Israeli government spokesperson Ilana Stein said that she was “deeply shocked by this comment.”
She continued: “To think that we exploit the … Holocaust … is despicable. We are not ‘using’ anything. Hamas showed how it massacred us. And this is what we are fighting against — a massacre, a terror organization that says that it wants to be ‘from the river to the sea,’ and that means that they want the whole state of Israel to be free of Jews.
“Does that remind you of anybody?” she asked, rhetorically.
It was Hamas’s actions that evoked the Holocaust, she said, not Israel’s self-defense.
Stein reiterated that Monday that Israel would enter Rafah to defeat Hamas, despite President Joe Biden’s warnings, because “we still have one quarter of the terror organization [there], and it’s still operating.”
She said the only alternative would be if Hamas would surrender and release the Israeli hostages it still holds.
Stein reiterated Prime Minister Netanyahu’s comment last week that “Whoever tells us not to operate in Rafah, is telling us to lose the war – and that will not happen.”
Stein noted that Israel supports President Biden’s plan to build a temporary, floating pier in the Mediterranean to assist in bringing more aid into Gaza, and that an “unlimited” amount of aid is already permitted to enter the territory.
Stein also blasted Sweden and Canada for restoring their funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which had been credibly accused of association with the Hamas terror attack on October 7, and before waiting for the results of an ongoing investigation into the agency.
“By doing that, Canada and Sweden … are continuing to ignore the involvement of UNRWA employees in terrorist activities.”
“Taxpayers should know that their money is funding terror,” she added.
She said UNRWA would not be part of a postwar Gaza “in any way.”
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it),” now available on Audible. He is also the author of the e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
