My wife and I saw “An Officer and a Spy” last night, which I highly recommend. Because it’s a Roman Polanski film, it’s not being distributed anywhere in the US. Nor is it available on streaming. But you can see it at Film Forum.

It’s a superbly made film, about the Dreyfus Affair. Less about Dreyfus himself than about about Georges Picquart, the French officer who played a critical role in getting Dreyfus exonerated. That frame is problematic in all sorts of ways: as David Bell wrote in an excellent piece from a few years ago, when the film came out, the film dramatically underplays the mobilization of the French Jewish community as well as of the Dreyfusards. The entire drama of the film turns on the heroic apostasy of one good man in the French military establishment. Even so, it’s a terrific film. It validates the claim, made by everyone from Hannah Arendt to George Steiner, that if you were to ask anyone at the outset of the twentieth century, which European country would likely commit the mass murder of the Jews, it would not have been Germany but France. Polanski is well aware of the parallels and resonance: there’s one chilling scene of antisemitic mob violence the streets that is designed as a prefigurement of Kristallnacht.

People will obviously see in the film different things: when Bell first saw it, he saw a lot of Polanski’s positioning himself as a modern-day Dreyfus (which Polanski certainly did in interviews). The film came out at the height of the MeToo movement, so it was hard not to see that.

In 2025, the film lands differently. First, the interweaving of Judeophobia and anti-immigrant hostility is hard to miss. Second, though we remember the Dreyfus Affair as a victory for republican France, the film shows just how precarious and fragile and temporary that victory was. The future, at the end of the film, does not look bright, and it wasn’t.

But inevitably the question that looms over the film today, for anyone who is Jewish, is the question of Israel and Palestine.

As every Jewish child learns, modern Zionism began as a real movement when Theodor Herzl witnessed and reported on the Dreyfus Affair, which convinced him that Jews would never have a safe home in Europe. An Officer and a Spy explains why. The antisemitism is casual, cruel, and comprehensive. It’s not surprising that Jews would think, if this can happen in the country of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, we’re fucked.

Fast-forward 129 years. The contemporary parallels are eerie, and not in Israel’s favor. Polanski brilliantly brings out the paranoid groupthink of the French army, an institution of great power and an even greater sense of its own besiegement. Every bit of concrete evidence that either undermines the case for Dreyfus’ guilt or supports the case of his innocence is simply dismissed as propaganda for and from the Jews. The more pebbles of truth are assembled into a solid rock of irrefutable evidence, the firmer and loonier and more desperate the French denial of the truth becomes. When insiders and declared antisemites like Picquart start questioning the establishment’s version of events, they, too, are dismissed and distrusted, and ultimately hounded out of established society as tools of the Jews and haters of France.

The France of the time was not just the Third Republic. It was also still the beneficiary of the conquests of the Second Empire. For me, it’s not the backdrop of Devil’s Island, off the coast of French Guiana, that makes the loudest noise in the film. It’s when Picquart is exiled to manage the natives in North Africa.

The Dreyfus Affair is not about the struggle between a republic of tolerance and a nation-state of Catholics. It’s about an imperial society, housed in its military, that has long slipped loose of any sense of territorial boundedness, that never had any firm sense of borders at all, confronting and distrusting and fearing a people within that it refuses to see or to treat or acknowledge as any kind of fellow citizen.

Israel’s defenders like to claim that Palestinians have equal rights within the country. That’s nonsense, as any perusal of both de jure and de facto discrimination within the country (and I’m not even talking about control over the Occupied Territories) will reveal.

But what An Officer and a Spy brings out, with great sensitivity and subtlety, is the parallel experience for Jewish people in France. They, too, could vote. They, too, could own property, get education, build businesses. What they could never be, in the eyes of the anti-Dreyfusards, was French.

For me, what this ultimately comes down to is the fact that no matter how liberal a Zionist you may be, you will still say that any Jew living anywhere in the world still has more right to live within the State of Israel than any Palestinian living there. How do we know that? If you’re a Jewish Israeli, your Jewish relatives in Long Island are welcome to immigrate to the country at any time, and to receive the full benefits of citizenship. If you’re a Palestinian Israeli, your Palestinian relatives in Bay Ridge are not. In this country, we call that racism and xenophobia. In Israel, we call it equal rights.