Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, directors of ‘NAZA’: ‘That life in Tel Aviv goes on as if nothing was happening is also an act of violence’

Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor live in Jerusalem, but their families are from Tel Aviv, the city where they filmed NAZA at night. Their documentary, which has won the Special Jury Prize at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, gathers the testimonies of 24 military personnel, officers and soldiers from Israel’s intelligence service who demonstrate the systems used for mass killing in Gaza, some based on surveillance and attack programs generated by artificial intelligence.

Oscar winners in 2025 for No Other Land alongside the Palestinians Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal, Abraham and Szor consider themselves activists who, through journalism and cinema, are seeking to stop the “state crimes” that Israel is committing “right now” against the Palestinian population.

This past Friday, Abraham and Szor spoke to EL PAÍS following the impact of their film at the Venice festival. More relaxed than the previous day, the directors nonetheless kept a serious, restrained demeanour (“Rachel is very shy,” Abraham joked briefly). That attitude matches the sombre coldness with which NAZA lays out the lethal video game of the Israeli army — which yesterday replied to the film with a statement denying the use of AI programs and asserting its “unprecedented efforts to minimize harm to the civilian population”— directed against the Palestinian people of Gaza. NAZA is produced by the British newspaper The Guardian, whose investigative team has verified the truth of the film’s claims and guaranteed the legal right to anonymity for its sources.

Question. What is it like to live in a society that denies reality?

Yuval Abraham: It’s difficult for two reasons. The first is that I care about my society, and it’s painful to see so many people losing the most basic moral and human principles. I have read reactions to our film and they not only fail to deny the crimes — the atrocities described by the officers — but justify them, and even applaud them. It’s disgusting. The second reason has to do with things that apparently are not violent, things that are normal in any society, but that right now are violent in ours. The fact that life goes on in Tel Aviv as if nothing was happening is also an act of violence. The military headquarters from which everything that has happened in Gaza was programmed sits in the heart of the city, and its mere presence infects everything else with violence. It may sound strange, but when you turn on the radio in the morning and hear a cheerful voice wishing you a good morning, that gesture feels like violence. Denial and ignorance continue while systematic killings and genocide persist just 60 kilometers away.

Rachel Szor: If daily life is bearable — and it’s important for me to say that it is — it’s because a very small part of Israeli society, the activists around us, oppose what is happening. I’m not talking about opposition to Bibi’s [Benjamin Netanyahu] far-right government, but about a community of people with a real presence in the West Bank who are fighting the crimes Israel is committing.

Q. The film explicitly references Shoah, Claude Lanzmann’s masterpiece about the Holocaust, and who later became a problematic figure because of his Zionism. The treatment of the city’s darkness and its sounds recalls two films by Chantal Akerman, who was Jewish, such as News From Home…

Y. A. What do you think Lanzmann would have thought of this film? Shoah is an absolute masterpiece of cinema and you must distinguish between the film itself and its creator. In Shoah that insistence on detail is very important — those tiny aspects to which Lanzmann returns again and again. That influenced us a lot. Shoah has shaped a culture of memory and the way we remember affects our actions in the present. I think it’s a very pertinent question because many people invoke the memory of the Holocaust to justify Israel’s actions. Precisely for that reason, it’s important to try to reexamine that memory to draw more universal conclusions. Even if he did not arrive at those conclusions from his own film, I believe we are free to do so.

R. S. Akerman’s films were not a conscious reference for us, at least not intentionally.

Q. You have been critical of the instrumentalization of the Holocaust.

Y. A. The past is there to learn from, and Holocaust memory is not a relic. It must be brought into the present. Like religion, it can be used in many ways, including as a weapon.

Q. In Shoah, Treblinka officer Franz Suchomel explains the system of the Final Solution to Lanzmann on a blackboard. Were the sketches the military use in NAZA to explain their algorithmic strategies your own suggestion?

Y. A: It’s true, I didn’t remember… but it wasn’t for that reason. The drawings allowed us to better understand those systems; it’s useful to see them, even if they are simple sketches of the programs.

Q. NAZA is a very cold film until its final minute when the camera enters Gaza. Why?

R. S. We debated the ending. We hesitated a lot. There is no artistic flourish in this film; the feeling of coldness in the portrayal of Tel Aviv reflects that it is a city that turns its back on what is happening. The decision to show the ultimate result is precisely because it is happening now. We wanted to show it, especially for those viewers who are most in denial — Israelis, Germans and Americans.

Q. Off-screen space is crucial in the film; the victims do not appear. In that sense, you have cited the influence of The Zone of Interest by Jonathan Glazer, who is also an executive producer. How has Glazer intervened in the film?

Y. A. We began working with him when a first cut already existed, but his influence has been very important in the structure, the opening and the sound. Everything came from discussions with him. In early versions, atmosphere and sound occupied a lot of space, and he thought we should be more focused on the dialogue, letting the sound develop more gradually so that the city would become present little by little.

Q. How do you divide roles? Rachel never appears in front of the camera.

Y. A. We edit together and we plan everything together, but Rachel is the artist…

R. S. We work entirely together… I didn’t study film; we trained ourselves in history. I’ve learned on the job, without film school, because we wanted to tell these stories… We don’t work in a traditional way.

Q. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz has published an exclusive in recent days about Netanyahu’s alleged prior knowledge of the October 7 attack. How do you see Israel’s future after Netanyahu?

Y. A. We are fairly skeptical… I don’t know.

R. S. If he received that warning and ignored it, it’s because he has believed for many years that he can manage control over the Palestinians without anything exploding. What matters to him is staying in power — that, we all know.

Q. In the film, some images of him slip into home televisions where he repeats his speech about the struggle between Good and Evil.

Y. A. In the film’s research process, we found his texts from 1986 in which he repeats exactly the same idea: always Good against Evil, civilization against barbarism. In that struggle, everything is justified. He has been repeating the same thing for years and it is terrifying and dehumanizing.

Q. Is coexistence between Israel and Palestine possible?

Y. A. Of course. Any solution that respects the rights of both the Palestinian people and the Israeli Jewish people, and that guarantees security and national and individual representation, is a solution. It could be two states, one state, or a confederation. The problem is not a lack of solutions. The problem is a lack of will. But the urgent issue is that the Palestinian people are being destroyed and expelled from their land. Everything else is a distraction right now.

Q. Do you think Israel can regain the world’s sympathy?

R. S. It’s true that Israel is losing the battle of public opinion, but what it is not losing is the support of governments, and I think that is the main problem. As long as it receives weapons from the U.S. or Germany, as long as states remain complicit, nothing will change. Public opinion and individual support are fine, but they are not the main thing.

Q. Do you observe, and are you concerned about, the rise of antisemitism?

Y. A. We are concerned about human rights. And antisemitism often needs no excuse. But yes, of course we are worried, especially for Jews living outside Israel, people on the left who adopt a morally consistent stance.

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