The Film No One Saw

Last week, my country reopened the season for a genre of film criticism boasting over 20 years of repertoire: the review written by someone who never bought a ticket. This time, the critics formed a panel any festival would envy, comprising the Prime Minister, the Minister of Culture, the Chief of the General Staff, and also the Prime Minister’s opponents in a rare moment of concord just weeks before the elections.

All were unanimous in condemning Naza, the documentary by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor awarded in Venice, and all equally unanimous in acknowledging they had not seen it. Benjamin Netanyahu classified the film as yet another piece of global antisemitic incitement, Miki Zohar promised to act immediately to strip the two directors of their citizenship, Itamar Ben-Gvir called them a disgrace and told them to leave the country, and General Eyal Zamir sentenced that everything in it rests on blood libels. This confirms that among us, conviction dispenses with screening with the exact same serenity with which a sports fan dispenses with the replay to swear the referee was bribed.

No one can accuse them of having missed a single screening, since until now the film has only been shown in Venice, and anyone who was not in that room saw nothing at all: neither the Prime Minister, nor the general, nor the commentators who for a week have been discussing it with the fluency of someone who knows it by heart. Thus, all national indignation rests upon a single syllogism, so short it fits into a social media post, according to which anyone who questions the Army’s procedures is antisemitic, and therefore any film questioning them is antisemitic even before being projected.

Zohar stated the premise without beating around the bush by equating criticism of Israel’s actions with hatred of Jews, and Netanyahu completed the reasoning by lamenting that the incitement now comes from within, as if two Jewish and Israeli filmmakers proved that antisemitism has learned to speak Hebrew, when they merely prove that Hebrew remains fully capable of asking questions. Even the more than one thousand cinema professionals, among them Ari Folman and Nadav Lapid, who signed a manifesto of solidarity with the directors and censured colleagues who attacked the film without seeing it, admitted with rare frankness this week that they themselves still have not seen it either. This leaves them in the only honest position available in the country: that of someone who suspends judgment until the screening.

The repertoire has been perfected ever since the Film Board banned Mohammed Bakri’s Jenin, Jenin in 2002, heeding the complaint of five soldiers, a ban the Supreme Court overturned the following year for violating freedom of expression. Nine years ago, at the very same Lido as now, Samuel Maoz took the Silver Lion for Foxtrot, while Miri Regev, then Minister of Culture and former Army spokesperson, accused the film of defaming the soldiers and admitted with a certain pride to never having seen it.

In 2022, Avigdor Lieberman denounced Farha, by Jordanian director Darin Sallam, even before its Netflix premiere, while Chili Tropper, a Minister of Culture emerging from Benny Gantz’s centrist party, called the film lies and libels, and thousands of users poured a one-star rating on IMDb at a time when, as the director recalled, nobody yet had any way to see it. This at least demonstrates that the genre has never been a monopoly of the right.

Last year, it was Zohar’s turn to lament the Oscar win for No Other Land, the previous work by Abraham and Szor, treat the award as sabotage against the State, and request by letter that cinematheques and cultural institutions not screen the film. Now, with Naza, the escalation has reached citizenship, so that the recipe can be followed much like watching a child’s growth through pencil marks on a doorframe: first ban, then condemn without seeing, then condemn before anyone can see, then ask that no one see, and finally threaten with exile the person who showed it.

Naza has not even arrived in the country’s theaters and has already received the same treatment that Bakri, Maoz, Sallam, and Abraham himself knew before it, because anticipated condemnation has begun to fulfill the task that the ban fulfilled in 2002 with less paperwork and more noise: delivering the verdict to the public before handing them the film. The previous films spoke through the mouths of Palestinians or invented characters, and the difference now lies in the voices. Those speaking are the military personnel themselves: twenty-four Israeli soldiers and intelligence agents interviewed over three years on Tel Aviv rooftops, always at night and with their faces in shadow, who, according to Szor, chose Hebrew to be heard by more Israelis, and who explain with the calm of someone describing an ordinary office day how it was decided how many civilians could die in each bombing.

The title comes from an acronym, and the acronym comes from nezek agavi, meaning collateral damage, an expression with which military jargon designates the number of innocents whose death is accepted beforehand when attacking a target. According to the interviewees, this number was elastic, sometimes falling below a dozen and reaching, in other cases, two hundred or even five hundred people: men, women, and children reduced to a handful of letters that easily fit in the margin of an attack order.

One interviewee recounts that a bombing was approved with five hundred projected civilian deaths and admits that to this day he does not know how many actually occurred; another describes planning an attack before a screen crowded with data as something akin to a video game, to the point that the building reduced to rubble ends up looking amusing. Still others report the end of a mission followed by a night out in Tel Aviv bars, as if between an attack order and the evening’s first round there were no distance at all to travel. Behind all this lie nearly three years of war and at least 73,789 dead Palestinians, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.

I spent 35 years in advertising, and if I learned anything in that trade, it was that the most efficient words are those that spare the client from thinking about what they are buying. Therefore, I recognize nezek agavi with the shame of someone who finds, in the place it should never be, the finished product of their own profession, because no copywriter I ever met managed such a successful expression capable of turning a buried child into an item approved in the morning and forgotten by night. I know how such a word is built; I know it is born to comfort those who drop the bombs and those who pay for them, since for those beneath them no euphemism makes a difference. And because of this, I cannot write about it as an innocent observer, I who spent my life teaching so many people not to look properly at what they were buying.

I still have not seen Naza for the exact same reason as everyone else, but I will see it, just as I saw, one by one, Jenin, Jenin, Foxtrot, Farha, and No Other Land, every film that someone in this country tried to ban or condemn before the screening. A citizen’s freedom begins with the right to look with their own eyes at what the government would prefer they not see. A country that trusts itself lets its citizens watch, disagree, and leave the theater angry at the director; only a country afraid of what it might discover needs them to leave the theater before even entering.

In 1980, a sociologist named Stanley Cohen arrived in Israel, a Zionist since his youth who ten years later began documenting the torture of Palestinian detainees alongside Daphna Golan from the organization B’Tselem. Later, he described the official response as a four-stop journey: pure and simple denial that the event happened, the discrediting of researchers deemed biased or naive, the renaming whereby something happened without deserving to be called torture, and finally justification.

The government traveled through those exact same four stops in less than a week: with Netanyahu’s spokesperson denying the accusations and attributing a hunger for applause from those who hate Israel to the directors, with Zamir presenting the film as an attempt to deny the country the right to defend itself against the worst of enemies, and with the renaming spared any effort because it came ready-made from the factory, embedded right in the acronym that titles the film. In States of Denial, Cohen later dedicated an entire book to people who react as if they do not know what they know, observing that the Israeli case was unique because this blindness coexisted with a free press, open courts, and space for dissent, that is, with all the instruments that would permit seeing.

It is on this frontier between knowing and pretending not to know that the bad faith described by Jean-Paul Sartre in Being and Nothingness resides, a book published in occupied Paris in which we read that self-deception runs into a problem unknown to ordinary lying, since deceiver and deceived inhabit the same person, and whoever hides a truth from themselves must know it very well to know precisely where not to cast their eyes. No scene this week illustrates this acrobatics as faithfully as Zamir’s order to military prosecutors to track down the soldiers who spoke, because no one opens a leak investigation against a fantasy. The institution that calls the testimonies a libel and at the same time searches for the person who revealed them is admitting without realizing it that it knows perfectly well where the material it swears is false came from.

Shortly after the liberation of Paris, Sartre wrote his Anti-Semite and Jew, showing that in the antisemite conviction arrives before experience and therefore no fact can shake it. Few things have hurt me as much as recognizing this mechanism which he described to explain hatred against us operating now in the mouths of Jews who condemn without seeing under the pretext of protecting us. The young woman Sartre describes leaving her hand forgotten in the hand of the man courting her, neither accepting nor withdrawing it as if that hand were an alien object, resembles me more than I would like, and resembles a good part of the country which has left its hand resting on this war without withdrawing it and without ever looking at it.

It would be unfair, besides lazy, to attribute this blindness solely to the ministers, because it also reaches many of my Jewish brothers scattered around the world who defend from a distance a war they know only through official communiques and condemn a film whose headlines are all they read. This blindness feeds on a fear that has been well-founded since October 7, 2023, when 1,200 people were murdered and 251 taken as hostages. One of those hostages, today free and deserving of the gratitude and tenderness of us all, gave voice to this fear by stating that the blood of Diaspora Jews would be on the directors’ hands and that tomorrow anyone speaking Hebrew in a European city will be spat upon and assaulted. The antisemitism he fears is real and has killed many people; yet the fear of being hated in Europe does not bring anyone back to life in Gaza, merely offering each of us, inside and outside the country, a respectable reason not to know.

The film’s soldiers, according to the critics who were in Venice, neither boast nor show shame. One of them recalls the school trip to Auschwitz where he wondered how human beings could be so evil, adding that now he knows how, while another admits to having no idea what to do with what he has just comprehended. Zohar sees in the directors a self-hatred that would burn them from the inside, but anyone who climbs a rooftop at night to tell their own people in their own language what has been done in their name is practicing the most demanding form of loyalty. The self-hatred that deserves the name belongs to those who cannot bear to hear this account in Hebrew and prefer to treat whoever recorded it as a traitor.

The 24 on the rooftop, moreover, are far from the only Israelis to say that something in Gaza has surpassed what a man can carry, and although it is indecent to turn the death of someone who took their own life into a manifesto since each of those losses has causes no essay can reach, no one has the right to plug their ears to what families recount. Eliran Mizrahi, a father of four, spent 186 days in Gaza driving a sixty-two-ton armored bulldozer, returning home to say that an invisible blood was dripping from him and repeating to his sister that no one would understand what he had seen. His mother Jenny summarized the tragedy in a phrase not even the most zealous of generals would call a libel, saying that her son left Gaza and Gaza did not leave him.

According to Haaretz counts, at least twenty active-duty soldiers have died by suicide since January, following twenty-two last year, a total that was already the highest in fifteen years, and the Army itself recorded 279 attempts in nineteen months, figures no director invented in search of applause in Venice. No minister would dare call traitors the mothers who by another path and in Hebrew say what Naza also says: that what was done in Gaza weighs on those who did it and does not end when the soldiers return home.

There remains the serious objection that anonymous testimonies cannot be verified, and it deserves an equally serious response which the Chief of the General Staff took it upon himself to provide by announcing the hunt for the interviewees, demonstrating with military efficiency why they needed the shadow. Not to mention that the Army has already acknowledged using artificial intelligence to identify targets, adding only that a human being gives the final word before each strike. A democracy wishing to refute twenty-four testimonies has courts, commissions of inquiry, and journalists whose lack of curiosity Abraham rebuked in an interview with Raviv Drucker on Channel 13, asking why the death of civilians merited so little investigation.

It was a Lod court that in 2021 examined Jenin, Jenin, concluded that the film defamed an officer, and ordered the copies collected, a debatable decision yet made by someone who at least had the decency to begin with the screen. Netanyahu’s spokesperson ironized the twenty-five minutes of applause that the Venice audience dedicated to Naza, and it is fair to admit they were long, even if twenty-five minutes longer than any of the film’s detractors spent before it.

I carry the ADI card in my wallet registering my wish that doctors hand over whatever is left of usable in my body to a stranger whose name, faith, or language I will never know. I carry it because I learned that a life has value the moment it exists and cannot be weighed against any objective no matter how noble it may seem. That is why the acronym that titles the film hurts me more than any other word in this war, as it is the very name of that scale. The fury of the ministers brings despite everything a hidden consolation, because no one is so offended by the accusation that their soldiers kill innocents without considering such an act intolerable. That intolerance, which for now turns against the messengers, may be the first step toward one day wanting to hear the message.

The directors intend to release the film in Israel, and the day it arrives I will buy two tickets: one for myself and one for Minister Zohar, who can then form his opinion in the order opinions usually form. I will sit beside him without rancor and without superiority, because neither of the two of us will enter that room with clean hands. I hope that in the dark he finds what that soldier found who was still a boy returned from Auschwitz asking how anyone could be so cruel, and who needed an entire war recounted on a Tel Aviv rooftop while down below the city went about its traffic without lifting its eyes to understand an answer our people learned on the side of the victims and should never have needed to know from the inside.