If you’ve heard anything about “NAZA,” the new documentary about the war in Gaza, it might be that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was so outraged by it that he has proposed legislation that would revoke the filmmakers’ citizenship. So you could assume that the film, which has not yet been released, is about him. Or maybe that it’s about the suffering of Palestinians, with lots of images of bloody corpses, weeping children and hungry families.
But it’s nothing like that. The film consists almost entirely of calm interviews with Israeli military officers and soldiers, filmed on Tel Aviv rooftops at night against a backdrop of generic glass-and-steel towers.
In these interviews, the speakers (whose identities are obscured) describe the mechanics of total surveillance in Gaza, the artificial intelligence systems that analyze surveillance footage to identify human targets and the calculus of what the military calls NAZA, or the number of civilians it’s permissible to kill alongside any given target.
One interviewee describes targeting people who are running toward a food distribution site. Another guesses that his body count numbers in the thousands. (The Israel Defense Forces have denied the allegations in the film, cast doubt on the film’s sources and insisted that decisions about who it strikes are made by “human personnel” only. The culture minister, Miki Zohar, has accused the filmmakers of treason.)
The night before I saw the movie at a press screening, Michael Sfard, an Israeli human rights lawyer who was a consultant on the film, told me that it was “a movie about Tel Aviv,” the sophisticated, stylish city in which Sfard himself lives. He meant that it’s about the educated, cosmopolitan Israelis serving in elite units. Not the violent ideologue politicians or a few bad-apple soldiers on whom Israelis blame some of the wanton violence in Gaza, but rather the people making day-to-day decisions.
More than halfway through the film, Yuval Abraham, who conducted the interviews and co-directed the movie with Rachel Szor, asks one of the subjects if he realized that he was taking part in a genocide. This interviewee has already said that he found the work to be fun, because staying up late with your buddies, working toward a common goal, is fun. Now he agrees calmly, indeed casually, that yes, he has been taking part in a genocide.
The word doesn’t appear in the movie again.
A different but similarly contested term, on the other hand, appears over and over, landing with brutal force every time. The term is “terrorism,” or “terrorist.” At least one of the A.I. systems used by Israeli intelligence identifies suspected terrorists by patterns of phone calls and social connections, among other data.
Does the system make mistakes? Of course it does, one interviewee readily acknowledges. He continues: A baker whose shop is near Hamas headquarters, for example, might have patterns of movement and contact that, to A.I., look similar to those of a Hamas fighter. (Just such a case is described in the podcast “The Gaza Chef,” produced by the German newspaper Die Zeit, which built on some of Abraham’s reporting to examine the targeted killing of a man named Mahmoud Almadhoun, who ran a soup kitchen near a hospital Israeli intelligence had identified as a Hamas stronghold.)
Once the system categorizes the person as a terrorist, he becomes a human target. Members of his family or staff could be killed along with him. This is where NAZA comes in: the acceptable number of additional casualties rises along with the perceived importance of the human target. It may be 20, 50 or even 100. People.
The word “terrorism” appears in a different context in a clip the makers of “NAZA” pulled from a 1986 episode of the PBS program “Firing Line,” in which a young Benjamin Netanyahu is promoting his edited volume “Terrorism: How the West Can Win.” In his perfectly unaccented American English, he offers a clear definition of terrorism: “The systematic and deliberate attack, the murder, maiming and menacing of innocents, of civilians for political goals.” Unspoken but unmissable is that this definition applies to the actions of the Israeli military and to the state it serves.
“NAZA” opens at the IFC Center in New York City’s Greenwich Village on Wednesday. Just a few blocks away, the Quad Cinema will be showing another movie about Israel, called “Checkout.” It’s the story of a hapless Mossad agent who is facing forced retirement when he suddenly spots what seems to be the mark of a lifetime, a high-level militant posing as a businessman.
Absurd and violent high jinks ensue, and — spoiler alert — the businessman ends up dead. Too late, however, the agent realizes it may have been a case of mistaken identity. And so the forces of Israeli intelligence must be marshaled to eradicate any semblance of doubt and brand the businessman a terrorist, posthumously.
“Checkout” is a dark comedy, and it was finished before Oct. 7, 2023, the day of the deadly attack by Hamas that catalyzed the war in Gaza. I have known the director and screenwriter, Jonathan Dekel, for a few years. I like interviewing him, because he is unusually open about his ethical struggles and cognitive contradictions.
Like the subjects of “NAZA,” he has served in an elite intelligence unit. In his 30s, he moved with his family to what is known in Hebrew as Neve Shalom and in Arabic as Wahat al-Salam, a co-living village created by Jewish and Palestinian Israeli families. He has told me he wanted to make sure that his three children would not serve in the Israeli military. But on the day of the Hamas attack, he drove straight to his old unit and reported for reserve duty, without being called up, and served for two years. Then he moved to New York, in part, he told me, to sever the bond with the Israeli military, or perhaps to escape the contradiction of wearing a uniform while living in a peacenik village.
I met up with Dekel again before going to see “Checkout.” He was telling me that he and his wife were flying back to Israel to vote in next month’s election, spending so much money on tickets that they may not be able to visit again for a family wedding a few months later. It’s that important to unseat Netanyahu, Dekel said, because only then would Israel have a chance. Only then would he see a way to move back to Israel and continue raising his kids there, because the war in Gaza and the attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank might cease and the air-raid alerts in Israel might grow less frequent and Dekel would be able to set the example he wants for his children.
And then, unprompted, he added: “I don’t think what’s going on in Gaza is a genocide.” It’s horrible, he acknowledged. The Israeli military has killed tens of thousands of civilians, and continues to kill civilians. “But it’s just war.”
I see his point, in a sense. What’s happening in Gaza, as depicted in “NAZA,” is also what his own movie depicts. When that hypothetical baker is killed, or that real-life chef, or that fictional businessman, the system, or the humans in charge of the system, don’t say that they made a mistake: They say that they killed a terrorist. And the people who died because they happened to be nearby are just NAZA.
Take the number of official targets and multiply it by the number of bystanders it’s permissible to kill in order to reach the targets, and pretty soon, Abraham says in the film, “you end up with all of Gaza.” Anyone can die, and the death will be “just war.” The difference between the practice depicted in “Checkout,” the comedy, and the unrelenting, unbearable horror described in “NAZA” is scale. Now, it’s industrial. That’s what makes it a genocide. It really is that unequivocal, and perhaps this is why the makers of “NAZA” didn’t need to use the word more than once.
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