When NAZA‘s chilling final frame turned black and the sound of moviegoers crying became audible, I experienced something I have never experienced in a movie theater in my life.
Nobody in the sold-out screening got up. Not a single person.
The entire audience sat, without speaking, through the credits. The only sounds were muffled sobs.
And then, wordlessly, the entire Brooklyn audience rose from their seats and left the cinema in total silence.
NAZA is an unusual movie with a challenging premise: co-directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor (No Other Land) interviewed 24 current and former members of the Israeli military about how the IDF killed one out of every 30 people in Gaza over the last three years. (At least 75,000 people have been killed in Gaza since October 7th, the vast majority of whom, by Israel’s own admission, were civilian men, women, and children.) All 24 worked in Israeli military intelligence and offered stark and often horrifying accounts of their war crimes. While the title sounds like a portmanteau of “Nazi” and “Gaza,” a “NAZA” is actually a “unit” of collateral damage—a civilian killed while trying to take out a Hamas operative. Each civilian Palestinian killed by an Israeli aerial assault is counted as “one NAZA,” from a day-old baby to a 92-year-old great-grandmother.
NAZA is a cold, cynical, calculating term. It achieves a different kind of dehumanization than comparing a stigmatized group to insects or rodents (i.e., how the Nazis referred to Jewish people as Jüdischer Parasit or vermin). Rather, NAZA is more evocative of how, in Errol Morris’s The Fog of War, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara recalled how he’d applied Henry Ford’s assembly line techniques to the computer management of mass slaughter of the Cambodian and Vietnamese people. The term NAZA isn’t meant to reduce Palestinians to animals, but to numbers—to make the quantitative extermination of human beings so removed, so clinically digital, as to not require investigation. (Indeed, as one of the soldiers says, the people doing the remote killing often feel like they are just playing a video game, like Buster Bluth carrying out drone strikes on Arrested Development.) 15 NAZA per strike was once deemed acceptable, but after October 7th that number rose to 50, then 100, and at one point even 500. Most, but not all, of the speakers seem to feel little remorse or personal responsibility for their actions; like Adolf Eichmann at his 1961 trial in Jerusalem, most claim to just have been following bureaucratic orders. They seem to blame the NAZA for not evacuating, or for loving a “terrorist” husband, or for being children destined to become terrorists themselves—or for just having bad luck.
NAZA presents something far more sinister than Israelis who feel guilty for killing people: Israelis who don’t seem to feel bad about it at all.
NAZA’s premise immediately prompts two questions, the first being: Is there sufficient moral justification for a film about Gaza to be made by two Israeli filmmakers? (In press notes, the directors say they “made this film out of a sense of obligation to use our position as Israeli filmmakers and journalists to examine the systems behind the mass killing of Palestinian civilians for which our country is responsible.”) I was prejudiced on this front after reading postings by Palestinian writers whom I respect a great deal and who, understandably, were not thrilled by the idea of the film. Why, they wondered, should the world have any interest in what Israeli filmmakers have to say about Gaza? Why do they need to hear from people who have spent the last three years remotely killing Palestinians beneath the safety of the Iron Dome? After Palestinian witnesses have been screaming about what was happening since 2023. After nearly 300 Palestinian journalists had been killed. This is an understandable sentiment, and I would never criticize a Palestinian for feeling this way.
However, despite understanding the reason why Palestinian writers had little interest in NAZA, I appreciate that it was produced. The film is about Israeli soldiers, but it does not encourage the viewer to feel sympathy for them. Unlike the Israeli films Waltz With Bashir (2008) or Lebanon (2009), the narration of the Israeli soldiers in NAZA avoids the pitfalls of a dynamic described by Gil Hochberg as “shooting and crying” (or yorim ve bochim). As Hochberg said, those films were “non-apologetic apologies.” NAZA presents something far more sinister than Israelis who feel guilty for killing people: Israelis who don’t seem to feel bad about it at all.
It’s not just unfair to accuse NAZA of not giving voice to any Palestinians, it’s also not strictly true. A Palestinian voice in the closing seconds of NAZA is the reason so many people, including myself, were crying at my screening. But it is true that the bulk of the film is not about the victims of the Gaza genocide; it is about its perpetrators. Neither Eichmann In Jerusalem nor The Zone of Interest are about Jews; they’re about the Nazis who killed them. NAZA, in turn, is not about Palestinians, but about the Israelis who kill them. As the directors wrote, NAZA focuses “not on sporadic war crimes committed by rogue soldiers who disobeyed orders” but “on the orders themselves, the policies, the accepted practices, the language and logic that make those practices possible, and the people who operate within them. The system and its cogs.”
In terms of facts, little in NAZA surprised me. Even still, I found the film mesmerizing.
NAZA has another challenge. Despite the best efforts of Zionist politicians and legacy media outlets, the genocide in Gaza has been one of the biggest news stories of the last three years. Would NAZA have anything new to say? There were numerous people wearing keffiyehs when I saw the film, and I sensed many amongst our audience were well versed in the news from Palestine. Would those people find NAZA boring or self indulgent?
In its tight, 80-minute runtime, NAZA answers the question of whether it has good reason to exist with a resounding yes. Title cards bear names for different sections of the film, such as “Lavender” (an “AI” system used to kill people in Gaza) or “Daddy’s Home” (a program used to listen in on family members of Hamas operatives and, when the father arrives home, to kill them all). When they’d flash, I not only knew about all of them, I could recall reading the original stories, broken by co-director Abraham himself in +972 Magazine and the Guardian. In terms of facts, little in NAZA surprised me. Even still, I found the film mesmerizing. It was nauseating, but informative, to hear how the people who have committed war crimes with anonymity and impunity did what they did.
Visually speaking, NAZA is a beautiful piece of cinema, albeit disturbingly so. Abraham interviews the genocidaires on the roofs of buildings in Tel Aviv/Jaffa in the fall of 2023, just weeks into the genocide. Szor’s cinematography is haunting and seductive. She shoots her co-director in a clean, identifiable half shadow but shoots his conversation partners such that they appear completely black. Indeed, at the beginning of the film, it is revealed that all of Abraham’s interviewees have had their voices and images digitally altered. (It’s an unsettling technique, which made me queasy as I wondered if AI—a technology that has powered the Gaza genocide—had been used to protect the identities of these mass murderers.)
NAZA is a film about surveillance. The people talking about listening in on Palestinians in 2023 are using cutting edge methods but—as historic footage shows—high-tech spying on Palestinians by Israel has been going on in Gaza since the first telephone cables were laid decades ago. What Szor’s camera shows beyond the speakers is as creepy as what they are saying: high-rise buildings, their windows framing the bodies of Tel Avivians in repose, looming hundreds of feet over occupied Palestine. One skyscraper under construction is 70 floors tall—a stunning foil to the urban hellscape of Gaza, a place the soldiers talk about flattening with such calm detachment.
I saw NAZA with the film director Adam Baran, and was reminded of his wonderful 2021 short film Trade Center. Based on an essay by Billy Miller in the book Petite Mort: Recollections of a Queer Public, Baran’s Trade Center features voiceover of five queer men talking about sucking and fucking in every possible corner of the old World Trade Center. As they talk, Baran’s camera shoots the new World Trade Center, in all its dystopian sterility. We see Calatrava’s white oculus. We see pristine boutiques and high-end stores. We see security cameras and the backs of cops everywhere. But we see none of the dicks, assholes, or warm mouths the narrators speak of experiencing in the 1980s; indeed, we don’t see any human faces at all. In Trade Center, the visuals are as antiseptic as the audio is lurid—much as the Germans in Jonathan Glazer’s 2023 film The Zone of Interest enjoy a Home and Garden-style life on one side of the walls of Auschwitz while Jews, who we hear but never see, are gunned down on the other. There is a different movie going on in the soundtracks and the visuals of Trade Center, Zone of Interest, and NAZA (though that changes dramatically in the final minutes of the latter film.)
What is the ethical responsibility here? Does journalistic duty trump the moral imperative to bring these people to justice?
After leaving the NAZA screening in silence, I found myself thinking about the moral dimensions of how far the filmmakers had gone to protect the identity of their sources.
Abraham and Szor interrogate “the system and its cogs” very well. But when it comes to “the people who operate within them” doing the killing, they change their voices, alter their appearances, and even blur out their handwriting. As a journalist, even though I very rarely quote anyone anonymously, I understand the need to protect the people who entrust you with their stories. In this case, however, the people being quoted anonymously are the perpetrators of perhaps the greatest mass atrocity in living memory. They have confessed to crimes against humanity. To obliterating apartments full of young children. To hacking into the phone of a little girl so that they could kill her and her entire family as soon as she uttered the words “Daddy’s home.”
What is the ethical responsibility here? Does journalistic duty trump the moral imperative to bring these people to justice? As I wrote recently about Akbar Ahmed Shahid’s book Crossing the Red Line, it is important for reporters to do the muddy work of actually talking to people in the U.S. State Department or the Israeli military—but it doesn’t preclude action, either during or after the fact. The NAZA directors are about 30 years old; if they exposed their subjects, they’d likely never be trusted to interview anyone again. Their careers would be over, but 24 mass murderers would be in the Hague. There are many, I’m certain, who would consider that to be a fair trade.
Then again, NAZA did what good documentary art is supposed to do: it made me uncomfortable. Not just about the filmmakers and their ethical choices or about the subjects and the fact of their continued freedom—it also made me uncomfortable about myself. All of us who have let Palestine choke are complicit. American and European taxpayers whose taxes buy bombs? Complicit. College students whose tuition funds bullets? Complicit. University professors whose research is funded by the “charity” of warmongers? Complicit. Documentarians who live relatively safely while their subjects are killed? Complicit.
NAZA is a movie about Palestinians but not for Palestinians. Palestinians, whether they are in Gaza, the West Bank, or the diaspora, don’t need to see this film—they live it every day. This is a movie about the perpetrators and conspirators. It is for us that NAZA is important. Even as its filmmakers allow some of those guilty of crimes against humanity to evade accountability, NAZA gets confessions of these crimes on the record. And this could be a very helpful tool for those of us charged with ending the crisis and making sure “never again” is not an empty slogan.
For as James Baldwin wrote, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
Leave a Reply