The Nezek and Nonsense of NAZA

1. The Nezek of NAZA 

The documentary NAZA, about civilian casualties in Gaza, infamously received a Stalin-esque 25 minutes standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival last month. I use the term “Stalin-esque” not only to describe the length of the ovation, but also to describe the specific form of Jew-hatred which was fostered by Stalin and other violent Marxist extremists as a permission structure to harm Jews. Not ALL Jews, of course. Only the nefarious “Zionist” ones. The fact that today’s cultural Marxists are too ignorant to be aware that they’re the direct social descendants of such Stalinist ideology is immaterial.

I haven’t seen the NAZA documentary. I also haven’t seen “The Birth of a Nation”, the pro-Klan movie from 100 years ago. But I still know, based on what’s called inductive reasoning from secondary sources, why each film is flawed. I write that to get the first logical fallacy out of the way: that if one hasn’t seen or read something, they don’t have a right to comment on its content. That fallacy is called the ad hominem circumstantial.

To start with: Criticizing Israel’s war policies is not inherently bigoted. There are great Israeli anti-war movies like Walz With Bashir, The Gatekeepers, or Lebanon, to name just a few. Although I disagree with the main trust of all those movies, I can’t accuse them of being antisemitic. NAZA is different.

Imagine a member of the black American community making a documentary about crime in that community. It’s entirely possible to imagine a good faith effort in that regard. But imagine that this documentary portrays young black men in general as gangsters and thugs, and that said film receives a 25-minute standing ovation from an entirely white, wealthy, privileged, and elitist audience. That would raise some flags, wouldn’t it? Similarly: are we going to pretend that a film portraying Jews as uniquely blood-thirsty and demonic, inhuman child-killers is received rapturously by western audiences, and that this is completely unconnected to a certain centuries-old systemic hatred? What an extraordinary coincidence.

NAZA stands for Nezek Agavi, meaning collateral (or incidental) damage. In the cheapest possible appeal to emotion, the acronym in its English rendering is clearly meant to evoke a moral response akin to how one is meant to feel about the very similar sounding word “Nazi”; a textbook example of violating Godwin’s Law.

Even if NAZA’s filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor didn’t intend for all of this, there’s a principle from the actual, ancient halachic laws of nezek (damages), called “Adam Muad L’Olam” – A person is always responsible for their actions – which means that Abraham and Szor still guilty of egregious nezek to all of world Jewry, regardless of their intentions.

Their understanding of the word nezek is secular, or chol in Hebrew, which I don’t just mean in the neutral sense of the word, but in the more religious sense of “profane”. My perspective on the word is from ancient L’shon Kodesh (the Holy Tongue), and how the word is understood by the Torah and Talmud. Avraham and Schor have committed slander (Motzi Shem Ra) against all of Israel, but that alone does not actually constitute nezek.

Nezek in halacha (Jewish law) means material damages, such as assault and battery. Verbal sins alone usually don’t usually constitute nezek, with only one exception; Mesira (treason). A Jew who unjustly sells out a fellow Jew to the gentile authorities is a Moser (traitor), and that act does indeed constitute the worst and most contemptible form of actual nezek which exists in all of halacha. Jews who contribute to the most powerful and systemic social permission structure which exists in the world today to harm and harass and exclude Jews from polite society – namely, demonizing antizionism – are very much complicit in such nezek.

Halacha aside, the Yiddish word Mazik came to sarcastically mean something like impish or naughty, based on the mystical meaning of mazikim as harmful spirits. I’m aware that Abraham and Schor can’t actually see the timeless and systemic millennia-old demons (mazikim) which they’re possessed by: demons of Jewish self-negation and approval-seeking from the dominant culture. These mazikim are invisible but are still very real. The mystics held that the mazikim are real in a literal sense. The rationalists considered them to be a metaphor. Either way, such mazikim do exist, even if you want to call them by the modern term “pathologies”. And Avraham and Schor are very much possessed by them. That is the systemic, historical, and religious context through which to understand Abraham and Schor’s vogue and international Jewish Minstrel Show.

Now that I’ve gotten the polemical portion out of my system, I want to show how all of the main conceits of NAZA are demonstrable logical fallacies. I’ll have to break this down into a series, since the fallacies are legion.

2. The Nonsense of Naza

The core argument of NAZA is that the “mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza” is not an accidental byproduct of war, but the result of a deliberate, mathematically calculated military policy enacted through automated technology.

They aim to prove this boy showing that Israel used AI in order to calculate how many civilians would be killed in each strike. The real reason that Israel did this actually proves the opposite of what the film is trying to argue: the IDF was doing its due diligence to see if each and every strike would conform to the principle of proportionality under Just War Theory.

Their argument to the contrary entails three basic logical fallacies, as summarized here by AI (the same nefarious tool which the IDF uses!):

“1. Affirming the Consequent (Formal Fallacy)

This error occurs when someone takes a true conditional statement and invalidly flips it. The underlying logic of the argument can be mapped out as follows:

Premise (If P, then Q): If a military intended to maximize civilian casualties as their primary goal, they would calculate and track civilian numbers (P  Q).

Observation (Q): The military calculates and tracks civilian numbers.

Conclusion (Therefore, P): Therefore, they intend to cause civilian casualties.

This is invalid because calculating casualties is also a mandatory requirement under international humanitarian law to ensure proportionality and minimize harm. Therefore, the observation (Q) can be true for entirely different reasons.

2. Conflating Foresight with Intent (Conceptual Fallacy)

In ethics, law, and philosophy, there is a strict boundary between foreseeing an outcome and intending it.

Foresight means knowing that an incidental side effect will occur as a result of an action.

Intent means desiring that specific outcome as either your ultimate goal or the chosen means to achieve that goal.

Arguing that predicting a side effect makes it the intended target ignores the Doctrine of Double Effect. This ethical framework dictates that an action with both good and bad effects is permissible if the bad effect (civilian casualties) is an unavoidable, unintended side effect of achieving a legitimate objective (neutralizing a military target).

3. Intentionality Bias (Cognitive Bias)

From a psychological perspective, this line of reasoning is influenced by the intentionality bias. This is the deeply ingrained human tendency to assume that all outcomes—especially highly tragic or impactful ones—are the result of deliberate, purposeful intention rather than a byproduct, structural failure, or tragic trade-off”.

End first quotation from AI.

Speaking of AI, the second conceit of the film is in appealing to the very fact that the IDF used AI, which is an inhuman tool, in order to calculate civilian casualties. Ergo, the IDF itself should be seen as being cold and inhuman in this regard; somewhat akin to Skynet in Terminator 2. The truth is that AI was indeed used as a tool for these calculations, but all final decisions on targeting were made by human officers. In any case, I gave AI itself the following prompt about this particular sort of fallacy:

“Prompt: A company uses AI to help calculate salaries and pensions, or healthcare, and someone says that that’s immoral because AI is uncaring and inhuman – what type of fallacy is that?

Response:

“This argument relies primarily on the Appeals to Emotion (specifically an Appeal to Fear or Disgust) and is structurally driven by the Moralistic Fallacy and the Genetic Fallacy.

The speaker is making a logical leap by assuming that because an entity lacks human feelings, the outcomes it produces must inherently be cruel, unfair, or immoral.

Here is the exact breakdown of the fallacies at play:

1. The Genetic Fallacy (Devaluing based on origin)

The genetic fallacy occurs when someone judges the merit, accuracy, or morality of something based solely on its origin or what it is, rather than its actual performance.

The Error: The speaker argues that the calculations are immoral because they originate from an “inhuman” machine. However, the morality of a salary, pension, or healthcare allocation depends on its accuracy, fairness, and equity—not whether the math was done by a soul or a software program. A human accountant can be deeply caring but terrible at math, leading to disastrous financial mistakes for employees.

2. Anthropomorphism (Reverse Personification)

This is an informal fallacy where someone expects a non-human system to possess human emotional traits to be valid.

The Error: AI is a tool, much like a spreadsheet or a calculator. Criticizing AI for being “uncaring” is like criticizing a calculator for being “heartless” when it tells you. The tool’s job is data processing and objective calculation, not empathy.

3. Appeal to Emotion (Argumentum ad Passiones)

By using highly charged, negative words like “uncaring” and “inhuman,” the speaker is attempting to trigger a gut reaction of fear or disgust in the audience. They are shifting the debate away from objective metrics (e.g., ‘Does the AI calculate benefits accurately and without bias?’) and moving it into an emotional arena (‘Do you want a cold, dead machine ruling your life?’).”

End of second quotation from AI.

Above are only two examples of the many demonstrable logical fallacies on which the contemptible NAZA movie is based on. I’ll save most of the rest for later installments, and include just one more here for now:

3. The Jewish View on Nezikin

One of the scenes in NAZA shows us that many more Arabs than Jews formerly lived in what’s now Tel Aviv. We’re apparently supposed to infer from this that Jews are foreign colonizers.

The Talmud in Bava Kamma 79b, in the order of Nezikin, records a law codified by Rambam is his laws of Nezek, about the special care that Jews must have about avoiding environmental damage to Eretz Yisrael (The Land of Israel) –

Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Nizkei Mamon (Laws of Damage to Property) 5:2.

“For this reason, our Sages forbade our people from raising small animals (sheep and goats) and small beasts in Eretz Yisrael, where there are fields and vineyards. One may, however, raise these animals in the forests and deserts of Eretz Yisrael.”

Bava Kamma, also called the tractate of Nezek by the rabbis, records on the very next page, Daf 80b, that it’s permitted to direct a gentile to write up a real estate contract in order to buy a home in Israel even on Shabbat because of the great mitzvah of Jews settling in the Land of Israel. This is codified into law by Rambam Hilchot Shabbat 6:11 and Shulchan Aruch Orach Chayim 306, authored by R. Yosef Karo. (Both Rambam and R. Karo, the two most important decisors in Jewish history, are themselves buried in Eretz Yisrael).

The commentaries all express wonder at how Yishuv Eretz Yisrael (settling the Land of Israel) is the only mitzvah in the entire Torah for which the rabbis allowed such an astounding leniency.

In this week’s parsha, Lech Lecha, the original Avraham is told to journey to the Land (Bereishit 12:1). In the haftorah for the second day of Rosh Hashana, which was read mere days after NAZA received its cultish applause in Venice, the prophet Jeremiah tells us that the matriarch Rachel weeps for her Jewish children in exile from their Land (Yirmiyahu 31:14). 

If the filmmakers of NAZA, Y. Abraham and Rachel Szor, were even remotely familiar or connected to how these basic concepts from Scripture, and from the laws of Nezek, manifest in Jewish tradition, perhaps they wouldn’t view themselves as foreign colonizers in their own land. Since they appear to be entirely detached from their own Jewish heritage, I would actually affirm that they are, in fact, akin to western colonizers who do not belong in the Land, and I would encourage them to move to Europe, where their values will be more aligned with their surroundings. Our only legitimate ties to Eretz Yisrael are as Jews. In my opinion, people like Abraham and Szor do not contribute to the mitzvah of Yishuv Eretz Yisrael, but on the contrary, they only spiritually defile the Land with their presence.

These filmmakers have sadly turned themselves into the most egregious examples of Adam HaMazik (human damagers) against their fellow Jews who exist in the world today. They are guilty not just of “Nezek Agavi” incidental damage, which is a modern secular term, but of Nezek Mamash, actual damage, by the ancient law of God. And that’s just sad.