It Is Forbidden to Forbid

What answer should a country give when two of its citizens make a documentary that accuses the nation’s army of having decided in advance how many civilians each strike would be allowed to kill, and an audience in Venice stands to applaud the film for twenty-five minutes? Every documentary is a work of culture, and whoever treats it as a courtroom either expects from it a verdict that no film can deliver or answers it with a sentence, and since Venice our government has chosen the sentence.

The film is called NAZA, the army’s acronym for nezek agavi, the Hebrew term for the civilian deaths expected in an air strike, and over three years Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor filmed twenty-four soldiers and intelligence officers on Tel Aviv rooftops, always at night, and altered the face and voice of each one. The witnesses describe an artificial-intelligence system that helped choose targets and say that the number of civilians who would die in each strike was calculated and accepted before the order was given, and one of them recalls that authorization was once granted to kill five hundred people in order to hit a single target. Abraham accepted the Special Jury Prize with the remark that politicians and journalists in his own country were denying the film without having seen it, and over the next four days our government proved him right.

Culture Minister Miki Zohar promised to strip the directors of their citizenship for treason, although his ministry holds no such power, and on Monday the Chief of Staff, Eyal Zamir, ordered an investigation to identify the film’s sources and asked the Military Advocate General to consider prosecuting everyone involved. On Wednesday Netanyahu announced two government bills, one to take away the citizenship of anyone who defames the soldiers and another to raise twentyfold the damages such people can be ordered to pay, and on the same day Zohar asked the Shin Bet to find out who the anonymous witnesses are. By then the condemnation had the support of Gadi Eisenkot and Naftali Bennett, who hope to replace Netanyahu on October 27th, and Eisenkot had seen in the film moral blindness and a detachment from reality. We are condemning a film we have not seen, and a sentence of that kind lends authority to every word spoken on those rooftops, because whoever refuses to look at an accusation implies that he already knows what he would find.

In 1986, a year after the end of twenty-one years of military rule in Brazil, the civilian government of José Sarney banned Jean-Luc Godard’s Hail Mary out of deference to the Catholic Church, and I found a way to see the film, because my generation had learned from Caetano Veloso, one of the greatest singers and songwriters Brazil has produced, that it is forbidden to forbid. For the same reason I defend the right of Abraham and Szor to make and show NAZA, and my defense does not depend on the film’s accuracy, just as Godard’s right never depended on the truth of his Mary.

A work of culture needs no verdict to change what millions of people think, as cinema learned in 1925, when Eisenstein turned the mutiny of the Potemkin’s sailors into a revolutionary myth. No country has applied the lesson as steadily as the United States, where the War Department lent planes and pilots to Wings, the first winner of the Academy Award for best picture, and later commissioned Frank Capra to make the propaganda series Why We Fight. The Pentagon went on lending aircraft carriers and fighter jets to Hollywood in exchange for a say in the scripts, Top Gun worked in 1986 as a recruiting poster nearly two hours long, and in 1990 the political scientist Joseph Nye gave the phenomenon a name, soft power, the ability of a country to obtain what it wants because others come to want the same thing.

We know that power from the inside, for few films have done as much for Israel as Exodus, which in 1960 put Paul Newman on the deck of a refugee ship and told a generation of Americans the story of the State’s birth in a version that the Jewish Agency could never have sold on its own. Exodus won the Oscar for its score in 1961, and in 2025 the prize for best documentary went to No Other Land, which Abraham and Szor directed with the Palestinian filmmakers Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal from scenes shot between 2019 and 2023 in Masafer Yatta, in the West Bank. Before October 7th, then, the image of Israel on screen had already traveled from the ship of survivors to the bulldozers that knock down homes and schools.

Those who hate us will use NAZA, but they had made up their minds long before Venice, and the audience that matters consists of the millions who do not hate us. From September 30th, when the film opens in New York, those millions will carry into the theater the question that Gaza itself has been asking since the war began. In June the United Nations satellite center recorded damage to eighty-two per cent of the structures in the Strip and classified two-thirds of the damaged buildings as destroyed. The question is whether that destruction was the cost of fighting Hamas in the streets and tunnels where it hid among the population or the product of a system that counted civilian lives before each strike and judged the price acceptable. The audience will leave the theater with the film’s explanation, the only one on offer, and I ought not to call it false. The duty to explain is ours, because wherever we keep silent someone speaks for us, and a well-made film speaks better than a press release.

Our army is made of the neighbor’s son and of the reservist who closes his shop when he is called up, and I understand the urge to deny before listening. In the high command, that urge became a categorical rejection of the testimonies and an objection that no one can verify who the witnesses are or where they served. A denial does not satisfy anyone who counts the soldiers as his own, and if we do have the most moral army in the world, no institution in the country should want an independent judgment more than the army itself, since only a judgment of that kind establishes who did what and acquits those who did nothing.

Only facts can answer a work of culture that asserts facts, and we have none to offer, because the government that condemns the film has spent more than a thousand days keeping anyone from establishing them. Since the first months after the terrorist attack of October 7, 2023, we have been asking for a state commission of inquiry, the body with the broadest powers in Israeli law, including the power to compel testimony. The government preferred a model in which politicians would choose the members, in defiance of its own Attorney General, for whom a state commission is the only mechanism the law recognizes for a failure of that magnitude. On August 19th even the Attorney General suggested leaving the decision to the next government, and on September 23rd the High Court took her advice, postponed the case until after the election and gave the government until January 15th to state its position, so the electoral calendar became the latest pretext for waiting. In three years two filmmakers with a camera and a rooftop gathered twenty-four testimonies, and in the same three years not one witness has sworn an oath before a state commission of inquiry, for the elementary reason that no such commission has ever been created, and the men who denounce the damage the film will do abroad have left the country without the only answer the world would accept.

Netanyahu rejects a state commission on the ground that, appointed by the President of the Supreme Court, it would have its conclusions ready before it began and half the country would not accept them, although the Israel Democracy Institute found last October that nearly three-quarters of Israelis wanted a fully independent inquiry, including sixty-eight per cent of those who described themselves as right-wing. Coming from a government that spent 2023 bent on taming the courts, the objection tells us what the prime minister means by trust, for whoever trusts a court accepts in advance a verdict he does not yet know, and faith conditional on the outcome is no more than a preference, while justice shrinks to a formality once those under investigation choose their investigators and witnesses are hunted instead of heard.

The losers in this story are our soldiers, whom no impartial body has had the opportunity to convict or acquit, the families of the October Council, who keep asking for an investigation of the Saturday that opened this war, Abraham and Szor, who left Venice with a prize and a threat to their passports, and the twenty-four witnesses on the rooftops, to whom the State has so far offered only the prospect of being found.

The word fascist has been thrown at so many adversaries that I reserve it for cases in which the resemblance can be shown line by line, and this is one of them. On January 31, 1926, four years after the March on Rome, Mussolini’s Italy adopted a law under which a citizen who did anything abroad that might diminish the good name or the prestige of the country lost his citizenship, even if the act constituted no crime, and in the gravest cases could lose his property as well. On September 30th of that year the regime applied the law to seventeen antifascist exiles, among them the historian Gaetano Salvemini, who later taught the history of Italian civilization at Harvard. Whoever sets that law beside Netanyahu’s two bills will find the same offense, committed abroad against the good name of the nation or of its soldiers, punished with the same two penalties, the loss of citizenship and the blow to the pocket the prime minister has promised.

The Dresden philologist Victor Klemperer recorded the language of the Nazi years in his diary and later wrote that words can act like tiny doses of arsenic, swallowed unnoticed until the poison takes effect. The week after the prize administered several doses when it called a documentary an act of treason, the testimony of our own soldiers a blood libel and the applause of a festival audience global antisemitic incitement, and when it declared, through the prime minister’s mouth, that the place of two Israeli citizens is not among us. Each of those phrases fuses nation, army and leader into a single word, so that to criticize any one of them is now to betray all three. Israel in 2026 is not Italy in 1926, and a bill is not yet a regime, but a government that answers a film with the legislation of 1926 has made plain where it wants to take us.

On the night of September 15, 1968, at a song festival in a São Paulo theater, Caetano sang It Is Forbidden to Forbid to an audience that booed without listening, and he broke off the song to warn them that if they were in politics what they were in aesthetics, we were done for. Three months later the generals who had ruled Brazil since 1964 showed what they were in politics with Institutional Act Number 5, which closed Congress, suspended habeas corpus for political crimes and gave the censors the final word over newspapers, songs, plays and films. On December 27th agents took the man who had sung It Is Forbidden to Forbid from his home in São Paulo, and he spent fifty-four days in prison, four months confined in Salvador, the capital of his native state of Bahia, and two and a half years in exile in London. Caetano told the story of that imprisonment in a 2020 documentary shown in Venice, at the same festival that has now honored NAZA, and his account concerns what Brazilians lost in a single December night, the power to forbid the government to forbid. We still hold that power, with courts that work, an election set for October 27th and a press free to print whatever it pleases, and we would do well to use it before the arrival of our own December.