Would-be dictators like Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu don’t like whistleblowers such as Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, the creators of NAZA, the controversial new film on the Gaza war. (The name comes from the Hebrew acronym for the execrable term nezek agavi, “collateral damage.”) Moreover, Ashkenazi Jews have an unwritten rule that one should never tell the goyim about Jewish misdeeds. There is a name in Yiddish for someone who does that: the despised moyser, “informer.” Many, perhaps most Israelis think that Israel has never committed and never could commit misdeeds of any kind. It’s not in our DNA. We have, as the politicians and the chiefs of staff love to tell us, the most moral army in the world.
Hence the astonishing vehemence of the reaction in Israel to NAZA, which received a twenty-five-minute standing ovation at the Venice International Film Festival and won the Special Jury Prize. As of this writing, hardly anyone in Israel has actually seen the film. (It will presumably be banned here once it is released for wide distribution abroad, though beginning in late November it will be available for viewing on The Guardian’s website.) Still, that hasn’t stopped anyone in the government, the army, the Knesset, on social media, and to some extent in the Hebrew press and on television, not to mention the vituperative prime minister, from flooding the public space with poisonous invective. Abraham and Szor have received death threats from thugs on the nationalist right, which should not be taken lightly. The prime minister says he will deprive them of their citizenship. (There is no strong legal basis for such an act, which would perhaps require passing a new law.) The president of Israel, Isaac Herzog, called the film “a disgrace and a shame.” Although the first wave of violent reactions to the unseen documentary has now died down, its fate, and that of the courageous activists who produced it, still hangs in the balance.
I’ve managed to see NAZA twice—the second viewing was even more devastating than the first. Those who have followed Abraham’s reports for publications such as +972, Local Call, and The Guardian over the last three years will learn nothing new from the film. The evidence it presents comes from unidentified army officers and soldiers who took part in the war, either in Gaza or in the air-conditioned offices of the computer wizards who were crucially involved in identifying targets to be bombed. At issue is the number of innocents killed in the course of hunting down presumed Hamas operatives. We know from these still-anonymous voices, among other sources, that the army’s rules on collateral damage were significantly, sometimes dramatically, relaxed during the war. But it is one thing to read about what was and still is going on in Gaza and another thing entirely to hear the intonation, the choice of words, the occasional moments of pregnant silence, and the sometimes deadpan, at other times seemingly shaken or stunned voices of these soldiers, always in rapid-fire army Hebrew. Most human language, not only in times of horror, communicates not just by lucid articulation but by the tones and overtones that carry meaning.
These soldiers in front of their screens had access to the telephones of virtually every person in Gaza and to an immense store of digital information about the entire Gazan population. They were also connected to the army’s supercomputer, which could identify every building and determine who lived where and what was the best way to find and kill someone—often at night when he came home to his family, who would die with him. It is wrong to think that they pulled the trigger or sent up the planes to carry out the bombings. Once the target had been identified, there were still several stages of human intervention and some (perhaps minimal) form of oversight before the assassination could be approved. However, the sheer number of targets (many thousands in the early weeks of the war) apparently narrowed down the time for human judgment and confirmation. On the basis of his interviews, Abraham’s report in +972 finds that approving the bombing of each target usually took no more than a few seconds.1 I have no way of judging the accuracy of such calculations.
So why did these computer whizzes come to speak to Breaking the Silence—the anti-occupation and human rights organization that specializes in this kind of debriefing—about what they did during the war? I’ll come back to this question, with a somewhat wider perspective. Two of the interviewees in the film speak in Hannah Arendt territory. “I was just a cog in the system, a screw in the big machine.” “I am a technician. That’s my role. I am not supposed to express an opinion on a matter of principle or a moral position.” “If I wasn’t there doing it, someone else would presumably do it.” Those chilling phrases call up familiar, terrible words from long ago. Then we have the snipers who shot down anyone—hundreds or more—who strayed even a few yards from the demarcated path to food distribution points; and hundreds more were killed by drones. I suppose those were the orders. One of the interviewed soldiers says, with apparent regret, that the war in the early months was like a computer game, exciting and even fun.
At least one of the anonymous interviewees says that at some point he couldn’t go on doing what they told him to do. According to his testimony, he had already targeted hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Gazans. Somehow he extricated himself from this role. For the viewer, it is a moment of transient relief.
What about the background, the history, and the horrific trauma that the Hamas terrorists inflicted on all Israelis on October 7, 2023? Despite what some critics have said, the film never loses touch with all this. It opens with the unbearable perspective of the massacre. Nonetheless, NAZA is focused on the war crimes that according to the witnesses in the film the Israeli army has perpetrated in Gaza. Such testimony is not exactly a secret. None of us is innocent. Whatever one might think, or want to think, about what the interviewed soldiers have to say, there is the brute fact of some 73,000 dead Gazan people, the number given by the Gaza Health Ministry and unofficially confirmed as an estimate by senior IDF officers in January 2026. The IDF claims that 20,000-plus were actual Hamas terrorists or somehow connected to Hamas. (One of the soldiers in the film says there were many hundreds, if not more, false identifications.) That leaves some 50,000 innocent corpses—women, children, the aged, the sick and disabled, doctors and teachers, and plenty of noncombatant men. Many more are probably still buried in the rubble or in mass graves.
The prominent Israeli journalist Raviv Drucker, who was tormented by the film, asked for figures from recent similar battlegrounds.2 There happens to be a basis for such a comparison: the successful campaign of the Iraqi army, backed by the Americans, against the Islamic State warriors in Mosul between October 2016 and July 2017. The population of Mosul was similar to that of Gaza—roughly two million. The fighting took place in heavily built-up urban areas, and the fanatical terrorists, like Hamas, used hostages, tunnels, schools, mosques, and whatever other perfidious means were available to them. You can’t fight a war of that nature and magnitude without killing civilians. The final figure for civilian deaths in Mosul was around 9,000 to 11,000—about one fifth of even the IDF’s official Gaza count.
Almost immediately after the news of NAZA’s award in Venice, Eyal Zamir, the IDF’s chief of staff, announced:
This film is a direct move against the State of Israel. It adopts antisemitic narratives and attempts to present the IDF as deliberately acting illegally. This is a dangerous attempt to deny us the legitimacy of defending ourselves against our worst enemies—and thus to endanger the soldiers and officers of the IDF in concrete ways.
In a later statement the army claimed that the IDF acts in accordance with international law, and the spirit of the IDF and its values, and it leads the effort to minimize harm to noncombatants, while maintaining a ratio of harm to noncombatants relative to terrorists that is significantly lower than that of other armies around the world.
In a sense, Zamir is right. The film does undermine the legitimacy of the IDF and, indeed, of the State of Israel. But the rest is, to say the least, dubious. I wonder about Zamir, who seems to be a relatively honest man in an impossible position. Or perhaps he lives with stark cognitive dissonance, possibly unawares. Could he fail to know of the crimes his soldiers have committed? Haaretz devoted an editorial to the film and concluded that “by screening their film at the Venice Film Festival, Abraham and Szor are trying to force Israelis to confront what they already know: that there’s a black stain on the way Israel is conducting war in Gaza, to put it mildly.”3 Yes, mildly indeed. And perhaps we have only scratched the surface.
I haven’t been to Gaza since long before the war and before the many Israeli campaigns against Hamas, but I see the IDF in action, or inaction, every week in the Palestinian territories on the West Bank. The contrast to Zamir’s euphemistic statement is crystal clear, hour by hour. The soldiers there, including the higher echelon of officers, have long ago sold out to the convicted criminal Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Orwellian minister for internal security, and Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister and architect of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians on the West Bank (and also in Gaza, where he uses another euphemism: “voluntary emigration”). The soldiers in the West Bank are an integral part of the violent settlers’ highly successful project of tormenting, and quite often killing, innocent Palestinian shepherds and farmers in Area C (under Israeli control) and also now in areas A (under Palestinian Authority control) and B (under joint Israeli and Palestinian control). When armed settler thugs invade a village, set houses and vehicles on fire, shoot live ammunition at the villagers, beat them to the verge of death or beyond, and drive them from their fields and grazing grounds, the soldiers who are there nearly always just stand and watch. Often they actively join the pogroms alongside the settlers, and they routinely collaborate with settlers besieging Palestinian homes. So much for the most moral army. The casualty numbers add up. Recorded attacks on Palestinian civilians on the West Bank in 2025 numbered around 1,835 (probably an underestimate). This year’s count will be much greater.
From my own experience I can say that by now there are multiple attacks every hour throughout the occupied territories, with dozens killed and hundreds wounded this year so far. On October 7, 2026, a Palestinian man trying to harvest his olives was murdered by settlers in Burqa. It wasn’t an isolated incident. The villages of al-Mughayyir and Taybeh face almost continuous, lethal violence.4 The West Bank is a brutal, lawless place, where violent settlers, abetted by the army, inflict suffering and death on innocents with impunity.
The ferocious attacks on NAZA (mostly by those who have not seen it) usually claim that it lies, but it should be clear to anyone who sees it that the interviewees speak the truth. They describe from their own experience how the army machine worked in those early months of the war, and they give obviously authentic testimony about the dominant atmosphere and ethos in their units. No one could invent or even imagine such an ambience and its consequences. The veracity of their memories and the way they express them in words are indubitable.
I am certain that Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor will someday be remembered as remarkably brave figures in the honorable line of Israelis who spoke, from within, the unsettling truth to power and to the recalcitrant popular consensus. But times have changed. In November 1948, toward the end of the war of independence and the time of the Nakba, the poet Natan Alterman published a poem—“Al Zot” (“Because of This”)—in the mainstream newspaper Davar. It describes a random murder of an elderly Arab couple by a young soldier: “Our warriors, ready for battle, and we who are with them, either actively or by simply patting them on the shoulder, murmuring ‘necessity’ or ‘vengeance,’ are driven into the realm of crimes of war.”
David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel and undoubtedly a reader of Davar, wrote to the poet: “Congratulations on the moral validity and the powerful expressivity of your latest column…. You are a pure and faithful mouthpiece of the human conscience.” He ordered 100,000 copies of Alterman’s poem—enough to send to every Israeli soldier. The murder of one innocent elderly couple was once no less abominable than 50,000 instances of “collateral damage.” Whether words were commensurate with praxis or not is still a moot question.
In 1949 S. Yizhar (Smilansky), the creator of modern Hebrew prose, published Khirbet Khizeh, a partly autobiographical novella about a fictional Palestinian village whose people are expelled by the young Israeli army. The doubt-ridden soldier-narrator—Yizhar’s alter ego—follows his orders, but he knows all too well that he is participating in a crime. A Jewish settlement will replace the Palestinians, but, Yizhar writes,
wouldn’t the walls cry out in their ears—those sights, screams that were screamed and were not screamed, the confused innocence of dazed sheep, the submissiveness of the weak, and their heroism, the unique heroism of the weak who didn’t know what to do and were unable to do anything, the silenced weak.
Yizhar’s story, believe it or not, became a canonical text and an optional part of the standard curriculum in Israeli high schools.5 That option would probably be unthinkable today.
A somewhat similar story by another major writer, A.B. Yehoshua, “Facing the Forest” (1968), follows the same logic, with a twist at the end: the expelled Palestinian finds a way to take revenge. Like everything else in Israel, Hebrew literature is heavily politicized. But there are many other memorable moments of protest like the creation of NAZA. In 1982, in the course of the first Lebanon war, the minister of defense, Ariel Sharon, allowed (according to some, actually colluded in) the massacre of Palestinians by Christian Phalangists in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. Some 400,000 Israelis—at that time, nearly 10 percent of the population—demonstrated against Sharon in Tel Aviv. A judicial commission of inquiry threw him out of office. That’s the kind of impartial judicial inquiry that Netanyahu has resisted tooth and nail since October 7.
We have sunk very low, in a disastrous, evolving process that has gone on for decades, with the occupation at its center. Protest inside Israel is still robust, and our activists are still doing what they can, at considerable risk, to save Palestinian villages from destruction. But the cancerous, hate-driven ideology of the Israeli right is rampant, as we can see from the nearly unanimous, toxic attacks on NAZA. How can we explain this?
Michelle Goldberg has formulated an insightful way to pose the question: “It’s hard to tell whether Israelis are enraged by NAZA because they think it’s full of lies, or because they know or fear it’s true.”6 We might go a little further. There’s no doubt that this time something has touched an untouched nerve.
Ignorance, willful or otherwise, does play a part. The main news channels and newspapers have not fulfilled their obligation to offer a truthful, multifaceted picture of the reality in Gaza over the last three years. Israelis get at most a very limited sense of Palestinian suffering, although pictures of the vast destruction do tell a story—except for viewers who swallow the rabid distortions of Channel 14, Netanyahu’s home channel. In any case, many Israelis clearly don’t want to know. The trauma of October 7 has annihilated their remaining empathy. We should also not forget that Israelis have reason to be afraid.
But the failure to know, or worse, to feel, is not enough. The war in Gaza, with or without daily news reports, has threatened, perhaps more than ever before, to undermine the axioms by which Israeli Jews have lived for decades: “We’re the good guys (always),” “Everyone hates us so we have to hit out at them,” “This war (every war) is necessary for our survival,” and most precious of all, “We are the undisputed winners of the most-victimized victims’ sweepstakes.” This package of clichés—there are more—is not a surface phenomenon. It is actually the primary component of the rather fragile mainstream Israeli self (not merely the derivative self-image). Living for six decades in Israel, I have seen ordinary people go to any length, including sacrificing their children, husbands, fathers, and brothers, in order not to lose or loosen the wobbly foundations that have given meaning to their world. These same foundations also rationalize the basic conditions of tribal solidarity, including lust for revenge, as we see in Gaza. Revenge, however, is usually a transient pleasure. If peace is ever to come to Israel, this entire package will have to be jettisoned and replaced by something better. It won’t happen without some measure of collective and personal remorse.
Remorse, the therapeutic aspect of guilt, is a human achievement, less rare than we might think. It can happen spontaneously. One soldier in the film had the inner strength to say no. Another one says in sorrow, after recounting the cruelties he had witnessed and taken part in, “I didn’t resist when I was there.” There are other moments in the film that I won’t write about here, just as one of the soldiers suddenly says, “There are many things that I can’t tell you.” That may be one of the most moving statements in NAZA.
Soldiers in particular, after surviving years in the military system in a state of relative numbness, sometimes experience delayed remorse. They may have performed all the vicious acts that soldiers are commanded to perform without fully realizing what they were doing. Only after their release from the army, perhaps some months or even years later, are they unpredictably flooded by the torments of remorse. I’ve known such people. Somewhere in the communal psyche now lie at least 50,000 innocent corpses, like the silent witnesses in Yizhar’s story. They won’t go away.
The natural first response is denial and then fierce hate. There’s no dearth of hatred, after years in which it has been fostered and deepened by Netanyahu and his gang of criminals. Hate is one way to transmute guilt, especially shared guilt, or an amalgam of trauma and guilt, in some desperate psychic maneuver. Still, in the end, hidden guilt has a way of bursting forth. When that happens, it bears the unmistakable marks of truth. There are always good reasons to fear that truth. But the great tragedy that inheres in recovering a measure of human empathy, and with it the rebirth of hope, is that it usually comes too late.
We are now in the aftermath of the Israeli election on October 27, which produced an uncertain result. Netanyahu is at the moment unable to put together a new government. The Jewish opposition parties could, in theory, form a government, but only by the obvious and indeed necessary move of bringing the Arab parties (with nineteen seats out of 120 in the new Knesset) into a workable coalition. That solution would demand real courage on the part of Gadi Eisenkot, the leader of the Yashar party, which heads the opposition bloc. Sadly, he declared during the campaign that he would do no such thing. (This was a failed attempt not to alienate mainstream nationalists who hate all Arabs.) Meanwhile, Netanyahu is toying with the possibility of canceling the election results on the specious grounds that the Arab votes were “stolen.” He’s also likely to attack Iran again, in which case Israelis will rally around the flag, the army, and the monsters still in power. In Palestine, many more innocents will die.
—November 4, 2026