I watched the extraordinary new Guardian-produced documentary from Oscar-winning Israeli film-makers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor the other night, and I have struggled to stop thinking about it ever since. The film’s title comes from a Hebrew military term for collateral damage, and it consists of eye-opening interviews with two dozen Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers sitting in darkness, often on the rooftops of Tel Aviv, their voices “digitally altered to disguise their identities”.

At one point, Abraham asks one of the soldiers a remarkably blunt question.

“Do you think it’s a genocide?”

“Yes,” the soldier replies. “Completely.”

He points to what he describes as the “intentional” killing of Palestinian civilians, including children.

“We have to describe things as they really are.” That sentence could serve as the film’s subtitle. Because for the past three years, there have in effect been two wars over Gaza: the war itself, and the war over how we are allowed to describe it.

How much Israeli testimony describing the killing of children are we expected to ignore?

Has Israel been targeting civilian sites – or is Hamas simply using “human shields”?

Were Palestinian children knowingly killed – or is even making that claim anti-Jewish “blood libel”?

Were hungry Palestinians shot while seeking food – or was Hamas responsible for those killings?

Are many of the Palestinian dead really civilians – or are huge numbers of them “terrorists”?

Does the Israeli military’s conduct in Gaza invite comparisons to the Holocaust – or is making such a comparison itself evidence of antisemitism?

NAZA matters because, one after another, Israelis who actually participated in the surveillance and killing infrastructure of the Gaza war weigh in on these issues themselves. And what they say is pretty devastating.

I have spent the past few years debating some of Israel’s most committed defenders – on the live stages of Open to Debate in New York and the Munk Debates in Toronto, on cable news, and on Piers Morgan’s YouTube show.

I wish every one of them would sit down and watch all 80 minutes of NAZA. Not because the film contains another argument from me. Because it contains testimony from precisely........

© The Guardian