On one level, NAZA is an inquiry into proportionality. Or, more accurately, disproportionality—and thus injustice, immorality, war crimes, and where to set the line that marks genocide, a question all the more pressing because the nation accused of genocide in Gaza was built out of the ashes of the Holocaust. Those are vital issues, but they are also in some ways abstractions. On another, more human level, the new documentary from Israeli journalists Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor is about the decisions people make—or choose not to make—and how they rationalize them. On yet another, more tragic one, it is about a stateless, impoverished people who have no choices at all, their fates determined by a highly sophisticated military equipped with AI, surveillance and geolocation tech, and remotely deployed lethal weaponry.
The filmmakers ably elicit and investigate all these ideas through interviews with two dozen IDF soldiers and intelligence personnel directly involved in the campaign of destruction, which, according to the UN, has killed more than seventy-three thousand Palestinians, a third of them children. The IDF categorizes the “acceptable” number of civilian deaths for a given attack as “NAZA,” an acronym for the Hebrew nezek agavi, “collateral damage.”
The formula Israel uses for determining NAZA is ill-defined: when a building, or a whole block of them, is leveled by missile or drone strike, what is a permissible number of civilian deaths? Twenty? “Maybe,” one interviewee allows. Or many more. “Hundreds,” says another. Thousands, multiple thousands? It seems possible that no amount is satisfactory payback for the 1,200 Israelis Hamas killed on October 7, 2023. The prevailing sentiment, according to one interviewee, is that “no one in Gaza is innocent.”
Almost all of NAZA’s eighty-minute running time is devoted to interviews. The mood is at once somber and sleek. Subjects’ faces are shadowed and their voices digitally altered to protect their identities. Abraham is a respectful but persistent questioner. The conversations are quiet, taking place at night on the roofs of modern Tel Aviv high-rises. Just forty-some miles from the northern border of Gaza, the city is alive with traffic and activity. Feathery, moonlit waves break gently on the Mediterranean shore. While members of the IDF meticulously and without affect describe wiping out three- and four-story apartment buildings in Gaza, the camera pans to the twinkling Tel Aviv skyline and a new tower rising more than sixty stories, cranes still lifting beams through the night.
We also get regular glimpses through windows of cosmopolitan Tel Aviv residents in their stylishly austere apartments, relaxing before big-screen televisions, making tea, and doing yoga, even as interviewees recount remotely conducted nighttime bombings that kill Palestinian children in their beds and families in their kitchens. The innocent remark “Daddy’s home,” uttered by an adolescent Palestinian girl over a cellphone hacked by the IDF, is enough to trigger a deadly strike. In more than one instance, it’s admitted that Hamas operatives—the ostensible targets of such attacks—are rarely found where they’re believed to be. One interviewee seems puzzled by this: What is the purpose of all this killing if we don’t kill the one we want to kill?
The film’s power derives from its tone: the cold, remorseless detailing of a slaughter by those who have helped perpetrate it. One describes the “atmosphere of generalized hate” driving the “mission.” Another recalls the work as “insanely fun,” sounding as though suddenly surprised by the realization. One exchange centers on the IDF’s use of snipers to pick off Palestinians at food-distribution sites. Abraham does his best to plumb motives and challenge evasions. “How is that not mass murder?” he asks, almost plaintively. No one responds with that notorious justification, “I was only following orders.” But they come close enough. “We were cogs in a machine,” one interviewee says; another shrugs: “If I didn’t do it, someone else would.”
In the closing minutes of the film, the perspective suddenly changes. A clip from Benjamin Netanyahu’s appearance on a 1986 episode of Firing Line is shown. The permanent representative of Israel to the UN at the time, the young Netanyahu recites his definition of “terrorism” to an attentive William F. Buckley: “The systematic and deliberate attack, the murder, maiming, and menacing of innocents, of civilians, for political goals.” Then, an immediate cut to what appears to be a raid in Gaza: the shapeless, gray ruins of buildings as seen through night-vision goggles, civilians scattering in the darkness. Next: cellphone video shot in broad daylight. Dozens of bodies visible beneath the pancaked layers of a collapsed building. The wailing of survivors. A bereft father searching for his wife and daughters, desperately pulling at the rubble, crying out to his missing son—“Sa’id! I told you to look after your sisters!”—while another man rubs his back in a futile attempt to comfort him. This is how NAZA ends.
The filmmakers note that the government has denied the film’s allegations and questioned the verifiability of its sources. In a lengthy statement earlier this month, the IDF said “it has acted and continues to act humanely, even if the filmmakers have done everything they can to conceal that fact.” The Israeli government vehemently protests charges that it has committed genocide in Gaza. Netanyahu is under warrant for crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court and in a fight for reelection against former army chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot. He just received the endorsement of Donald Trump, who called him a “Great Warrior Prime Minister.”
The screening of NAZA I attended in New York was nearly sold out. Some attendees responded to Netanyahu’s forty-year-old words on Firing Line with profanities. But when the lights came up, no one said anything. Many seemed distressed. Some were unmistakably weeping. NAZA is necessarily a difficult film to watch precisely because it’s the necessary document of an atrocity.
We welcome your comments about this article. Please send your response to [email protected].
