Movie review: Naza. Both versions

I am sure you saw all the rage about the movie NAZA. The title is an Israeli military acronym for “collateral damage.” Its makers interviewed anonymous soldiers who claim the IDF deliberately and systematically targeted civilians in Gaza. (Not so) shockingly, it won a prize in Venice.

Israelis answered with a film of their own, NAZA: The Real Story. Reserve officers speak on the record about terrorists in civilian clothes, hostages hidden in homes, and the rules for opening fire. Their message: we did everything by the book and hold ourselves to the highest possible standards.

I’ve been following the fight between these two films. They are both wrong. Not about the facts. But about the premise.

Allow me for a second to miss-tell you a fascinating historical story.

In 1847, a young doctor in Vienna named Ignaz Semmelweis figured out why so many new mothers were dying of fever. Doctors were walking straight from the autopsy room to the delivery room. Wash your hands, he said, and the dying will stop. He was right. And ever since his message caught on, he has saved millions of lives.

Now let me make up a different version.

Semmelweis arrives at the hospital as a young intern. He knows the secret: wash your hands. But the senior doctors laugh at him. That’s not how medicine works, they say. It’s the air. It’s the patients. Actually, it’s you. You’re the one killing these babies.

He wants to belong. So he stops pushing. He does everything they say, and he does it well. Even more than the other doctors are doing. But mothers and babies keep dying.

Then there’s a colleague, jealous of him, who starts making up stories about what goes on in his ward. That he isn’t listening to the real experienced professionals and is poisoning the babies. I am not sure if she dislikes Ignaz and wants to ruin his career or maybe she just wants to be liked even more by the other staff, but she runs to them daily with complaints. She even makes a diary of all his mistakes to prove her point.

So Ignaz spends his days defending himself. “I’m not doing what she says! I’m following your rules exactly!” He makes his own diary, with witnesses and data proving how well he is listening to his superiors. He’s so busy proving himself that he stops doing the one thing he knows, deep down, is true.

Wash your hands.

So the moms and the children keep dying.

That’s Israel today.

The senior doctors are the world, telling Israel what morality in war requires. NAZA is the jealous colleague, making things up to throw Israel under the bus. And then “NAZA: The Real Story” is Semmelweis, pleading, “Look, I followed every rule you gave me!”

Both films are arguing about whether Israel met someone else’s standard. Neither asks whether that standard is right.

The Torah, the guidebook of life, has its own. The Talmud teaches: Haba l’hargecha, hashkem l’hargo. “If someone comes to kill you, rise early to kill him first.”

It doesn’t say debate him. It doesn’t say wait until the world approves. It says protect life, first and decisively. And the test isn’t who the attacker is or what he’s wearing. It’s whether he’s coming to kill you. Man, woman, child, Jew, non-Jew, with a uniform, pushing a stroller…doesn’t matter.

Israel keeps trying to fight by a moral code written by people who will never be satisfied and are making it up as they go along. Those borrowed morals aren’t preventing the problem. They’re creating it. Hesitating in front of a real threat isn’t mercy. It costs lives.

Only when the enemy has no incentive to keep fighting because it knows it doesn’t stand a chance since there will be no mercy, only then, it doesn’t bother to start a war. And that is the ultimate way of being merciful!

If Israel had held to the Torah’s standard from the start, far fewer families in Israel, and Gaza, would be mourning today.

So stop playing defense against the accusers. Stop auditioning for the bullies.

Semmelweis didn’t need the senior doctors to like him. He needed to wash his hands. And when he doesn’t, children die.

Israel doesn’t need the world’s approval. It needs to stick with what the Torah teaches, because that’s what works.

That’s how you save children’s lives.