The 80-minute documentary NAZA, directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, is chastening. It examines the conduct of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) during its ferocious, unremitting war in Gaza, drawing upon the interviews of 24 anonymised military and intelligence personnel. The interviews were filmed on Tel Aviv rooftops at night, with profiles and voices appropriately altered. The name of the documentary draws on a Hebrew acronym for nezek agavi or collateral damage, an obscene term used when counting the estimated number of civilians who will perish in a military strike. Last month, the film won the Special Jury Prize at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, receiving a standing ovation lasting 25 minutes.
The interviewees focus on the terrifyingly relevant role played by artificial intelligence (AI) targeting systems used in guiding the bombing campaign launched in response to the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023. In Abraham’s words, “the Israeli intelligence officers we spoke with talked to us about how this mass killing is systemic: not by accident, but by design, actions of murder and policies that are based on the total dehumanization of Palestinians.” One of the interviewed subjects speaks of the goal being “quantity, not quality.” Another notes the conscious decision to target Hamas members, some even in the lower echelons, when they would be at home even if it meant killing family members and neighbours. In one recalled instance, the phone of a 12-year-old girl was hacked to learn when her father would arrive home. The subsequent strike killed her. The cold logic is revealed in the rhetorical question posed by one of the interviewees: “When people talk about ‘flattening Gaza,’ what do you mean if not executing people?’
Despite being placed in a “too hot to handle” category by prominent indie studios, the self-distributed documentary managed to pass the US$500,000 mark in the United States after two weeks of release. Eight days after premiering at New York’s IFC Center, it went on to earn US$125,000. A further 85 theatres across 30 cities across North America then showed the film. Michelle Goldberg, writing in The New York Times, was impressed by the drawing power of the production when attending Walter Reade Theater for a screening. The venue, seating 268, was at capacity. “This is, in my experience, very unusual for documentaries of any sort, even those that, like ‘NAZA,’ win the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival.”
Militaries specialise in euphemised killing. A dedicated process of terminology and assessment sanitises and exsanguinates: death and murder become justifiable, necessary measures against an enemy bloated with wickedness and venality. In that process, mock tributes are paid to the canon of international law, notably international humanitarian law and doctrines of targeting. The more honest generals do us a favour by boasting about high casualty figures and mass mortality: they are not hiding matters and lurking behind worn ceremonies and the emperor’s non-existent clothes. Take the remarks of a former head of Israeli military intelligence made in a leaked audio: “For every one person [killed] on Oct. 7, 50 Palestinians must die.” Those militaries with a heavily staffed legal department supposedly providing guidance in striking a target, largely to reassure the squeamish that they are not implicated in acts of murder, are always suspect. In that regard, the IDF provides a model example, always claiming to do things differently from other powers in the region, yet resorting to the selective language of exculpation.
The reception of the film in Israel has been markedly hysterical. This was to be expected: the film unmasks and discomfits. It demolishes shibboleths. The IDF chief of staff Eyal Zamir vowed to use “every tool at our disposal” against the production. The Israeli Culture Minister Miki Zohar thought the film treasonous. Abraham and Szor were “willing to harm their homeland in order just to get applause from antisemites around the world”. The irate minister was keen to “act immediately to revoke the Israeli citizenship of these despicable creators for treason against the state,” he thundered in a social media post. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also called upon the passing of legislation stripping the duo of their citizenship, a curious point given the existing provisions of Israel’s Citizenship Law. (Making German Jews stateless was a specialty of the Third Reich: that the Jewish state would consider this to its citizens is a distinct, bitter irony, yet sadly permissible in light of the Israeli Supreme Court ruling in 2022 validating revocation for acts done in “breach of loyalty to the State of Israel”.)
Activists and members of the far-right party Jewish Power (Otzma Yehudit) led by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir protested outside the parents of Szor’s house, with a speaker calling for both directors to be executed and the homes of their families to be demolished (collective punishment remains a great inspiration for tribal sentiment).
The IDF has marshalled its own response in a document accusing the filmmakers of presenting “a distorted, misleading and disingenuous picture of the IDF’s target planning and striking process.” The narrative of the documentary drew upon “substantial factual errors stemming from manipulative misrepresentations of reality.” Worth noting here is the lower register of critique that does not entirely repudiate the targeting practices of the IDF, dressed up in the apologetics of collateral damage. Concessions and confessions are always evident from those in and of power who resort to such dismissive language as “misrepresentative” and “disingenuous”.
Be that as it may, the agitated response is illuminating. The Lavender database, to take one objection, was apparently not one of targets, merely “a database that assists intelligence analysts.” This represents a distinction without a difference. The faith placed by militaries in the divinities of technology are hard to shake; there is nothing here to say that such analysts do not treat these data sets as unimpeachable. AI and religious deities serve to do the imagination for others; they discourage independent thinking and verification. Why bother when you have someone, or something else, doing it for you?
The response remains weak in claiming that the IDF believes itself “bound by and committed to international humanitarian law, its operational procedures are designed to implement those legal obligations, and it operates dedicated units and mechanisms to mitigate civilian harm.” The staggering death toll in Gaza, always sneered and jeered at by the Israeli authorities and their defenders, would suggest otherwise. NAZA serves to, as the Israeli American historian Omer Bartov points out, address a “state of denial” by “actually speaking about the issue of what happened in Gaza rather than refusing to speak about it.”
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com
