How the Israeli army's death machine works

Directed by Israeli journalists and filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor –who participated in the making of the Oscar-winningNo other land–, Naza dissects the death machine deployed by the Israeli army to perpetrate the Gaza genocide. The protagonists of the documentary are 24 soldiers who offer direct testimonies of a war campaign executed remotely using artificial intelligence systems. A chronicle of horror that is surprising for the coldness of the chroniclers, who seem detached from the human drama contained in their words. If in the poetic The Profession of Arms Ermanno Olmi illustrated the implications of the appearance of firearms at the beginning of the 16th century, Naza studies with clinical rigor the new martial paradigm in which human beings are reduced to numerical factors or erasable pixels on a digital screen.

As Basilio Martín Patino did with the executioners of the Franco regime in the essential Queridísimos verdugos, Abraham and Szor look the operators of barbarism in the face, although in this case the soldiers appear with their voices and faces distorted to avoid government reprisals. In this sense, the night filming on the rooftops of Tel Aviv reflects the clandestine dimension of Naza, while archival images of the history of the Israeli state outline a terrible historical paradox. Confronted with the memory of the Second World War, an Israeli soldier identifies in the Palestinian genocide the banality of evil that was unleashed during the Holocaust. For their part, Abraham and Szor also evoke another history, that of cinema, when they show that the Israeli film archive is dedicating a retrospective to Claude Lanzmann, the author of the monumental documentary Shoah, which turned the word into the most resonant and poignant container of a people's memory.