'NAZA' Directors Tell Haaretz: Netanyahu's Attacks on Us Are 'Incitement to Murder' -
NEW YORK – Filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor haven't been back to Israel since "NAZA," their documentary about the Israeli military's conduct in Gaza, premiered in Venice earlier this month.
They spoke to Haaretz on Friday at The Guardian U.S.'s offices, ahead of the film's North American premiere at the New York Film Festival. A day earlier, they announced that The Guardian, which co-produced the film, would make it available online for free in November after its initial theatrical run.
Since the film's Venice launch and its 25-minute standing ovation, Israelis have largely been split into two camps: those who want to ban it and those who want to watch it but can't. Both camps have strong opinions despite not having seen it. Only a handful of journalists have been able to watch it so far (at small-scale press screenings). Abraham says he remains committed to bringing the film to Israeli audiences, but Israeli cinemas have so far declined to screen it, even for free.
"We chose to release the film online as early as November because we recognize the intense violence currently happening in Israel [surrounding the film], from multiple directions, which are trying to prevent it from being shown," Abraham says.
"Our goal is for Israelis to view it. In a few weeks, it will be accessible to everyone, and I hope the focus will shift to the film's content rather than everything around it."
The film has already provoked an uproar in Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has threatened, at least twice, to strip the directors of their citizenship. The Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir instructed the military's top lawyer to "advance possible legal measures concerning the film and those involved in it."
Culture Minister Miki Zohar threatened to cut funding for cinemas that screen it, and was the first to propose stripping Abraham and Szor of their citizenship. A far-right mob gathered outside Szor's parents' home twice in the days after the Venice screening, calling for the execution of " the traitors."
On the morning of our conversation, Netanyahu likened "NAZA" to launching "dozens of ballistic missiles at Israel" in an interview with the religious Zionist publication Makor Rishon.
"It's obvious what you do to people who launch ballistic missiles. You kill them. This is incitement to murder," says Abraham.
"I think there's a line connecting this incitement to what we're seeing in the streets: the graffiti with crosshairs drawn over our faces, the chants outside Racheli's parents' house and, in a sense, the silence of the Israeli opposition in the face of all this," he adds.
"It's a feeling that's been around in the country in recent years, that there's no responsible adult," says Szor.
"The [Israeli] public is very angry at us. It raises the question of what inflamed it so much, even though they didn't watch the film. The people in charge, in the army, in the government, from every direction, are actually leading this," she adds.
Abraham sees the attacks as an appeal to Netanyahu's base ahead of the election and an attempt to evade accountability.
"You don't have to agree with us on everything, but this is a film whose aim is to open a critical discussion in Israel about the army's policy in Gaza. I think Netanyahu's latest statement is part of a broader move to divert this discussion elsewhere and to criminalize journalistic and documentary work," he says.
Yuval Abraham, co-director of "NAZA"I think Netanyahu's latest statement is part of a broader move to divert this discussion elsewhere and to criminalize journalistic and documentary work
Despite the backlash, Szor says reaching Israelis remains a priority. "We had, not a hope exactly, but something like it, that for the first time there would be a discussion in Israeli society about everything that happened and what we did in Gaza," she says.
"And it took a very violent turn directed at us. Many people haven't seen it yet, but some of the testimonies and material are already public. It feels like a lot of [the uproar] is about avoiding what's actually in the film," she adds.
"NAZA," which grew out of Abraham's investigations for Israeli outlets +972 Magazine and Local Call, and his reporting with The Guardian, features testimony from 24 Israeli soldiers and intelligence personnel whose faces and voices are digitally altered. They describe military systems and practices that they say made mass killing of civilians routine in Gaza.
NAZA is a Hebrew acronym for "collateral damage," used to describe the number of civilian deaths authorized in a strike on a single target. The number is calculated before a strike; it is not a count of casualties afterward. A designation of NAZA 15 permits up to 15 civilian deaths in a strike on one target; NAZA 20 permits 20.
Abraham had been reporting on the IDF's rules of engagement, but says he sensed a gap between how experts discussed NAZA and his own intuition.
The idea for the film crystalized during a conversation with a senior intelligence source at a Tel Aviv café. The officer told him, half in shock, that earlier in the war he had begun seeing NAZA figures exceeding 100 – meaning strikes approved by senior command that could kill more than 100 civilians.
The officer compared the numbers to previous wars and operations in Gaza, including in 2021.
Abraham recalls the officer pointing to a tall building nearby and saying, "It's as if I want to kill one person, and I just drop a bomb on the building, killing everyone inside."
"That moment made me realize the film had to focus on this and be shot in Tel Aviv, using our buildings," says Abraham.
The film's anonymous sources describe designing and implementing these systems and practices.
Some describe using an artificial intelligence system called Lavender to identify tens of thousands of targets, which they say was known to incorrectly classify people as militants in up to 15 percent of cases.
The interviewees say that NAZA 200 and NAZA 300 were authorized for strikes on high-value targets. One officer says he once saw NAZA 500 authorized, though he didn't know how many people were ultimately killed in the strike.
According to the officers, strikes that leveled entire residential blocks in an effort to kill mid-ranking or senior Hamas members often failed to kill their targets.
"It was striking to me how many conversations I've had with Israeli intelligence officers where they describe strikes carried out in these conditions, and the end result is civilians being killed, but the so-called target not even being killed," says Abraham.
Rachel Szor, co-director of "NAZA"We had, not a hope exactly, but something like it, that for the first time there would be a discussion in Israeli society about everything that happened and what we did in Gaza
One officer describes a strike in which intelligence personnel looked at the target's phone and saw a picture of him with his two daughters, ages 3 and 6. The officer says the army bombed the house, but the target had left his phone there and gone out, the officer says. His family was killed; he survived.
Before any IDF representative had seen the film, the army rejected the allegations, saying some claims were "clearly beyond the knowledge of junior-level soldiers." It also accused interviewees of misusing legal terms and making contradictory claims.
Zamir said the film was "based on blood libels, deliberate distortions of reality and grave, false accusations against IDF soldiers and commanders." Abraham stands by the film's claims.
"I think we've written, together with The Guardian, about 16 pieces dealing with the army's firing policies in Gaza and technology used by the military," he says.
"In the written text, we could be very specific. The claims included dates. One example is a strike in the Jabalya refugee camp on the 31st of October, 2023, on Ibrahim Biari, which had a NAZA 300, meaning the army authorized the killing of 300 civilians. When you check what happened on the ground, the razing of roughly 20 buildings full of civilians, different estimates put the number at 400 casualties: 120 killed, 280 injured. That checks out," he says.
The film has drawn criticism for digitally altering its sources' voices and faces. Turning written investigations into a documentary changed the form, Abraham says, but not the journalistic standards.
"The claims made by soldiers require confirmation from multiple sources. We would need to go through a kind of normal process that you would go through as a journalist writing a written piece," says Abraham.
One of the main challenges was protecting the sources' identities.
"When you write a story, you have different kinds of tools to do that. You don't always have to quote someone. You can paraphrase. With a documentary, everything is a quote."
Abraham says some of the testimonies didn't make the cut.
"We had a lot of specific information that isn't in the film but helped us verify testimony and check its credibility. That was a challenge, and one of the differences between film and a written piece," he adds.
He also stands by the claim that the military approved NAZA 500.
"I know the army denied it. I don't want to go into more detail now, partly because of the risk of identifying sources. The truth will come out, and we stand fully behind the claim."
Beyond the officers' accounts, Abraham says, the images coming out of Gaza spoke for themselves.
"You can look at what's happening on the ground and listen to Palestinian journalists who have been describing this for a very long time. The insight we gain from the Israeli system and Israeli soldiers is the actual numbers, so we see that this is something very calculated. The army knows that it is bombing houses of families."
He also feels responsible for protecting his sources. "When I look at the government's insane response against us, I can only imagine what could happen to these soldiers, who, in my view, really took a step here and spoke about subjects that, I don't want to say an entire society, but most of Israeli society doesn't want to talk about right now."
The documentary, filmed by Szor and another cinematographer who remains anonymous, intersperses the officers' testimony with shots of Tel Aviv residents going about their daily lives or watching the evening news at home. It also uses archival footage of Tel Aviv's history, the 1948 war and the expulsion of Palestinians during the Nakba (particularly from Jaffa and Manshiyya, its former historical northern neighborhood that is now a part of Tel Aviv).
The film's historical references draw on contemporary Israeli discourse, Abraham says.
"The word [Nakba] returned to Israeli discourse not because of me and Rachel but because senior government figures speak about carrying out a Nakba in Gaza now," he says.
"Just recently, the defense minister spoke about the need for 'voluntary emigration' of Gazans. Netanyahu spoke about the army destroying homes so that Gazans have nowhere to return to, and said the inevitable result will be emigration from the Strip. ... Avi Dichter [agriculture minister and former head of the Shin Bet] said back in November '23 that we are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba.
"Pointing to the historical connections in the ongoing process of pushing Palestinians off their land doesn't mean casting doubt on the rights of Israelis or on Israel. This idea isn't new in Israeli public life, and it felt right for the film to touch on that too."
Szor says setting the film in Tel Aviv tied the city and mainstream Israeli society to what's happening only 60 kilometers (37 miles) away and to the reality hidden in plain sight, like Manshiyaa, or the Kirya – the military's headquarters, which sits in the heart of the city.
One of the soldiers describes going out to eat on Ibn Gabirol Street – one of Tel Aviv's main avenues – after approving a bombing in Gaza, in a blurring of military and civilian life.
"There's a sense that Tel Aviv is a liberal center that's easy to see as disconnected from everything. As Israelis, we've gotten used to these images. We don't even question the fact that this compound sits in the middle of the city," says Szor.
Abraham says the filmmakers kept the Hebrew acronym NAZA as the title, rather than translating it as "collateral damage," to convey how the officers' language reduces human beings to numbers.
"In Hebrew, the officers don't say nezek agavi, the full term for collateral damage. They say NAZA, which even for many Hebrew speakers is just a sound," he says.
"What really stayed with me while conducting these interviews was how often this word was used as a substitute for human beings, for children. You hear it in the film: 15 NAZA, 20 NAZA, 50 NAZA, 200 NAZA. The word is thrown around without its weight. It came up in almost every interview with intelligence officers, multiple times, and we felt it would be a disservice to make it into something it isn't," says Abraham.
The film also references the Holocaust, including a shot of a billboard advertising a screening of Claude Lanzmann's "Shoah" in Tel Aviv on Holocaust Memorial Day.
Abraham says these references aren't meant to draw simplistic comparisons but to reflect how Israeli society invokes the Holocaust. He disagrees with the criticism that invoking Nazi Germany in a film about the Gaza war is unfair or defames Israeli society.
Israeli leaders do it all the time, he says. "We saw the memory of the Holocaust used after October 7 and still today. Netanyahu, in his speech at the UN, talked about the Holocaust as a means to legitimize or justify his own policies in Gaza."
The film's first references to World War II and the Holocaust comes from the soldiers themselves.
One officer describes how, growing up, he saw the German perpetrators of atrocities such as the Holocaust as purely evil.
He then retells his part in the killings of civilians near food distribution sites in Gaza.
"The officer talked about coming back home and looking at many people he admired: his friends, snipers who took part in this, he understood something new about being a perpetrator. It challenged his notion of pure evil and what it meant," says Abraham.
"I understand it's a very sensitive topic. But when we say we should learn the lessons of the Holocaust, when we say 'never again,' part of that is understanding patterns of dehumanization, patterns of being a cog in a system, that can be seen in the present."
Before the film's Venice debut, Abraham wrote that the film was intended for international audiences but also "directed inward, toward Israeli society."
The backlash raises the question of whether Israelis are ready to engage with it.
"I don't have an essentialist view of Israeli society. Societies can be complicit in very grave crimes, as is the case here. But societies and people can change. I've changed. I don't have the same opinions I had 10 years ago."
Despite the hostility, Abraham sees signs that the film is having an impact. He points to a letter in which the IDF chief denounced the film while saying the military would continue to investigate its conduct, correct mistakes and accept substantive criticism.
"The need to reassure everyone that what the army is doing is okay is a sign of things shifting. This term, NAZA, and the actions of Unit 8200 and Israeli intelligence have rarely been scrutinized to such a degree in Israeli society," he says.
"I think it's really important that these discussions are starting. It's super violent, and there's a lot of pressure, but it won't deter me and Rachel."
Reaching audiences abroad, particularly in the United States, is almost as important, Abraham says.
"We just saw Trump again announcing weapons shipments, again this unconditional support. People who believe in the human rights of Palestinians and of Israelis – and I don't think there's a contradiction there – cannot keep sending weapons this way when they're used to violate international law. These conversations and actions need to happen in the United States as well."
Responding to reports that the IDF is considering releasing footage of the October 7 attacks to "counter" "NAZA," Abraham says empathy is not a zero-sum game.
"Recognizing the killing and erasure of entire neighborhoods, the killing of more than 20,000 children in Gaza, takes nothing away from the killing of children and civilians on October 7. Presenting empathy as a zero-sum game very much serves the government, and has served the Israeli right for many years. I don't think the public that opposes the government should accept it," says Abraham.
Announcing the film's free online release, Abraham wrote that he wouldn't be deterred. "Racheli and I will return to Israel and continue to fight for the future of this place, together with many partners."
Asked how soon they might return, Abraham is less certain.
"I don't want to speak for Rachel," he says, describing being "in the middle of the storm" making it "hard to see what will happen." But, he adds, "I definitely don't see the possibility of giving up. And personally, I don't want to be an exile."
"We're journalists. We're filmmakers. This is an important story. The storm will pass, and we will come back and move on to the next thing. I don't know what that will be. But I want to keep doing journalism and writing about things I think are politically and socially important," says Abraham.