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                    "The 80-minute documentary NAZA, directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, is chastening.\u00a0 It examines the conduct of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) during its ferocious, unremitting war in Gaza, drawing upon the interviews of 24 anonymised military and intelligence personnel.\u00a0 The interviews were filmed on Tel Aviv rooftops at night, with profiles and voices appropriately altered.\u00a0 The name of the documentary draws on a Hebrew acronym for nezek agavi or collateral damage, an obscene term used when counting the estimated number of civilians who will perish in a military strike.\u00a0 Last month, the film won the Special Jury Prize at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, receiving a standing ovation lasting 25 minutes.\nThe interviewees focus on the terrifyingly relevant role played by Artificial Intelligence (AI) targeting systems used in guiding the bombing campaign launched in response to the Hamas-led attacks of 7th October 2023.\u00a0 In Abraham\u2019s words, \u201cthe Israeli intelligence officers we spoke with talked to us about how this mass killing is systemic: not by accident, but by design, actions of murder and policies that are based on the total dehumanisation of Palestinians.\u201d\u00a0 \nOne of the interviewed subjects speaks of the goal being \u201cquantity, not quality.\u201d\u00a0 Another notes the conscious decision to target Hamas members, some even in the lower echelons, when they would be at home even if it meant killing family members and neighbours.\nIn one recalled instance, the phone of a 12-year-old girl was hacked to learn when her father would arrive home.\u00a0 The subsequent strike killed her. The cold logic is revealed in the rhetorical question posed by one of the interviewees: \u201cWhen people talk about \u2018flattening Gaza,\u2019 what do you mean if not executing people?\u2019\nDespite being placed in a \u201ctoo hot to handle\u201d category by prominent indie studios, the self-distributed documentary managed to pass the US$500,000 mark in the United States after two weeks of release.\u00a0 Eight days after premiering at New York\u2019s IFC Center, it went on to earn US$125,000.\u00a0 A further 85 theatres across 30 cities across North America then showed the film.\u00a0 Michelle Goldberg, writing in The New York Times, was impressed by the drawing power of the production when attending Walter Reade Theater for a screening.\u00a0 The venue, seating 268, was at capacity.\u00a0 \u201cThis is, in my experience, very unusual for documentaries of any sort, even those that, like \u2018NAZA,\u2019 win the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival.\u201d\n\nMilitaries specialise in euphemised killing. A dedicated process of terminology and assessment sanitises and exsanguinates: death and murder become justifiable, necessary measures against an enemy bloated with wickedness and venality.\u00a0 In that process, mock tributes are paid to the canon of international law, notably international humanitarian law and doctrines of targeting.\u00a0 The more honest generals do us a favour by boasting about high casualty figures and mass mortality: they are not hiding matters and lurking behind worn ceremonies and the emperor\u2019s non-existent clothes.\u00a0 Take the remarks of a former head of Israeli military intelligence made in a leaked audio: \u201cFor every one person [killed] on Oct. 7, 50 Palestinians must die.\u201d\u00a0 Those militaries with a heavily staffed legal department supposedly providing guidance in striking a target, largely to reassure the squeamish that they are not implicated in acts of murder, are always suspect.\u00a0 In that regard, the IDF provides a model example, always claiming to do things differently from other powers in the region, yet resorting to the selective language of exculpation.\nThe reception of the film in Israel has been markedly hysterical.\u00a0 This was to be expected: the film unmasks and discomfits.\u00a0 It demolishes shibboleths.\u00a0 The IDF chief of staff Eyal Zamir vowed to use \u201cevery tool at our disposal\u201d against the production.\u00a0 The Israeli Culture Minister Miki Zohar thought the film treasonous.\nAbraham and Szor were \u201cwilling to harm their homeland in order just to get applause from antisemites around the world\u201d.\u00a0 The irate minister was keen to \u201cact immediately to revoke the Israeli citizenship of these despicable creators for treason against the state,\u201d he thundered in a social media post.\u00a0 Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also called upon the passing of legislation stripping the duo of their citizenship, a curious point given the existing provisions of Israel\u2019s Citizenship Law. (Making German Jews stateless was a specialty of the Third Reich: that the Jewish state would consider this to its citizens is a distinct, bitter irony, yet sadly permissible in light of the Israeli Supreme Court ruling in 2022 validating revocation for acts done in \u201cbreach of loyalty to the State of Israel\u201d.)\n\nActivists and members of the far-right party Jewish Power (Otzma Yehudit) led by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir protested outside the parents of Szor\u2019s house, with a speaker calling for both directors to be executed and the homes of their families to be demolished (collective punishment remains a great inspiration for tribal sentiment).\nThe IDF has marshalled its own response in a document accusing the filmmakers of presenting \u201ca distorted, misleading and disingenuous picture of the IDF\u2019s target planning and striking process.\u201d The narrative of the documentary drew upon \u201csubstantial factual errors stemming from manipulative misrepresentations of reality.\u201d\u00a0 Worth noting here is the lower register of critique that does not entirely repudiate the targeting practices of the IDF, dressed up in the apologetics of collateral damage.\u00a0 Concessions and confessions are always evident from those in and of power who resort to such dismissive language as \u201cmisrepresentative\u201d and \u201cdisingenuous\u201d.\nBe that as it may, the agitated response is illuminating.\u00a0 The Lavender database, to take one objection, was apparently not one of targets, merely \u201ca database that assists intelligence analysts.\u201d\u00a0 This represents a distinction without a difference.\u00a0 The faith placed by militaries in the divinities of technology are hard to shake; there is nothing here to say that such analysts do not treat these data sets as unimpeachable.\u00a0 AI and religious deities serve to do the imagination for others; they discourage independent thinking and verification.\u00a0 Why bother when you have someone, or something else, doing it for you?\nThe response remains weak in claiming that the IDF believes itself \u201cbound by and committed to international humanitarian law, its operational procedures are designed to implement those legal obligations, and it operates dedicated units and mechanisms to mitigate civilian harm.\u201d\u00a0 The staggering death toll in Gaza, always sneered and jeered at by the Israeli authorities and their defenders, would suggest otherwise.\nNAZA serves to, as the Israeli American historian Omer Bartov points out, address a \u201cstate of denial\u201d by \u201cactually speaking about the issue of what happened in Gaza rather than refusing to speak about it.\u201d\nThe views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor."
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