I saw the documentary the Israeli government doesn’t want you to see

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As Palestinians in Gaza queued up to reach a station with food aid in the wake of October 7th, some of the beleaguered and starving people would step out of line and barrel towards a dip in the land that could be used as a shortcut to reach the front more quickly. That’s when IDF snipers would shoot them dead. “Those were the rules of engagement,” according to one anonymous Israeli soldier. “It was like a video game.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will deliver a speech at the United Nations in Manhattan on Thursday afternoon to, in his words, “defend, from the UN podium, Israel and IDF soldiers” against “the terrible lies that are being spread there.” But Wednesday morning on a movie screen across town during a screening of the new documentary “NAZA,” a theater full of journalists learned agonizing new details about the mathematically-precise way Netanyahu, Israel and his IDF soldiers’ carried out the genocide of more than 73,000 Palestinians since 2023.

Over the next couple of weeks in theaters across the world, the public will be able to see this 80-minute crash course in Lavender, the AI-assisted targeting system devised by IDF intelligence to bomb Palestinian civilians under the guise of targeting militants. While the scope of the carnage is already largely understood, the insider information revealed by the 24 interview participants paints a picture of a murderous campaign controlled by people who knew exactly their own powers for destruction.

NAZA had its international premiere at the Venice Film Festival on September 10th, where it won the Special Jury Prize and received a 25-minute standing ovation. For Israeli filmmakers Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham, these past 10 days have been a whirlwind. After the premiere, Israeli officials were immediately on the defensive; IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir said it was "based on blood libels, deliberate distortions of reality, and grave, false accusations against IDF soldiers and commanders,” despite not having seen the film yet; Netanyahu has said he’s considering legislation to strip the filmmakers of their citizenship and to pursue defamation claims. 

After seeing NAZA, it’s no surprise they’re so worried. 

Given the subject matter, I braced myself for 80 minutes of harrowing footage from Gaza; orphaned children searching for their parents among the rubble; mothers with crying babies trying desperately to find food. But in reality, there was almost none of that. The film’s visuals are striking in their banality. For a vast majority of the duration, it’s nighttime in Tel Aviv. We see the interview subjects—Israeli military and intelligence officials—only in shadow, sitting on rooftops and speaking with Abraham while life goes on in the buildings nearby. Through various windows we can see locals watching tv, ironing their clothes. The soundtrack is the whirr of traffic going by. Everything appears astonishingly normal in the city 40 or so miles north of Gaza. And that, one can assume, is the filmmakers’ point. 

I also expected the Israelis interviewed for the film (which is entirely in Hebrew with English subtitles) to be more emotional, given that—despite being anonymous—it’s incredibly risky for them to speak out about IDF and government secrets. I expected that for many of them, speaking for the first time about the reality of what they’d done would unleash a torrent of guilt and devastation. Some you could tell were more reflective than others, but overall there was a noticeable detachment across the subjects. A just-following-orders mentality. “I understand how a man can blow up a place and go home to his degree in clinical psychology,” one subject said. 

Perhaps the fact that Palestinians have been so dehumanized in Israeli culture accounts for the fact that, despite participating in a genocide, feelings of remorse just wouldn’t hit them. And/or perhaps the use of AI and the lack of physical proximity to their targets made it easier to separate themselves from the devastation they wrought. “AI deciding who lives and who dies is better than letting someone whose friend was killed by Hamas last week decide,” one of the interview subjects says, seemingly in defense of the system. Another called it “the perfect task for machine learning.”

NAZA is a Hebrew acronym used by the IDF that loosely means “collateral damage,” and which referred to the software’s estimated death toll in a potential military strike; one NAZA equals one casualty. One interviewee alleged a strike that estimated 500 NAZA got the green light—and that a 20 NAZA strike would be approved “without a second thought.”

Human targets were marked by the IDF by hacking into cell phone networks. One interviewee estimated 60-70k Gazans had been marked—clearly including many, many people beyond those considered Hamas fighters—and another said it did not distinguish between kids and adults. The interviewees said the targets were hit at night when they were home with their families, who they could hear through their phones before initiating strikes. “How could you bomb when you hear a crying baby inside?” Abraham asked one of them.

The documentary’s executive producer Jonathan Glazer is no stranger to controversy: After he accepted his 2024 Oscar for his film “Zone of Interest,” an open letter signed by Jewish Hollywood creatives decried his acceptance speech. “Every civilian death in Gaza is tragic,” the letter reads. “Israel is not targeting civilians. It is targeting Hamas.” While their assertion was so obviously untrue two years ago with tens of thousands civilian deaths already, the revelations in NAZA make clear civilians were part of the calculus from the start. Or, put differently, indifference to Palestinian civilian lives was baked into Israel’s strategy in retaliating against Hamas. 

I’m not a film critic or a subject matter expert, but I’m a person who’s watched in horror the last three years as the Israeli military leveled Gaza, killed thousands, and as one interviewee put it, “erased history.” I watched as my government continually encouraged and financed this apocalypse, and Christian Nationalists weaponized “Jewish safety” to justify it. I’ve witnessed endless arguing among the Jewish diaspora about whether our perceived fears deserve more weight than actual Palestinian lives. I’ve seen the way a musician saying the words “Free Palestine” got him fired. 

Watching NAZA, I felt the stinging truth of what has been done and continues to be done in my name, as an American and as a Jew; it’s a truth I’ve always known, but the clinical, mathematical descriptions of how the genocide has been carried out made it plain. 

Some Americans may see NAZA and finally come around to the idea that Israel has acted as atrociously as many of us have said all along; but they could also create some distance between this country and the atrocities much like some IDF intelligence officials have absolved themselves by saying they weren’t the ones dropping the actual bombs. That would be a mistake. 

Earlier this week, Bloomberg published a blockbuster scoop about the US bombing in February of Iran’s Shajarah Tayyebeh Elementary School that killed more than 150 people. In the immediate aftermath, the bombing was reportedly a result of outdated mapping; the property where the school was located was previously a military target. Tragically, those changes were not communicated to the appropriate people.  

The Trump administration would not—and still won’t—take responsibility for the massacre in Minab.  

“Inside Centcom, which conducted the US attack, some personnel relied too much on the artificial intelligence embedded in Maven Smart System,” Bloomberg reports. “Maven, which is made by Palantir Technologies Inc., allows users to view and coordinate complex military operations — from targeting to command and control — using AI-enabled software that fuses more than 150 different data inputs into a coherent set of information to inform commanders’ decisions.”

Maven AI software has become a “cornerstone” of US military operations, officials told Bloomberg. AI has generally been a priority of the second Trump administration, taking decisions out of the hands of humans and placing them with notoriously unreliable, amoral technology. Much like in the IDF, American military members are given the luxury of psychological and physical distance from killing with remarkable power to carry it out.

“It’s so insanely fun,” one of the subjects in NAZA says at one point of the targeted mass killing of Palestinians. It’s impossible to imagine how this thought could enter a person’s mind, and even worse, escape their lips. But then again, it’s impossible to believe this technology was developed in the first place, then implemented in Gaza at epic scale, while the rest of the world kept ironing and watching TV.