Reflections on the cycle of state violence

In a 1963 book that came to define her career, Eichmann in JerusalemThe historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt said, ” [Adolf] Eichmann’s point was precisely that there were many people like him, many of whom were not perverted or sadistic but were, and still are, horrifyingly and frighteningly normal.’In 1961, Israel publicly tried Eichmann for his involvement in the Holocaust.

Arendt began covering this controversial scene. New Yorker before it grows into a bigger project Eichmann in JerusalemAmong other things, she coined the term “the banality of evil” and suggested that the trial of Eichmann was a theatrical production. A frequent critic of early Zionism, Arendt questioned the need for trials and who they were for. June ZeroJake Paltrow, director and co-writer of “The Hunger Games,” offers his own counterargument: that while historical memory can be changed and shaped by those who have the privilege of using it, it must be passed on to future generations.

June Zero “The Last Jew” is a trilogy of stories about the marginalized Jews of early Israeli society. The films raise provocative questions about the troubling morality of Eichmann’s extradition and execution (the former in violation of international law, the latter a first in Israeli history) and about the founding of the state of Israel itself: is a nation built on retribution in danger of slipping into traumatic rage? Steven Spielberg’s Munich before that, June Zero It’s a moving meditation on the cycle of state violence.

Shot entirely on 16mm, the film begins with the story of David (Koby Aderet), a precocious Libyan-Israeli whose Arab and Sephardic Jewish identities quickly push him to the margins. Shortly after being caught stealing candy from a local store, David’s father finds him a job at a power plant run by Shlomi Zebko (Tzahi Grad), a former soldier with the violent Zionist paramilitary group Etzer. Employees and soldiers allude to Zebko’s past exploits, suggesting that he took particular delight in killing Arabs. Either way, he soon becomes a mentor to the sensitive David, who becomes a small, muscular man in front of his superiors and uses his ability to get into tight spaces to fit in well with Zebko’s team.

This relationship seems to teach David that revenge is just if it is done against a just victim. This philosophy extends to Zebko’s attempts to win the contract to build the crematorium that will eventually incinerate Eichmann’s body. The team is alarmed when they realize they are working from blueprints similar to those used by the Nazis to build the crematorium. This is also a plot point that recalls Zionist-Nazi collaboration before and during the Holocaust, a historical footnote that Arendt herself frequently criticized.

Zebko’s team gets this grueling assignment through Chaim (Yoav Levi), a Moroccan-born prison guard assigned to the prison where Eichmann awaits death. Because the Holocaust primarily targeted Ashkenazi Jews, only Sephardic Jews were allowed to guard Eichmann during his imprisonment. June Zero The film expresses this strange racial dynamic through Haim, who is as troubled by toothaches and burst blood vessels in his eyes as he is by his conscience.

The two men converse in Spanish, which becomes their only common language, and an eerily intimate relationship develops between them, eventually leading Eichmann to tenderly ask his bodyguard to deliver a final letter to his wife. Paltrow expertly builds tension, emphasizing Heim’s uneasy position in close proximity to the man responsible for the mass murder of his own people, particularly in a scene where he paranoidly watches a Tunisian barber (Assi Itzhaki) cut Eichmann’s hair. In a particularly brilliant choice, Eichmann is only filmed from behind, in extreme close-ups of his hands and the back of his head, reinforcing the notion that the Nazi leader was an extraordinary yet ultimately incomprehensible man.

The film’s third act abruptly switches the setting to Poland, where Mika (Tom Hagi) is leading the first tour group through the former ghetto with the help of Ada (Joy Rieger), a foreign representative of the Jewish Agency in Israel. After Mika, a Polish survivor of Auschwitz, tells the group his story of being whipped in the street as a child, Ada sneaks him into a local bar to speak to him about capitalism’s potential to exploit grief. She warns him that his company is trying to drag him around like a “circus animal.” Speaking almost directly to the camera, Ada asserts, “If we throw ourselves into this pain, we’ll have the biggest ghetto in history, except this time we’ll build our own wall.” (Given that the film was released in the midst of Israel’s ongoing operations in Gaza, this scene is eerily prescient.)

Micah responds to Ada’s accusations by arguing that he is a “fossil,” a living memory, and that his existence embodies the memory of the Holocaust. The film suggests the same about Israel’s existence as a state, but rather than presenting a single answer to the Zionist question, Paltrow and co-writer Tom Shoval give credence to the multiple perspectives of the diaspora. It is not an anti-Zionist film, of course. June Zero At the very least, there is room to consider both assimilationists who believe in a Jewish future beyond trauma and nationalism, and Zionists who insist on Israel’s existence as an essential aspect of Jewish survivalism.

In response to Adah’s recognition that Israel is in danger of “justifying the present” by dwelling on the pain of the past, Micah counters that memory never remains in the past. Micah is based on Michael Goldman Gilad, Gideon Hausner’s personal assistant who gave depositions at the Eichmann trial, and his place in history is assured. In contrast, many of the film’s characters long for their mark on history to be acknowledged, no matter how brutal that mark may be.

June Zero is a tender, if sometimes cynical, portrayal of a new country on old soil working through the growing pains of establishing itself both internationally and among its own people. Though the film does not depict Palestinian life, or address the public debate about Palestinians in the 1960s, its dramatization of cycles of anti-Arab racism and retribution recalls Audre Lorde’s assertion that “the master’s tools can never dismantle the master’s house…you can never effect real change.” June ZeroThe filmmakers also question what the point is in using these tools if they hold the power to distort and weaponize our collective memory.