“In No Other Land, Abraham and Szor told a story by directly documenting it. In NAZA the scope, as well as the importance, is bigger, but the film’s strongest feat is not its story, but the added cinematic contemplation on who lives and who dies, and how similar the two are.”

“We erased history.”

Within Europe, Germans have a reputation for thoroughness and efficiency; it’s a bit of a stereotype, really, but all stereotypes have a nucleus of truth in them. The most gruesome example of German Gründlichkeit came during World War II, when the Nazis documented every possible detail to aid their mass killing machine. A few years ago I visited the former concentration camp in Amersfoort, The Netherlands, now a museum. Part of me wanted to find out more about this place because my grandfather had been held there for half a year until he managed to escape. He never talked much about his time in the camp. When I discovered its online archives, to my amazement and shock I found out he had had the flu for a couple of days in the winter of 1945 (his escape was also noted). My grandfather’s illness, and by extension his existence, became a cold data point.

I tell this story because NAZA, the new documentary by the Oscar-winning directors of No Other Land, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, shows how Israel is mimicking this Nazi efficiency by collecting tens of thousands of similar data points on the Palestinian people living in Gaza, and is systematically using them to destroy lives, living spaces, and history. In a series of interviews with anonymous intelligence officers, drone operators, and former operatives on the ground, NAZA lays out the efficiency of the systems used to plan and execute the erasure of Gaza, and the erasure of a moral conflict in the minds of the people using these systems. They are candid about the inner workings of a genocide, even though they are reluctant to admit it is one, and fall silent when they are confronted with their direct role in it. Their faces may be obscured, for obvious reasons, but you can sense from their evasiveness that in their hearts they know they are (or in some cases were) the monster’s brain, but they have told themselves that it was not wrong as a coping mechanism. To relate this back to Nazi Germany, they display a typical ‘befehl ist befehl‘ (orders are orders) mentality. They make the comparison to the Holocaust themselves: one interviewee remembers a trip to Auschwitz in his youth, wondering how people could be so evil; he now realizes how. And this day and age of AI only makes it more impersonal, and thus easier. Planning the bombing of a building in a system that gives you thousands of data points becomes like playing a video game; when your target is reduced to a pile of rubble it can even become ‘fun’. It is the algorithm of a genocide, where human lives have become meaningless because they are just numbers on a screen.

The term ‘NAZA’ is used to describe the collateral damage of striking a perceived Hamas operative. In clearer terms, the number of innocent civilians killed when said operative is struck. The Israeli intelligence machine knows these NAZA numbers on a home-by-home basis, even before they strike. What number is acceptable? At some point, 20 becomes the norm. Twenty people dead, including children, because they are in the vicinity of what might be a low-level Hamas member. Although the system can’t be fully trusted on that. One of the officers admits that Lavender, the system used for planning these attacks, for which it uses AI to suggest targets, is wrong about 15% of the time. This roughly tracks with the amount of time ChatGPT is wrong when you ask it an innocuous question, but we are talking about human lives here. But if your goal is ‘quantity over quality’, as it is put in the documentary, and the dehumanization of a population as a whole by a relentless war propaganda machine (“We will win together”, one billboard in Tel Aviv reads) is combined with those human lives being reduced to numbers in a database, reaching your targets comes without remorse.

NAZA is more than a series of interviews with a bunch of talking heads, albeit unrecognizable. Most of the one-on-ones are conducted on rooftops, in the darkness of night to keep them covert. Tel Aviv’s high rises, all glass and metal, become the background for the meticulous execution of a genocide. These images, often connecting one interview to the other, are poignant. The camera peers into windows from its high vantage point, filming people in their homes doing that one global evening ritual: hanging on the couch watching television. Big flat screens showing the news, or speeches by Bibi Netanyahu and his ilk, all meant to keep the spirits of war high. Innocent people that are filmed doing innocent things, shot in such a way that they remain faceless behind window frames and other obstacles. It’s a striking parallel to the faceless people the intelligence officers talk about. What were the NAZAs in Gaza doing when their apartment building, so similar to those in Tel Aviv sixty kilometers down the coast, was bombed? Were they too watching television, eating dinner, bathing their little ones? The sleek night skyline of Tel Aviv is not just cinematically shot, but holds a message. When it explains how a whole Palestinian neighborhood in the city was flattened to create a park, it focuses on the one building left standing; again, drawing a line from that deliberate destruction of a neighborhood to a similarly deliberate destruction of many such neighborhoods in Gaza is as easy as drawing a few buildings on a piece of paper to explain how such destruction is planned. NAZA doesn’t even have to show the latter. On its surface, it is just another documentary made up of a series of interviews connected by B-roll. But the weight that both the interview and the B-roll carry makes NAZA a work of important cinema. Not just an important piece of journalism, but important cinema. The journalistic part (done in cooperation with a team from The Guardian) carries the damaging weight: Israel goes out of its way to proclaim the utmost care in killing as few innocent bystanders as possible, and blames Hamas for using these bystanders as human shields. The interviews with people from within the genocide machine eradicate those arguments. The fact that the term NAZA exists within the Israeli intelligence community says enough in this regard. The B-roll footage, however, carries the emotional weight of the film because it indirectly shows the innocent human lives that are lost, the lives behind the impersonal term NAZA.

There are moments where the documentary falters. Historical footage used to explain the background of what we have witnessed over the past three years adds context, but doesn’t bring anything new to the table and feels like an addition from a different, more traditional documentary. The focus on the political branch of the intelligence department is all too brief. They are tasked with misinformation and propaganda to keep Israel, and in particular Benjamin Netanyahu, acceptable to the West, and actively follow and intimidate elements within Israeli society who are critical of the regime’s efforts in Gaza. There’s a certain irony in the fact that a day after Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s DAU had its premiere, a film in which KGB officers not so subtly pressure the protagonist and others around him, we now hear men speaking about digging into extramarital affairs and people’s out-of-norm sexualities to use as proverbial thumbscrews; fiction and reality aren’t that far apart (though the KGB no doubt employed such tactics too). It is a shame that Abraham and Szor don’t pay more attention to the system using these data points just as easily and with the same lack of remorse against Israel’s own as it does against Palestinians in Gaza.

Taken as a whole though, NAZA is an important document that shows the inner workings of a genocide as told by those who participated in it, however reluctant they may be to admit it. It’s akin to interviewing SS officers and camp commanders during the Holocaust, with them openly explaining in detail how mass killing works. It’s a conversation with the banality of evil, in a sense. There is no more denying after watching this. But that it manages to marry the journalistic facts with a cinematic approach that adds a sobering poignancy to the dry, if horrific, monotony of the accounts is where the film’s real triumph lies. In No Other Land, Abraham and Szor told a story by directly documenting it. In NAZA the scope, as well as the importance, is bigger, but the film’s strongest feat is not its story, but the added cinematic contemplation on who lives and who dies, and how similar the two are. It is a work of art that everyone who is interested in humanity’s dark side should watch.