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NAZA and Israel’s History of Automated Warfare

“NAZA” and Israel’s History of Automated Warfare

As violent technologies like spyware, predictive targeting algorithms, and 2,000-pound warheads become ordinary instruments of military rule, once-abhorred practices become routine.

IDF intelligence illustrating warfare tactics in Naza.

On July 22, 2002, an Israeli Air Force pilot dropped a one-ton bomb on a block of apartments, four stories tall, in the Karkash neighborhood of Gaza City. The target was Sheikh Salah Shehadeh, one of the founders of Hamas’s Izzedine al-Qassem brigades. The operation flattened the residential building he called home, killing him, his aide, his wife, three sons, and nine other civilians; 150 more were injured. It was the latest outcome of a relatively new Israeli military strategy adopted at the height of the second intifada: aerial assassinations.

In Israel, the carnage set off a wave of dissent among Air Force pilots. Some had begun to question what, exactly, the air strikes were achieving. For months, Palestinian testimonies from the West Bank and Gaza, reprinted in major global newspapers, had telegraphed horrific scenes: shrapnel slicing through the torsos of bystanders; students taken out while exiting their school. The operation that day in June was, however, a tipping point. Twenty-seven IDF pilots penned a letter refusing to play a part in operations they deemed “illegal and immoral.” Thousands more rallied in support. It was the first coordinated protest among Israeli pilots against such policies in the occupied Palestinian territories. It was also the last.

NAZA, a new documentary by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, the Israeli half of the team behind the Oscar-winning No Other Land, helps elucidate why, offering a portrait of the technological war machine that developed in the years since. Composed of interviews with anonymous reservists and officers from Israeli units responsible for planning and coordinating air strikes, the film digs into how Israel’s military carried out one of the most destructive air campaigns in modern history in the weeks following October 7, 2023. The documentary’s name is not a combination of “Nazi” and “Gaza” as some reviews have insinuated, but rather taken from the Hebrew acronym for collateral damage. Previous reporting on the film has focused on the dystopian array of machine-learning technologies used to kill Palestinians—one officer calls Israel’s air war the “perfect use of AI.” Less remarked upon, however, though no less consequential, is how NAZA showcases this arsenal’s political effects on the country’s liberal camps: how Israel’s embrace of automated warfare has made policies that once seemed exceptionally cruel, like intentionally killing dozens of innocents as they sleep in their beds, feel routine to the intelligence officers who helped coordinate Israeli air strikes in Gaza. And with them, how ideologies once relegated to the margins of political discourse have become mainstream.

For those who have been paying attention to reporting on Israeli military operations in Gaza for the last three years, NAZA’s revelations are not exactly new. Palestinians in Gaza have been documenting the astronomical toll of these air strikes since October 2023. Abraham and others have also reported on the operational details, like how the army hacks children’s phones with spyware to kill a Hamas operative and his family and military lawyers sign off on these operations. What is new with NAZA, though, is the way the film articulates these points: through testimonies from secular, ostensibly liberal young Israelis who served in elite military units. The film’s subjects sit on Tel Aviv rooftops, describing........

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