Our Zoom call this week will discuss the Israeli government’s extraordinary response to the film NAZA and the general atmosphere of violence and terror in the run-up to Israel’s elections next month. Our guests will be Mairav Zonszein, senior analyst for Israel at the International Crisis Group and a contributing opinion writer at The New York Times and Raef Zreik, a senior research fellow at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem. Mairav and Raef are two of the most sophisticated and fearless internal critics of Israeli politics and society. I can’t think of anyone better to describe conditions there now. Please join us.
Things to Read
(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)
In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), watch Scenes From the Divide, a documentary about the intra-Jewish fight over the campaign of Zohran Mamdani.
On MSNOW, I talked with Ali Velshi and Dr. Christina Greer about the domestic politics of the Iran war.
For the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s Occupied Thoughts podcast, I talked to international lawyer Itay Epshtain about the impact of sanctions on Israeli settlements.
Register for Jewish Currents Live on October 11.
I’ll see you on Friday,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
So, I just watched this new film, NAZA, by the Israeli filmmakers Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham. It’s a devastating film, and I can’t do it justice, and I would really recommend that people, if they have the opportunity, watch it. But there are a few thoughts that occurred to me after seeing it.
The first is there’s been criticism that this film, which is going to get a lot of attention, is another example of Israelis speaking about what happened in Gaza in ways that Palestinians themselves often don’t have the opportunity to do. It’s an old story. Edward Said decades ago said that Palestinians lack permission to narrate their own experience, and it’s still very much the case. We see that again and again Israelis, or diaspora Jews like me, are elevated above Palestinians in our ability to speak. We’re often harder to write off as antisemites.
We often have many, many more resources. People tend to believe Jews and Israelis when they say bad things about what Israel’s doing in a way they don’t believe Palestinians. And just the whole kind of material, political kind of whole series of ways basically, there is what can only be called a kind of affirmative action, honestly, in which Jewish and Israeli voices have a kind of unearned privilege in the conversation that Palestinians don’t. And I think anyone like myself or like Yuval Abraham, you know, has an obligation to do their work if they think the work is valuable, but simultaneously to try to change that system of honor and privilege. Yuval Abraham has been very, very open about trying to do exactly that.
But beyond that larger point, I do think it’s worth making that this particular film, NAZA, could really only have been made by an Israeli because it’s a film of interviews in Hebrew with Israelis who were involved in the targeting and other forms of the destruction of Gaza.
So, it’s like asking someone from Vietnam to make a film about the inner workings of the United States Pentagon during the Vietnam War. It really had to be made by someone who was from inside that Israeli society. And so, it’s crucially important that Palestinians be given more resources to tell their story, to tell more stories about Gaza. But this was, I think, a story which was really important and really probably had to be told by an Israeli.
And it’s a devastating story for a number of reasons. It’s a devastating film for a number of reasons. First of all, I think it really very effectively kind of dismantles a lot of this discourse about human shields. So, since October 7th, there’s been this line from Israel’s defenders again and again that the reason that so many civilians were killed in Gaza is because Hamas used them as human shields.
But one of the points that you see in this film is that Israel makes this very clear decision to target people they think are Hamas operatives not on the battlefield but at home. That Israel quickly runs out of supposedly military targets and they decide that the best way to get people that they think are Hamas operatives—I’m saying they think are Hamas operatives because the truth is really what Israel is doing is having these algorithms where they think if your phone is in contact with someone else who they think is a Hamas operative, they give you a little score and then they decide you’re a Hamas operative too, and then you get high enough on the score that they basically try to kill you.
So, in many cases, they didn’t really know if these were Hamas operatives, but they had made a kind of probabilistic judgment that they were more likely to be Hamas operatives than other people in Gaza.
But the key point is that they go after these people at home because they don’t actually have enough actual battlefield targets. And so, through this program called “Where’s Daddy?” they decide they’re going to bomb the building or bomb the floor of the building in which this supposed Hamas operative is sleeping with their family.
When you think about this, it kind of makes the whole idea of the human shields idea kind of absurd. Human shields is basically the idea that there are these Hamas people hiding in this hospital or in a school, and the doctors or teachers are essentially being made kind of hostages by these militants who’ve taken over their hospital, right.
But again, so much of this killing is happening where Palestinians are being killed in their homes. What on earth does it mean to say in that circumstance that the people, the children, the wife of the supposed Hamas operative are human shields? It’s an absurdity. These people are not being made hostages. These are the family members of the people that Israel has decided to kill.
It would literally be like if Hamas decided to bomb an apartment building in which you had some kind of person in the Israeli military—and, by the way, virtually every apartment building in Israel has such people—and then says, well, actually, the reason that we killed all of these civilians, the family members literally of this Israeli soldier, is because they were being used as human shields.
The second point about the film which I think is very powerful is it really dismantles what is a very crucial distinction in a lot of liberal Zionist discourse in the United States between a good Israel and a bad Israel. So, we’re very accustomed to hearing this idea that Netanyahu and Ben-Givir and Smotrich represent this kind of right-wing religious, even fascistic Israel. But there’s this kind of good, more liberal Israel, maybe it harkens back to an earlier era in Israel. These are the people who protested judicial reform, the people who may have even protested to end the war in Gaza earlier to get the hostages back.
And I’m not saying there aren’t meaningful political conflicts between those two forces. Of course, there are. But the people who are involved, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, are interviewing in this film actually are really people who come from the ‘good Israel’ because they’re interviewing primarily people from these elite intelligence units.
These are units populated by people who tend to be highly educated, kind of cosmopolitan, relatively secular, Ashkenazi, the kind of people who are very unlikely to vote for Benjamin Netanyahu, the kind of people who are likely to loathe Benjamin Netanyahu. And yet, it is these people, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor show, who in some ways are more responsible for the destruction in Gaza than their right wing opponents because they may not actually be pulling the triggers, but they’re the ones who are creating the algorithms, who create the technology that allows Israel to kill so many people in Gaza.
And you see that the fact that they may have a kind of liberalism when it comes to certain Israeli cultural issues doesn’t mean that they’re not playing an absolutely fundamental and crucial role
in creating the technological architecture that allows Israel to lay waste to Gaza. And so, I think this is a really, really important and really sobering point when you realize that really the entirety of Israeli Jewish society—right and also what we might call left—is deeply, dimply implicated in the destruction of the Gaza Strip and the fact that such vast numbers of people are killed.
The third point about the film that I think is significant, and this is kind of almost like kind of an eternal point, but it’s always important to be reminded of is the way in which language facilitates murder. This is the point that George Orwell made so famously.
The very term of the film itself, NAZA, right, is a reference to the term that’s used in Israeli military and in intelligence circles to refer to collateral damage. So, if you’re going to kill a supposed Hamas operative, and then there are going to be 10 family members there, or others who are going to be killed who are civilians, you don’t say, well, we’re going to kill his daughter, her name is so-and-so, or even we’re going to kill a man, a woman. You say, it’s 10 ‘naza’, right?
So, it’s completely flattened, completely dehumanized. You don’t even know the gender, age, anything of these people. The name for collateral damage is just ‘naza.’ And you see in which this process completely dehumanizes and creates this distance between the people who are creating the algorithms for murder, right, and the people who are actually killed.
You also see in the film the way this is done with the term ‘terrorist.’ So, there are these interviews with these people who say that once Israel decided to basically force all of the Palestinians out of northern Gaza that anyone who remained in this area was therefore considered a terrorist, right. And in fact, that anyone who went back to Northern Gaza, who crossed into some invisible zone that Israel never marked for Palestinians, would be shot because Palestinians were now no longer allowed in this area. And if they enter the area, even if they were children, they would therefore be classified as terrorists.
You just see the way in which this dehumanizing language facilitates destruction, facilitates killing, and particularly in the use of this word terrorist, which has been used so profoundly promiscuously, again, almost always to refer to Palestinians or other Muslims in Israeli and American discourse, but this is a particularly hideous example that you see in the film.
And I think the last point, and maybe the most important point, which is the most chilling, is that the people who are narrating what they did, the people are basically saying, you know,
I went to work and I was in charge of determining that there would be this building that we should bomb, and it would have, you know, 10, 20, 200, you know, 500 naza in it and basically then creating the mechanisms that then these people would be killed.
They talk about it in these very clinical terms, right? They basically say things like, you know, I was just part of the mission. Somebody else would have done it. There’s one scene where somebody, kind of after they’ve just blown up a building, he talks to someone else in his unit and he says, you know, what do you think about this? And the guy says, well, we just have to trust the system.
And so, again, this is such an old story, but what you see here is the way in which individuals—one guy calls himself a cog. He said, I was just a small cog in this machine. What happens is, and in fact, this whole process of killing is described in the film as a kind of a factory, right, in which everyone is playing a little role. Someone helps to create an algorithm with a team, and then that other people then build upon it, and then ultimately there’s someone else who presses the button to send the drone. All of this is done in a way that allows people to say, well, I’m not really fundamentally responsible. There’s something much bigger here going on, and I can’t really do very much about it anyway, and these decisions are being made by a system which is much bigger than me.
If some of this language is reminiscent of the language that we’re all familiar with when having to do with the Nazi Holocaust, you know, I was just following orders, famously the way that Nazis were described as functionaries, right, in Hannah Arendt’s writing about Adolf Eichmann. That’s not coincidental. In fact, one of the Israeli intelligence analysts themselves, one of these military intelligence himself, compares the situation to the Nazis. And he says, when I was a child, I was in high school, I was taken to go to Poland to learn about the Nazis, and now I can understand how it happened.
And so, one of the most fundamental points that the film makes is about the willingness of human beings to take agency, to take responsibility for their own actions and not to basically blame a system that they think is too big for them, but to recognize that ultimately they are accountable for their contribution they make to the destruction of the life of other human beings. And I think it’s a very, very important question for any Jewish Israeli who’s thinking about going to serve in the Israeli military. But beyond that, it’s a very, very important question for American Jews, and Americans in general, because we too, in a way, are part of that system, that machinery of dehumanization and death.
Every rabbi who gets up next week on Yom Kippur, on Kol Nidre, and speaks only about antisemitism, and doesn’t speak about the realities of what’s happening to Palestinians and what’s happened to Palestinians in Gaza, is part of this process of dehumanization that I think ultimately makes it easier to continue killing Palestinians. Every person in Jewish organizational spaces, every American politician, every journalist who decides to kind of avert their eyes and speak about a Jewish life as if it’s more important than Palestinian life, or use the kind of tropes to describe Palestinians that rob them of their humanity or make them seem lesser, or simply decide not to look in uncomfortable spaces.
All of these people, it seems to me, are also involved in a process in which they contribute—yes, in a small way, but in a way that’s fundamentally important for them—contribute to a process that makes dehumanization and the killing of Palestinians possible, that allows it to continue. And it’s why when there are people like this rapper Macklemore or Mark Ruffalo who are willing actually to take a risk, right, by standing up for the idea that Palestinians deserve to live and Palestinians deserve freedom, even though they also could just say, well, who am I? This is all so much bigger than me. It’s why those people really need to be celebrated and we need to take courage from them.
You know, Abraham Joshua Heschel very famously said that only a few are guilty but all are responsible. And I think that the question of larger responsibility for the enormity of what has happened and is continuing to happen to Palestinians in Gaza and beyond is a crucial lesson that everyone should take from this remarkable film.
