Naza

NAZA by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, two of the makers of the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land, is a revealing film about the systems behind the large-scale civilian deaths in Gaza. On the roofs of Tel Aviv, far from the war zone, Israeli soldiers hold secret conversations at night. Step by step, it becomes visible how within the army and the intelligence services it is determined who is a target, which technologies and procedures are deployed in the process, and how much collateral damage an attack may cost. Dozens to sometimes hundreds of Palestinian civilians can thereby be considered an acceptable price for eliminating a single target. The film thus asks the painful question: how can the killing of innocent civilians within a military apparatus become so normalized that it is no longer seen as a moral or legal problem? The title refers to Nezek Agavi, 'collateral damage', the Israeli military term for the expected number of civilian casualties of an airstrike. The term thus stands as a symbol for the dehumanization that is deeply ingrained in the system: civilian deaths are not a tragic side effect, but a foreseen and accepted part of military operations.