Joey Magidson
Regardless of your thoughts about the war in Gaza, it should be unrcontionable for civilians to be murdered. Whether it’s soldiers or terrorists, it’s just plain wrong to target innocents. That should be a common sense take, if not a particularly nuanced one. Of course, this particular war has become such a wedge issue and political football that any sense of nuance has long been lost. It’s not important to know where I stand on that issue, since we’re not reviewing the conflict, but rather the documentary NAZA, currently playing at the New York Film Festival. The doc is a chilling account of murder, done through some incredible investigative journalism during wartime.
NAZA, which means collateral damage in Hebrew, is meant to be upsetting. Even if you’re a staunch supporter of Israel, there’s almost no way you can rationalize what you see here. If the war is about preventing another October 7th attack, how is killing innocents going to achieve that goal? The indignation over how what went from a sovereign nation protecting itself in the way of a terrorist attack to something more than one humanitarian organization calls a genocide looms large over the entire film.
Shot between 2023 and 2025, the documentary is almost entirely takes place on the rooftops of Tel Aviv during the nighttime. There, two dozen Israeli intelligence officers and soldiers, with distorted voices and shot in darkness, describe the mass killing of Palestinian civilians during the war in Gaza. The members of Israel’s armed forces detail how an AI based targeting system, as well as a military protocol known as NAZA is used to quantify or the expected civilian casualties relative to a military target. Essentially, the system allows the Israeli forces to justify killing an entire Palestinian family in order to take out one targeted individual.
Interspersed with the interviews are repeated shots of Tel Aviv at night, looking peaceful and quiet. Those static moments combine with the almost detached way the soldiers detail these killings to take your breath away. How could human beings do this to one another?
Filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor capture these young men detailing how Artificial Intelligence has helped to depersonalize war. By having a computer make the calculations and justify the collateral damage, it’s more like a video game than a murder. The fact that Abraham and Szor found these soldiers and got them to talk is astounding. Some of the things they say? Chilling. Though, at other times, there’s reflection, as at least one wonders if what they’re currently doing makes them no better than the Nazi soldiers who exterminated Jewish men, women, and children, before just going home to their families like they had punched a clock at an office.
NAZA is a chilling watch, one that some will find too hard to sit through. Sobering as the movie is, it also feels essential. Whether at NYFF, in general release, or when it’s made free on the internet to watch, it demands to be seen. No matter where you fall on the political spectrum or the war, watching this account of a state of the art killing machine being deployed, seemingly with little regard, if any, for collateral damage, should feel like a bridge too far. If it’s not, then perhaps we’re already lost as a people.
SCORE: ★★★1/2
Shame you didn’t explain why you gave this film the rating you did. Sounds 5 star. For me the objectionable aspect of the film (and I am Pro-Palestinian for those who think anyone criticising Naza must be a Zionist) is its total lack of verifiability. We only know they are Israeli soldiers because we are told this is the case (they could be actors), there’s no dates, no footage, no insider knowledge, no images of the actual drone strikes; in fact there is less here than any of us around the world (I am in London, UK) have seen on TV. The interviewer doesn’t even ask about the bombing of hospitals. Remember those? Nor in this film – which is like a sleek Hollywood C-movie, is any of this information put to the IDF generals or politicians. As for Palestinian voices – they are dumb. Basically this is a propaganda film rather than journalism, taking about how modern warfare works [ pick any conflict you like] with one soldier admitting that sometimes it’s actually quite fun playing computer games and killing. Well we all know the mentality of the average soldier in the 21st century – in fact those old enough, know the mentality of the 20th century. It has been always thus; otherwise no one would do the job. I would have thought Americans with their love of veterans would know this too well. After all the US murdered a group of schoolchildren in Iran.
Our reviews are out of four stars, not five.