I Haven’t Seen the Film, But

We will never know how many decent people, and how many antisemites, were among those who stood at the Venice Film Festival applauding Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham. It is also too early to know whether NAZA is a major work of documentary cinema. But one thing is already clear: the reaction to it in Israel will be remembered as one of the lowest points our political culture has reached.

Almost everyone who rushed to comment began with the same formula: “I haven’t seen the film, but…” What sounds at first like an honest admission of limitation becomes, through repetition, a request for exemption from the basic condition of criticism: the willingness to expose oneself to the thing one is judging. A request to judge without having to look.

The filmmakers were willing to confront terrible knowledge. So were the interviewees, who testified about their involvement in the IDF target-generation system known as “Lavender” and accepted the burden of bearing witness. But NAZA does not reveal a secret. It gives words and images to a truth that was already publicly known. What is being attacked is not the disclosure of a secret, but the breaking of the pact of silence surrounding the conditions that made the killing possible.

NAZA, the Hebrew acronym for “incidental damage,” known in English as collateral damage, is an operational term. “NAZA 15” means authorization to kill up to fifteen civilians in order to strike a single target. According to the interviewees, strikes rated “NAZA 200” and “NAZA 300” were also approved during the war, and one of them recounts seeing an authorization for “NAZA 500.” No one in Israel can plausibly claim to be surprised that bombs were dropped on Gaza even when the expected result was the mass killing of women, children, and the elderly.

The crisis the film exposes is not a difficulty in distinguishing truth from falsehood in wartime. It is a loss of interest in any truth other than the truth of Israeli trauma. We speak of being kept in the dark, a metaphor for oppression that assumes there are people who want to know and are prevented from doing so. Something more serious has happened here. Since October 7, large parts of Israeli society have simply stopped wanting to know anything that does not fit their story of injury.

Wilfred Bion described a particular kind of damage to the capacity to think: not ignorance, but an active process that destroys the mental functions on which judgment depends. Hannah Arendt, writing about the Pentagon Papers, observed that many of the relevant facts had long been known; the failure lay in the unwillingness to absorb them. One of the interviewees in the film quotes his commander: “You have to trust the system.” That is precisely what the refusal to think looks like.

The Start-Up Nation may have built the most Israeli machine ever created. With one crucial difference: the machine has no unconscious; it cannot repress what it has been fed. It calculates in advance how many uninvolved civilians are expected to be killed and produces a number. The machine knows those who operate it better than they know themselves.

I, too, haven’t seen the film. But I know that the camera of NAZA filmed us twice: once in the dark, in the interviewees’ testimonies, and a second time in broad daylight, in the Israeli reaction to the film.

In that sense, the campaign against the filmmakers and their families has become part of the film itself. It shows not only how a military system translates a worldview into numbers, but how an entire society defends itself against knowledge of what is being done in its name.

One of the most effective forms this defense takes is a change of subject. In recent days, many who see themselves as the Zionist left, or as champions of serious documentary cinema, have not disputed the testimonies; they have reclassified them. NAZA, we are told, is not about targeting procedures but an assault on Zionism itself: propaganda in the service of a genocide libel, a post-colonial indictment of the Jewish state’s right to exist. Its supporters in the film community stand accused of moral suicide and of collaborating with those who would erase Jewish national life. What these texts almost never mention is a single number: not NAZA 15, not NAZA 300, not NAZA 500. Once the film is recast as an attack on Zionism, defending Zionism becomes a substitute for answering the question the film actually poses. That question is not whether the Jewish people have a right to a state. It is whether that state, in this war, has abandoned its ethics of warfare altogether. And those who insist that exposing NAZA 500 is an attack on Zionism are, in effect, declaring that NAZA 500 is what Zionism in the aftermath of October 7 now means.

Anyone who seeks to harm the filmmakers or strip them of their citizenship seeks to turn October 7 into the founding moment of a new collective denial. This is why the film enrages both camps: the right loses its “there is no alternative,” and the left its “this is not who we are.”

We are shaken by NAZA not because it tells us something we did not know, but because it forces us to think about what we already knew. What we perhaps did not know was how deeply Israel today hates those who are still willing to help it think and feel.