There are weeks when I know some days in advance what I will write about in my blog. In these, idyllic, weeks, my walks to and from shul on Shabbat afford me at least 50 minutes to play with the idea and start to map out how the post will flow.
Then there are weeks when I have no idea what I will write about, until, on Monday or Tuesday, I sit in front of the laptop and wait for the muse to inspire me. While occasionally a little nerve-wracking, this is also very often exhilarating, and sometimes results in what I judge to be among my best pieces.
And then there are weeks like this week. Shabbat and Sunday were, of course, Rosh Hashana, and my mind was occupied with issues even more pressing than my blog. So it was that, on Sunday evening, I opened up my phone to catch up with the news, and discovered the news item that clearly had to be the subject of this week’s blog.
On Motzei Shabbat, 12 September, the British film NAZA won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice International Film Festival.
That fact, the incidental facts around that central fact, and the worldwide attention that that fact has attracted, make it impossible for me not to write about the film. In addition, I feel that the moment to write about is now, and not a few weeks down the line, even though I have not yet seen the film. I have, however, seen a two-minute trailer, and I have read a considerable number of reviews, opinion pieces, and news stories about the film and its screening, and I believe that, confining my comments to what I am able to learn from all that, I have a couple of observations to make that may be worth reading.
The film itself is British, produced by The Guardian and James Wilson’s JW Films. (Wilson is a long-time collaborator of Jonathan Glazer, the film’s executive producer.) The film’s directors – Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor – previously directed No Other Land (2024), an Oscar-winning documentary about the Israel Defense Forces and settler violence in the West Bank, To note that all of the above are long-standing outspoken critics of Israel’s policy in Yehuda and Shomron and Gaza is not to invalidate their right to make the film. I would certainly not want to live in a country where it was illegal to make a film criticising government or army policy. However, it is worth going into the cinema recognising that all those involved with the production have an agenda, and ensuring that your critical faculties are appropriately sharpened.
The film consists almost entirely of one-on-one interviews conducted by Yuval Abraham with individuals who are presented as members of Israel’s military and intelligence community, who describe the procedure the IDF follows when planning and executing targeted strikes designed to kill individual terrorists in Gaza. I have, in the previous sentence, stated that this is how they are ‘presented’, because the objective observer has to take on trust from the filmmakers that we are watching genuine personnel. This is because all of the participants appear anonymously, with their faces blurred and their voices digitally altered so that they are unidentifiable.
I certainly have no evidence that the participants are not genuine, but, on the other hand, neither I, nor anyone else, has any way of verifying their genuineness. The filmmakers ask the audience to take their word, both their claims and their conclusions, on trust. I have seen them called whistleblowers, but I would argue that that is an inaccurate term. Whistleblowers may seek protection, or go into hiding, but they do not act anonymously.
Certainly, no court of law would consider ‘evidence’ presented in such a form. Again, I am not claiming that the participants are not genuine. However, I would certainly argue that any review of the film unquestioningly talking about the ‘proof’ it presents, and accepting all of the narrative at face value, reveals a pre-disposition to believe the worst.
The same pre-disposition was demonstrated by the audience at the film’s premiere in Venice. Free Palestine banners and flags were unfurled after the screening, and the record-breaking 25-minute standing ovation the film received was surely a reflection of an audience flourishing its politically correct sensibilities. The 80-minute documentary may be good, but objectively 25-minute standing ovation good? I somehow doubt it.
I want to make two specific points. The first concerns the film’s title. This is a British production and, although all of the interviews are conducted in Hebrew, with English subtitles, the title – NAZA – is the transliteration, rather than the translation, of a Hebrew acronym. Naza is the IDF’s acronym for Nezek Agavi, collateral damage. I find myself wondering why the filmmakers chose to keep the acronym, initially incomprehensible to any potential English-speaking audience, rather than simply calling the film Collateral Damage. I have spent the last couple of days trying, and failing, to rid myself of the ugly suspicion that NAZA was simply too wonderful a gift for the filmmakers to spurn, with its twin echo of Gaza and Nazi.
The second point is a broader one. Let me accept, for the moment, that the account given in the trailer I watched is accurate. Israel deploys AI and surveillance techniques that enable the quantification of all collateral damage that can be expected to be sustained in the elimination from the air of any given terrorist target. The interviewee in the trailer states that sometimes a potential 20, 30, and even 300 civilian deaths were authorised in a single attack. On one occasion, he claims, the figure authorised was 500. (You can view the trailer here.)
The fact that even The Guardian has never claimed a civilian-to-terrorist ratio greater than 5:1 certainly suggests that the figures quoted above (20, 30, 300, 500:1) presumably apply to the killing of a very, very small number of senior Hamas leaders.
The reviews that I have read of the film take this as evidence of the indefensible savagery of Israel’s conduct of the war. Online commentators take it as evidence of Israel’s conducting of genocide against Gazans.
What this clip in fact demonstrates is that Israel follows the Geneva Convention: the international rules of conduct of conflict that Israel is a signatory to and that Israel has also adopted as domestic law. When conducting a war, countries are required to estimate the collateral damage expected to result from any action, and to make a judgement as to whether the military benefit of the action justifies the estimated collateral damage. From the testimony of the interviewee, that appears to be exactly the procedure that Israel followed. It also clearly demonstrates that Israel is not conducting genocide. A country carrying out genocide would not have a maximum authorised civilian collateral damage figure; indeed, the higher the collateral damage, the better. Such a country would have no interest in accurately estimatingcollateral damage.
There is, of course, a second discussion that needs to be had. Even allowing that the IDF (or the political leadership) considered the acceptable maximum collateral damage for each action, was their final conclusion morally acceptable? To answer that question, of course, requires knowing Israel’s assessment of the realistic potential threat of the specific target. This is not a question that the film addresses, and, if my reading of some of Israel’s official responses is correct, it is not a question to which the personnel interviewed in the film would have had the answer. The intelligence assessment of specific targets would have been beyond their rank.
It certainly seems that the moral questions that surround this whole issue are not ones that the narrow remit of the film addresses. Given the political agenda of the filmmakers, it is easy to understand why they chose the narrow remit that they did. It is also very probable that they all too correctly calculated how the film, even with its narrow remit, would be received by the audience in Venice and by far too many people around the world.
For a fuller and very thoughtful reflection on all of the issues raised by NAZA and its reception, I encourage you to listen to Haviv Rettig Gur’s analysis on his podcast, which you can watch here.
Excellent points raised considering none of us have seen the film.
Many thanks to the link to Haviv Rettig Gur’s response.