A new documentary has drawn fury from Netanyahu but, with his political future on the line, a measured response would have been smarter
“I look through my binoculars,” said the Israeli officer, “and I see children.” The soldier was Eli Geva, then the youngest colonel and the most accomplished tank commander in the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). The view that appalled him was of some of the youngest inhabitants of Beirut, a city which he had just been ordered to assault.
Rather than lead the offensive against Lebanon’s capital and endanger its children, Geva took a decision in July 1982 that no Israeli officer on the eve of battle had ever taken before. He resigned his command in protest.
Now, there are more Eli Gevas in Israel – not resigning or declining to obey, but sharing the former colonel’s moral anguish by speaking out and describing in agonising detail exactly how they waged war in Gaza after the Hamas atrocity of Oct 7, 2023.
A new documentary called NAZA contains the calm, searing and deeply informed testimony of 24 Israeli intelligence officers and soldiers. Each of these anonymous interviewees – and particularly the film’s Israeli directors, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor – must have known that they were bound to trigger an avalanche of protest in their homeland.
For the question of morality is deeply ingrained in Israel’s sense of self. The only democracy in the region, it extends rights to Arab citizens that they would not enjoy if they lived in neighbouring Arab countries. Its army is, by repeated proclamation, “the most moral in the world”.
So Abraham and Szor would not have been surprised when, even before their documentary’s general release last Friday, Benjamin Netanyahu denounced a “false” and “misleading” film and ordered the Shin Bet – Israel’s version of MI5 – to track down the whistle-blowers.
And the film-makers will surely have realised that NAZA’s appearance just days before Israel’s knife-edge election next week, with Netanyahu’s political future hanging in the balance, would only make the controversy yet more intense.
After 19 years in power, making him the longest-serving prime minister in his country’s history, Netanyahu the political magician is fighting tooth and claw for survival against a rival – former army chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot – who is running as the plain-spoken anti-Bibi.
Eisenkot’s party name, Yashar, even means “Honest”, and he is narrowly projected to win the most seats after next week’s poll. Whether he becomes Israel’s next prime minister will depend on the country’s complicated coalition maths. It is even possible that a grand coalition could see the two men work together (despite campaign promises not to). But for now they are bitter rivals and differ on almost everything.
Except NAZA. Netanyahu is already presenting the film as yet more evidence of how Israel’s reputation is under the kind of relentless attack that only he can be trusted to defend the country against. Eisenkot, whose own son Gal Eisenkot was killed in a booby-trapped tunnel in northern Gaza in December 2023, has also condemned it, calling the film a moral stain on Israel’s soldiers. And the same is true almost across the political board.
This reaction, and how it differs from 1982, is telling. For anyone who watches this careful and measured production and considers the first-hand evidence it presents might gain two impressions. First, although the reality of an all-consuming election campaign probably made a splenetic reaction inevitable, the Israeli government’s furious response is unjustified and misguided. And second, NAZA achieves wider significance because it paints a picture of how warfare is being transformed not just in Israel and Gaza but everywhere.
The killing machine
The interviewees describe how technology has enabled a peculiarly clinical method for identifying, tracking and then killing human beings – in their homes, in the streets or just about anywhere else – since this system has come close to abolishing hiding places, at least above ground.
In Gaza, the process depends on the constant mass surveillance of just about all of the territory’s two million people. Israel monitors their conversations, follows their movements and assigns a serial number to every house, flat or dwelling of any kind, transforming Gaza into something approximating to a giant panopticon. Just about every square inch can be made visible, except within the network of tunnels.
That relies on universally owned smartphones, which are hijacked and turned into tracking and eavesdropping devices, and AI, which can analyse and make sense of the colossal haul of data produced by all of the above.
One officer in the documentary describes how Israel uses an AI tool called Lavender to identify the Hamas terrorists in Gaza – effectively the same as marking those individuals for death – based on indicators like whom they talk to, where they live and what their movements are.
We learn that Lavender has singled out between 60,000 and 70,000 of Gaza’s inhabitants with a supposed accuracy rate of 85 per cent.
Such targeting raises the vital question that gives the film its title. How many innocent bystanders – men, women and children – are you prepared to kill in order to eliminate a single Hamas terrorist? “Naza” is the Israeli military jargon for an acceptable number of civilian deaths, based on the Hebrew phrase Nezek agavi, or “collateral damage”.
One interviewee claims that during the Gaza war the naza for killing one Hamas operative, however junior, was 20. For more senior figures, the naza figure rose to the hundreds. For one approved strike, it was supposedly 500.
The documentary draws the mathematical conclusion: if you have 60,000 or 70,000 targets and you are prepared to kill 20 other people to eliminate each, the total death toll would approach the population of Gaza. The IDF has responded that strikes risking collateral damage were never granted automatic authorisation but rather were passed up the chain of command.
With their faces deliberately shrouded in darkness and the brightly lit skyline of Tel Aviv spread out behind them, the subjects describe a lethal system that is at once detached and intimate.
Detached because those identifying the targets and recommending the strikes are sitting in a clean and safe headquarters, miles from the rubble and squalor of Gaza.
Yet still intimate because smartphone-enabled surveillance brings Israeli operatives into proximity with those who are – or will be – on the receiving end of bombs and missiles. Eli Geva had to look through his binoculars to see distant children in Beirut. His successors, by contrast, might listen to individual voices inside the very home in Gaza they are marking for destruction. Sometimes, they can even hear the piteous aftermath.
“I heard him trying to pull them from beneath the rubble,” said one interviewee, describing how a target had survived the strike and then fought to rescue his children. They were “not just crying – screaming,” he added.
The director, Yuval Abraham, asks another officer: “How could you bomb when you heard a baby crying inside?”
“The general atmosphere is hatred,” comes the reply. “You understand that the goal is to destroy.”
Flaws
In the aftermath of Oct 7 – the largest mass murder of Jews on a single day since the Holocaust – the documentary paints a picture of how Israel’s imperative to destroy Hamas took precedence over everything else.
But the film does not lead the audience towards easy conclusions. In fact, before reaching any, it’s worth reflecting that any country that might wage AI-enabled warfare in the future – and that certainly includes Britain – will use some variant of the system that Israel has constructed in Gaza.
And, put delicately, not every country in the Middle East has a concept of naza or any intention of even considering the possible civilian toll from a military operation. Iran’s leaders had no such thoughts when they killed tens of thousands of their own people while suppressing mass protests against the regime in January, before the outbreak of the current war.
Bashar al-Assad, the former Syrian dictator, never cared in the slightest about civilian suffering when he was pounding, starving and besieging one city after another during that country’s civil war.
Critics will doubtless seize upon the documentary’s flaws. All the interviewees are anonymous, which you might say makes them inherently unreliable, except that intelligence officers and soldiers could hardly have spoken openly about such sensitive matters. No documentary evidence is presented to support their testimony but, on the other hand, the directors cannot be blamed for failing to lay their hands on secret paperwork. Had they done so, this would surely have been added to the charge sheet against them.
More serious is a lack of precision about some of the most disturbing claims. When exactly was the naza for even the lowliest Hamas operative set at 20? Did that apply throughout the Gaza war, or for a specific period? If the latter, what period? The strike that carried a naza of 500 is described as “approved”, which is not the same as saying that it happened. Did it happen?
There was an alternative to politicians so uniformly heaping vitriol on the film and its directors. A wiser Israeli leadership, not facing a fraught and imminent election, might have challenged their country’s overseas critics to reflect on a series of questions.
Where else in the Middle East could such a documentary be made? Is there any other country in the region where soldiers and intelligence officers could meet an independent journalist and describe how they have fought a war?
Does the appearance of NAZA not serve as proof that Israel retains the characteristics of a free and plural society?
Ironically, the radical Israeli Left from which directors Abraham and Szor hail is one of the most stable, if small, ideological constituencies in this changing landscape. This ecosystem includes activist groups such as B’TSelem, a joint Jewish-Arab organisation that attempts to document Israeli abuses in the West Bank and Gaza and last year formally declared the war a “genocide”.
Breaking The Silence, a group that encourages former and serving IDF soldiers to expose alleged war crimes in the Occupied Territories, is another cornerstone of this movement. So are the growing networks of “protective presence” Israeli activists who roam the West Bank, trying to deter and record settler violence against Palestinians.
Haaretz, the Hebrew and English-language liberal-Left broadsheet, is their newspaper of choice.
Many would describe themselves as Zionists, intent on placing Israel on what they would see as a better path. They have traditionally had a place in Israeli society and continue to do so for now.
Them against us
The biggest change is arguably the weakening of Israel’s mainstream political centre and centre-Left. When much of the outside world is ferociously criticising your country, that naturally creates a sense of “them against us” which Netanyahu and his allies enthusiastically embrace.
As he fights for political survival in the coming election, Netanyahu excels at presenting Israel – not without justification – as under siege from the assaults of global anti-Semitism.
Just as he portrays himself as the ultimate guarantor of Israel’s physical security, he does the same as the defender of its moral reputation.
Whether Netanyahu is resisting Britain’s economic sanctions on West Bank settlements, the arrest warrant against him issued by the International Criminal Court, or this 77-minute documentary that very few people have yet seen, he is the man to fight for Israel’s honour.
Since the Second Palestinian Intifada, or uprising, of 2000 to 2004, Israeli public opinion has been moving steadily to the Right, accelerated by Oct 7 and by deeper factors too.
Netanyahu knows that the country’s demographic and social make-up – and consequently its electoral arithmetic – is changing fast. Of all the sectors of Israeli society, ultra-Orthodox Jews have by far the highest birth rate, meaning that their share of the total population has risen from below 10 per cent in the early 2000s to more than 14 per cent today.
It follows that the proportion of Israelis who view their primary identity as being citizens of a secular state and value diplomatic amity with the West is diminishing.
Those for whom Jewish religious identity is the overwhelming factor are, by contrast, gaining ascendency.
That electoral reality explains why Netanyahu increasingly responds to international criticism in terms that appeal to the latter group. When, for example, The New York Times alleged the sexual abuse of Palestinian prisoners in May, the prime minister denounced a “blood libel”. Many in Israel have used the same phrase about NAZA.
In these circumstances, as they scramble for votes in the election, even centre-Left politicians with serious military credibility shy away from nuanced criticism of the conduct of the war in Gaza.
Yair Golan, a Major General in the reserves and former deputy chief of staff of the IDF, now leads the Democrats, the successor to the Israeli Labour party. He has appeared several times to raise concerns about the treatment of Gazan civilians, only to backtrack or “clarify” his remarks later. The NAZA controversy is a case in point: Golan confined himself to criticising Netanyahu’s handling of the issue, not endorsing or rejecting the claims made in the film itself.
It was not always so. Back in 1982, two months after Eli Geva relinquished his tank command, a Lebanese Christian militia allied with Israel massacred between 800 and 3,500 Palestinians in Sabra and Chatila refugee camps in south Beirut.
Afterwards, 400,000 Israelis – about 10 per cent of the entire population at the time – massed in Tel Aviv under the banner of Peace Now to demonstrate their revulsion for what had happened to the Palestinians.
The government was forced to establish a Commission of Inquiry under Yitzhak Kahan, the president of the Supreme Court, which found that Ariel Sharon, the defence minister, and General Rafael Eitan, the chief of staff, bore “indirect responsibility” for the killings because they had sent the Lebanese militia into the camps knowing that this would probably result in the murder of innocent Palestinians.
The Commission demanded Sharon’s resignation – and they got it soon afterwards.
“The IDF should continue to foster the basic moral obligations that must be kept even in war conditions, without prejudicing the IDF’s combat ability,” wrote Kahan and his colleagues in the closing remarks of their report. “The end never justifies the means and basic ethical and human values must be maintained in the use of arms.”
A wise Israeli leadership would take these words to heart and temper their fury against NAZA.