NAZA Confronts Israel’s High-Tech Killing Machine

I didn’t cry until the very end of NAZA. The new documentary, by Academy Award–winning Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, is all about Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza. But it’s only in the film’s final minutes that we get a direct view of the suffering on the ground there—a bombed building, a screaming crowd, and then a close-up of a man searching desperately through the debris. He’s shouting over and over, “Sa’id, my love, it’s Daddy. Sa’id, my love, it’s Daddy,” until he collapses, sobbing in the rubble that buried his child. Sa’id was a “NAZA,” the Israel Defense Forces’ acronym for collateral damage: the number of civilian deaths—adults and children—that Israel deemed acceptable for every Hamas operative it eliminated (“Hamas operative” meaning anyone Israel’s AI targeting systems identify as being in some way connected to Hamas). After 80 minutes listening to Israeli officers describe strikes with 15 approved NAZA, 20, 100, even an instance of a 500-NAZA strike, to be confronted with the desperate, hopeless agony that is one single NAZA—that is the murder of this man’s beloved child—is as big a cinematic gut punch as any I’ve experienced.The searing emotion of this finale is a sharp tonal break from NAZA’s preceding scenes, which are composed of nighttime interviews with 24 Israeli intelligence officers. The core of each interview is an often quite clinical description of the systems these soldiers used—and may be still using—to target and kill Palestinians. Though of course the Israeli government has gone on offense to label NAZA “distorted, misleading, and disingenuous”—with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu threatening to revoke the directors’ Israeli citizenship—the film is remarkably straight in its presentation. Abraham, who conducts each interview, is shown on-screen; we hear his questions and how he sometimes pushes back on his interviewees’ answers. We also see how an interview was interrupted by an air raid siren, a regular fixture of life for Israelis. Though the cinematography is effective, there is no filmmaking magic or trickery here, no moments that a reasonable person could describe as propaganda. Just 24 Israelis explaining from their own firsthand experience how they helped kill thousands of unarmed men, women, and children in Gaza.Much of NAZA’s run time focuses on descriptions of two related AI surveillance and targeting systems used by many of the interviewees. The first, named Lavender, identifies Hamas operatives—or, more accurately, the phones of Hamas operatives—through their behavior. So if someone calls another person whom the system has identified as related to Hamas, they’re awarded a certain number of points; if they go to a location the system has identified as related to Hamas, they get more points. Once the person has enough points, they’re automatically added to Israel’s kill list. “It’s a perfect job for machine learning,” noted one officer who helped develop the program. “Looking at characteristics, making a determination. Is it a cat or a dog?” Lavender allowed Israel to unleash “targeted” attacks at scale. “Efficiently, like in a factory,” said an interviewee—attacks directed not just against senior Hamas officials but people “so junior we didn’t know who they were.” It was, said another officer, about “quantity, not quality.” Of course, as anyone who’s encountered a large language model hallucination knows, AI regularly makes mistakes. And this was factored in too. As one officer explained, Israel operated with an understanding that its Lavender kill list had a 10 percent–15 percent error rate. The second system, nicknamed “Where’s Daddy?” identifies the right time to bomb a target. The right location is already decided—Israel’s protocol, the officers explain, is to strike targets in their homes. To determine whether the person is actually at their home, Where’s Daddy? monitors their family (again through their cell phones), searching in particular for children asking their mothers when their fathers would be home—hence the program’s name. One officer described monitoring a 12-year-old girl and then calling in a strike, saying, “You hack her phone and then you kill her.” Another remembered hearing a baby crying in the background before he signaled for an attack. In a third conversation, an officer described looking through the photographs saved on a target’s phone to help identify the best angle of attack on the man’s apartment. He recounted seeing a picture of the target with his young daughter, then listening in real time to the family’s screams as the girl was burned alive. How many times have we heard defenders of Israel try to pin the blame for the disproportionate carnage in Gaza on Hamas’s use of human shields? You can’t blame Israel for killing so many civilians when Hamas hides its military targets behind civilian infrastructure, the line goes. And all the while, the Israeli military has been making a conscious decision to attack its targets at night, after they return to their crowded residential apartment blocks. As one interviewee said, “There are only so many military sites in Gaza. But there are lots of private homes.” The human shields argument never actually relieved Israel of culpability for its slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians. But it certainly tried. Like so many other defenses of the indefensible, it was, from the very beginning, a willfully immoral delusion.Israel can utilize killing systems like Lavender and Where’s Daddy? because it controls all telecommunications in Gaza. An officer described being able to listen in through any cell phone’s microphone or look out through any cell phone’s camera. “You feel like God,” he said. What the subjects of NAZA are describing is a new era of warfare, based on mass surveillance and AI decision-making, that should never have been allowed to escape the realm of dystopian sci-fi. Now that this computerized barbarity has seeped out into our real world, we’d be fools to think the contagion won’t spread.This is where, as grounded as NAZA is in Israel and Gaza, the lessons of the film extend out far beyond the specific atrocities it chronicles. Palestine has always been a testing ground for the West’s newest security systems. Some of Israel’s strongest American supporters are quite explicit about this—in a recent debate, Republican Congressman David Valadao defended his support for military aid for Israel, saying, “The fact that those weapons are used there and tested there, we are able to learn from that and use that experience to develop our weapons systems to help us.” When you add together Flock, Palantir, NSA surveillance, and the development of a class of oligarchs who, like the Israeli officer peering into a victim’s phone, “feel like God,” as they control our government and invest in luxury bunkers and talk openly of Armageddon, it is not hard to see NAZA as prefigurative: a warning of what the entire world can become—will become—if we don’t take action now to stamp out this nightmare vision.Of course, for the Palestinians who remain trapped in Gaza, this isn’t a possible dystopian future—it’s their lived reality today. These people are the victims of this nightmare. Still, the nightmare is leaving deep marks on the Israelis executing and implementing it too—effects we see laid bare in this documentary. Watching NAZA as a Jew, it is hard not to grieve over the ways that nationalism, fear, and hate have shaped the attitudes of too many in our community. How else to describe some of these quotes by NAZA interviewees—some describing their own feelings and some describing the broader views of their society—which I jotted down as best as I could in the movie theater:There are no innocent people in Gaza.Whatever we do to them, they deserve it.I’d carry out strikes and then go out with my friends.Dogs would eat the bodies. I didn’t like to watch. But people around me would watch the dogs eat the bodies.It’s so insanely fun. Like a video game. You enjoy completing your mission.There was talk of bringing in psychologists to see us, but there was no need. Not one person raised any doubts.Some of the officers were themselves grieving what they had become: Yes, it’s a genocide. Completely. Even if you say it’s NAZA, it’s intentional. We intended to kill those children.I never understood how the Germans could do it. Today, I understand it. I still see those Nazis as evil. But what does that make me?This is the ultimate question underlying NAZA. The Holocaust and Israel’s genocide in Gaza are different in many ways—scale, context, rationale, historical era. But the systems creating these atrocities, and the mindsets that allow them, share obvious similarities. No one in NAZA ever actually says the words, “I was just following orders.” But many equivalent justifications—“I was a small cog”; “If I hadn’t done it, someone else would have”; “It’s not my role to say something”—can be heard throughout. Ultimately, whatever historical comparisons one might draw, the most salient fact about the destruction of Gaza is that it is ongoing to this day. The survivors in Gaza, in addition to experiencing hell on earth—as Israel continues restricting aid and squeezing them into an increasingly small and dangerously overcrowded area—are still being killed every single day. At least 30 men, women, and children were murdered just this past week, and over the last year, Israel has injured more than 5,000 Gazans and killed nearly 1,500, including more than 300 children—all during an ostensible ceasefire. Just last Wednesday, an Israeli airstrike hit a family’s apartment in Gaza City, killing a 33-year-old-mother; video footage from inside the apartment shows her young daughter watching as her mother was consumed by flames. There are people—many people—who still deny this reality. NAZA won’t change their minds. After justifying apartheid, famine, and genocide, it seems simple enough to write off a documentary—even one made by Israeli filmmakers, featuring Israeli military officers—as nothing more than anti-Israel or even antisemitic lies. But hopefully there are some previously quiet people out there whom NAZA can influence—people who can be inspired to begin speaking out against these crimes. Israelis who, like Abraham and Szor, feel nauseated by what their government and military have been doing. Americans who don’t want to keep paying for these atrocities with their taxes. Jews who are sick and tired of seeing children killed in their name. In some ways, we have all served as small cogs in this nightmare system. Likewise, we all have a role to play in dismantling it.