Two Israelis made a film about how the army decided whom to kill. It won at Venice. The film leaves things out, as did almost everyone who attacked it.
It does not take a genius to discern that the death toll in gaza is an extreme underestimate. A significant number of people have also been horrifically maimed by israel's bombing.
When other countries including proto country Gaza are held to the SAME standards I’ll bite. I hate the qualifiers Israel isn’t perfect there are bad soldiers big fat DUH. For every Israeli that says something dark- how many Gazans have much darker things to say and did before the war. It’s only dark when an Israeli says it because it’s not justified.
There’s bait here. The more Israel defends herself to a standard only applies to her the worse not the better not the more transparent she looks. Good people don’t want to reckon with this. They are as jabotinsky warned against pulling their pockets out at the wrong time for the wrong audience to show they didn’t steal anything.
"Most of the online response spent its energy on the fact that NAZA sounds like a mashup of Nazi and Gaza." This is in fact entirely appropriate because it highlights the fact that, as you yourself make crystal clear, the movie does not appeal to the viewers' brain - the allegations can be contradicted by information that is undisputed and on first principles, as you do - but to the audience's guts. It allows them to wallow in the delicious feeling of hatred while at the same time thinking that they are virtuous. This permission structure was made possible by 3 years of media coverage that only shows one side of the conflict, as you also point out.
Your desire to see the film's allegations disputed rationally are reminiscent to me of the medieval blood libels - which were also facilitated by Jewish converts -, which some apologists try to combat by pointing out that Jewish dietary laws prohibit the consumption of blood. The problem is that the implication of this defense is that if Jews loved boudin like the French do, then the notion that they consume Christian children's blood would all of a sudden become believable. However, since French people weren't accused of killing and consuming human blood, the blood libel requires something else: a predisposition to demonize the Jews - a predisposition that was built over centuries of Church propaganda. Likewise, I think it is naive to believe that the ability of today's film festival audiences to applaud such a movie for 25 minutes is simply due to a lack of rational explanations by Israel' apologists.
I don't think the blood libel comparison holds. No Jew was ever caught doing what the libel accused them of. The NAZA threshold is real. The NYT confirmed it independently. The army doesn't deny raising it. The dispute was never whether it happened. It's what it proves.
You're right that three years of one-sided coverage built the audience for this. I wrote a whole paragraph about that. But "the audience was primed" and "so the content doesn't matter" are different claims. The second one means nothing anyone says can ever move anything. That's not an argument in my books, and that is one of the reasons why we're losing imo.
The lowering of acceptable NAZA - let's call it נז״א - is real. I can be explained by the circumstances. Likewise, in medieval Jewish law, a Jewish life deserves more care than a Gentile life in some circumstances - regarding e.g. the efforts that are demanded of you to save a Jew vs a non-Jew on the Sabbath (and this is something the Jewish converts would have made sure to emphasize to the Christians). This, also, can be explained by the historical circumstances, if you are into apologetics. But then, these facts are used to reach far reaching and unwarranted extrapolations - that the lowering of acceptable נז״א means that the IDF targeted civilians, up to genocide, on the one hand, and that the different standard for saving a Gentile life in medieval Jewish law means that a Christian child can be killed and consumed by Jews, on the other. So while no two things are identical, I do believe the analogy totally works for our purposes. The extrapolations require a prior demonization of the subject of the libel.
That said, I actually agree with you that rational pushback is important. But I think the target should be those audiences that are swamped with one-sided information while originally being emotionally primed to empathize with Israel. I'm talking about Jewish audiences abroad, and particularly young Jewish audiences. But I do really think audiences like that in Venice cannot be convinced by rational arguments. They are acting as a cult and will only respond to reinforcements of their prejudices.
My question is whether Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor who say “all Israelis must see this film” are actually willing to engage Israelis who know something about the topic that isn’t just intended to bolster their ideological position and be challenged in Hebrew in front of Israelis about it. Do they have real courage or just the courage to speak to audiences who all agree with them and are both anti-Israel and anti-American. As an American I’m tired of Abraham making speeches denouncing the US support for Israel too which he did at the Oscars and now. He has no idea.
> There is a defense available here, and Israel’s supporters aren’t making it.
Going out and arguing with people who watch this film feels like going to a DSA convention to argue about rent control. There's no point, these people are not people willing to listen to reason. Find a different audience for those arguments, outside the niche of hyper leftist political film festival reviewers.
That is what happens after decades of absurd allegations. We stop listening to the absurd allegations even when there's a kernel of truth buried under the absurd blood libel and holocaust inversion. What is to be achieved by arguing with people whose minds were made up long before any consideration of silly things like "evidence" and "equal standards"?
It is a fine line to walk though. “Answering criticism” can also be a form of validating libels. When is it criticising and when is it libel? Because defending libels is simply turning out our pockets. And I understand how we are just sick of doing that because it makes no difference.
I get the exhaustion. I'm tired of this too. But the line here isn't that hard to find. The threshold exists, and the army itself confirms that raising it and then lowering it isn't libel. It's a policy. You can argue about what it proves. It's hard to argue that it didn't happen.
Calling it libel and refusing to engage is the easier move. It also means we never get to say the true thing, which is that the film overreaches and the mechanism it's describing isn't what it claims. Both are true.
The incapacity for self examination and the self destruction this produces is hardly the sole purview of this Israel regime. The US has become nearly satirical as exemplified by everything from Vietnam to 9/11 to Iran. It appears that one cannot be “great” and wrong.
And it is in this culture that the AI race is being run with those who warn about its destructive powers appearing to blame the machine instead of seeing it as the reflection of its creators, of a culture in which “winning” is rewarded no matter the manner in which one got there. AI is the child that its human parents are designing to become a psychopath.
That Netanyahu continues to hold the votes of a substantial proportion of the Israeli public is a testimonial to exactly this.
I agree with this assessment of Israel’s tendency not to defend itself in public discourse. I had never heard of CDE, and did not know that every army does it and the numbers represent a hierarchy of decision making. These are robust facts, and completely alter the meaning the filmmakers sought to apply, shamefully, to the IDF.
That non-combatant cut-off values aren’t unique is true but rather misses the point of the key allegation the film (and other sources) have made: that Israel routinely accepted a dozen or more civilian deaths in strikes on low level suspected militants (or even non-militants otherwise linked to Hamas), in strikes at night in their homes, far from actual combat. Such strikes were disproportionate to an egregious extent, and by every other Western military’s standard obvious war crimes. The US hat a NCV of 30 for *Osama bin Ladin*, and mostly values of 0 for strikes on low level militants. So yes, the concept is not the problem. But where Israel set the line how many, where and when it killed civilians this way very much was.
As for the deliberate destruction of homes, in many cases neither use of Hamas of some structures not tunnels are a reasonable explanation. Israel used private contractors and civilian construction equipment to systematically clear square kms of homes, often weeks after it took control of areas and without any ongoing threat. And regarding the allegation that a key motive for this was to make Gaza uninhabitable and usher in mass emigration, there are credible reports that Netanyahu himself said just that to his own cabinet: https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/pm-said-to-tell-mks-israel-destroying-homes-in-gaza-so-palestinians-have-nowhere-else-to-go-but-outside-the-strip/
If after three years you don't have anything more than rumors and allegations by people with ulterior motives, that's almost certainly because there's nothing there. If there was someone would have found something more than a rumor in three years of obsessive searching.
If the IDF routinely kills a dozen civilians for one hamas soldier, how is it that hamas itself is reporting casualty rates of only 2-3 civilians per soldier (based on its total count and the "martyr" stipends it bragged about for killed soldiers)? Why do you assume that hamas military infrastructure left behind after parts of gaza were evacuated was no longer a threat and could be decommissioned without damaging the homes it was built into?
Mmkay. The 3% statistic is the percent of casualties over the population. It isn't possible to know what percentage of those are combatants because this is urban warfare where even children are conscripted and combatants don't wear uniforms. But even if the number is 83% of 3% which is not what Hamas has said, but ok. Then you have about 2.5 % of the population as civilian casualties. Those numbers would be much higher if the bombing was indescriminate. THEY HAVE NO BOMB SHELTERS. And why is that? There are miles of tunnels. Why aren't the civilians allowed to shelter in the tunnels? Genocide with 2.5 % civilian casualties. Seems like bullshit. Hamas wanted this war and reveled in every child killed. Their leaders are on camera saying as much. How is Israel supposed to prevent civilian casualties and still fight this war? The answer, as always, is for Jews to lay down and die. No. Hamas attacked with Gazan civilians at their heels raping, pillaging, and killing lsraelis. Now they have war. It's a tale as old as time. It could have been written a thousand years ago or last week. There is nothing outrageous about this war except that Jews are defending ourselves and the world can't bear it.
Mmkay. The 3% statistic is the percent of casualties over the population. It isn't possible to know what percentage of thise are combatants because this is urban warfare where even children are conscripted and combatants don't wear uniforms. But even if the number is 83% of 3% which is not what Hamas has said, but ok. Then you have about 2.5 % of the population as civilian casualties. Those numbers would be much higher if the bombing was indescriminate. THEY HAVE NO BOMB SHELTERS. And why is that? There are miles of tunnels. Why aren't the civilians allowed to shelter in the tunnels? Genocide with 2.5 % civilian casualties. Seems like bullshit. Hamas wanted this war and teveked in every child killed. Their leaders are on camera saying as much. How is Israel supporting to prevent civilian casualties and still fight this war? The answer, as always, is for Jews to lay down and die. No. Hamas attacked with Gazan civilians at their herks raping, pillaging, and killing Israelis. Now they have war. It's a tale as old as time. It could have been written a thousand years ago or last week. There is nothing outrageous about this war except that Jews are defending ourselves and the world can't bear it.
The US also has an all volunteer army, isn't geographically adjacent to a territory that was actively engaged in armed combat against its citizens, and wasn't facing an enemy that deliberatively strove to sacrifice its civilian population for PR purposes. It was never going to have the same NCV. And for what it's worth, what good did the previous NCV do for Israel? And in any case, this whole conversation is so far from "genocide" to make that accusation ridiculous. Your TOI Israel also distorts the quote from Netanyahu.
Only won because it suited their narrative and they could promote it as “see, Israelis say so”. Chickens for KFC worse than kapos
Very good piece.
It does not take a genius to discern that the death toll in gaza is an extreme underestimate. A significant number of people have also been horrifically maimed by israel's bombing.
Millions of German and Japanese civilians were killed and “horrifically maimed” in World War 2. The Israelis were far more humane.
When other countries including proto country Gaza are held to the SAME standards I’ll bite. I hate the qualifiers Israel isn’t perfect there are bad soldiers big fat DUH. For every Israeli that says something dark- how many Gazans have much darker things to say and did before the war. It’s only dark when an Israeli says it because it’s not justified.
There’s bait here. The more Israel defends herself to a standard only applies to her the worse not the better not the more transparent she looks. Good people don’t want to reckon with this. They are as jabotinsky warned against pulling their pockets out at the wrong time for the wrong audience to show they didn’t steal anything.
" 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."
Israel should stop doing that. It's a cringe, and it's an implied insult to other Western armies.
Saying that the IDF tries to obey the laws of war as best it can is enough.
Most Americans understand that.
I feel trying to say this to other Israel-supporters is like talking to a brick wall.
Buddy, this is just BS. Nothing you have said has any value
"Most of the online response spent its energy on the fact that NAZA sounds like a mashup of Nazi and Gaza." This is in fact entirely appropriate because it highlights the fact that, as you yourself make crystal clear, the movie does not appeal to the viewers' brain - the allegations can be contradicted by information that is undisputed and on first principles, as you do - but to the audience's guts. It allows them to wallow in the delicious feeling of hatred while at the same time thinking that they are virtuous. This permission structure was made possible by 3 years of media coverage that only shows one side of the conflict, as you also point out.
Your desire to see the film's allegations disputed rationally are reminiscent to me of the medieval blood libels - which were also facilitated by Jewish converts -, which some apologists try to combat by pointing out that Jewish dietary laws prohibit the consumption of blood. The problem is that the implication of this defense is that if Jews loved boudin like the French do, then the notion that they consume Christian children's blood would all of a sudden become believable. However, since French people weren't accused of killing and consuming human blood, the blood libel requires something else: a predisposition to demonize the Jews - a predisposition that was built over centuries of Church propaganda. Likewise, I think it is naive to believe that the ability of today's film festival audiences to applaud such a movie for 25 minutes is simply due to a lack of rational explanations by Israel' apologists.
I don't think the blood libel comparison holds. No Jew was ever caught doing what the libel accused them of. The NAZA threshold is real. The NYT confirmed it independently. The army doesn't deny raising it. The dispute was never whether it happened. It's what it proves.
You're right that three years of one-sided coverage built the audience for this. I wrote a whole paragraph about that. But "the audience was primed" and "so the content doesn't matter" are different claims. The second one means nothing anyone says can ever move anything. That's not an argument in my books, and that is one of the reasons why we're losing imo.
The lowering of acceptable NAZA - let's call it נז״א - is real. I can be explained by the circumstances. Likewise, in medieval Jewish law, a Jewish life deserves more care than a Gentile life in some circumstances - regarding e.g. the efforts that are demanded of you to save a Jew vs a non-Jew on the Sabbath (and this is something the Jewish converts would have made sure to emphasize to the Christians). This, also, can be explained by the historical circumstances, if you are into apologetics. But then, these facts are used to reach far reaching and unwarranted extrapolations - that the lowering of acceptable נז״א means that the IDF targeted civilians, up to genocide, on the one hand, and that the different standard for saving a Gentile life in medieval Jewish law means that a Christian child can be killed and consumed by Jews, on the other. So while no two things are identical, I do believe the analogy totally works for our purposes. The extrapolations require a prior demonization of the subject of the libel.
That said, I actually agree with you that rational pushback is important. But I think the target should be those audiences that are swamped with one-sided information while originally being emotionally primed to empathize with Israel. I'm talking about Jewish audiences abroad, and particularly young Jewish audiences. But I do really think audiences like that in Venice cannot be convinced by rational arguments. They are acting as a cult and will only respond to reinforcements of their prejudices.
My question is whether Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor who say “all Israelis must see this film” are actually willing to engage Israelis who know something about the topic that isn’t just intended to bolster their ideological position and be challenged in Hebrew in front of Israelis about it. Do they have real courage or just the courage to speak to audiences who all agree with them and are both anti-Israel and anti-American. As an American I’m tired of Abraham making speeches denouncing the US support for Israel too which he did at the Oscars and now. He has no idea.
> There is a defense available here, and Israel’s supporters aren’t making it.
Going out and arguing with people who watch this film feels like going to a DSA convention to argue about rent control. There's no point, these people are not people willing to listen to reason. Find a different audience for those arguments, outside the niche of hyper leftist political film festival reviewers.
The biggest threat to your freedom is Chinese Qatari Russian influence… They turn regular people into morons
As the statement from the MD sadly demonstrates
That is what happens after decades of absurd allegations. We stop listening to the absurd allegations even when there's a kernel of truth buried under the absurd blood libel and holocaust inversion. What is to be achieved by arguing with people whose minds were made up long before any consideration of silly things like "evidence" and "equal standards"?
It is a fine line to walk though. “Answering criticism” can also be a form of validating libels. When is it criticising and when is it libel? Because defending libels is simply turning out our pockets. And I understand how we are just sick of doing that because it makes no difference.
I get the exhaustion. I'm tired of this too. But the line here isn't that hard to find. The threshold exists, and the army itself confirms that raising it and then lowering it isn't libel. It's a policy. You can argue about what it proves. It's hard to argue that it didn't happen.
Calling it libel and refusing to engage is the easier move. It also means we never get to say the true thing, which is that the film overreaches and the mechanism it's describing isn't what it claims. Both are true.
Agree💯
The incapacity for self examination and the self destruction this produces is hardly the sole purview of this Israel regime. The US has become nearly satirical as exemplified by everything from Vietnam to 9/11 to Iran. It appears that one cannot be “great” and wrong.
And it is in this culture that the AI race is being run with those who warn about its destructive powers appearing to blame the machine instead of seeing it as the reflection of its creators, of a culture in which “winning” is rewarded no matter the manner in which one got there. AI is the child that its human parents are designing to become a psychopath.
That Netanyahu continues to hold the votes of a substantial proportion of the Israeli public is a testimonial to exactly this.
I agree with this assessment of Israel’s tendency not to defend itself in public discourse. I had never heard of CDE, and did not know that every army does it and the numbers represent a hierarchy of decision making. These are robust facts, and completely alter the meaning the filmmakers sought to apply, shamefully, to the IDF.
Nothing new about Jews by birth allying with our enemies to persecute us.
That non-combatant cut-off values aren’t unique is true but rather misses the point of the key allegation the film (and other sources) have made: that Israel routinely accepted a dozen or more civilian deaths in strikes on low level suspected militants (or even non-militants otherwise linked to Hamas), in strikes at night in their homes, far from actual combat. Such strikes were disproportionate to an egregious extent, and by every other Western military’s standard obvious war crimes. The US hat a NCV of 30 for *Osama bin Ladin*, and mostly values of 0 for strikes on low level militants. So yes, the concept is not the problem. But where Israel set the line how many, where and when it killed civilians this way very much was.
As for the deliberate destruction of homes, in many cases neither use of Hamas of some structures not tunnels are a reasonable explanation. Israel used private contractors and civilian construction equipment to systematically clear square kms of homes, often weeks after it took control of areas and without any ongoing threat. And regarding the allegation that a key motive for this was to make Gaza uninhabitable and usher in mass emigration, there are credible reports that Netanyahu himself said just that to his own cabinet: https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/pm-said-to-tell-mks-israel-destroying-homes-in-gaza-so-palestinians-have-nowhere-else-to-go-but-outside-the-strip/
If after three years you don't have anything more than rumors and allegations by people with ulterior motives, that's almost certainly because there's nothing there. If there was someone would have found something more than a rumor in three years of obsessive searching.
If the IDF routinely kills a dozen civilians for one hamas soldier, how is it that hamas itself is reporting casualty rates of only 2-3 civilians per soldier (based on its total count and the "martyr" stipends it bragged about for killed soldiers)? Why do you assume that hamas military infrastructure left behind after parts of gaza were evacuated was no longer a threat and could be decommissioned without damaging the homes it was built into?
If this is true, then how did they keep the civilian casulties at 3% while demolishing Gaza?
The IDF is the most humane military in the world.
The IDF’s own leaked stats demonstrated the civilian casualty rate was 83% not 3%. Whoops!
Mmkay. The 3% statistic is the percent of casualties over the population. It isn't possible to know what percentage of those are combatants because this is urban warfare where even children are conscripted and combatants don't wear uniforms. But even if the number is 83% of 3% which is not what Hamas has said, but ok. Then you have about 2.5 % of the population as civilian casualties. Those numbers would be much higher if the bombing was indescriminate. THEY HAVE NO BOMB SHELTERS. And why is that? There are miles of tunnels. Why aren't the civilians allowed to shelter in the tunnels? Genocide with 2.5 % civilian casualties. Seems like bullshit. Hamas wanted this war and reveled in every child killed. Their leaders are on camera saying as much. How is Israel supposed to prevent civilian casualties and still fight this war? The answer, as always, is for Jews to lay down and die. No. Hamas attacked with Gazan civilians at their heels raping, pillaging, and killing lsraelis. Now they have war. It's a tale as old as time. It could have been written a thousand years ago or last week. There is nothing outrageous about this war except that Jews are defending ourselves and the world can't bear it.
Mmkay. The 3% statistic is the percent of casualties over the population. It isn't possible to know what percentage of thise are combatants because this is urban warfare where even children are conscripted and combatants don't wear uniforms. But even if the number is 83% of 3% which is not what Hamas has said, but ok. Then you have about 2.5 % of the population as civilian casualties. Those numbers would be much higher if the bombing was indescriminate. THEY HAVE NO BOMB SHELTERS. And why is that? There are miles of tunnels. Why aren't the civilians allowed to shelter in the tunnels? Genocide with 2.5 % civilian casualties. Seems like bullshit. Hamas wanted this war and teveked in every child killed. Their leaders are on camera saying as much. How is Israel supporting to prevent civilian casualties and still fight this war? The answer, as always, is for Jews to lay down and die. No. Hamas attacked with Gazan civilians at their herks raping, pillaging, and killing Israelis. Now they have war. It's a tale as old as time. It could have been written a thousand years ago or last week. There is nothing outrageous about this war except that Jews are defending ourselves and the world can't bear it.
The US also has an all volunteer army, isn't geographically adjacent to a territory that was actively engaged in armed combat against its citizens, and wasn't facing an enemy that deliberatively strove to sacrifice its civilian population for PR purposes. It was never going to have the same NCV. And for what it's worth, what good did the previous NCV do for Israel? And in any case, this whole conversation is so far from "genocide" to make that accusation ridiculous. Your TOI Israel also distorts the quote from Netanyahu.