It was 25 minutes of applause, something that even prime Netanyahu couldn’t achieve when addressing Republican members of Congress. That was the ovation filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor received after winning the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival on Saturday. Back in Israel, ministers and politicians on both sides issued sharp condemnations. Avigdor Liberman called them two Israel-haters selling out their country for a moment of glory at antisemitic festivals.
I have some thoughts. The first thing that came to mind was Nadav Lapid (no relation to Yair), who I posted about a few months back. Nadav Lapid is a leftist Israeli filmmaker; he made a film about Ahed Tamimi. Lapid was removed from the jury of a festival in Marseille for being Israeli.
Venice gave two Israelis a prize, so maybe the difference isn’t nationality; it was something else. It was that Lapid’s film didn’t serve the purpose leftist Israeli filmmakers are supposed to. His was a surrealist, wartime satirical drama entitled Yes! It was about a struggling jazz musician named Y. and his dancer wife, Yasmin, who abandon their artistic principles and sell out to the nation’s elite following the October 7 attacks by composing an ultra-nationalist anthem. It dealt with Israel’s right-wing nationalist trends in a satirical way, but it didn’t fully bolster the case of Israel’s detractors. There was no genocide verdict or confirmation of ethnic cleansing.
Nadav Lapid was dropped, and Yuval Abraham won the award. Yuval offered what the people wanted. His film, NAZA, offers real testimony from over two dozen Israelis about how the IDF changed its collateral damage protocol following October 7. I should say I haven’t seen it. It premiered in Venice on Thursday and opens in New York next month. When an Israeli is confessing to the crimes they are wanted for, nationality is not a problem. Notice where this appetite for a confession stops. No festival is touring testimonies from October 7. You’ll remember that TIFF pulled a film about a heroic October 7 rescue story, and only reinstated it after the outrage.
The unpleasant fact for supporters of Israel is that the film deals with a real issue: at the start of the war, the IDF increased the limit on the number of civilians it would allow to be killed before carrying out a strike, and decisions were made quickly. The officers describe a system that had civilian deaths already factored into its calculations.
But the film also makes more serious allegations. It accuses Israel of carrying out systematic home destruction to prevent the return of Palestinian residents, without weighing that Hamas spent years booby-trapping houses and building the tunnel network beneath them, which often made destroying them unavoidable. It also accuses Israel of deliberately targeting journalists and medics, another claim that is not established.
The arithmetic also has issues. Around 80 percent of the buildings in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed. The death toll, which includes Hamas fighters, is roughly 3 percent of the population. Those two numbers don’t sit together without the evacuation warnings. An army trying to kill the people inside those buildings would have brought them down on them.
On top of the allegations in the film, the Holocaust parallel the filmmakers themselves draw is just as disturbing. Several pro-Israel advocates have spoken about the letters NAZA, but that is a weak argument when there is a substantial one available.
Jonathan Glazer is the executive producer, and the filmmakers cite Glazer’s line about his award-winning film The Zone of Interest: “victims out of sight but never out of mind,” as shaping how they approached Israelis who did the killing. Zone of Interest was Glazer’s film that told the story of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, and life next to the death camp. Their own festival statement asks how one group of people allows the total dehumanization of another, and invokes their grandparents’ generation.
That Holocaust comparison always has an audience. The ultimate crime committed against Jews, reversed and handed back. Israelis who object are usually told the parallel is being forced on them by their enemies. In this case, two Israeli Jews built it in Israel, and the audience ate it up.
And there are also legitimate questions about the issue of collateral damage and why such a film is unique to Israel. Before a targeted strike, it is common practice for militaries to estimate how many civilians are likely to die. NATO countries call it a collateral damage estimate, or CDE, and every professional Western army does it. It’s important to be clear that the number attached to it isn’t permission to kill that number of people. It’s the ceiling on who can approve the strike. If under 20 civilians are at risk, a lower-level commander can sign off. When it’s greater than 20, it goes up the chain of command. The commander still has to weigh the expected harm against the target’s military value and take feasible steps to reduce it.
One of the most quoted moments in the film has an IDF soldier describing how Israel mapped Gaza before the war and knew who lived in which apartment. The film treats that as proof of intent. What’s the alternative? Should the IDF not map the area, not bother knowing who lives where, and bomb without checking who is inside? The knowledge is the precaution, and it’s being used as the charge.
This threshold, which was increased in response to October 7, was also lowered during the war. According to a New York Times investigation published in December 2024, the army halved it to 10 on November 5, 2023, and required special permission above that. By late January, permission was needed for nearly all such strikes. The film, not surprisingly, leaves that out. But it doesn’t restore the prewar standard either, when most strikes were approved only if no civilians were expected to die.
Two lines from the film have been widely quoted since the premiere. A soldier says the work was fun. Another says these are not human beings, they are NAZA. They are 2 men out of 24, and 24 out of an army of hundreds of thousands. The film doesn’t establish that they speak for anyone but themselves. It still lands. We tell the world our army is different, the most moral in the world, and that is not a claim you can make on paper.
This saga is an important reminder of a point I often make and something I realized after spending the year after October 7 between Israel and North America. From both places, I saw the two different publics and the alternate realities they’ve lived in since that day. For Israelis, almost three years of October 7 footage, funerals, hostage videos, and almost nothing of Gaza that wasn’t Hamas. Outside Israel, October 7 was a week, and then almost nonstop footage from Gaza.
Both audiences responded rationally to what they were shown, and both missed out on half. To me, this helps explain the reaction to the film, both the international praise and the Israeli condemnation.
Israelis see it as a betrayal because, to them, what happened in Gaza was a justified war on Hamas resulting from October 7, whereas for critics in the international community, October 7 was just an excuse Israel used to kill Palestinians.
There are many things this Netanyahu government has done that I cannot defend, but this film is different. There is a defense available here, and Israel’s supporters aren’t making it. Nothing is unique about NAZA, about CDE, or about proportionality, and a NATO member reacting to a similar threat likely would have behaved similarly.
Of course, Liberman didn’t dispute this, nor did he cite a threshold, a strike, a number, or explain himself. He called them a small and wretched minority looking for work as moral emissaries at antisemitic festivals. Culture Minister Miki Zohar said he would act immediately to revoke the citizenship of “these despicable creators” for treason, citing their “burning self-hatred.” Bennett, to his credit, at least made an argument: human shields, the warnings before strikes, the house-to-house fighting that cost Israeli soldiers their lives, the polio vaccination campaign. He asks what anyone else would do, and says a terrible war is not genocide. But he called the film a blood libel rather than answering what is in it, and he didn’t mention a threshold either. Most of the online response spent its energy on the fact that NAZA sounds like a mashup of Nazi and Gaza. I guess we’re in election season and anything goes. But this was a film built entirely on Israeli testimony, and the Israeli response was to litigate the Israelis who made it.
And yet that does not absolve those in Venice who applauded for 25 minutes without knowing what a CDE is. And nobody in Israel explained it, and that is our problem.
We have stopped answering criticism, we just deny it. We refuse to engage the merits of the case. If you call us out, you must hate us. If you’re one of us and call us out, you must hate yourself, like Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor.
Yet another colossal PR failure on Israel's part. Why am I not surprised.
Well done Eli