Naza: Rage Against the Machine of Death

I’ve just seen the Israeli film, Naza נז”א . I’ve seen all the blurbs and reviews talking about how disturbing and powerful the film is.  But my primary emotion was rage.  As I listened to these 24 IDF intelligence officers–most serving in the elite Unit 8200–describe their ever more efficient means to exterminate Palestinians, I felt real hate for them. Not just for them, but the entire nation which produced them.  They are evil. Their leaders are evil. The country they serve is evil. They are not defending the nation. They are systematically eradicating another nation.

As for the lie proffered by Pres. Herzog and countless generals and politicians, that there are no innocents in Palestine; and that it is therefore permissible to murder everyone: all I can say is they are killing babies, toddlers, children.  In their beds, at the dinner table, while watching TV. When did the art of war come to murdering people for no other reason than an algorithm told you it was their day to die?  When did real war, when real human beings are killed, become a video game?

There are many confirmations from the film’s interviewees regarding genocide methods used by the IDF which Israel had hitherto denied.  That is one of Naza’s most useful features. Among them is the assertion that the war on Gaza was never about defending the homeland or freeing the hostages.  After all, Hamas offered to free all the hostages a month after 10/7.  This is one lie among many Netanyahu offered to cover up his real intent: to eradicate every vestige of Palestinians and Palestine.

As an aside regarding Israel’s aerial defenses, the claim that Iron Dome is a defensive weapon is false.  There are no distinctions between defensive and offensive weapons. This weapon directly enabled the genocide.  Because Israel paid a small price after 10/7 regarding damage and injury from Hamas missiles (thanks to Iron Dome, among others), the IDF could pursue its genocidal operations without hindrance.  If the price was higher, much higher, Israel would have faced constraints it never did.  Allies like the US might have been more vocal in their opposition.

Returning to the film, an interviewee gets a slight tremor in his voice as he describes a 12 year-old girl who has texted her mother that Daddy is coming home.  Listening to her on the phone, he hears the excitement in her voice.  And then proceeds to give the coordinates for eliminating the entire family. The surveillance app used to perform this ghoulish task: “Where’s Daddy?”  How can this make you feel anything but rage?

For most of the subjects, there is no remorse.  In fact, a speaker says that he was part of a system; and that if he didn’t play his proper role–if he objected or resisted–that the system would break down.  We viewers say to ourselves: that’s right! If one person stood up and said No, then the system would be weakened, if not destroyed.  Yet, not one of these officers did that.  Because the system was so strong, the indoctrination so thorough.  There was no possibility anyone would violate the code, the consensus.

Another horrible confession: an IDF intelligence officer describes hearing through a victim’s cell phone, the screams of survivors of a bombing he facilitated.

One subject calls the IDF killing fields a “factory,” whose machinery was the algorithm and AI which determined human targets, apartment blocks and entire neighborhoods.  This was no longer the piecemeal efforts of past Israeli wars in Gaza.  It was total war.  Not really war since Hamas’ resistance had been exhausted.  This is killing for killings sake. A paroxysm of bloodlust.

The Holocaust and Gaza: industrial murder

Just as the Nazis developed modern industrial methods to exterminate the Jews, so Israel devised its own methods of automated mass murder, to systematically eliminate Gazans–and Gaza itself. The algorithm isn’t always accurate. In fact, one soldier said that his unit permitted a 15% error rate.  That was the percentage of attacks which murdered innocent victims who were not intended to die.  But who knows if that figure is accurate, and how he could discover every victim he killed who was an innocent civilian. In other words, these systems fail and sometimes fail horrifically.

In that regard, Abraham asks how they vetted targets. Whether there was any human oversight.  The answer not only was NO. But the subject says he was told that turning the process over to human beings would introduce errors, which the supposedly efficient technology would avoid.  Better to permit machines to find victims than humans.  Machines are smarter than humans. They know best.  This logic will take you places you never want to go.

The film title is based on a Hebrew acronym for “collateral damage.” As if this wasn’t horrible enough, the interviewees repeatedly speak of “Naza” as a person. Not 10 people killed or 20 Palestinians killed, But 20 Naza.  The dead are not people. They are collateral.  Devoid of humanity. This enables the soldiers to kill them more easily, with a clearer–or no–conscience.  This entire system is fucked.  It is evil.  It is irredeemable. That goes for Israel too.  It has become a state based on mass murder and vengeance.  It is not a country in any normal sense. It is a nuclear-armed mafia clan.

Smearing the ICC

One intelligence operative worked for the prime minister. He was tasked with sabotaging the ICC case against Israel.  To do so, he spied on Palestinian petitioners to the Court.  He sought any damaging private information he could find including those having extramarital affairs, homosexual liaisons, etc.  He admits that there were individuals so compromised that they were forced to withdraw from the case.  He says that Netanyahu saw the ICC and human rights NGOs as no less a national security threat than Hamas.

For those who suspected that the sexual abuse case brought against Karim Khan was engineered by Israeli intelligence: there can be no doubt, based on this account, that it’s true. I’m not saying the events of which he’s accused didn’t happen. After all, a good intelligence agent tries not to invent a scandal out of whole cloth. It is much easier to detect and debunk such an effort. Rather, it’s more effective to discover a single true, but damaging accusation and amplify and embellish it.  I have little doubt that either the Israelis or agents acting on their behalf did precisely that in this case.  Once they knew of the alleged victim’s situation, they likely cultivated and encouraged her to bring charges. Or they used internal assets to lobby for an investigation.  Khan may or may not have been innocent.  But Israel made certain it got maximum mileage in destroying him and discrediting the ICC.  It was a twofer.

Now that Trump has all but designated the ICC a terrorist entity, the Court has been further enfeebled.  It likely cannot recover in its current iteration, which suits Israel quite well.  As the prime minister’s official states: the goal was to remove any entity that stood in the way of Israel’s operations in Gaza.

Another issue confirmed by one of the interviewees concerns the food distribution points run by an outfit with the obscene name: the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.  Hundreds (perhaps thousands) of Palestinians were murdered as they swarmed its sites desperately seeking food for their starving families.  The IDF denied any role in these killings. Yet the soldier in Naza admits watching via drone cameras, as the Palestinians were shot by snipers.  He even said the bodies piled up as they toppled on one another.  The reason they were killed?  Because they sought to detour from the established route in order to reach the food more quickly. If they weren’t killed by the IDF, they were murdered by the Foundation’s security force tasked with maintaining order and safety.  But there was no safety for the starving dead.

Another one of the 24 interview subjects describes the “fun” his work was. The adrenaline that coursed through his veins as he played what he described as a video game.  It’s almost impossible to describe the revulsion I had: for him. For all of them.

Naza: city of life and city of death

The mundane events of daily life: precisely what these same Tel Aviv residents have denied Gazans. Some who have seen Naza, note that the city of Tel Aviv is a character in the film.  The camera repetedly pans slowly over the beaches, streets and high-rise apartments.  As an interviewee describes how IDF intelligence tracked targets by their building, their floor and their unit, it pans upward at a Tel Aviv apartment building construction site. Each floor is numbered, just as the death algorithm records the precise location of the intended victim.

As if to say, these Israelis are doing precisely the same things in their apartments as the Gazans are doing in theirs as they are killed by Tel Aviv’s sons and daughters. The camera sweeps past windows lingering slowly on Israelis at dinner, watching television, doing workouts.  The rooms are filled with the detritus of everyday life: flowers, TV sets, toys. It watches from the outside as a distant observer, documenting and juxtaposing the ease of Tel Aviv and the horror of Gaza, happening only 30 miles from their home.

It is, as Hannah Arendt wrote about Adolf Eichmann, the banality of evil.  Israel has turned genocide into a video game. It permits Israelis to lounge on a sofa watching TV while a holocaust rages only 30 miles from their home. The machine of death creates AI systems with names like Lavender; and most horrifically, Where’s Daddy?

But it isn’t Tel Aviv that is the character in Naza, but Israel itself.  An entire state is devoid of conscience; remorseless, yet oblivious.  One interviewee tells Abraham that as a youth he visited Auschwitz, asking himself: how could the Germans do this?  How could they engage in such horror without any sense of remorse or conscience. He responds to his own question saying: now he knows how it’s possible.  He’s been to Gaza. He’s seen it and done the same as the Nazis.

Another describes a day of work executing Gazans, and then going out after work to enjoy a night with his pals.

The world must wipe away Tel Aviv’s normality.  It must press the faces of these average Israelis in the excrement they have made. It must make them hurt; make them suffer. It could never cause enough to match the suffering they have inflicted on Gaza.  But because of the comfort and ease in which Israelis live, being deprived of that will have almost as much impact.

Abraham asks probing, disturbing questions of his subjects.  Some of them face them in momentary silence, as if contemplating something unpleasant.  When they do admit to performing an act which they know should disturb the average person, they do so in monosyllables, as if saying too much about it might elicit pangs of guilt.

Some personal thoughts: I can remember a time years ago when I was very careful how I portrayed Israel.  I knew there were Zionist apologists waiting to pounce on every word I wrote.  I pulled my punches. I offered the benefit of the doubt, when it wasn’t deserved. I warned not to blame all Israelis for the crimes of the few “bad apples.”  That the settlers were an “aberration.”  I was so naive.

But over the years, as Israel has sunk ever deeper in depravity, I no longer feel such compunction and have not for a long time.  There is no longer any doubt.  It deserves no consideration.  Instead, it deserves denunciation.  I would even say–in rejecting that gotcha question popular with Zionists–Israel has no right to exist.  What nation guilty of 75 years of genocide, apartheid and ethnic cleansing deserves to exist?  What nation founded on ethno-supremacy and racial purity deserves to exist?  Did the Pol Pot regime deserve to exist? Did Nazi Germany deserve to exist? No, which is why it was destroyed and replaced by a western democracy.  If only the world had the determination which the Allies showed in creating a new German state out of Hitler’s ashes.  It would transform Israel from a criminal terrorist state into a democratic state for all its citizens.