Originally published in Israel Hayom, republished with permission. 1. For one moment, on the shores of the Pacific Ocean, all the ills of Diaspora Jewry were expressed in just a few words: "Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation, which has led to conflict for so many people… Whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack in Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?" That was what the British-Jewish film director Jonathan Glazer said in his Oscar-acceptance speech for his film "The Zone of Interest," which deals with the Holocaust and which received the award for best international feature. Let me address Glazer directly, and through him the Jews of the world. With your words, you shamed Israel: What you were saying was. 'I am not like the (barbarian) Israelis, respect me for this (he received an ovation).' Our sages condemned those who exclude themselves from the Jewish people as if their plight was not their concern. See for example the four sons in perhaps the most widely known Jewish text, the Passover Haggadah. 2. The comparison between the atrocities committed by the murderers of Hamas and the war against the monstrous entity established on our border is shallow and vacuous. On the one hand, they raped our daughters, beheaded our sons, burned parents and children alive. If they could, they would do the same to all Jews in Israel and to Jews around the world. On the other hand is a war against these terrorists who use their own people as human shields. You have the right not to live in Israel, but our choice here is either to die or to kill the terrorists; in other words, we have no choice even if it means that we have to harm those behind whom they shield and shelter. This is a moral choice and was established as such in our tradition thousands of years ago in the Talmud: "Your life takes precedence over the life of the other" – this is truer even more so when it comes to choosing between our lives and the lives of our enemies. In any event, when we compare this war to other wars in history, we see that the ratio between dead terrorists and deaths of non-combatants is the lowest in history. 3. You made a film about Auschwitz. My children's great-grandmother was taken there in a cattle wagon. Your words suggest that had you lived in the 1930s, you might have ignored the explicit intention expressed in Mein Kampf and joined the British cultural and academic elite that condemned Churchill for his warnings about Hitler. It seems to me that only those unfamiliar with the Hamas Charter could draw such a wanton comparison. Hamas' spiritual and political manifesto contains two Nazi principles: a total commitment to the destruction of Israel and the killing of Jews wherever they may be, including those who receive Oscars on the shores of the Pacific and who think they will be exempt from this evil. Apropos the Holocaust, we do not use it to justify the establishment of the State of Israel, nor our war on terror. Israel was not established because of the Holocaust; it was established despite the Holocaust – the ultimate attempt to physically destroy us and to prevent the historical process of the return of the Jews to Zion. Coincidentally (or not) these are precisely the goals of Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, Hezbollah, Iran, and the other evil entities that take advantage of your good intentions to incite against us. The irony is that you who shamed Israel for supposedly using the Holocaust received a statuette, honor (and money) for a film dealing with the Holocaust. Our sages taught us: "First fix yourself, then correct others." 4. Your statement determined that the horrors of October 7 and the war against Hamas are both rooted in one reason: the occupation. What moral abandon to put together the murderer and the victim, those who sliced open the stomach of a pregnant woman and those who went out to defend her. It is for this comparison that you received applause in the palace of illusory glory. When pogroms were committed against us throughout history, all we were able to do was run and hide. The historical change brought about by the establishment of the state of Israel is that now we don't run and we don't hide, we fight back. The war on Hamas is the war of the whole free world against tyranny that seeks to enslave the world in the name of a belief in death – including the death of those who applauded while you shamed us. In a deep way, this war is a correction of that old war in which we could do nothing to stop those who sought to harm us. Nevertheless, what occupation are you talking about? In the summer of 2005, Israel withdrew from Gaza down to the last inch after expelling the pioneers who had settled there; we even dug up our graves. The merchants of illusion told us, 'Gaza will be the Singapore of the Middle East.' But the monsters of Hamas chose to build the greatest terror fortress in history, with only one purpose: To destroy us. The assumption behind your statement is that the root of the conflict is territorial, not religious. From my perspective, this points to intellectual laziness. It is not only the Hamas charter that is committed to genocide against the Jewish people, so too is the PLO charter, an official document of the Palestinian Authority in which Article 20 erases the Jewish people from the family of nations and states that Jews are not a people but a religion and that therefore we do not have the right to self-determination. In other words, we do not have the right to a state in a land of ourselves. According to the IHRA definition of antisemitism, anyone opposed to Israel as a Jewish state is an antisemite. It's not the occupation, it's genocidal ideology. 5. Jews around the world recognize that Israel is their insurance policy in case they are in danger. Israel is also the reason for their self-confidence in the face of hate crimes. Their ability to hold their heads up proudly stems from the recognition that there is a Jewish state that will avenge their honor and ensure their safety. The contemptible statement by our enemies that "they have no problem" with the Jews – only with Zionism or the State of Israel – is a ruse. Because what is Zionism? The simple political expression of the two-thousand-year-old Jewish dream of a return to Zion. Wherever we sojourned in our exile, be it England or Los Angeles, we passed on to our descendants a defining narrative: We once lived in an independent kingdom in a biblical homeland promised only to us by God, but then, to our great shame, because of our bad deeds, we were ruined and exiled from our land. Wherever we were in our exile, we did not delude ourselves that we were really home. Every day we mentioned Zion and Jerusalem and prayed for our return. Under the canopy we broke a glass in memory of the destruction and repeated the ancient oath of the Babylonian exiles: "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, Let my right hand forget her cunning. Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, If I remember thee not; If I set not Jerusalem Above my chiefest joy." And when we gave thanks for our bread, we asked God to take mercy on us and rebuild Jerusalem. As far as I am aware, this is the only blessing for food among all religions that ties the personal and existential with the national and political. After the destruction of the Temple, our sages wished to implant within us the understanding that just as a human cannot live without food, so too our nation cannot exist without Jerusalem. So, Jonathan, do you understand that our hope was not placed in the award of an Oscar statuette on the shores of the Pacific, but in political independence in a state where we could live our lives as Jews and defend ourselves as such? The problem is that Jews such as yourself, who recognize the lessons of the Holocaust and the deadly significance of an existence without a national home, are not willing to pay the necessary price – clear and public support for Israel. They want the insurance policy on the cheap, and to keep living in alien lands in peace and quiet – and, if possible, to get accolades and awards, and even to gain these honors at the cost of shaming the one and only Jewish state, which despite its humiliation was and is always ready to accept them in their time of need. After all, Jonathan, you are our brother. Dror Eydar is the former Israeli Ambassador to Italy