NAZA

 “The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be either good or evil.” 

— Hannah Arendt 

It is here that Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’s film takes on a radical dimension. Because the problem is no longer simply who kills, but what happens to responsibility when killing is fragmented among algorithms, intelligence, drones, operators, superiors, procedures and orders. Contemporary horror does not necessarily need a monster. All it needs is a chain of expertise. 

The two Israeli directors occupy a particularly significant and, at the same time, paradoxical position. They are able to make this film also because they belong to the society they are accusing, because they have access to a language, a culture, a network of contacts and an information apparatus that would simply be inaccessible to a Palestinian in Gaza. It is the paradox of privilege transformed into dissent: sometimes only those who possess a certain proximity to power are able to reveal its inner rooms. 

The film is in fact the result of three years of investigative work and of the investigations conducted by +972 Magazine, Local Call and The Guardian, bringing twenty-four people from the military and intelligence apparatus before the camera. 

But their faces disappear. Their voices remain. 

And this is anything but an ornamental choice. Those voices seem to come directly from the machine. They are no longer individuals, but functions. We do not see the man pressing the button, because the contemporary system has learned something far more sophisticated than simple cruelty: it has learned to distribute responsibility until it becomes almost invisible. 

And yet, precisely in these testimonies, something even more disturbing emerges. 

Some recount their experience with astonishing lightness. They speak of the mission, technology, efficiency, even of the pleasure of striking. The destruction of buildings can become a spectacle watched through a screen; the drone makes it possible to witness death without physically standing before the dead; artificial intelligence produces targets; the surveillance of phones allows an entire population to be transformed into an enormous map of information. Physical distance becomes moral distance. 

And when moral distance becomes sufficient, killing can even take the form of entertainment. 

This is probably the most chilling passage in NAZA: not the discovery that human beings capable of killing exist, but the discovery of how easily a technological apparatus can teach people to stop perceiving the other as a human being. 

Technology, then, is not the problem. It is the new alibi. 

Artificial intelligence does not decide on its own who must die. It is human beings who build the algorithms, establish the thresholds, validate the results, and choose when to turn a prediction into an attack. The machine does not eliminate responsibility: it simply makes it more convenient to deny. 

It is at this point that NAZA inevitably enters into a relationship with the memory of the Holocaust. Not because the film establishes a simplistic historical equivalence — which would be historically and conceptually untenable — but because it reopens a question that the memory of Auschwitz has made irreversible: how can a society transform the killing of the other into an administrative, rational, organised activity that is even morally acceptable to those who carry it out? 

The issue, then, is not merely violence but the normalisation of violence; the language makes it bearable, and the system allows someone to say that they were simply doing their job. 

And here NAZA becomes almost a technological continuation of that terrible banality of fragmented responsibility that twentieth-century history has already known. Not Auschwitz repeated, not the Shoah transferred elsewhere, but the eternally contemporary question of how easy it is to construct an apparatus in which no one truly feels responsible for what everyone together produces. 

The strength of the documentary also lies in its refusal to turn all the interviewees into caricatures of evil. Some seem slowly to become aware of what they have taken part in; others remain within a morally anaesthetised zone; still others continue to regard their activity as a privileged mission, almost a professional elite to which they have been granted access to something exceptional. 

It is precisely this word — privilege — that becomes monstrous. 

Because the privilege of being able to strike without seeing whom one is striking, of being able to observe a city from a monitor, of knowing in advance the expected number of dead, produces a form of psychological impunity even before legal impunity. 

Perhaps the true tragedy that NAZA brings to the screen lies in this semantic transformation: the death of the other gradually becomes incapable of producing outrage precisely because it has been made compatible with administrative normality. 

The decision to film the rooftops of Tel Aviv at night is also significant. Above the apparently ordinary Israeli city, while life goes on, there exists another invisible city made of screens, intelligence, orders and trajectories. Tel Aviv sleeps while somewhere else someone calculates how many human beings may die. Geographical distance becomes a deterrent. 

And NAZA performs an even more powerful operation: it forces the viewer to confront not the image of the victim, which at least retains the ability to arouse pity, but the voice of someone who participated in the mechanism. It is an anti-cathartic choice. It does not allow the viewer to feel morally superior. It forces us to listen to the normality with which the unthinkable can be recounted by those who carried it out. 

The documentary also shows, with an irony as bitter as it is involuntary, that while Holocaust Remembrance Day is observed — recalling how bureaucracy, technical language and obedience can transform human beings into numbers — elsewhere those same mechanisms seem to reappear in the form of algorithms, coordinates and “expected victims.” 

The documentary thus becomes a reflection on the death of conscience in the age of automation. 

There is no longer any need to hate someone in order to kill them; it is enough to consider them a target. 

One is no longer cruel but efficient; the other is simply data. 

And it is here that NAZA transcends the chronicle and becomes political cinema in the most radical sense: it does not merely document what is happening in Gaza, but interrogates the mental structure that allows a society to produce death without everyone participating in the production chain perceiving themselves as killers. 

One must then ask what happens to responsibility when history arrives after the events…. 

At Nuremberg, there was at least the possibility of constructing a courtroom in which those responsible could be called to account for their actions. Today the question is infinitely more complex. In November 2024, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, accusing them of war crimes and crimes against humanity; in parallel, proceedings brought by South Africa are underway before the International Court of Justice, accusing Israel of violations of the Genocide Convention. None of these developments, however, amounts to a trial already held and concluded like the Nuremberg Trials. 

And perhaps this is the final vertigo of NAZA: not merely to ask how it was possible, but to ask whether, when everything is over, there will be anyone willing to pronounce the word responsibility. 

Because history is often very generous to those who carry things out: it grants them time, distance, bureaucracy, superior orders, oblivion. 

Cinema, on the other hand, can take at least one thing away from them: the possibility of saying that they did not see. 

“The most far-reaching consequence of obedience to authority is the loss of a sense of responsibility.” 

Stanley Milgram