“NAZA” Puts Israel Face to Face with the War in Gaza

One source, speaking of the high NAZA numbers assigned to many low-level Hamas targets, concludes that “you end up with all of Gaza.” Even without adding the word “genocide,” the source’s implication is clear. Another source, describing one instance of “Where’s Daddy?” targeting, explains that, when a particular target happened to leave his phone at home when he went out, the missile launched at his apartment killed his family but not him. The mechanisms of surveillance are such that targeted killings are often audio-recorded and photographed. One interviewee says, “I’d hear the final moments of a person’s life,” and another recalls hearing family members screaming and crying after a child was killed. These acts, to the sources who describe them, are outrages, and in speaking of them, the sources also speak, implicitly or explicitly, of themselves: What kind of people could do this, and what kind of people are they for taking part?

“NAZA” is filmed in Tel Aviv, but the city is more than a setting; it’s one of the movie’s major subjects. The movie includes a montage of historical clips that tell a story of the city, beginning with a groundbreaking ceremony in the nineteen-twenties and going on to evoke the metropolis of the seventies. Throughout, Abraham and Szor show contemporary Tel Aviv by night, from the heights of rooftops, during wartime—a sumptuously modern city, bright with skyscrapers and street lights, and bold new construction, its roads ablaze with headlights and illuminated corporate logos. In what amounts to closeups of the nocturnal face of the city, the camera gazes at apartment windows, through which residents are seen eating, resting, walking, watching television—and some of what they watch on television is news, including Netanyahu and other officials giving speeches and interviews in ferocious defense of the war. In one TV program, the President of Israel says that, after the October 7th attacks, “it’s an entire nation out there that is responsible.”

Shortly after that remark is heard, the movie’s sources characterize the mind-set that this view has produced: “We need to erase Gaza”; “Whatever we do, they deserve it.” The military use of A.I. has pursued that aim, sources say, creating a “factory of targets” on a “mass scale.” Some of those targets are individuals; others are architectural. One source describes orders to destroy an entire neighborhood and, with pen and pad, diagrams for the filmmakers the selection and destruction of targets. Several sources produce sketches of this kind, and these onscreen artifacts, accompanying the interviewees’ descriptions, conjure powerful, albeit imagined, visions of war. The goal, as one person says of the plan to empty the north of Gaza and force all inhabitants to the south, is to “make sure they wouldn’t return.” Another, describing the destruction of houses, streets, and neighborhoods, and just about all of the residents’ possessions, concludes, “We erased history.” Someone else calls Gaza “a mass grave.”

At one point in “NAZA,” Abraham and Szor include a telling reference to a key artistic forebear: a shot of the Tel Aviv Cinematheque, with a marquee announcing a tribute to Claude Lanzmann, whose epochal 1985 film “Shoah” details the Holocaust by way of interviews—with survivors, historians, even perpetrators. “NAZA” does something similar, and it’s striking that its title is a Hebrew term as internationally unfamiliar as “Shoah” was at the time of that film’s release. Crucially, the two films share their makers’ sense of a documentary aesthetic as an ethical imperative. In both, the bearing of witness is not just a matter of delivering information; it’s dramatic action of great moral moment, and it demands from the filmmakers an artistic and conceptual engagement that goes beyond mere recording. Like Lanzmann, Abraham is often on camera with the film’s participants; like Lanzmann, Abraham and Szor rely on editing, connecting interviews with images of locations, to convey a sense of place. Unlike “Shoah,” “NAZA” is about ongoing events, and those events are happening, in a sense, right there, where the filming is happening; the film pointedly includes an image of the I.D.F. headquarters, in the center of Tel Aviv, and Gaza is only about forty miles away. The Tel Aviv evoked in “NAZA” is a city haunted by silences—by what’s not being said in daily life and mass media, and what the sources in the film are bringing to light.