NAZA Review: Investigation of Israeli Genocide Is a Rare Film of Genuine Urgency

In 2023, the two Israeli Oscar-winning filmmakers behind No Other Land, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, sat down, across rooftops in the shadows of the Tel Aviv night, to discuss Israel’s genocide 35 miles away in Gaza. Their visually obscured subjects—24 Israel Defense Forces intelligence officers and soldiers participating on conditions of anonymity—spoke candidly.

NAZA is a new word, the lexical equivalent of dehumanization. It counts human beings, but doesn’t regard them as people—just numbers. It doesn’t distinguish between age, gender, or other demographics. “NAZA” is the term the IDF invented to identify collateral civilian deaths from an airstrike… without having to call them that. So when an officer remotely bombs a building that’s suspected to have two Hamas members inside and 47 civilians, they don’t say “47 civilians.” They say “47 NAZA,” then pull the trigger.

Szor and Abraham’s documentary answers a perplexing, wide-reaching contemporary question: how does a military encourage its ethically troubled, AI-led, remote drone operators to kill women, children, and other innocents in the name of the state? Nationalism and jihadistic belief only go so far for those tasked with exacting mass execution. But language can cut deep, cover up, rewire (or remove) the meaning of something in our brain and change how it sounds, how it feels. Until one’s conscience catches up with them.   

The military personnel that came forward have all done so because they’re having second thoughts about the Israeli occupation and suffocation of Gaza as a means for good. Many speak about how they joined after the October 7 attack to help Israel, to defend their country. They talk about how the idea that “there are no innocent people in Gaza” spread like wildfire and rallied them into what they thought was defensive action. Meanwhile, cameras capture life in Tel Aviv—through apartment windows, construction sites, traffic-locked roads. Above them, rockets sail through the air like shooting stars on steroids and hair-raising wartime sirens sound off in the ether.

NAZA is not for the faint of heart, just as it’s not for Zionists. The litany of evidence, examples, and statistics provided is staggering—more than enough to break through the weeds of technicalities to make you feel sick to your stomach or sob uncontrollably. It’s a thorough, primary-source investigation into how genocide literally operates in modern times, how it functions through the strength of a well-backed 21st-century military, much less the ideological conviction that it’s warranted. 

Agents explain that one of the main ways the IDF collects intelligence and locates targets is through an AI program called “Lavender,” which finds phones that operate like Hamas operatives. But they fire on those targets regardless of the collateral body count, regardless of the NAZA. Drone operators talk about strikes with 500 NAZA for one target (20 eventually becomes the benchmark). They discuss how at least 15% of Lavender’s intelligence is inevitably leading them to non-Hamas operatives (e.g. a bakery owner who has Hamas customers in the neighborhood but no connection to the group). They admit that the most junior-level operators have been given carte blanche to green light their own AI-intel attacks.

They discuss the value of quantity over quality (or accuracy) of strikes in the IDF’s mission, how they kill suspected targets at home to make it easier, knowingly annihilating entire families—mothers, kids, babies—and all neighbors in a building just to kill one man. On one occasion, a man recalls what he says is a common story of dropping bombs on a target with dozens of NAZA present, only to learn afterward that the Hamas operative they were going for wasn’t home. They merely murdered his family and neighbors with no repercussions. If anything, the strike invites pats on the back.

They talk about below-the-belt moves ordered from up high to disrupt The Hague in order to reduce or eliminate the international war crimes with which Netanyahu has been charged. Soldiers tell first-person stories about picking off Palestinians with sniper rifles at food distribution sites if the malnourished people—fearful they wouldn’t get enough food to survive—got out of line. The banality of evil that Hannah Arendt witnessed in the Eichmann trial is on full display in the soldiers’ explanation of why they continue to carry out a genocide on behalf of the state: they’re just doing their job.

In one of NAZA‘s most chilling sequences, an officer explains that he never understood how the Nazis perpetrated such evil against the Jewish people until he, simply wishing to help his country, suddenly found himself a proud cog in a similar machine built to systematically wipe out a civilization and group. He still thinks Nazis are evil; now he wonders how he’s any different.

Very, very few films, no matter how great or important, are actually urgent. You’ll get around to it eventually; it’ll be stuck in time waiting for you. But NAZA is urgent, an essential film, a living document in conversation with the most pressing issue in the world right now. And it’s the new foremost authority on what’s happening on a granular, behind-the-scenes level in Israel’s crusade against Gaza. It’s much harder to question or deny a genocide that’s happening when the people perpetrating it in real time call it genocide themselves.

NAZA screened at the 64th New York Film Festival and is now playing in limited release.