When Is a Traitor Not a Traitor?

For about twenty-five minutes at the Venice Film Festival, audiences stood for NAZA, a documentary made by the Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor. The film, built around the anonymous testimony of 24 current or former Israeli military and intelligence personnel, alleges that AI-enabled systems helped generate and prioritise targets in Gaza, and that the human checks meant to restrain them could be alarmingly thin. It has since won Venice’s Special Jury Prize.deadline+1

The Israel Defense Forces rejects that account. It says that its intelligence systems are analytical tools, not machines that determine who is a terrorist; that human personnel independently select and approve targets; and that it does not deliberately target civilians. Those are serious denials, and they deserve to be heard.theguardian+1

But a serious denial creates a serious obligation: to answer the evidence.

Instead, Israel’s Culture Minister Miki Zohar has called the filmmakers’ work “treason” and urged that their citizenship be revoked. Other officials have called the film “blood libel”; government agencies have reportedly developed talking points for diplomats responding to the film abroad.timesofisrael+2

This is where the argument risks being lost. A country need not accept a documentary’s conclusions simply because it has received an ovation in Venice. Applause is not proof. Anonymous sources must be tested; a film’s claims can be challenged; the IDF is entitled to present its account. Yet “traitor” is not a refutation. It is an attempt to make the person speaking morally inadmissible before the substance of what they say can be assessed.

The issue is not whether computers appear somewhere in the targeting chain. The IDF acknowledges that analysts use information systems to assemble and cross-reference intelligence. The disputed question is whether human control was substantive: whether people independently assessed the system’s recommendations, or merely gave a human signature to an automated process.theguardian+1

That distinction is more than technical. A person may press an approval button and still be described as “human in the loop.” But if thousands of names or homes are generated at machine speed, if review is hurried, if an algorithm’s error rate is tolerated, or if civilian harm is calculated as an acceptable cost, then human presence is not necessarily human judgment.

Israel has faced versions of this moral argument before. Breaking the Silence, the organisation of former Israeli soldiers that publishes testimony about service in the occupied territories, has long been attacked not only on questions of evidence but on the accusation that it damages Israel and its army abroad.

Some of those criticisms are legitimate subjects for public scrutiny: testimony should be corroborated, anonymity should be handled responsibly, and no organisation should be beyond challenge. But the relevant democratic question remains unchanged. Does the country investigate what its veterans describe, or chiefly investigate why they described it?timesofisrael+2

Israel knows, too, the historical weight of the word “traitor.” Before Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in 1995 by Yigal Amir, a Jewish extremist opposed to the Oslo Accords, Rabin was denounced by opponents as a traitor. The assassin alone was responsible for the murder. But the official inquiry recorded the public language around Rabin: “traitor,” “liar,” “Nazi.”history.state+1

That memory does not mean every use of the word today will produce violence, nor does it make criticism of NAZA illegitimate. It means Israel should know that political excommunication has consequences. It turns disagreement into national contamination. It converts an Israeli with an unwelcome argument into someone who supposedly no longer belongs.

There is an irony in the state’s fear of how NAZA will be seen abroad. Israel’s standing will be shaped not by whether its makers can be branded traitors, but by whether their allegations are met with evidence and independent scrutiny. Treating them as the diplomatic problem is unlikely to make the film disappear.

States have legitimate secrets. Armies have genuine security concerns. Not every disclosure is responsible and not every whistleblower is right. But a democracy does not prove its moral seriousness by making dissent criminal in spirit before it is examined in fact.

If NAZA is wrong, Israel should show where and how. If its sources are unreliable, their claims should be tested. If the IDF’s account is correct, it should be able to withstand independent examination. But if calling Israeli filmmakers traitors is the first answer, then the question is no longer only what happened in Gaza.

It is what kind of loyalty Israel is demanding from its own citizens. And whether a country can still recognise love—and the courage it professes to treasure, military and moral—when they come in the form of a question.