Content warning: the following film review directly quotes or paraphrases descriptions of anti-Palestinian racism and graphic violence in the film.
Directors: Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor (UK, USA). Year of Release: 2026
NAZA is one of those films where understanding the background does help you better understand the film. Made by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, the Israeli half of the team who made No Other Land, its release has caused Benjamin Netanyahu to threaten to strip the directors of their Israeli citizenship. Right-wing agitators gathered outside Szor’s home, shouting “Execute traitors.” In the Israeli city of Ashdod, a large mural appeared of Abraham and Szor’s faces in the crosshairs of a gun.
Why does NAZA infuriate Netanyahu and the Israeli fascists so much? Let’s start by talking about the title—a Hebrew acronym short for “Nezek Agavi”, which seems to be best translated as collateral damage. NAZA is used by the Israeli military to determine the acceptable number of Palestinian civilians who are killed in an air strike on a so-called “Hamas leader.” The soldiers interviewed in the film agree that the army considers 15 NAZA to be acceptable, although some say that they have personally experienced at least 500 NAZA.
Szor films Abraham interviewing 24 former Israeli soldiers about their role in the ongoing genocide. While one soldier is even prepared to use the g-word, they are almost universally unapologetic. Some are even proud of what they have done, which does make you wonder why they agreed to the interview in the first place. Some are excited by their actions, as if what they did was not real, but part of a video game. Others are more circumspect, but even these are insistent that there are “no Arab-haters” within their unit.
The interviewees remain anonymous, as if their names becoming public would put them at risk of being tried for treason. Most do not attempt to excuse themselves, other than pointing out that they were part of a wider system. We hear phrases like “my role is technical. I’m not allowed to express any moral positions,” and “you have to trust the system.” One officer says: “I’m just a cog. Someone else would have done it.” No-one actually says that they were just obeying orders, but you wouldn’t be too surprised if they did.
Annihilation Zones
Even if the soldiers are not really prepared to accept personal responsibility, many are candid about what they have done. Some speak of “annihilation zones,” where all Palestinians are seen as legitimate targets. They explain how the IDF deliberately targets food queues, luring starving Palestinians into empty spaces where they then open fire. Soldiers are given direct orders to kill as many Palestinians as possible. One aim is to ethnically cleanse Northern Gaza and to force the population into the equally dangerous South.
We learn of Operation Lavender, where AI is used to predict when targeted suspects might be at home. When the suspect is deemed to be present (and the software is often wrong), the whole building is blown up. Lavender has a huge margin of error—around 15%—and results in a high number of civilian casualties. Most reviews I read were outraged as this collateral damage includes “women and children.” Such reviews essentially see all Palestinian men as legitimate targets. The use of AI helps to further dehumanize the victims, who are not even seen as Palestinians or Arabs (let alone Hamas), but as “targets.” Someone points out that AI leaves no room for morality.
One example of that is “Where’s Daddy?”—a sickly named operation aimed at targeting militants through their families. Soldiers report how they use surveillance software to listen to family conversations, including people screaming when their homes are bombed. One interviewee says: “You feel like God, because you hear everything they say.” Another soldier tells us how he hacked the phone of a 12-year old Palestinian girl. The last words he heard her say before her house was bombed was “Daddy’s home.”
Other soldiers report the work of the Israeli security services which are mainly there to protect the government. Spies are deployed to look for extramarital affairs or homosexuality amongst critics of Israel, in order to blackmail them. One interviewee reports that more than one attempt to make Israel accountable at an international court has been stymied in this way. Given Israel’s claim to be a sanctuary for gay people, this leaves a particularly nasty taste in the mouth.
Questions are asked about the lessons of Nazi Germany. We see an extract from Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, which was apparently playing in Tel Aviv while NAZA was being filmed. One soldier recalls a visit to Poland to try to understand the fate of his family, killed in the Holocaust. His conclusion: “I still see those Nazis as evil, but what does it mean for me?” In Poland, he did not understand why Germans would consent to the Holocaust. Now he has an inkling how that could happen.
Should we watch NAZA?
Different friends had told me that they’d probably give NAZA a miss. A range of reasons was given from the expectation that they would not learn anything they already knew to outrage that the world is only sitting up and listening to Israeli film makers telling us what Palestinian journalists, film makers, and simple farmers have been telling us for years. Despite this, my friends said that of course they would try to get others to see the film, particularly those who haven’t been watching the genocide on live TV.
The film with which NAZA was most often compared in this context was The Voice of Hind Rajab, but having seen both films now, I don’t think the comparison fully holds. While the state murder of 5-year old Hind did get substantial media coverage, the details of what happened (which we see in that film) were largely ignored by the press. Added to this, the story of Hind’s death had a dramatic arc,which draws an audience into the story. NAZA is just relentless and largely lacking in emotion.
The phrase which comes to mind is Hannah Arendt’s “the banality of evil.” But if you’re trying to convince an uncommitted audience, you need to both address them emotionally and draw them in. The difference between NAZA and, say, The Zone of Interest (whose director Jonathan Glazer produced NAZA) is a relative consensus among the latter film’s audience that Hitler was Bad. NAZA only works as a film, firstly if it is seen by people who do not agree with its premise, but also if it is able to challenge them.
NAZA provides breathtaking evidence from the horse’s mouth of terrible crimes being carried out against the Palestinians. The nature of the film to accept the IDF narrative, even if it is given by rogue soldiers. So for most of the time, the idea that the Israeli army simply kills Palestinians because they are Palestinians is largely absent. In this context, talk of 15% failure rates are largely irrelevant.
I am not arguing here that NAZA does not work at all. But I don’t think it works quite as well as, say, the aforementioned Voice of Hind Rajab, or the directors’ previous film No Other Land. Unlike these films, in NAZA we just see an accumulation of bad things happening, without the chance to take a breath, and pause to think about what we are actually seeing.
The only breathing space we are offered is when the interviews are interspersed with close ups of Tel Aviv apartments—a technique which different critics have understood in different ways. Some see this as a statement on the complacency of middle class Israelis who watch flatscreen tellies while Palestinian houses are being destroyed just 40 miles away. Others draw the opposite conclusion that the intrusive software which is used to organise the murder Palestinian children is also being used to spy on Israelis.
While I obviously believe that the second conclusion is a ridiculous false equivalence, the fact that it can be raised at all shows one weakness in NAZA, which is very good at depicting the problem, but much less so at suggesting how we can get out of the current situation. The almost complete concentration on Israeli voices sees this as a problem of the occupier, who must, somehow, find a solution. A quote from one soldier who says that he is upset by watching dogs feasting on Palestinian corpses adds to this dissonance.
Palestinian voices
There is one exception to this. In just about the very last scene, we see a helpless Palestinian father searching for his children in the rubble of his destroyed house. Suddenly, we experience the emotion—and the humanity—which has been missing from the film so far. It may feel sentimental and slightly obvious, but this scene provides a context with which the audience can process what it has seen so far. It is worth noting that this is pretty much the only Palestinian voice we hear in the whole film.
I do see some parallels between NAZA and Waltz with Bashir—a film which I loathe because it tries to reduce the horrors of the Sabra and Shatila massacre to the trauma experienced by one occupying Israeli soldier—but is found useful by other people in the movement. NAZA is much more nuanced than Waltz with Bashir, and is also aware that Palestinians are the main victims of the occupation. At the same time, its need to concentrate on audiences in Israel and the Global North causes it to erode Palestinian agency.
I was also wary of the self-congratulatory involvement of the Guardian in the production of the film. The Guardian has, at best, been half-hearted in its coverage of the Israeli occupation and genocide. NAZA is like one of the Guardian’s better articles, in that it documents the obscenity of war, without providing much explanation or context. This distances the audience from what is going on, much like the soldiers who we hear explaining the war crimes which they have committed without taking any personal responsibility.
In this context, let’s briefly look at the Guardian’s review of the film by their highly regarded (especially by himself) critic Peter Bradshaw. Bradshaw erroneously speaks of the “the grotesque antisemitic pogrom of 7 October” and is perturbed by an “ahistorical comparison to nazism” which the film never makes. If 3 years of genocide has taught us anything, it is that liberal publications like the Guardian may provide us with some good ammunition—like this film—while simultaneously being on the other side of the debate.
NAZA is still a film which has been made by the good guys—guys who have exhumed a speech from Benjamin Netanyahu lacking in any self-awareness. Bibi describes terrorism as: “the deliberate and systematic murder, maiming, and menacing of the innocent to inspire fear for political gain.” Exactly. This film is a weapon in our armoury, with which we can advance the fight for Palestinian rights. At the same time, the most important voices are those of Palestinians and they are sadly largely absent here.
