NAZA review: Portrait of Israel as a nation stuck in a moral abyss - Middle East Eye

On 24 August, only nine days before the start of the Venice International Film Festival, a report in The Guardian announced an addition to the lineup. NAZA, by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, the Israeli co-directors of 2024 Oscar-winner No Other Land, would premiere in the main competition.

On the Venice Lido, the film, which “reveals in detail the systems behind Israel’s calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza”, was met with a 25-minute standing ovation and later won the Special Jury Prize.

Within days, France’s mk2 films announced that it had come on board as sales agent, while several major autumn festivals, including San Sebastian and New York, confirmed its inclusion in their lineups. Building on this, NAZA is being rushed into cinemas across the world, including Germany and the US in the coming weeks, which will surely intensify interest, before streaming for free on The Guardian.

Produced by The Guardian and James Wilson (The Voice of Hind Rajab), and executive-produced by Jonathan Glazer, Oscar-winning director of The Zone of Interest, NAZA was presented in advance of its premiere as the biggest filmic expose of Israel's security apparatus. 

Yet none of the early reports could prepare the audiences at Venice for the horrors it unleashes. This is a stark document that unflinchingly looks evil in the eye, forcing us to confront the grisliest and most terrifying facets of the genocide in Gaza that no image has been able to convey.

Few of its findings are new, and have been previously revealed by Al Jazeera, The Guardian, Forensic Architecture and +972 among others. Likewise, Abraham has stated in interviews that the violations covered in NAZA have been repeatedly reported by Palestinians for several years, yet nobody paid any notice.

That they are attracting attention now is testament to the power of cinema rather than any superior investigation by Abraham and Szor. It also points to the grave importance of NAZA as the staunchest and most damning denunciation of Israel and its army since 7 October. 

For NAZA is a work not targeted at Arabs or supporters of the Palestinian cause but rather Israelis who still brand Gaza as “false genocide”; the Zionists of the US, Germany, UK, France and elsewhere, who will never listen to the voices of oppressed Palestinians; and the incredulous and indifferent millions worldwide who may now begin to question their convictions.

Nowhere has the conversation about the issues raised by NAZA been more intense than in Israel, where commercial distribution is highly unlikely. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is facing a general election next month, and other politicians have demanded that Abraham and Szor be stripped of their Israeli citizenship, demonstrating again how the Zionist state is anything but a democracy. The Israeli Film Council has recommended state funding for films celebrating the “heroism” of Israeli soldiers.

In Haaretz, prominent Israeli journalist Gideon Levy wrote that “[NAZA] has elicited a nationwide uproar. After years of repression, denial and lies, apathy and indifference, the pus has burst forth in a mighty stream.”

There have been accusations from some Arab and Palestinian quarters that Abraham is self-promoting, seeking fame, and that NAZA is intended to rehabilitate Israeli cinema. Such claims are nonsensical: NAZA is invaluable at a time when ongoing violence in both Gaza and the occupied West Bank continues to be normalised.

Audience appetite for Palestinian stories has never been as strong as during the past few years. Aside from No Other Land, which was co-directed by Palestinian journalists Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal,  The Voice of Hind Rajab was nominated for an Oscar this year, while All That’s Left of You and Palestine 36 have been global commercial successes.

Israeli cinema, meanwhile, remains isolated. A few Israeli films have featured at festivals but are largely shunned by distributors. Major titles with strong leftist, anti-Zionist leanings, such as Nadav Lapid’s Yes and Shai Carmeli-Pollak’s The Sea, both released last year, have faced a hostile and arduous path towards wider international audiences. Avi Nesher’s 7 October drama Our Loves premiered this month in Toronto to little fanfare and few reviews. 

NAZA focuses exclusively on Gaza and the tactics the Israeli army has employed in a war that the pair emphasise is yet to end, depicting an industrialised targeting system founded on collective punishment.

Through testimonies, Abraham and Szor stress that, contrary to the Israeli military narrative, civilian casualties have never been avoided in Gaza, despite the claims of Israel and its supporters.

At its heart are interviews with 24 intelligence personnel and soldiers whose details have been kept under wraps, not only due to the film-makers’ ethical journalistic responsibilities, but also because none of the subjects dares divulge their identities.

Abraham and Szor reject a dramatic narrative that might inject meaning into NAZA's salvo of senseless barbarism, also refusing to pepper the film with sensationalism or sentimentality. Instead, they establish a fixed visual and structural setup that is largely unchanged throughout. Interviews take place on a Tel Aviv rooftop. Interviewees’ faces are obscured. Voices are digitally altered. Abraham is the only visible subject, asking concise but pointed questions. Szor is invisible behind the camera.

NAZA, as the film explains, is the Hebrew military acronym for the expected number of civilian casualties resulting from a planned strike (“nezek agavi” approximates to “collateral damage”). Many of the interviewees use the term to subconsciously safeguard themselves from regarding Palestinians as human beings, as well as shield themselves from accepting the gravity of killing. Defenceless civilians are not only the collateral damage suggested by the film’s title but a pretext for murdering as many Palestinians as possible.

The barrage of ghastly revelations then begins to unfold.

According to Israeli military tactics, each targeted Hamas operative in Gaza carries an “allowance” of at least 20 civilian deaths, including women and children. If the Israeli army were primarily focused on wiping out all 40,000 Hamas operatives estimated to exist before the war, then the number of collateral deaths would amount to 800,000, or nearly half the population of Gaza.

But as some of the whistleblowers reveal, civilian casualties in individual incidents far exceeded that ratio.

In one chilling scene, Abraham quizzes an intelligence operative about the highest number of anticipated civilian deaths for a strike in Gaza. “I don’t know how many were killed, because they never check this, but there was once an approval for 500,” he replies.

As the testimonies pile up, it becomes clear that Israel’s military operations would eventually lead, intentionally or not, to the annihilation of Gaza’s entire population.

NAZA’s biggest revelation is the extent to which the military used AI in its operations.

Lavender, an AI-powered database and decision-support tool, identified suspected low-ranking Hamas operatives, who were each scored from one to 100 based on the likelihood that they belonged to a militant group. Despite an admitted considerable margin of error, and military officers’ willingness to accept low scores, thousands of anonymous civilian targets were still identified for execution.

Every killer, however evil, needs tools to rationalise their actions: what the “advanced” methods employed by the Israeli army expose is a broken system that affords venality a facelift, allowing those responsible to blame the technology should all Palestinians be annihilated.

At every turn, Abraham and Szor debunk the myths that the military and Israel have unconvincingly promoted about their handling of the war. The incessantly repeated narrative that Hamas has used Gaza's civilian population as human shields is not outright refuted by the interviewees, but it is questioned and ultimately dismissed as the chief reason for the colossal casualties - currently more than 73,000 Palestinians killed at the time of writing.

Time and again, the Israeli army emerges as the unquestionable culprit, having made little to no effort to isolate its targets from their domestic surroundings. At one point, NAZA focuses on "Daddy’s Home", an additional piece of AI software that uses mass surveillance to target individuals when they enter their family residences. In the process, children and other family members become intrinsic to the planned strikes, their presence relied on by software and military operatives to identify and ambush targets.

Then there is the sniper who confesses to killing civilians awaiting food aid. He gives no reason for what he did and, pressed by Abraham, simply states that “they have to learn with blood”.

Several soldiers are remorseful, fully conceding that Gaza has undergone a genocide; others speak of their trauma over the women and children they have murdered, of the screams that still echo in their ears.

But NAZA is not one of those habitual Israeli films that slyly endeavours to restore its nation’s squandered reputation by parading a group of sanctimonious murderers seeking redemption.

Most interviewees contend that the killing of civilians is a necessary evil. Some believe it is a justifiable price to pay for Israel’s protection. Others postulate that it is an unavoidable and expected consequence of war. And then there is the group that crows about its killings, comparing Gaza to a videogame and boasting about the technical achievements of its military.

“You feel a bit like God because you hear everything they say,” one respondent says.

Abraham and Szor present testimonies with minimal interference save for imperative historical codas that contextualise the Gaza genocide within a larger historical framework.

The pair underline how Gaza in 2026 resulted from the Nakba of 1948, and how the vast majority of the Palestinian population was expelled and displaced from lands that now constitute the modern metropolis that is Tel Aviv.

Robbed of infrastructure and living in the shadow of a relentless military occupation that deprives its inhabitants of mobility, self-determination and basic human rights, the abolition of Gaza is deeply ingrained in the DNA of Israel’s foundational policies and, as such, observed by successive regimes.

More audaciously, the film-makers juxtapose the Gaza genocide with the Holocaust, a comparison that even Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian’s own critic, has taken against in his review. With a nod to Claude Lanzmann’s monumental documentary Shoah (1985), which echoes NAZA in focusing exclusively on testimonies without embellishment, the pair draw parallels between the two systems of dehumanisation.

As with the Holocaust, apathetic citizens and foot soldiers never challenge the amorality of the system - or as one Israeli interviewee asserts, “they never stood up”.

Abraham and Szor add a third correlative layer with their series of nocturnal shots of Tel Aviv residents, insulated in their comfortable apartments watching TV. Several critics have likened this to Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, in which a Nazi family idly lives adjacent to Auschwitz. Yet, visually and conceptually, these images owe more to the lonely New Yorkers found in the paintings of Edward Hopper: disparate individuals isolated from reality, from themselves and from the rest of the world.

The glaring testimonies of the 24 interviewees stand in contrast to the obliging TV narratives in which Tel Aviv’s residents take comfort. Like Hopper’s New Yorkers, theirs is a byproduct of a governing system that has painted life in an ominous metropolis with a tint of sameness. Unlike Hopper’s subjects, however, the isolation of Israel’s largest urban centre is voluntary, driven by a reluctance to acknowledge the truth of the unfolding nightmare next door, and a failure to acknowledge a truth that few people in the world still continue to question.

Towards the end of NAZA, the Netanyahu regime receives a predictable drubbing, yet it is Israel’s so-called left who come off worse.

Throughout, whistleblowers from both the right and the left demonstrate little distinction in how they view or would handle Gaza. At one point, an interviewee tells Abraham of some of the most horrific measures he saw or did, before qualifying it with: “And my unit was mostly composed of the liberal middle-class of Tel Aviv.”

NAZA stands as a portrait of a nation in a moral abyss; a nation that is far from coming to terms with a genocide it has enabled and continues to enable.

Regardless of the outcome of next month’s election, the conversation around Gaza and the morality of the Israeli state can never be the same again.

Of all the testimonies, the one that stayed with this writer most belongs to an officer who insists that he has resumed his normal life and that, although the army has deployed psychologists to support those with possible PTSD, he soon realised that “there was no need for them”. He is asked whether he feels any remorse, and whether the images of the women and children he has killed haunt him. 

“No, they don’t,” he coldly answers. “Nothing has stayed with me. Zero.”