Joshua Scheer
Israel’s leaders have threatened the filmmakers. The documentary’s deeper challenge is to a society that treats technical expertise as an escape from moral responsibility.
A government confident in its account of a war should be able to withstand a documentary. Benjamin Netanyahu’s response to NAZA has been to threaten the citizenship of people who expose what Israeli soldiers say happened in Gaza.
According to Reuters, Netanyahu pledged to pursue legislation allowing citizenship revocation for those who defame Israeli soldiers, alongside sharply increased financial penalties. Directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, NAZA draws on anonymous military and intelligence testimony alleging that civilian deaths were routinely incorporated into targeting decisions. Netanyahu and the military reject those allegations.
The threat raises an obvious question: If the testimony is false, why reach for the power to strip people of their citizenship?
The film’s significance extends beyond Netanyahu. In his October 2 essay for +972 Magazine, Israeli academic Sebastian Ben Daniel argues that NAZA challenges the comforting assumption that responsibility for Gaza’s destruction belongs exclusively to Israel’s openly extremist politicians and settlers.
His focus is on the prestigious institutions that make military violence possible: intelligence units, the Air Force and the professional culture connecting military service to Israel’s technology industry. The people operating that machinery can consider themselves educated, reasonable and politically opposed to the far right while participating in its devastating consequences.
That is a challenge Americans should recognize. We, too, have learned to discuss war through the reassuring vocabulary of expertise: intelligence assessments, precision weapons, operational requirements. The language sounds clean because it removes the people underneath the bombs.
NAZA confronts liberal Israel with an accusation it cannot comfortably assign to Netanyahu and the far right: The destruction of Gaza depends on prestigious institutions staffed by educated, secular professionals who consider themselves the extremists’ opposite. Political moderation does not erase responsibility, and expressions of anguish cannot redeem participation in mass killing. Ben Daniel also describes liberal media commentators attacking a film they have not watched and questioning anonymous testimony—the same kind of sourcing routinely accepted when it serves the military’s narrative. That selective skepticism protects the institutions under scrutiny while shifting attention away from the Palestinians whose lives those institutions have destroyed.
A targeting system does not bury a child. People authorize an attack, carry it out and defend its consequences. Dividing those actions among departments cannot make responsibility disappear.
For some viewers, the testimony has brought historical questions of obedience and accountability into immediate focus. Reporting for Vulture, Rachel Corbett quoted attendee Roland Lewis: “I couldn’t stop thinking about the Nuremberg trials.”
That comparison is an audience member’s reaction, not a judicial finding. Its force lies in the question it raises: How much moral shelter can anyone claim from a chain of command?
Palestinians should not have to wait for Israeli testimony to make their suffering credible. Their reporting, their photographs and their accounts of families destroyed deserve attention on their own terms.
What NAZA can do is confront another audience with testimony from inside the institutions whose assurances it has accepted. The obligation that follows belongs to viewers, journalists and governments—including Washington, whose support for Israel demands scrutiny alongside the conduct of the Israeli military.
Watching a documentary is a beginning. Accountability requires following the chain of responsibility beyond the screen.
This commentary draws on Sebastian Ben Daniel’s essay in +972 Magazine, Rachel Corbett’s reporting in Vulture and Reuters’ coverage of threats against the filmmakers. Readers can read them here Vulture, MS NOW and +972 Magazine.
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