NAZA through an IDF soldier’s eyes

In all my years of training, operations, and reserve duty, I have never received an illegal order. I have never taken part in an action that deliberately harmed a civilian. Before every mission, no matter how small, we were reminded of the values we carry with our weapons. I am proud of my service. I am prouder still of the soldiers beside me, ordinary people who became the best of us.

I believe in Israel’s democracy, in the right to criticise the state and its army. But real criticism is honest. It means taking evidence to the IDF’s own investigators, who examine every credible claim of wrongdoing, not smuggling anonymous accusations into a so called “documentary.”

That is exactly what NAZA does. Every claim in it is anonymous. Unsourced. Never once handed to the military it accuses, never tested, never investigated, just packaged for audiences abroad who were already primed to hate us.

I think about an Air Force pilot I heard interviewed, who aborted the same strike again and again against one target in Gaza. Asked if that was frustrating, he said no, it was the opposite. The best thing about his Air Force, he said, is that it wouldn’t let him fire where civilians might be hit. Otherwise, he couldn’t have lived with himself.

I understand that feeling in my bones. Not harming civilians was never a policy memo to me. It was the thing I thought about every single time I went out.

Colonel Richard Kemp, who commanded British forces in Afghanistan, has said no army in the history of warfare has done more to protect civilians than ours. Think about what that means. An army that wants a population dead doesn’t drop leaflets first. It doesn’t make phone calls. It doesn’t publish maps showing people where to run. Israel does all three, and then sends its own sons and daughters in on foot, street by street, house by house, instead of levelling everything from the air. Hundreds of us have died because we chose to fight that way. I have carried some of them.

That is the army I know. It is not the army in this film.

The people who killed with intent to harm civilians were Hamas on October 7th, and the crowds who followed them into homes and into a music festival, who murdered, raped, and tortured 1,200 people, who dragged 250 hostages, babies among them, back into Gaza while baying mobs cheered and celebrated in the streets. They filmed it themselves, proudly. None of that footage appears in NAZA. Not one frame.

NAZA is a travesty of truth that reverses cause and effect. The lying picture this film paints of the IDF is a mirror image of the truth, built by two filmmakers whose work has brought comfort to the people who want us destroyed. I believe their citizenship deserves to be reconsidered.

And I will not forget this: had they been standing where I have stood, in the path Hamas cut through our people on October 7th, their self-loathing would not have saved them.