Australia’s examination of a ‘war hero’, a lesson on Israel’s response to NAZA
For years Australian soldier, Ben Roberts-Smith was celebrated as the embodiment of Australian military courage — a Victoria Cross recipient (highest military honour for bravery), one of the country’s most decorated soldiers, and for many Australians a living symbol of the ANZAC tradition. When allegations emerged that he had committed war crimes in Afghanistan, the instinct among many supporters was disbelief. How could a man so publicly honored be capable of such acts? The answer was not supposed to come from loyalty to his reputation, or hostility to it. It was supposed to come from testing the evidence.
Today, Australia remembers Ben Roberts-Smith not as the soldier whose reputation collapsed, but as a lesson in how democracies are supposed to respond when allegations challenge a national mythology.
The process was extraordinary. After a 110-day Federal Court trial involving testimony from dozens of former and serving SAS soldiers and officers, Justice Anthony Besanko found that newspapers had established the substantial truth of allegations that Roberts-Smith had murdered four Afghan prisoners or civilians and committed other serious acts of violence. That was a civil finding, not a criminal conviction, and Roberts-Smith has consistently denied wrongdoing. What matters here is not the verdict but the mechanism: once the allegations were subjected to a transparent adversarial process, corroborating testimony emerged from within the institution itself — from other soldiers, not just journalists. The lesson isn’t that every allegation against a soldier is true. It’s that neither heroism nor patriotism can substitute for investigation.
This is why the reaction to the Israeli documentary NAZA deserves attention. Directed by Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, the film is not about one rogue soldier. It presents testimony from 24 Israeli military and intelligence insiders about the systems used to identify and strike targets in Gaza, including allegations that commanders knew civilians would be killed in attacks on residential buildings. The directors argue the issue is not isolated misconduct but the policies, orders and language that make large-scale civilian killing possible — and, taken alongside the scale of destruction and displacement in Gaza, they say this raises the question of whether some Israeli military practices form part of a deliberate policy of killing and removing Palestinians from their land.
That is an allegation of an entirely different scale from the accusations against Roberts-Smith, and it would be irresponsible to suggest the two cases are substantively equivalent. Roberts-Smith was never convicted of war crimes; the Federal Court found several serious allegations substantially true on the civil standard, after extensive evidence from other soldiers. NAZA alleges something closer to a systemic military policy — including conduct that could amount to deliberate displacement or ethnic cleansing — and claims at that scale require independent investigation before they can be authoritatively established either way.
Israeli officials have responded not with investigation but with pressure on the filmmakers. Prime Minister Netanyahu and Culture Minister Zohar have called for the directors’ citizenship to be revoked. At the same time more than 1,500 Israeli filmmakers and public figures have defended the directors.
The appropriate response to NAZA is not to decide in advance that everything it alleges is true, or false. A documentary, even one built on extensive insider testimony, is not a court, a commission of inquiry or a criminal investigation. Its sources are anonymous because they say they face risk, and Israel’s government and military dispute the film’s characterization of their conduct. Those are real limitations — but they’re an argument for investigation, not dismissal. That was the lesson of Roberts-Smith too: the allegations didn’t become established because Australians decided their decorated soldier was guilty. They became testable because they were put into a process where evidence could be examined, challenged and corroborated — a messy, imperfect process, but one whose messiness is exactly what gives its findings their weight.
The same principle should apply to Gaza. If NAZA is wrong, an independent, thorough investigation should be able to show that. If it’s right, the same process should establish that too. And if the evidence reveals something more serious, the world needs to know that as well. The more consequential the allegation, the greater the need for evidence that can withstand scrutiny.
Yet Israel has not yet set up a State Commission of Inquiry that could perform this function. There has been extensive scrutiny by journalists, human rights organizations, international bodies and Israeli civil society, and investigations into particular incidents — but the Netanyahu government has resisted an independent inquiry into the failures around 7 October and its aftermath, with critics arguing only such a commission could examine responsibility without political interference. Israel’s own Knesset State Control Committee has recorded that demand, its chair saying a state commission was necessary to investigate the events fully and without political intervention.
That matters because a democratic state cannot ask the public to choose between competing narratives when it hasn’t let the evidence be tested. The answer to NAZA should not be censorship, threats against filmmakers, or demands that critics be punished — nor should it be automatic acceptance of everything the film alleges. It should be investigation.
Australia eventually learned this, painfully and imperfectly. We did not protect the reputation of a Victoria Cross recipient by refusing to examine what other soldiers were saying about him — the willingness to investigate is what ultimately strengthened the credibility of the institutions making the findings. Israel faces a much larger and more consequential question. NAZA may be shown to have overstated some claims, substantiated others, or exposed a system more troubling than many people currently believe. We cannot know without the evidence being independently tested. But that is precisely the point: when allegations concern possible war crimes on a vast scale, the democratic response cannot be to insist that a nation’s soldiers are beyond scrutiny — any more than Australia could have insisted a Victoria Cross made Roberts-Smith’s conduct beyond investigation.
The comparison, then, is not between Ben Roberts-Smith and the Israeli state, nor between Afghanistan and Gaza. It’s between two moments when a deeply held national narrative collided with disturbing allegations. Australia let evidence challenge its hero story. The question now is whether Israel — and those of us outside it who care about its security and future — will demand the same evidentiary standard when the allegations concern a state and a war on a vastly greater scale.
