Yakov M. Rabkin Informed Comment
Hannah Arendt’s characterization of Eichmann as representing “The Banality of Evil,” the subtitle of her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, shocked many people. It was later criticized in the wake of the discovery of her protagonist’s antisemitic pronouncements, unknown during his trial. The new film NAZA, documenting the inner mechanisms of the Gaza genocide brings the concept of the banality of evil front stage again. Except that this time we have the testimonies of two dozen perpetrators who, unlike Eichmann, do not face a tribunal but share their experience mostly in a casual and relaxed manner, some with pride in their accomplishment, others with remorse. They sound like normal middle-class men and women conscientiously doing their challenging hi-tech job. These Israelis embody something different from the Nazis who tried to hide their crimes from their own people, whom they feared would not support them. The new film is about the normality of evil in a society that has largely accepted the genocide taking place less than forty miles south of Tel Aviv.
The twenty-four perpetrators interviewed in the film belong to elite intelligence units that harness the power of AI and total surveillance to destroy Gaza. They are not “Arab haters,” remarks one of the interviewees. Yet he believes he killed more women and children than the fiercest Arab hater. However abhorrent the ongoing West Bank pogroms against Palestinians by Zionist squatter-settler vigilantes less than forty miles south of Tel Aviv—taking place under the sympathetic gaze and occasional assistance of the IDF—the magnitude of mass murder of civilians in Gaza is incomparably greater.
The perpetrators come from privileged classes of upscale, glittering Tel Aviv, the visual background of the entire film. Among the leitmotifs of the testimonies are the readiness to obey orders and the delight of overcoming difficult technical challenges (technodélice, as the late Jean-Jacques Salomon defined it). “It was fun (kef),” admitted one of the perpetrators.
NAZA is a Hebrew acronym for collateral damage. The association with “Nazi” is not fortuitous; one of the perpetrators compares his experience with that of Nazis engaged in industrialized, albeit less sophisticated, mass murder in the early 1940s. When, like many young Israelis (and Jews from elsewhere), he was taken to visit Nazi extermination camps, he wondered how these Nazis could switch to normal life after killing thousands of people a day. Now, he admits, he knows. He would meet friends after a day of killing mostly women and children and enjoy his night out.
Initially, neither the Nazis nor the Zionists intended to commit genocide. In their exclusivist nationalist fantasies, German National Socialists wanted to expel the undesirables, to make the “purified,” expanded Germany great again and, in the case of the socialist Zionists in power in 1948 and 1967, when massive expulsions took place, to turn Palestine into a “Jewish state.” Both had land lust: the Nazis wanted fertile land in Eastern Europe ‘cleansed’ of most Slavs and all the Jews—while critics and political figures alike have described Israel’s territorial strategy as a pursuit of ‘a maximum of territory with a minimum of Arabs.’
From the turn of the 20th century, Zionist pioneers laid strong emphasis on breeding the intrepid and valiant New Hebrew Man who had broken with the victimhood of the past. In his eulogy for Theodor Herzl in 1904, Vladimir Jabotinsky, who established and shaped the now dominant stream of Zionism, defined the new creature thus:
It was only later, faced with resistance kindled by the settler movement, that Israelis assumed the role of innocent victims, forced to defend themselves. Visits to the Nazi extermination camps are essential components of the didactic tools used to forge hard-nosed fighters. No wonder most of them called the attack on southern Israel in October 2023 “the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.” Totally lost was the difference between powerless Jewish civilians targeted by the Nazis and the powerful Jewish state that had expelled and confined Palestinians in an open-air concentration camp in Gaza. Referring to the violence they unleash, the Israelis often use the expression ein brera (“there is no choice”), which preserves their self-image and justifies excesses. This is how the genocide has metastasized from Europe to West Asia.
The film’s protagonists explain how they use sophisticated technology to survey every telephone communication of the Palestinians. One of the phrases AI extracts from millions of conversations is “When does daddy come home?” This is how the decision is made to destroy the suspect’s home along with his wife and children. Behind their computer screens, those who determine such targets can later hear the cries of those wounded children who were waiting for their fathers a few minutes earlier.
Israel, many of whose politicians overtly advocate and pursue fascist policies, is justly proud of being a world leader in technological innovation, a “Start-up Nation.” Its qualitative edge over its neighbours, guaranteed in American law, involves close cooperation with the U.S. military-industrial-digital complex. Forthcoming legislation will formally embed the Israeli military in it. Unlike Ukraine, which serves mostly as a testing ground for Palantir and other Western facilitators of hi-tech warfare, Israeli scientists and engineers actively contribute to the development of new systems such as Lavender, which are widely used against the Palestinians. All this happens within the larger ecosystem of U.S. financial, material, and strategic support. Not only Washington, Berlin, and London but even Belgrade maintain the lifeline, or rather the deathline, of munitions, materiel, and cloud services to Israel. These enable it not only to oppress and kill Palestinians but also to attack other countries, doing, as Chancellor Merz of Germany candidly admitted, “the dirty work for all of us.” There is little doubt that Merz and his Western counterparts were aware all along of the methods that the new film exposes to the public.
Moreover, Israeli expertise in surveillance and population control is in demand around the world. This portends dangers to privacy and democracy elsewhere. Tools of total surveillance may tempt rulers concerned about potential social turmoil and even revolutions against the growing—and unprecedented—economic polarization. Sprouts of fascism have been noticed in a good part of the Political West. ICE activities to target undocumented immigrants in the United States may be just the beginning. The ruling classes’ need to protect their privilege foments connivance with Israel and thereby contributes to the country’s impunity.
Similarly, the penetration of Hezbollah with booby-trapped pagers, which led to the murder and mutilation of thousands of people in Lebanon and Syria in 2024, shows how vulnerable anyone may become by using deceptively inoffensive civilian gadgets. (NAZA does not mention this gruesome episode, which is the subject of another recent documentary. Israeli officials have bragged that for them the stage is the entire world, and they are the main players on it. Ominously and proudly, Prime Minister Netanyahu said that everyone in the world carries a piece of Israel in his pocket.
The Nazi genocide of Jews, Slavs, and many others shocked Europeans mainly because the victims were fellow Europeans. Their genocides in Africa and the Americas had provoked no comparable revulsion. Another important cause of the shock is the rational organization of the Nazi genocide. Israelis in Gaza used hi-tech, including AI, to raise the level of organization to unprecedented levels. IDF specialists and snipers admit feeling like gods capable of killing people practically at will. Israeli media reported cases of depression when soldiers returned to civilian life. For some, the cause was the loss of the sense of omnipotence. They felt they were no longer gods but just nobodies lost in the crowd. Other IDF veterans experience depression in the face of world opprobrium, which they, convinced of their innocent victimhood, cannot comprehend and attribute to antisemitism.
One of the Israelis interviewed in the film was assigned to the political wing, which had to use electronic media to besmirch, discredit, and undermine critics of Israel. (After NAZA was released in cinemas, Israelis promptly produced a fake misleadingly named “Naza: The Real Story. Full Film” in an effort to divert viewers from the original, which, unlike the fake, is so far not available online.) This operation contributes to repressive measures even against political, let alone material, support for the Palestinians in several European nations and in the United States. Criticism of Israel is criminalized as antisemitism. Israeli agents in these countries provide target intelligence—most probably collected by the Israeli intelligence—to police, employers, and universities, which promptly move to intimidate, arrest, deport, sack, and expel the critics. While Israel undermines fundamental freedoms of speech and assembly in most Western countries, it nonetheless is losing the battle for public opinion.
Facing growing public disaffection in Europe and in the United States, Netanyahu promises to turn Israel into a “super-Sparta”—a heavily militarized, self-sufficient society capable of standing alone amid growing international isolation. Israeli politicians and military experts have long concluded that the official definition of Israel as a “Jewish and democratic state” is rent with tension between the two. Liberal democratic values —ostensibly valued by Western democracies—have to yield to Jewish supremacy. Consequently, peace is no more than a temporary policy option for Israel. To paraphrase von Clausewitz, politics is the continuation of war by other means.
States are inanimate but are operated by individuals. While the psychological and political range among the Israelis is broad, the film NAZA illustrates the striking success of breeding the New Hebrew Man liberated from the moral constraints of Jewish tradition and humanity tout court.
One of Francisco Goya’s famous works is titled “El sueño de la razón produce monstruos.” It is usually understood as “when reason falls asleep, monsters appear.” But the Spanish sueño also means “dream” or “fantasy.” The Zionist state embodies the phrase “Wenn ihr wollt, ist es kein Märchen” (“When you will it, it is no fairy tale”), written by Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, over a century ago. (It bears a striking resemblance to the title of the Nazi cinematographic masterpiece Triumph des Willens, or The Triumph of the Will.) The project that appeared like a fantasy and a fairy tale came true by rational use of political, financial, and human resources. Israel’s actions show that instrumental rationality—a characteristic trait of modernity—can also produce monsters. Moreover, such monsters are convinced that they are normal, and so are most Israelis around them. This makes Israel a serious danger to the region, to the world and, of course, to itself.
Juan Cole’s Informed Comment delivers independent, expert analysis of war, the Middle East, climate change, and U.S. foreign policy. Help sustain this work
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