Then, in the Sala Grande, the main screening hall of the Venice film festival within the Palazzo del Cinema, the audience stood almost as one and turned to applaud the film-makers for 25 minutes. The film the audience had watched for 80 harrowing minutes was the Gaza documentary NAZA, which has been produced by the Guardian. The film’s title comes from an Israeli military acronym used euphemistically to refer to the civilians expected to be killed in a military attack.
Unfolding against the background of Tel Aviv at night, the participants – intelligence officers and other soldiers – describe a series of systems, some powered by AI, that select the thousands who should die in strikes, often at night and surrounded by their families. Perhaps most challenging for Israel’s political elite is that it is a story told exclusively in Hebrew by 24 anonymised Israeli military insiders, many of them from elite units. The documentary depicts a wide variety of viewpoints that all lead to the same conclusion: participation in a programme of mass killing where there were few boundaries between combatant and civilian, in a war where more than 73,000 Palestinians have been killed.
Some describe being shamed by their experience. Others describe excitement, and a sense of “fun” as they justify their actions. It will open in US cinemas from 30 September, with international distribution plans to be announced shortly.
The ripples of ovation gathered in volume among the few who have seen the film before its New York premiere, but in Israel the film provoked a very different response. Rightwing political figures have rushed to accuse its directors – the Oscar-winning Israeli film-makers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor – of “treason”. The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has long harboured an antipathy to critical media, declared on Wednesday he would seek new laws to strip citizenship from people who he said “smear” Israeli soldiers.
Demonstrators and members of far-right groups went further still, calling for violence against the pair and the demolition of their homes. Outside Szor’s parents’ house in central Israel, protesters called for the “death penalty for traitors”. An editorial in the left-leaning newspaper Haaretz warned that their lives were credibly endangered.
Dozens of human rights and peace organisations in Israel rallied to defend the film-makers, as did international press freedom organisations. The whiplash ferocity of the response, even in the midst of a febrile election campaign where Israeli attitudes to the war in Gaza are a central issue, has surprised even those in the Israeli leftwing and human rights community who have long been on the receiving end of such denunciations. The pushback to the documentary is both a testament to its power and evidence of how the Israeli right is exploiting a film, as yet unseen by most, to craft its own version of what it says it represents.
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