Forgot Your Password?

New to The Nation? Subscribe

Print subscriber? Activate your online access

.nation-small__b{fill:#fff;}

A System of Destruction

Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’s NAZA.

The Clarion Call of “NAZA”

Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’s new film not only documents the horrors of the present but gives us a glimpse of a possible future too.

More than 74,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli troops in Gaza over the past three years. There are more than 20,000 children among the dead—an unfathomable number. We may never know exactly how many people were killed and how many died of secondary causes, such as sepsis or cancer. The environment, with packs of ranging dogs and the atomizing effects of kilotons of explosives, has done its part to efface those facts.

NAZA, a new documentary by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, works in a somewhat different direction. It seeks to document the particulars of what did take place, to preserve the truth through a series of interviews with two dozen perpetrators—primarily Israeli intelligence officers—on a rooftop in Tel Aviv. By focusing their interviews on these intelligence officers and data scientists, the men who built the air force’s targeting algorithms, Abraham and Szor anticipate and undermine any arguments that the atrocities committed in Gaza occurred on the ground and were strictly the result of targeting Hamas fighters. Instead, we learn that the massive death toll occurred through calculated and dispassionate appraisals of when it would be easiest to kill a particular Palestinian—usually when that person was at home with his family—and that all of the “collateral” deaths (tens or even hundreds of them, depending on the target) resulted from these deliberate policy decisions.

Early in NAZA, we see a view of the Israeli occupation of Gaza in the 1970s. We are treated to propaganda from another era, quaint depictions of a smiling, benevolent mid-career Israeli army officer describing his good works to the attentive and smiling Arabs, somehow in their fellahi garb—not an ahistorical detail, but an unrepresentative one. What we are watching is the installation of some of the first telephone infrastructure in Gaza, built by the Israelis and designed from the outset with surveillance in mind.

A voiceover in Hebrew explains that the system will, in the years to come, serve as one of the best ways for Israel to monitor Palestinians and control them. What we are seeing is the modern surveillance state, the one we all now inhabit, at an early stage in Gaza.

A half-century after those images were first recorded, we are taken to 2023—into a world whose currency is destruction on a massive, historical scale. One in which Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure is used to capture millions of hours of private phone conversations between Palestinians in Gaza every day.

Most of the shots in the film are constructed elegantly, with Abraham and his interlocutor facing each other in shadow. The backdrop consists of the lights and glass towers of a modern city—the city of Tel Aviv. Close-up shots punctuate these conversations, capturing intimate moments across various high-rises—a hand brushing crumbs from a table; someone watching the evening news in an apartment. Here, Israelis enjoy their privacy and experience life just as many people in Europe and the United States do. But not so for the Palestinians living in Gaza, a mere 37 miles or so to the south.

Each of the film’s two dozen interviews explores different contours of the mass murder. There is Lavender, the software program that “identifies” Palestinian targets for execution, often permitting the murder of 20 or even 500 people in order to assassinate a single man, and Where’s Daddy?, another software program used to track Palestinians on a kill list; and then there........

© The Nation