{"id":76559,"date":"2026-11-11T21:46:19","date_gmt":"2026-11-11T21:46:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/litci.org\/en\/?p=76559"},"modified":"2026-11-11T21:46:19","modified_gmt":"2026-11-11T21:46:19","slug":"israeli-operatives-divulge-details-of-their-crimes-in-film-naza","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/litci.org\/en\/israeli-operatives-divulge-details-of-their-crimes-in-film-naza\/","title":{"rendered":"Israeli operatives divulge details of their crimes in film, \u2018NAZA\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

NAZA\u201d a British documentary film by Yuaval Abraham and Rachel Szor. Coproduced by The Guardian and JW Films.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cNAZA\u201d is a movie cloaked in darkness and secrecy. As Israeli intelligence officers testify to the crimes they committed in the line of duty, they speak with their faces hidden by shadow, huddled on the roofs of Tel Aviv high rises rather than under the lights of a film studio. This is by necessity. One of the officers points to the fact that if it were known that he was speaking out, he would face jail time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Much of what the officers testify is not new. They speak out about their role in designing and operating Israel\u2019s Lavender and \u201cWhere\u2019s Daddy\u201d AI targeting systems, which helped Israeli soldiers find Hamas operatives in their homes at night, killing thousands of Palestinian noncombatants in their beds. NAZA, the Israeli acronym for \u201ccollateral damage,\u201d after all, gave its name to the film. The officers also speak to the phases of the war that came next, the systematic destruction of Gaza, neighborhood by neighborhood, Israel\u2019s attempt to depopulate northern Gaza through the creation of \u201ckill zones,\u201d and how Israel turned food distribution sites into massacres.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And yet, \u201cNAZA\u201d has more ambition than to merely report on these crimes; it puts Tel Aviv itself on trial. In one of its brief forays into archival footage, it debunks the notion that the city was \u201cbuilt from nothing\u201d on sand dunes, instead showing the reality that multiple Palestinian settlements had to be demolished to make way for the Zionist state\u2019s gleaming proof of a concept city. The movie also points to the closeness between the two cities of Tel Aviv and Gaza City, just a little over 40 miles apart along the same coastline.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Tel Aviv fills nearly the entire lens of the film. Clips from Israeli television are shown as if being watched through half-open windows into swanky Tel Aviv apartments. The residents of the city are shown making dinner, working out, and watching television with their families. Meanwhile, Palestinians in Gaza struggle for survival, besieged by hunger, disease, death squads, and killer drones, unseen until the last few minutes of the film.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cNAZA\u201d is more ambitious than being just a journalistic expos\u00e9 of the crimes of Israel in Gaza. After all, most of the specific allegations made in the film\u2014from the use of the AI tools Lavender and \u201cWhere\u2019s Daddy\u201d to the creation of kill zones and the massacre of hungry Palestinians\u2014have all been reported on before. What \u201cNAZA\u201d does is allow the criminals behind these acts to speak to the mindset necessary to commit them. In this regard, the film is universal. In another time and place, these men and women could easily be SS officers, or British colonial officials, or Young Turks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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And yet there is much about the Israeli genocide depicted in \u201cNAZA\u201d that is specific to this time and place. The officers interviewed describe a genocide committed remotely, from behind a computer screen. After an Israeli intelligence officer submits plans for strikes against women and children, they can step away for a smoke, or go out for lunch or drinks in the city of Tel Aviv. This represents a whole new chapter in the history of genocide and mass killing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the Marxist thinker Abraham Leon, himself a victim of the Holocaust, put it, under capitalism, \u201cthe progress of technology and science has become the progress of the science of death and its technology. The development of the means of production is nothing but the growth of the means of destruction.\u201d Thus, while the same forces of racism behind the genocides of the Native Americans, the Armenians, etc, were behind the Holocaust, the character and ideology of Nazi \u201ctotal extermination\u201d was different.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thomas Jefferson and his ilk dreamed of removal of the Native American population through strategic removals and eventual cultural assimilation. The capacity to utterly exterminate a population was not yet available.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This new means of destruction brought with it an ideology of utter destruction. Only the development of industrial capitalism gave Hitler the power to destroy European Jewry, nearly totally. While the medieval European antisemite hated Jews and wanted to kill them, and pogroms led to mass killings of Jews, the new industrial antisemitism of Nazi German militarism now could finally dream of a Europe that was judenfrei<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Similarly, \u201cNAZA\u201d shows how, once again, capitalist development of the means of destruction has created a whole new form of the same old species of extermination. The old colonial genocidaire at least had to get their hands dirty. Now, according to \u201cNAZA,\u201d their Israeli descendant watches from a drone as death squads shoot starving Palestinians on their orders. One of the officers interviewed in \u201cNAZA\u201d even stated that others in his unit would use the drones to watch dogs eat Palestinian bodies as a sick form of entertainment. Another said that the video-game-like nature of the software tools used to plan air force strikes against Gaza made the whole thing \u201cinsanely fun.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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To the Israeli audience, this revelation has been the most shocking aspect of the film. Within Israeli society the \u201cexcesses\u2019 of the IDF have been largely blamed on the \u201cArab-hating\u201d yokels, the poor Jews of Middle Eastern origin who speak Hebrew the \u201cwrong way\u201d and who are drafted directly into front-line infantry units.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Meanwhile, the elite denizens of Tel Aviv who work in the tech sector, who are snapped up by the elite intelligence units, see themselves as a cut above. One of the officers interviewed brags about how difficult being selected for his unit is, calling himself \u201cthe best of the best.\u201d Another describes how intelligence operatives are treated by the right-wing government with suspicion, snobby Tel Aviv \u201cleftists\u201d who will go on to high paying tech jobs after the end of their service. And yet, when one of the officers interviewed in the film tries to defend his conduct by saying that \u201cmost of us are left-wing \u2026 there aren\u2019t really any Arab haters in my unit,\u201d the director fires back that surely his unit killed more Arabs than any of these \u201cArab-haters\u201d ever did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is the face of the new ideology of techno-genocide in Israel. The cold-blooded hatred that exterminates block after block of innocent people in Gaza, that seeks to exterminate the people from the land, just as their ancestors did to the former residents of Tel Aviv. And yet, now the forces that carry out this genocide and their method of killing has been changed. Whereas those who \u201ccleaned out\u201d old Jaffa to build Tel Aviv were the sons and daughters of the European Jewish industrial working class, the new \u201cprotagonist\u201d of genocidal violence is the elite engineer of the tech sector, drafted into the military and turned against the enemies of the state. Whereas before the Zionists used the rifle, the leaflet, and the radio to create fear amongst the Palestinians and cause them to flee behind Egyptian lines to Gaza, now their descendants have come back to exterminate them entirely, in cold blood, sitting behind a LED monitor sipping a latte while directing hellfire from above.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once again, developments in the means of production have created horrifying new developments of the means of destruction. The AI-assisted genocide continues every day in Gaza.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

First published here<\/a> by Workers’ Voice<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cNAZA\u201d is more ambitious than being just a journalistic expos\u00e9 of the crimes of Israel in Gaza. After all, most of the specific allegations made in the film\u2014from the use of the AI tools Lavender and\u00a0\u201cWhere\u2019s Daddy\u201d to the creation of kill zones and the massacre of hungry Palestinians\u2014have all been reported on before. What \u201cNAZA\u201d does is allow the criminals behind these acts to speak to the mindset necessary to commit them. In this regard, the film is universal. In another time and place, these men\u00a0and women could easily be SS officers, or British colonial officials, or Young Turks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":76560,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"litci_post_political_author":"James Markin","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6229],"tags":[3655,7143,1159,3722,4057,3790],"class_list":["post-76559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-art-and-culture","tag-genocide","tag-intelligence","tag-israel-2","tag-palestine","tag-racism","tag-zionism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/litci.org\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/Soldiers-IDF.webp?fit=1200%2C525&ssl=1","fimg_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/litci.org\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/Soldiers-IDF.webp?fit=1200%2C525&ssl=1","categories_names":["Art and Culture"],"author_info":{"name":"Carlos S.","pic":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/fdf3a2076204dbf848fa7838fc9e2787f3317262207b35e333f31316e39fce9c?s=96&d=mm&r=g"},"political_author":"James Markin","tagline":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/litci.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/litci.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/litci.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/litci.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/litci.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76559"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/litci.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76559\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":76562,"href":"https:\/\/litci.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76559\/revisions\/76562"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/litci.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/76560"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/litci.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/litci.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/litci.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}