Israeli soldiers in ‘NAZA’ shake Venice: ‘The Nazis were the devil, but what am I?’

NAZA was filmed at night. On the rooftops of Tel Aviv buildings, its directors, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, interview 24 intelligence officers and soldiers who remain in shadow while anonymously detailing their roles after October 7, 2023, when Hamas’s brutal attacks that killed 1,200 people unleashed an unprecedented military operation against Palestinians in Gaza — a massacre (that so far has left more than 73,000 people dead) carried out by remote control with video-game-like technology that the interviewees in this devastating, rigorous film, which is based on an investigation by the British newspaper The Guardian, do not hesitate to call “genocide.”

Cold and meticulous, threaded with images and the ambient sound of a city we discover through its windows and buildings, NAZA (the name Israeli military personnel use for the human collateral damage of their operations) strings together testimony in an escalation that becomes unbearable. At one point, coinciding with Israel’s observance of the 80th anniversary of the Holocaust, we see the façade of the cinematheque headquarters and its program listing of Shoah, Claude Lanzmann’s masterpiece. Shortly after, one of the military figures in shadow in the film recalls traveling with his family to Poland to honor his ancestors’ memory and then says: “The Nazis were the devil, but what am I?”

The material assembled in NAZA by Abraham and Szor — who won the Oscar in 2024 for No Other Land, alongside Palestinians Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal — is a detailed account revealing the destructive strategies set in motion from October 7: “The secret systems organized to carry out mass murder of the Palestinian population,” their creators say. “References to the Shoah came from the soldiers themselves,” Yuval Abraham said in Venice Thursday. “But since we are in Italy, Primo Levi’s country, for me the memory of the Holocaust and of antisemitism cannot be instruments to avoid confronting what is happening in Gaza. Israel has used antisemitism as a weapon to justify itself. However, I, a grandson of Holocaust survivors, do not want to be complicit.” “This is not about comparing the Holocaust with Gaza — they are not the same,” Abraham replied to a question from a German reporter, “although the patterns of dehumanization are the same and defending human rights is a way of honoring the memory of the Holocaust.”

The lead producer of NAZA, James Wilson, is also behind The Zone of Interest, about life at Auschwitz under its commandant, Rudolf Höss. Its director, Jonathan Glazer, appeared Thursday in the Lido as executive producer of the documentary. Wilson said he is unconcerned by the antisemitism threats facing other critics of Israel: “Unlike actors such as Mark Ruffalo, I am Jewish, my collaborator Jonathan Glazer is Jewish and Yuval and Rachel are Israeli Jews. I am not naive; I recognize the nature of these attacks and their strategy: to hide the truth. Yet Judaism is not incompatible with pointing out the systemic violence of the Israeli government against the indigenous Palestinian population.”

In NAZA, some soldiers speak of a thirst for revenge after October 7 and others explain the dead end in which, three years later, they confess to feeling as part of a hyper-sophisticated technology machine in which the phones of Gazans suspected of belonging to Hamas allowed mapping in which the targets were not only those individuals but the buildings where they lived, with no regard for all those naza (women, children, the elderly) around them. From there they moved to a second phase in which the ruins of those buildings were set on fire one by one to erase what remained of homes and memory. The third phase was the so-called “hunger games” of the snipers, when famine in Gaza turned its inhabitants into desperate “ants.” Officers show, with sketches scrawled in the middle of the night, how the remote-control systems and their AI work like a video game in which “for one terrorist there are up to 500 nazas.” The signal always came from the hacked phones and each time the phrase “Dad is home” was heard they targeted the entire floor, causing the destruction of everything else.

These “technicians” of systematic slaughter — some belonging to the “military elite” — speak of how the screams they heard from the other side of their modern facilities began to haunt them; they speak of mass graves, of the hormones triggered by each mission, of the “crazy adrenaline” of war: “It was fun, none of us hesitated. They asked if we needed psychological help and we said no,” one of them says.

“Everything recounted here was known and published. But it is not the same as hearing it, seeing the nuances they add with their sketches and explanations,” Szor said Thursday. On the process used to conceal the identities of the officers and soldiers, The Guardian’s head of investigations, Paul Lewis, defended the legal right to protect sources. “As in No Other Land, what we pursue is exposing how state crimes are being committed systematically, which as Israelis is our responsibility to denounce,” Abraham added. “The motivations of the men who speak in NAZA vary: some do it to break down the wall of denial in Israel, others do not feel much remorse but want to speak — there is a bit of everything… but they are not the protagonists. As in The Zone of Interest, the victims are off camera, but never out of our minds.” “Our film,” he added, “was shot at night because we are inside that darkness and although, at least for me, there is not much room for hope, one must look for some light and keep going, and for that you must confront what happened and make those responsible pay.”

‘The Voice of Hind Rajab’

If a year ago The Voice of Hind Rajab, by Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania (who is a member of this year’s jury, chaired by Maggie Gyllenhaal) and also produced by James Wilson, stirred the Lido to its core — it won the Silver Lion for the Grand Jury Prize for its story about a five-year-old Palestinian girl who was shot and killed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) — it’s hard to believe that NAZA, which rigorously documents a first-rate journalistic investigation without resorting to sentimentality or unnecessary embellishments, and which only enters Gaza in a devastating final minute, isn’t aiming for the top honors this coming Saturday.

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