By JAMES MARKIN
“NAZA” a British documentary film by Yuaval Abraham and Rachel Szor. Coproduced by The Guardian and JW Films.
“NAZA” 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.
Much of what the officers testify is not new. They speak out about their role in designing and operating Israel’s Lavender and “Where’s Daddy” 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 “collateral damage,” 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’s attempt to depopulate northern Gaza through the creation of “kill zones,” and how Israel turned food distribution sites into massacres.
And yet, “NAZA” 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 “built from nothing” on sand dunes, instead showing the reality that multiple Palestinian settlements had to be demolished to make way for the Zionist state’s 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.
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.
“NAZA” is more ambitious than being just a journalistic exposé of the crimes of Israel in Gaza. After all, most of the specific allegations made in the film—from the use of the AI tools Lavender and “Where’s Daddy” to the creation of kill zones and the massacre of hungry Palestinians—have all been reported on before. What “NAZA” 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.
And yet there is much about the Israeli genocide depicted in “NAZA” 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.
As the Marxist thinker Abraham Leon, himself a victim of the Holocaust, put it, under capitalism, “the 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.” 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 “total extermination” was different.
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.
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.
Similarly, “NAZA” 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 “NAZA,” their Israeli descendant watches from a drone as death squads shoot starving Palestinians on their orders. One of the officers interviewed in “NAZA” 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 “insanely fun.”
To the Israeli audience, this revelation has been the most shocking aspect of the film. Within Israeli society the “excesses’ of the IDF have been largely blamed on the “Arab-hating” yokels, the poor Jews of Middle Eastern origin who speak Hebrew the “wrong way” and who are drafted directly into front-line infantry units.
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 “the best of the best.” Another describes how intelligence operatives are treated by the right-wing government with suspicion, snobby Tel Aviv “leftists” 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 “most of us are left-wing … there aren’t really any Arab haters in my unit,” the director fires back that surely his unit killed more Arabs than any of these “Arab-haters” ever did.
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 “cleaned out” old Jaffa to build Tel Aviv were the sons and daughters of the European Jewish industrial working class, the new “protagonist” 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.
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.