NAZA, filmed in Israel, joins a growing international propaganda barrage spreading false allegations that Israel’s defensive war against Hamas is genocide against the Palestinian people or at the very least deliberate mass murder of innocent civilians.
NAZA is getting a big buzz because its directors are two Jewish Israelis, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, and claims to be based on information leaked from inside Israel’s military. This allows Hamas defenders to say, “See, even Jewish Israelis admit it’s a war crime.”
At the heart of the “documentary” are interviews with 24 anonymous Israeli intelligence officers and soldiers whose faces and voices are digitally disguised. Even New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg — who enthusiastically promotes the film — admitted Sept. 18 that “the documentary’s claims” are “impossible to check.”
Film director Abraham says you don’t need proof because he and the British Guardian newspaper have vetted the anonymous whistleblowers. But the Guardian, like many woke liberal papers, has made anti-Israel bias in its news coverage a badge of honor.
NAZA, Hebrew shorthand for “collateral damage,” claims the Israeli military uses artificial intelligence, including information on how many people live in every apartment in Gaza, to deliberately massacre large numbers of civilians as part of its targeting of Hamas operatives.
Movie’s false claims
One of the anonymous sources claims that one operation the IDF planned was expected to kill 500 civilians, just to eliminate one Hamas official.
That’s “completely false,” the Israel Defense Forces said in a statement. “The IDF has never planned, approved, or carried out a strike in Gaza in which 500 civilians or anything near that number were anticipated to be killed.”
In fact, the Israel Defense Forces has called off hundreds of attacks in Gaza to avoid civilian deaths, often using the information system denounced in the film. It has repeatedly warned civilians by phone calls, texts and aerial leafleting to leave buildings and neighborhoods ahead of planned strikes that target Hamas.
That doesn’t mean that every action of the Israeli forces is correct, justified or moral. The IDF is a capitalist army fighting under difficult conditions.
The Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry says that Israel has killed 73,000 Palestinians, since Oct. 7, 2023. Israeli military figures say that figure is roughly accurate, but point out the Hamas ministry never says how many were combatants and how many were civilians. The IDF insists one-third of those killed were Hamas or Islamic Jihad operatives.
Film director twists the facts
For Abraham and Szor these facts don’t matter. They are pushing a political perspective, which whatever their intentions, would allow Hamas to survive, rebuild and prepare new pogroms.
Abraham laid out his views in a series of articles in +972, a middle-class, left-wing website in Israel, that became the starting point for the movie. The first was published just three days after Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas thugs systematically slaughtered 1,200 people, overwhelmingly Jewish civilians, took more than 250 hostages and raped and mutilated dozens of women, the worst pogrom since the Holocaust.
He admitted that Hamas committed a “war crime” but claimed the real problem is “Israel’s policies in Gaza.”
“There is no military solution to Gaza because the problem in Gaza is political — namely, keeping millions of people under siege, in an open-air prison, under an apartheid regime,” Abraham wrote at the time. “It is impossible to defeat Hamas, because Hamas is a political force that leads Palestinian society in Gaza, and the main fuel that sustains it is unrelenting Israeli oppression.”
This is exactly the same false narrative promoted by Hamas to justify its murder of Jews.
Hamas: leadership or Nazi thugs
Saying that Hamas “leads Palestinian society in Gaza” turns reality on its head. Less than a year after winning just 45% of the vote in 2006 elections in Gaza, Hamas declared war on its political opponents and instituted a brutal dictatorship. To this day Hamas’ thugs continue to arrest, torture or execute anyone who dares to oppose it. It passed laws restricting women’s rights. It brutalized gays.
Despite Hamas’ repeated attacks against Israel, prior to Oct. 7, Israeli authorities were granting permits to growing numbers of Palestinians from Gaza to work in Israel.
Hamas took advantage of this to expand its massive tunnel network. It built command posts, weapons storage and tunnel entrances underneath schools, hospitals, U.N. warehouses and mosques, preparing to turn civilians into human shields. It organized to maximize the number of Palestinian dead it could propagandize as “martyrs.”
If Gaza was an “open air prison” under siege, it’s because Hamas turned it into one.
Hamas is a Nazi-like organization. Its 1988 founding charter explicitly calls for exterminating the Jews, in continuity with the line of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, who directly collaborated with the Nazis during the Holocaust. That remains at the heart of its course today. Its leaders say they want to carry out Oct. 7-type massacres “over and over again” until Israel is destroyed.
That’s why a political solution is not possible without the decisive defeat, disarming and dismantling of Hamas’ murder machine.
Hamas is also the biggest obstacle to Palestinians winning their national rights. They need help to get Hamas’ boot off their necks. Hamas wants to keep Jewish and Arab workers from realizing they have common interests and can live and work side by side in the same land.
In response to the lies and distortions in NAZA, some Israeli officials have called for Abraham and Szor to be stripped of their citizenship or prosecuted for treason. But that allows them to portray themselves as victims. Moreover, restrictions on political rights and freedom of speech will eventually be used against the working class and its vanguard.
Answering the lies and slanders against Israel needs to go hand in hand with defeating Hamas militarily. That’s part of the fight to defend Israel as a refuge from Jew-hatred, something the makers of NAZA are not concerned about.