'NAZA' and the battle over who gets to tell the story

Some see this prize-winning documentary about Israeli soldiers’ crimes in Gaza as whitewashing by suggesting a plurality of opinion; others see it as important evidence

REUTERS

Yuval Abraham and Rachel Shor receive the Special Jury Prize for the film 'NAZA' at the closing of the Venice Film Festival, 12 September 2026.

'NAZA' and the battle over who gets to tell the story

Samer Abou Hawwach

last update on 15 Sep 2026

The Israeli film NAZA, screened at the latest Venice Film Festival, has stirred the beginnings of a debate among Palestinians and Arabs over the meaning and value of Israelis exposing the conduct of their own army and government during the genocidal war in Gaza.

This debate remains in a formative stage for two reasons. First, no one (save for the festival audience) has actually seen this 2026 documentary film written and directed by Israelis Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, which follows the mass killing of civilians by Israeli forces in Gaza through 24 interviews with anonymised military and intelligence insiders. As a result, the argument at this stage is one of principle. It concerns neither what the film reveals, nor how it handles its subject, nor its conclusions.

Second, the debate has so far been immediate and emotional, prompted by the commotion that followed reports that the festival audience applauded for 25 minutes after the film finished. This irritated some observers, who drew comparisons with the reception previously given to The Voice of Hind Rajab, a 2025 documentary about the Red Crescent response during the killing of a five-year-old Palestinian girl by Israeli soldiers in Gaza. A few even suggested that the contrast was deliberate and intended to elevate the Israeli account of genocide above the Arab one.

European acclaim for NAZA, which was reflected in a Jury Prize, may stem in part from relief that, this time, Israelis themselves are recounting Israeli atrocities in Gaza. For the festival, this shields it against accusations of antisemitism or bias in promoting the Palestinian narrative. It also gives the film a different status: testimony from within. This, in turn, may help confront Israel’s occupation, racism, and genocide. Yet some may see it as a kind of exonerating testimony on behalf of Israeli society, allowing them to oppose the occupation with a clear conscience without having to confront the deeper structural flaws of a society that grew out of that occupation.

NAZA, which is an Israeli military acronym for nezek agavi (meaning ‘collateral damage’), has not yet had a public release, and may not get one, given its nature as an investigative documentary. The controversy surrounding it is therefore, for now, genuinely a debate about principle: does a film made by Israelis about the crimes of their own state amount to ‘whitewashing Israel’ by presenting Israeli society as pluralistic, one that contains both good and bad, extremists and moderates, those who believe in justice and those who practise genocide?

The question is valid, as is the scepticism behind it. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s extremist government did not spring from nowhere. It came to power through democratic elections. During the genocidal war, demonstrations dwindled, while expressions of Israeli public support grew to a disturbing degree. Some even turned the round-the-clock bombardment of Gaza and the killing of civilians into an occasion for outings and spectacle.

Bashar TALEB / AFP — A boy stands by laundry hanging on lines amidst the rubble of collapsed buildings in Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip on 14 April 2025.

In favour of death

Between March and April 2024, when the death toll in Gaza since October 2023 stood at almost 35,000, a Pew Research Centre survey revealed that 39% of Israelis felt that the military response had been about right, 34% felt it had not gone far enough, and only 19% felt it had gone too far. Among Jewish Israelis, just 4% said the response had gone too far, compared with 74% of Arab Israelis.

Anti-Zionist Israeli writer Alon Mizrahi appeared acutely aware of this dilemma. “Palestinians are living at the heart of the tragedy, then Israelis come along and make films about their suffering and win awards,” he said. “I will not defend this phenomenon. It can seem like a terrible insult, and I share that feeling.” He added that “there are decent Israelis who are deeply pained and offended by the shame of apartheid and genocide,” but said they are “an exceedingly small minority, a tiny fraction of Jewish Israeli society”.

To some, therefore, only a vanishingly small minority of Israelis can still be said to have a conscience or moral sensibility, although even here, their positions vary considerably. Some authors and intellectuals, such as Alon Mizrahi, Ilan Pappé, Omer Bartov and David Grossman, openly acknowledge that Israel has committed genocide. Others confine their criticism to ‘isolated’ war crimes or ‘individual’ acts, a position often adopted by the Israeli government itself when it can no longer deny that a particular crime has taken place.

Some go no further than condemning occupation, colonialism, and racial discrimination. Others direct their opposition almost entirely at violent settlers without asking how the most extreme government in Israel’s history came to power. Even Mizrahi, in his post, defended only Rachel Szor and made no mention of Yuval Abraham. Some felt this omission was due to Abraham’s positions, such as defending reports that women were raped on 7 October 2023 (that, alongside the story of “burned babies”, was used to justify the brutality that followed).

What Mizrahi perhaps overlooks, owing to a heightened sensitivity to Palestinian suffering, is that Palestinians have already told, and continue to tell, their own story. The Israeli voices joining them in that endeavour are barely visible, merely a “fraction”, as Mizrahi himself puts it, of the wider picture. Hundreds of Palestinian voices have recounted the chapters of genocide in different ways, including through literature and the arts, and carried them to the world, despite the over 265 journalists killed since October 2023 (but that is another story).

REUTERS/Abd Elhkeem Khaled — A man touches the flack jacket of journalist Omar Al-Derawi as mourners gather around the bodies of Palestinians who were killed in Israeli strikes at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir Al-Balah, on 3 January 2024.

Historical precedent

The central question remains: do Israelis have the right to tell the story of what their state has done? If they do, does their testimony serve the image of Israel as a pluralistic, democratic state? This paradox is by no means confined to Israel.

During the Algerian War in the 1950s, some of the most prominent figures to expose the torture and killing by French forces were themselves French. In 1958, journalist Henri Alleg published La Question, which detailed the torture he endured at the hands of French paratroopers after his arrest in Algeria. French authorities confiscated the book weeks after its publication, but by then copies were circulating, and it became a famous testimony to torture during the Algerian War.

That same year, French historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet published L'Affaire Audin, about the young mathematician Maurice Audin, a member of the Algerian Communist Party who was arrested by the French army in Algiers in 1957 and subsequently disappeared. The French military claimed that he had escaped from custody. Vidal-Naquet dismantled that account, concluding that Audin had died under torture. He later devoted much of his work to documenting French torture in Algeria, culminating in Les Crimes de l'Armée Française: Algérie 1954-1962, which collated documents and testimonies.

Palestinians have already told, and continue to tell, their own story. The Israeli voices joining them in that endeavour are barely visible

In September 1960 came the 'Manifesto of the 121', formally titled the Declaration on the Right to Insubordination in the Algerian War. It was signed by French intellectuals, writers, and artists including Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras, André Breton, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, and Claude Simon, all defending the right of French citizens to refuse to support the war. In so doing, celebrated representatives of French culture were accusing their own state.

Back to the question: were Vidal-Naquet's books, Sartre's positions and Alleg's testimony forms of 'whitewashing' France simply because they made it possible to describe France as a pluralistic, democratic society whose intellectuals could criticise their own army? Or were they part of the struggle that made the crimes of French colonialism harder to conceal? Sartre's being French did not turn his condemnation of torture into testimony in favour of the French state, nor could a French anti-colonialist reasonably have been asked to remain silent simply because an Algerian was, naturally, more entitled to recount the experience of colonial rule.

AFP — Protesters clash during a demonstration against the Vietnam War held in front of the White House on 11 May 1970, and after a shooting at Kent State University in Ohio on 4 May 1970, where four students were killed by police.

Vietnam to Yugoslavia

The American example during the Vietnam War is equally clear. During the 1960s and 70s, opposition to the war grew into a broad cultural movement involving some of the most prominent writers, intellectuals, and artists in the United States. In 1967, linguist and left-leaning author Noam Chomsky published The Responsibility of Intellectuals, an essay attacking the role played by those with prominence in justifying American policy and the war.

Author Susan Sontag took part in the anti-war movement and travelled to North Vietnam in 1968, later writing about the experience in Trip to Hanoi, published in 1969. Fellow author Norman Mailer joined the 1967 march on the Pentagon and turned the experience into the Pulitzer Prize-winning Armies of the Night, published in 1968.

Yet the best-known example outside the cultural sphere was Daniel Ellsberg, a former employee of the US Department of Defence. In 1971, he leaked what became known as the Pentagon Papers. It was a vast and secret study prepared by the department on the history of US involvement in Vietnam, and exposed the gulf between what successive administrations knew and what they told the public about the war.

The Pentagon Papers did not become propaganda for the US merely because an American leaked them and the American press published them. They became, instead, among the most important documents to undermine the credibility of the US government's account of the war. In the same tradition, others have been prosecuted (or face prosecution) for exposing US state secrets, including former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, former US soldier Chelsea Manning, and investigative journalist Julian Assange, who founded the WikiLeaks website.

AFP — A man walks past a mural of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in a Melbourne laneway on 26 March 2024.

A similar example came during the wars that accompanied the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. While part of Serbia's cultural and media elite helped fuel nationalism, other Serbs stood against Slobodan Milošević's regime and the nationalism that justified the wars. Among them was theatre director and playwright Borka Pavićević, who founded the Centre for Cultural Decontamination in Belgrade in 1995. The name symbolised her rejection of the nationalist culture that accompanied the wars.

The architect, thinker and former mayor of Belgrade, Bogdan Bogdanović, likewise opposed Serbian nationalism and Milošević before leaving Serbia for exile. Sonja Biserko, founder of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia, devoted much of her work to confronting the denial of crimes committed in the name of the Serbs.

Bearing witness

These examples do not absolve France of crimes in Algeria, the US of crimes in Vietnam, or the Serbs of crimes during the Yugoslav wars. Likewise, Israelis who oppose occupation or genocide do not absolve Israel of crimes in Gaza. The confusion comes from conflating two different levels: the collective and political responsibility of a society and a state, and the right of an individual within that society (indeed, that individual's moral responsibility) to bear witness against what the state is doing.

Just as some Arabs volunteer to defend the genocide by describing it as a "war on terror" (even thanking Israel for its crimes, hailing it as a "liberator", and blaming the Palestinians for the fate that has befallen them), excessive sensitivity towards an Israeli who chooses to tell a story different from, and opposed to, that of his government should not be judged by the applause it receives or the prizes it wins. It should be judged by where it stands in the larger moral debate over the genocide, and by whether it signals some fracture in the Israeli collective consciousness, and with it the American and Western consciousness, or whether it is merely a passing episode.

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