NAZA, Collateral Murder, and Barbara Streisand

In 2010, WikiLeaks uploaded a compilation of leaked video that they entitled Collateral Murder. It details the killing of Iraqi Reuters employees by the US military after having mistakenly identified them as combatants as well as two other attacks including one that hit children. While this was a big win for WikiLeaks’ reputation, it didn’t go so well for the US Government especially after they courtmartialed and jailed Chelsea Manning who had taken credit for leaking the video files and hundred of thousands of diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks.

Manning had been turned in by itinerant grey hat hacker, Adrian Lamo. Lamo died in 2018 without a definitive cause of death found in his autopsy, though the dangerous and readily available opiod “alternative” kratom was found in his home along with drugs that would make using it more dangerous. Manning was freed by former President Obama after being in prison for seven years.

The resulting media fallout included a feud between Wired magazine and pundit/journalist Glenn Greenwald who has in many ways made his career on being critical of Israel and defending WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, an Australian hacker. And about a year a half later, the Iraq War “ended” only to continue again with the War in Iraq several years later, as well as several other periods of renewed intervention in Iraq. As it is, the US has yet again been withdrawing from Iraq since 2025. It’s hard to say if that withdrawal will continue or instead be followed shortly with a renewed presence in Iraq.

Like the Israeli film NAZA, Collateral Damage won awards as well despite not being a full documentary like Avraham and Szor’s film. And more worringly for defenders of Israel’s reputation, the Israeli government’s and IDF’s denials have only garnered NAZA more attention, much like the media circus that followed Collateral Murder. It seems unlikely that NAZA’s directors (and executive producer Johnathan Glazer, whose desire to “refute” his Jewishness is unabated) are unaware of this history whether they purposefully chose a similar name or not – NAZA is a Hebrew-style abbreviation of Nezek Agavi, the term for collateral damage. Instead of editorializing in the title, viewers are left to decide based on what they see in the film.

I know how transformative the impact a film like this can be, especially on the choices of young people. Perhaps the greatest concern for Israel is not in further international condemnations, but in the outcome of the directors’ own attack on Israeli media censorship hitting home. Right now the election cycle in Israel is giving NAZA free advertising with the help of the IDF, so are former hostages who are denouncing both the film and the filmmakers.

While this may seem like a tempest in a teapot, it invokes the Streisand Effect, named after Barbara Streisand’s attempt to have a picture of her clifftop Malibu mansion from the California Coastal Records Project. After suing the photographer, the previously-ignored photo gained huge public attention and Mike Masnick of Techdirt coined the term Streisand Effect after it several years later.

Or in Israeli terms, davka.