NAZA

Very little of the information in NAZA (2026) is new. The general public knew about “Lavender” (AI-based generation of “targets”) and “Where’s Daddy?” (killing targets with their families) and the mechanism by which all of this is accomplished (building flattening by missiles, arbitrary no-go zones enforced with capital punishment administered by omnipresent quadcopters, et cetera). And, finally, we knew about the hatred coursing through Israeli society, an entire culture rendered blood simple due to the experience on October 7 of receiving a fraction of a pain that they themselves have dealt over decades via conquest, displacement, occupation, torture, assassination, imprisonment, theft, propaganda, cultural desecration, religious persecution, and, of late, annihilation.

The novelty of NAZA is its direct confrontation with the extremely limited subset of Israelis capable and willing to describe how they are administering a genocide. The documentary is entirely structured around interviews conducted with 24 anonymized Israeli military intelligence officials on central Tel Aviv rooftops at night. They served in elite intelligence and frontline units, tasked variously with building AI systems to generate lists of kill targets; setting fire to homes left by fleeing Gazan Palestinians; eavesdropping on families right up to the moment a missile deletes their whole building and its other inhabitants; running disinformation campaigns on critics of Israeli policy; killing the families of critics of Israeli policy; enforcing arbitrary, shoot-to-kill no-go zones with quadcopters; shooting into crowds of people racing to get their first food in days; and more. “NAZA” is a military term of art derived from Hebrew for collateral damage, used by Israeli forces to describe the acceptable level of bystander death in an operation. The film reveals this level is always arbitrary, and often attached to targets that themselves may have been chosen in error.

There are frequent cuts to the surrounding city skyline, frequently peering into the windows of apartment buildings in which Israeli civilians go about their daily lives: watching TV, exercising, cooking dinner. The effect is an unsubtle and successful invitation to imagine all of this shit being blown up, bodies under concrete, columns of smoke—everything, in other words, happening just a few dozen miles down the coast.

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Darkened, voice-altered, silhouetted, the men who agreed to be interviewed for NAZA accepted what I will call “Breaking the Silence terms” for participation. Breaking the Silence is an Israeli activist group that has, for many years, collected anonymous testimonies from Israeli soldiers who describe atrocities and other human rights violations that they themselves committed or observed in the course of their service. This style of testimony is highly effective; Breaking the Silence testimonies, in part, drove me away from the Zionism of my youth. I know of at least one longtime AIPAC fundraiser who permanently turned off the spigot, for himself and others, after going on tours organized by BtS. But the practice of anonymization has drawn more criticism in recent years for two reasons. First, for serving as a kind of intra-Israeli expiation—a way for a brother to cry on the other’s shoulder. And second, for the fundamental conflict that anonymous testimony poses with other groups desirous of naming, shaming and, where possible, arresting Israelis who commit crimes against Palestinians.

After the Gaza genocide, I have become less certain about the practical utility of institutionalizing anonymity. What does another masked witness accomplish with 75,000 dead, and counting? However, watching NAZA, I was reminded of the experience of listening to U.S. airmen describe the illegal bombing of Cambodia to a Congressional committee in 1973. They talked about mass devastation, and how few (if any) military targets were hit. And they said it all under their legal names, recorded for posterity on audio reels that I later located in a politician’s university library collection. Except that the U.S. of 1973 isn’t the Israel of 2026. There are no analogous politicians with influence in Israel interested in listening to such testimony. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made stripping the citizenship of NAZA’s makers part of his reelection campaign’s closing pitch. While I may think that it is morally just for a man to eat a treason sentence because he participated in a war crime, I must not be stupid: publicly exposing oneself is simply not a choice that 99.99% of people anywhere will make. And there’s no doubt that many of the film’s interviewees are self-interested and self-serving, some simply bragging or processing their experience in a grand adventure/disaster, offering up the usual array of excuses as to why they went along with a genocide. I was but a cog. And so on. Men admitting to mass murder simultaneously trying to contain the damage of purging their conscience is by now a trope of journalism on the subject. Yet we can learn something from the squirm.

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Far from Buck Turgidson, the interviewees come from a liberal, upper-middle class milieu. In this respect, NAZA recalls an older, equally disturbing Israeli documentary: Ra'anan Alexandrowicz and Liran Atzmor’s The Law In These Parts (2011). In that film, the directors trained their gazes on the (mostly) liberal class of Israeli jurists who created the discriminatory parallel military court system that rules over Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.

The IDF intelligence officers interviewed by Yuval Abraham in NAZA are hardly the deranged-looking settlers who burn Palestinian villages. But it is these tidy, well-educated people from the nation’s cultural elite who are responsible for spilling unfathomably more blood than the rowdy settlers. As one of the interviewees puts it, he was part of the “tip of the spear” of the Israeli military. This fact sits uncomfortably with those answering the questions. Although the stereotype is that it’s overheated lefties who compare Israel’s crimes to those of the Nazis, it’s an analogy made by at least one subject himself. He said he understand how the Nazis did it, now, how easily a person can commit genocide and go on to live life normally and finish a degree in “clinical psychology.” This final interview beat of the film is followed by actual footage from Gaza, the first direct images of the devastation shown in the whole movie. The sequence brings to mind the documentary Waltz With Bashir (2008), in which more or less the same thing happens: the Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman associates his proximity to the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre with being a Nazi in the Holocaust (his parents are survivors), and then the movie ends with archival footage of the slaughter’s aftermath. This linearity is bracing and true, and even if Waltz With Bashir can be rightly faulted for being one man’s ornate therapy session, both said film and NAZA successfully link the Holocaust and the subsequent crimes of its victims. This is an important emotional and historical truth. But it’s an incomplete formulation on its own. Israelis, it says, are committing crimes that they themselves understand to be the crimes of Nazis. We are left to wonder: and what do we do to Nazis?

NAZA is currently screening at theaters nationwide, including BAM and IFC Center. In November it will stream for free via The Guardian.