Israel displayed an extraordinary ability this week, perhaps last seen in 2017, when then-culture minister Miri Regev attacked “Foxtrot” after it won Venice’s Grand Jury Prize, condemning its portrayal of the IDF without having seen a single frame.
This time, the scale was different. Israel demonstrated an uncanny national ability to experience a film in depth without actually watching it.
Netanyahu attacks ‘NAZA,’ but Israel’s deeper reputational damage is homegrown
(Photo: AP Photo/Ariel Schalit)
“NAZA,” the documentary by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival on Saturday. By Sunday, seemingly everyone in Israel already knew what was in it, what was missing, why its creators should lose their citizenship and why words like “treason” and “blood libel” belonged in the conversation.
The fact that the film had not yet been screened in Israel became a technicality.
By Wednesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was moving toward legislation that could allow citizenship to be revoked from Israelis accused of defaming IDF soldiers. Culture Minister Miki Zohar had already called for stripping Abraham and Szor of their citizenship. Meanwhile, the film had received some 25 minutes of applause in Venice, publicity that no government campaign could buy.
According to reports about the film, 24 Israeli soldiers and intelligence personnel, many from Unit 8200, describe the military concept of “collateral damage,” the civilian toll deemed permissible when approving a strike.
They describe systems in which a building can be selected and information appears about the people inside it, including family details, children and apartment locations. One interviewee says he approved strikes in which the projected civilian toll exceeded 200.
The IDF has rejected central allegations made in the film. That matters. The testimonies are anonymous; some interviewees describe decisions taken above their own rank; and humans, not algorithms alone, ultimately authorize strikes. There is also a legitimate criticism to be made of a film about the Gaza war that gives little space to the Oct. 7 massacre.
But it is still a film, not a final judgment handed down by a court. This is Venice, not The Hague.
And that brings us to the question the shouting is designed to drown out: What happened when those collateral-damage numbers began climbing?
Artificial intelligence does not feel nausea. It does not recoil. For that, human intelligence is still required.
The power of seeing things without an intermediary should no longer surprise us. Maj. Gen. (res.) Yaakov “Mandy” Orr, a former coordinator of government activities in the territories, has taken more than 250 people over the past year, including retired generals, former security chiefs and diplomats, to see for themselves what is happening on West Bank hilltops.
They saw. They were disturbed. And they talked about it.
The same principle applies here. For three years, the Gaza war was presented to Israelis through satellite images, red boxes, tunnel animations and official briefings. “NAZA,” whatever one ultimately thinks of it, removes some of that mediation. People who say they were inside the system sit on Tel Aviv rooftops and speak in Hebrew about what they witnessed and did.
There is another kind of collateral damage, however, one that no targeting system calculated in advance: Israel’s international standing.
The IDF is emerging from a prolonged war with its legitimacy questioned in places where that once would have seemed unimaginable. Israeli officers consider travel routes with international jurisdiction in mind. Soldiers completing their service will carry these years with them long after the final military campaign ends.
There is damage, and then there is damage.
One ends when a bomb hits a building in Gaza. The other does not disappear. It accumulates quietly and then, three years later, appears on a cinema screen in Venice.
A system capable of calculating how many people are believed to be inside apartment 6 on the fifth floor somehow failed to calculate the collateral damage it was inflicting on itself.
And is it any wonder that every such controversy becomes a political diversion?
Look how quickly public attention moved away from Shlomi Eldar and Ruti Yuval’s investigation into warnings Netanyahu allegedly received before Oct. 7 and toward a film most of the country had not seen.
Ask the obvious political question: Who benefits when attention shifts from those being questioned over the failures preceding the massacre to the filmmakers describing the war that followed?
With an election approaching, almost anything that diverts attention from the failures attributed by opponents to the current government has political value.
And, as usual, almost nobody in power proposed the one response a country confident in itself should be able to offer immediately: an independent and transparent investigation.
Instead, the familiar order goes something like this: sweeping denial, an aggressive hunt for whoever leaked or spoke, and perhaps, two years later and far from the cameras, an internal review.
Some of the public anger is not really about what was said but where it was said.
In Israel, we are told, dirty laundry should not be washed in Venice. It should be washed quietly at home, preferably by an internal committee nobody has heard of and whose conclusions almost nobody will read.
The problem is that we have been washing it that way for years.
It still isn’t clean.
Opposition leader Yair Lapid was summoned this week for a security briefing with Netanyahu.
About 40 minutes into the meeting, the head of the IDF Planning Directorate and the national security adviser entered the room, while the accountant general joined by phone.
The subject soon became clear: Netanyahu wanted Lapid’s support for reopening the state budget to provide additional funding for defense.
Lapid asked where the money would come from.
His position was straightforward. He supported giving the IDF more money, but said the source could not be another tax increase on Israel’s working middle class and reservists. Instead, he called for cutting coalition funds and money he says is being used to support ultra-Orthodox draft avoidance. Likud rejected his characterization, saying higher-than-expected state revenues meant additional defense spending could be financed without raising taxes.
There is a tendency lately, including in parts of the media that broadly identify with the anti-Netanyahu camp, to belittle Lapid, mock him and even suggest that he should quit.
Not from Netanyahu loyalists. Not from the political right. From his own political neighborhood.
Why?
Whatever one thinks of the state of his party, I cannot think of many Israeli politicians who have parted so gracefully with lawmakers and ministers who decided to leave. There was little bloodletting, few personal attacks, and some of those departing even said they intended to remain connected to the party and continue helping it.
Would that happen with Netanyahu? With Benny Gantz? With Naftali Bennett?
It is also worth remembering who first demonstrated, after years in which it appeared impossible, that Netanyahu could be removed from office and a change government formed, even at considerable personal political cost.
Yet our media culture struggles with such things.
We understand hit lists, feuds and personal destruction. Praising someone? That apparently threatens the sacred principle of “balance.”
We must prove we do not attack only Netanyahu. We are balanced, after all.
Just look at the television panels. Balanced with the precision of a spirit level.
And so every departure from Yesh Atid becomes a “collapse,” an “implosion” or an “abandonment,” followed inevitably by the cheapest pun available: “No future,” a play on the party’s Hebrew name.
The larger opposition camp now faces a problem far bigger than Lapid.
Who, at this stage, is actually willing to put personal ambition aside in order to build an alternative government? Avigdor Liberman? Gadi Eisenkot?
Judging from the behavior of the opposition parties this week, the bloc that speaks about change and repair appears perfectly capable of tearing itself apart before voters ever get the chance to decide.
What a missed opportunity.
And if that happens, nobody should pretend ego had nothing to do with it.