The horror of the Gaza genocide shakes Venice

VeniceLast year the Venice Film Festival was impacted by the striking The Voice of Hind, which mixed fictional scenes and the real voice of a Palestinian girl to denounce the genocide in Gaza. Kaouther Ben Hania's film ended up winning the Grand Jury Prize, and it wouldn't be surprising if history repeated itself this year with Naza, the documentary in which Israeli journalists and filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor expose the war crimes committed by their country's army during the Gaza War. Although it must be said that, beyond the rigorous exploration of the methods employed by the Israel Defense Forces, Naza manages to transcend the denunciation of war barbarism, and offers a lucid and terrifying portrait of the most sinister face of the contemporary world, marked by the threat that artificial intelligence poses to the most basic notions of empathy, democracy and humanity.

Naza follows in the footsteps of The Voice of Hind and No Other Land, the Oscar-winning documentary in which Abraham and Szor already participated as co-directors. But it does so by adopting a new perspective. “As Israelis, we felt a duty to use our position and our access to certain information,” Abraham explained at the film's press conference in Venice. “We wanted to show, from an internal perspective, how the Israeli army's assassination system works,” he added. In this sense, Naza strikes the viewer with a particular force because it offers no emotional refuge.

Paradoxically, in the tragedy that the film describes there is no room for drama: no cry of pain, no desperate demand for redemption, no cathartic confession or one steeped in decency. What we find are the terrible testimonies of 24 members of the “military intelligence”, men who, during the Gaza genocide, murdered dozens of people every day, from offices in Tel Aviv, while continuing with their daily lives. “Like No Other Land, Naza portrays the systemic dimension of the crimes committed by the Israeli state, murders made possible thanks to a mass surveillance system,” asserts Abraham.

The voice of the executioners

Just as Basilio Martín Patino did with the executioners of the Franco regime in the essential documentary Queridísimos verdugos, Abraham and Szor look the perpetrators of the barbarity in the face. In Naza, the soldiers appear with their faces covered by shadows and their voices digitally distorted. The risk of reprisals demands an anonymity that gives rise to brutal testimonies. Regarding the Palestinian victims, a young soldier notes: “The goal is quantity, not quality.” Another describes in detail the operation of an artificial intelligence tool called Lavender, with which the Israeli army compiled a list of between 60,000 and 70,000 telephone devices supposedly linked to Hamas. The smallest clue located by the AI served, and continues to serve, to order attacks in which there may be a high Naza index. But what is Naza? It is a unit of measurement that counts the number of civilian casualties that a military attack will leave behind. One of the soldiers points out that, during the harshest stage of the genocide, the Israeli army approved any attack with a Naza of less than 20, although in some cases attacks with a Naza of 500 dead civilians were ordered.

In Naza, Abraham and Szor present a work of great journalistic value: the savage testimonies of the soldiers are contrasted with archival footage in which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claims that he is “doing everything possible to avoid civilian deaths.” But the film also contains findings of great cinematic value. The night filming on the rooftops of Tel Aviv encapsulates the clandestine dimension of the project, while Abraham’s incisive, yet not insidious, questions guide the film toward the exposition of powerful underlying theses.

In a revealing moment, an Israeli soldier recalls an agonizing school trip to Poland, organized to remember the atrocities of Nazism. Confronting past and present, the same soldier admits that, after becoming the impassive executor of a genocide, he can understand the pit of immorality into which the perpetrators of the Holocaust sank. Abraham and Szor also evoke another history, that of cinema, when in Naza they refer to the figure of Claude Lanzmann, who in the monumental Shoah demonstrated that the word can become a precious container for the memory of a people, even when the words –in this case, those of the soldiers of Naza– belong to the realm of abjection.