Nazi Analogies Rarely Help
· The Atlantic
A new Israeli documentary provoking both record-breaking festival applause and unhinged condemnation is called NAZA—a title with a suggestive sting. Hebrew speakers will recognize the military acronym for nezek agavi, or “collateral damage.” But for anyone else encountering the word, it might present as a twisted portmanteau that blends Gaza and Nazi, or at least nudges the mind in the direction of gas chambers. This doesn’t seem coincidental to me.
The film consists almost entirely of nighttime conversations on Tel Aviv rooftops with 24 young-seeming Israeli men and women—all soldiers and intelligence officers whose face and voice are obscured—who participated remotely in the country’s retaliatory war in Gaza. They collected intelligence on Hamas targets, operated AI systems and drones, and designated where to drop bombs. They were “small cogs,” as one of them puts it. What they describe is a widening radius of death. The number of noncombatants they say Israel was willing to kill in pursuit of Hamas fighters, expressed as a factor of NAZAs, kept growing. Strikes that were estimated at 10 or 12 NAZA soon gave way to those set at 15 or 20 NAZA, and one mission targeting a certain unnamed member of Hamas was rated at 500 NAZA, according to one of the interviewees.
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Protected by the camera’s shadows, these soldiers are freely admitting that in the course of carrying out orders, they found themselves obliterating women and children—and whole apartment buildings. Is this genocide? Is it, as the United Nations defines it, killing with the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group”? Despite the ever more widespread adoption of the word to describe what has happened over the past three years, only one of the interviewees uses it, and then only when prompted by one of the filmmakers, Yuval Abraham. But I heard no talk of intention in these conversations, not even really any animus or desire to kill. Because Abraham and his co-director, Rachel Szor, spend little more than 30 seconds setting up the raw emotional backdrop of the October 7 massacre, motivation seems almost completely absent. Instead, something much scarier is revealed: thoughtlessness. “My role is technical,” one of the soldiers says. It came to feel like a “video game,” says another.
This is meant to horrify, and it does. But what are the filmmakers asking us to do with this horror? Abraham and Szor had a choice about how to frame these dark confessions, and they took a regrettable path—one that is likely to simply reconfirm the prejudices and convictions of its audience.
Although NAZA was co-produced with The Guardian, it does not present its revelations with the rigor of a journalistic investigation. None of the claims is corroborated—the lack of dates or names or much specific detail beyond what the interviewees recall leaves an unfortunate opening for critics. The mosaic that forms is disjointed because each of these people seems to be doing a different kind of job: One describes an AI system named Lavender that identifies fighters to kill based on a collection of data; another talks of setting fire to houses; a third describes hacking into the phone of a little girl to determine when her father, a Hamas operative, is home so that a strike can be ordered. Each piece of information would, if confirmed, surely point to a war crime, but the only overarching pattern is Israel’s willingness to loosen to a sickening degree its rules of engagement and warfare. And anyone seeing the level of death and destruction in Gaza already knew this was most likely the case.
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What Abraham and Szor do add instead is insight into a kind of psychological slippage—the ease with which people can stop seeing other human beings, how readily the killing of bystanders can be justified for the sake of an impossible war aim. What we are witnessing in this documentary is the Milgram experiment with real, appalling consequences.
NAZA could have asked its viewers to identify with these soldiers, to see the potential in themselves to do exactly as they had done, to be vigilant against such corrosive thoughtlessness. But this film does not want to be a mirror. It wants to tell us that there is something uniquely malevolent about Israeli society.
One of the film’s executive producers is Jonathan Glazer, the director of The Zone of Interest. That 2023 film depicts the home life of the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss as his family blithely goes about its day-to-day next door to a death camp; scenes of garden parties are juxtaposed with a constant thrum of menacing noises—the sound of the death machine just a few meters away. At times I felt that NAZA was intended to be a sequel. The only other major visual element in this stark documentary, aside from the interviews, is B-roll footage of Tel Aviv at night. The city appears to be depersonalized—a monstrous pileup of antiseptic skyscrapers. We see anonymous people through their windows: doing yoga, having dinner, watching television. Meanwhile, the soundscape almost exactly echoes the distinctive one of The Zone of Interest—a low-frequency rumble of industrial murder. What emanates from Tel Aviv at night is a similar hum, the coldness of an inhuman machine. Gaza, we are reminded at one point, is about 40 miles down the beach.
At other moments, the directors suggest a motive for Gaza’s destruction by using archival footage of the founding of Tel Aviv. As the city expanded from its sand dune on the Mediterranean, it overtook nearby Palestinian villages, and now only one building remains from that earlier existence, which the camera shows in present-day ruin. Without making it explicit, Abraham and Szor are connecting the violence in Gaza to something deeper and essential to Zionism, to Israel. Whether or not you believe this is true, it muddles and overdetermines what emerges from the interviews, which is nothing like a goal or objective on the part of these soldiers.
The effect of this overlay is to further distance the viewer from the anonymous people being interviewed, because the place they come from—rather than being the place everyone comes from—appears alien and evil. Those already inclined to see Israeli society as an abnormality will surely receive the film as just more evidence. NAZA will bolster the attitudes of people such as the playwright and actor Wallace Shawn, who said on a podcast last year that Israel is “doing evil that is just as great as what the Nazis did. And in some ways it’s worse, because they kind of boast about it. Hitler had the decency to try to keep it secret.”
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Abraham and Szor should be commended for making art that peels back the skin and shows us our darkest instincts: our ability to dissociate, to replace people with numbers, to ignore inconvenient suffering. They are now paying a high personal price for the film, subject not just to online hate (from the right, of course, but also from those on the left who boycott and reject any art made by Israelis, no matter how critical). Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has threatened to revoke their citizenship, and they will face very real death threats if and when they return to Israel after touring with the film. I’d like to say that the fact that they are displeasing people on both sides means, as the truism goes, that they are getting something right. But I can’t help feeling that they missed an opportunity.
NAZA is discomfiting, but it could have been even more so if it didn’t divert attention to a familiar and (for some) reassuring narrative about a fundamentally genocidal Israel. If Abraham and Szor had forced viewers to actually see themselves in those silhouetted people, to understand them as individuals, the shock of it might be even greater than imagining that the rest of us are made of purer stuff.