Twenty-four Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers describe in detail the killing of people in Gaza in NAZA, a documentary produced by the Guardian and directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor.
Asked in the film whether he believes Israel committed genocide in Gaza, one operative answers: “Yes. Completely.” Omer Bartov, dean’s professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University and author of Israel: What Went Wrong?, writes in a Guardian opinion piece that the killing was intentional and calculated.
NAZA is the Hebrew acronym for nezek agavi, or collateral damage. According to the interviewees, the amount of approved NAZA depended on the seniority of the target and could reach hundreds of innocent civilians.
One soldier concedes that if the benchmark of 20 NAZA were applied to each of Israel’s tens of thousands of targets, “you end up with all of Gaza”. “I just don’t know what to do with this understanding,” he adds.
Explaining his own part in the system, the operative tells the film his “hormones were going crazy” at the time. He describes his work on airstrikes as “insanely fun” and says it provided “a sense of meaning”. Asked whether he thought about the people in the buildings being bombed, he replies: “Zero. Not at all. I’d move on to the next mission.” He rejects the suggestion that he did not regard the victims as human: “We just wouldn’t talk about those things.”
Another interviewee says there were “not really any Arab haters” in his unit, describing it as an elitist unit “full of people from Tel Aviv” and saying there was no “extreme dehumanization”.
Bartov writes that the people interviewed are not the sadists of the popular imagination of genocide, nor typical supporters of the extremist ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. Many, he notes, are upper-middle-class graduates of the best schools who joined prestigious intelligence units, in some cases expecting to move into the hi-tech industry after their army service.
An officer reflects briefly on what drove the operation: “All I can say is that we’re completing the mission. That was the mission.”
Bartov writes that modern societies carrying out extreme violence depend on two kinds of people — those who beat, torture and kill at close quarters, and those who plan, organize and order killing at a distance. Genocide, he argues, is the product of the second group: technocrats, bureaucrats and cold planners who avoid the gore. He cites the Cambodian genocide, Rwanda, the genocide of the Armenians and the destruction of the Herero as further examples, writing that a genocide cannot occur without the planners and legitimizers.
The film’s title, Bartov writes, is itself a euphemism that distances operatives further from what the term stands for, so that the question asked is simply “How many NAZA?” rather than how many people may be condemned to death.
Bartov writes that the notion of killing as “fun” is crucial, and points to Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s 1996 book Hitler’s Willing Executioners, which described German perpetrators who enjoyed shooting people in the back of the neck and crushing babies against walls. The “fun” recalled in NAZA, he writes, is different: it concerns operatives performing at a high level under pressure, demonstrating professionalism and efficiency. American drone operators bombing Afghanistan and Iraq reportedly had similar experiences.
He also invokes Hannah Arendt’s account of the bureaucratic banality of evil, exemplified by Adolf Eichmann, and Stanley Milgram’s 1960s Yale University experiment on obedience to authority, noting that many people do as they are told by a figure of authority. “You must trust the system,” one man in NAZA recalls being told.
At the Nuremberg Tribunal in 1945, Bartov writes, German defendants argued they had only followed orders, and within their system what they did was legal and well compensated. The court rejected the defense, holding that unlawful orders exist — a notion widely recognized, including in the United States and Israel, meaning that an order blatantly contrary to ethics and morality may and must be refused.
Bartov writes that the film’s testimony largely repeats what investigative journalism has already established in recent years, published in outlets including the Guardian, +972 magazine, Local Call and the New York Times, but that hearing from the people who operated the system offers a crucial perspective. Intelligence personnel, he notes, are selected for secrecy and emotional detachment, while combat troops remain more visible.
The interviews were conducted at night on rooftops, with the camera scanning the cityscape. Bartov writes that he grew up in Tel Aviv and visits often, and that the conversations felt familiar, reminding him of his son, who served more than a decade ago in the intelligence unit many of the interviewees may have belonged to.
He writes that the most revealing moments come when the distance between the operatives and the people they kill breaks down — when they hack phones, hear voices and see photographs of loved ones before the bombing.
NAZA, produced by the Guardian, is currently in cinemas and will be shown in more than 50 countries, including across the UK and the US. It will be available for free on the Guardian’s website from late November.
COMMENTS