NAZA: Documenting a Genocide in the Killers Own Words

Directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, the Israeli half of the team that won an Oscar for No Other Country, have pulled off something astounding. Their 80-minute documentary NAZA, just released in theaters, contains no new information about the genocide in Gaza — Palestinians have already provided an endless stream of hellish videos. And yet, they showcase a disturbing new perspective on these horrors.

This film includes almost no imagery from Gaza — less than 60 seconds at the very end — and no Palestinian voices. Instead, Abraham sits on roofs above Tel Aviv with the darkened silhouettes of 24 operatives from Israel’s intelligence services, including from the elite Unit 8200. These specters, with their voices and outlines digitally distorted, talk about the AI tools they use to carry out a genocide, and they appear just as uncanny as their computer programs.

The information about Israel’s killer AI isn’t new — Abraham reported on the automated systems for identifying targets in Gaza over two years ago in the online magazine +972. “Lavender” is the name of a program that chews through vast troves of surveillance data about Gazans and labels tens of thousands of them as Hamas militants. “Where’s Daddy?” hacks into children’s phones to see if their fathers are at home so they can be assassinated.

When a target is selected, IDF rules allow for 20 additional people to be killed as “collateral damage” (or “Naza” in the Israeli acronym that gives the film its name). In some cases, up to 500 civilians are killed alongside one target.

None of these agents, most of whom worked at screens far away from the killing, deny what they have done. While their attitudes vary, none really try to justify it. Some are clearly haunted by the experience of listening to children scream as their homes crash down on top of them; others sound robotic as they sketch out the desktop interfaces they used to select targets for bombs.

When asked how they feel, all these killers resort to clichés: “My role is technical,” says one. “We’re just completing the mission.” “This was expected of us.” And on and on and on.

It’s impossible not to think about Hannah Arendt’s observations of Adolf Eichmann, one of the primary architects of the Holocaust, during his trial in Jerusalem in 1961. Eichmann used the dry, bureaucratic language of a minor government office to describe the worst crimes of human history. “He was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché,” Arendt noted.

One Israeli soldier in the film describes himself as “just a small cog,” echoing Eichmann’s defense lawyers, who called him “a small cog in the state apparatus.” He defends his work programming the AI — someone else was dropping the bombs, after all. Besides: “If I hadn’t done it, someone else would have.”

One soldier recalls travelling to Poland to learn about the Holocaust, and wondering how the Germans did it. “If the Nazis are the devil, what am I?” While Israel’s defenders claim any comparison between the IDF and the Nazis is antisemitic, can they stop IDF soldiers from drawing the comparison themselves?

Their Hebrew is sprinkled with English terms — “data science,” “benchmarks,” “parameters” — straight from Tel Aviv’s tech scene. They serve in elite units, are well educated, and hold liberal views. One emphasizes that they do not particularly hate Arabs (at least by Israeli standards), and seems stumped when Yuval points out that they nonetheless killed more Arabs than anyone else.

Israel’s establishment reacted with outrage, with an IDF general swearing to oppose the film “using all the tools at our disposal” — hopefully not including their nuclear weapons. Israeli politicians have called for Abraham and Szor to have their citizenship revoked. The propaganda campaign nonetheless seems confused, as the directors are accused of both defaming the IDF with a “blood libel” and revealing military secrets — it can’t be both, can it?

The film adds little to our understanding of the Gaza genocide — but it does offer a disturbing window into what has been going on in the heads of the people committing it. This focus on the perpetrators of genocide is not new — the spectacular 2012 documentary The Act of Killing takes a similar approach to the anti-communist, CIA-backed mass murder in Indonesia in 1965. Zionism, as an explicitly colonial project, was always based on the dehumanization of Palestine’s original inhabitants. This film shows how the genocidal campaign, backed by high-tech systems, has allowed much of Israeli society to sacrifice their own humanity.

The camera takes long shots of Israelis sitting inside their apartments in Tel Aviv — while voices talk about systematically murdering families inside their apartments in Gaza, just 60 kilometers away. This crass division between humans and non-humans is not a product of Benjamin Netanyahu’s political maneuvering — it is instead the result of the Zionists’ ethnic cleansing of Palestine, which began in 1948.

This film should be seen by the imperialist politicians who gave financial, military, and diplomatic backing to the Gaza genocide. They should not claim they didn’t know. NAZA is available in theaters and will be published for free on the internet in late November.