Israel would rather not watch NAZA

NAZA (Hebrew acronym for “collateral damage”), the documentary made by Yuval Avraham and Rachel Szor, has yet to secure an Israeli distributor or a public screening, despite its creators’ stated intention to show it widely in the country. Various senior executives, from the Israeli military chief of staff to the minister of culture, promised that they were about to “take steps” against the creators of the film. Other than stripping them of their Israeli citizenship (considered a remarkably rare measure), what those “steps” could be was unclear. However, one refrain dominated the outrage directed at Avraham and Szor: Those condemning the film had no intention of watching it.

It is important to emphasise that this oath to refrain from watching the film was authentic. In a way, it is a variation on a theme that became prevalent throughout the first months of the “war”. When images of devastation began to emerge from Gaza, many Israelis wrote that they could feel no pity for the children of Gaza (at the end of 2023, the number of children killed and orphaned was already known and difficult to grasp, as were military “procedures”). These Israelis said they had “closed their hearts” in response to the huge, intentional death toll in the Israeli towns and villages surrounding Gaza. They claimed they would not and could not feel pity for anyone who had committed such atrocities, or for anyone related to them. Activists on the Israeli left believed that if Israelis were exposed to images from the already nearly deleted Gaza, they would head for the streets and call for a stop to the war. These activists were soundly rebuffed.

NAZA was, itself, a rebuttal of the position actively taken by the Israeli media – “Yes, the Israeli military had made mistakes but these should be investigated by the military and the Israeli legal system, both very much capable of carrying out the task.” Raviv Drucker, perhaps Israel’s most prominent investigative journalist, when asked by Yuval Avraham (during an interview of Avraham himself conducted by Drucker) why Israeli media had done nothing to expose the methods of killing documented by NAZA, said with visible embarrassment that doing so was “difficult” for a host of reasons. However, Drucker was also quick to add that if it were up to him, he would not have aired the film because he believed it lacked journalistic professionalism, relying as it does on anonymous testimony. This line of criticism was quickly taken up by other journalists considered a part of the Israeli left. They attacked the film and its creators, accusing them of everything from seeking money and attention to actively working for Israel’s downfall in the service of Netanyahu and Qatar. They were called “useful idiots”, meaning people who work for a worthy cause but are unwittingly used in the service of another. Journalists like Uri Misgav acknowledged the importance of criticism but implied that NAZA served the goals of Israel’s enemies. They suggested that its disregard for journalistic standards showed that the creators had already reached their conclusion: That Israel was the root of all evil and solely responsible for the state of Gaza.

For Israelis, not watching NAZA is a point of pride. Some will cite the lack of journalistic standards (this from a country that assassinated more than 200 journalists over the course of its genocide in Gaza). Other Israelis will suggest that they recognise “treason” when they see it. Many Israelis will apply the following wondrous excuse: “Even if some of this is true, you wash your dirty laundry at home; you don’t entertain others by using that dirty laundry to demonstrate that Israel really is responsible for the killing of 20,000 children and more than 70,000 Palestinians in Gaza.” The fact that the military and the Israeli legal system have proven themselves to be incompetent at best (and thoroughly politicised at worst) when investigating war crimes and crimes against humanity is beside the point for many Israelis. After all, one could offer up such incompetence as an excuse for the strategies exposed by NAZA. Israelis wouldn’t hear of it. This is yet another example of the world’s hatred for Israel (“anti-Semitism”, if you like) that makes international accusations levelled against Israel completely irrelevant. No matter what we do, we will emerge at fault, so why encourage this state of affairs by having lengthy discussions about a critical movie? We’ve heard the criticism countless times. We know there is a web of detractors all over the world (perhaps funded by Qatar, perhaps by the Red-Green alliance between the woke left and radical Islam). It doesn’t matter.

Just as Israelis “closed their hearts” when the genocide began, so they are shutting their eyes and ears now. They take pride in their ignorance of the film’s content. They feel it misrepresents them. How do they know? They don’t, but that only makes them even more convinced of the one-sidedness of the whole episode. It is enough to hear that the directors received an unprecedented 25-minute standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival, where they won a special jury prize. Special, eh? Everything about Israel is special. A special prize can simply be invented on the spot to present Israel negatively. It isn’t as though Avraham and Szor walked away from the podium with the Silver Lion, one of the festival’s major awards, is it? Their film is not art. Nor is it a documentary because it doesn’t observe the codes of documentary filmmaking. Its only purpose is to discredit Israel, isn’t it? If that is the case, why should an Israeli with any sense of identity do the enemy’s work: The ultimate destruction of Israel as a Jewish state (democracy was abandoned right at the start), for them? Better to deny and reject reality. It isn’t just that we do what we want – we are the ones who define the very nature of reality itself. When we don’t like it, we close our eyes and wait for the threat to pass. It always does.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.