NAZA Controversy: Israelis Are Blind to How the World Sees Our Country
What the new documentary about the Gaza war proves more than anything else is how detached most Israelis are from the global discourse on Gaza
Israel's Minister of Culture, Miki Zohar, a member of the ruling Likud party, wants to strip two documentary filmmakers of their citizenship. Their crime? Producing the film NAZA, which includes anonymous testimonies by Israeli soldiers about the war in Gaza.
This film has been dominating the headlines in Israel for the past 48 hours, but almost no one is responding to its content, because almost no one has watched it. Even Zohar didn't cite a single claim from the film before condemning it and threatening to revoke the filmmakers' citizenship. This is a debate taking place without content, purely on the basis of emotion.
What the conversation about this film proves, more than anything else, is how detached Israelis are from the global conversation about the Gaza war. Two years ago, as Israel was marking one year since the October 7 massacre, one of the country's most prominent journalists, Ilana Dayan, said in an interview with CNN: "I think of the tragedy in Gaza, and I think we don't cover it enough." She was right back then, and her words are even more true today.
When Israelis watch their prime-time news shows every evening, they watch new testimonies from the hostages who were held by Hamas terrorists, or another heartbreaking report about a reserve soldier who took his own life after struggling with PTSD. These are important stories that must be told. If Gaza appears on the screen at all, it is usually in the form of old footage showing Palestinians there celebrating the massacre.
What Israelis barely get to see is the immense destruction in Gaza, and the human suffering it has caused. Their only glimpses of that reality come when military correspondents visit the coastal enclave embedded with the IDF – and even then, the reality is filtered through the army's binoculars. Tone differs from channel to channel, but the avoidance of covering Gaza remains the same.
Outside Israel, it is the opposite. October 7 held the front page for a handful of weeks, and then came three years of non-stop Gaza coverage: the rubble, the death toll, the destruction and displacement, and of course, the harmful statements of Israeli government ministers calling for ethnic cleansing and the resettlement of Gaza.
One Israeli journalist who paid the price for bucking this trend is Arad Nir, the foreign news editor of Channel 12, the country's most popular television station. After 100 days of war, he said on air that the fighting should end. His network stopped putting him on its flagship Friday evening broadcast for a full year.
Someone who has watched Israeli news for three years has almost no way to assess what NAZA alleges, not because the claims are necessarily false, but because nothing prepared them to judge it. Someone who followed only the international coverage barely remembers why the war described in this film actually started, and by whom.
That's why the NAZA saga tells us an important story that goes beyond the documentary itself. Israelis are responding to this film as if it is an attack on their country, because it is an attack on their reality. That's why so many have chosen to condemn it without even watching it.
To a degree, it's an honest and understandable instinct. Israel is fighting a barbaric enemy. Our grief over October 7, and our trauma from three years of running to bomb shelters with our children, make it difficult for many Israelis to contend with what they perceive as unfair accusations. But that can't be an excuse for shutting our eyes and ears.
The crowd in Venice clapped without asking basic questions – like, for example, how unique are the IDF tactics exposed in the film, compared to those used by other militaries? Israeli society must do better than that audience. We must be able to ask questions, instead of condemning the film without even watching a single frame.
Eli Kowaz is a writer and analyst covering Israeli politics, American Jewry, and U.S.-Israel relations. He writes The Middle Ground on Substack and was previously communications director at Israel Policy Forum.