The title of the “documentary” NAZA, which received a mandatory Stalinesque record-breaking ovation at the Venice film festival, is an acronym for the Hebrew term for “collateral damage.” It concerns a system developed by the Israeli military to predict the collateral damage of any strike before it is approved.
And that explains why the project, made by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, has landed with a thud rather than an explosion—at least outside any venue in which participants were required to clap.
Why would Israel need a system to calculate the collateral damage of a near-term strike before it’s approved? There are three possibilities.
The first: So the IDF can reduce civilian casualties. If one needs approval for a strike, and one is required to note for the record how many people would die in that strike, one is less likely to have that strike approved.
The second: So the IDF can increase civilian casualties. The assumption here is that Israelis are psychopaths who gamify war and therefore they will only carry out a strike if the collateral damage is above a certain level.
The third: For no reason at all. According to this theory, the IDF doesn’t care how many people die in a strike. It has gone through the effort and high cost to design a world-leading technology to predict collateral damage because… someone needed a cool party trick? I guess?
This multiple-choice question is easy: The only possible answer is the first, that the purpose of NAZA is to reduce civilian casualties.
Does that automatically let Israel off the hook for every single anonymously sourced claim in the anonymously sourced film? No, of course not. There is the possibility that the casualty limit was too high during the most recent war. Nobody has shown this to be the case, however, and that is unlikely to change.
The film hasn’t been screened widely because the filmmakers didn’t want the IDF to have a chance to respond to the allegations before launch. That’s because the point of the film isn’t accuracy in reporting but to establish a baseline narrative in which Israel is guilty until proven innocent. But what has been available thus far does not bode well for the possibility that the full film establishes NAZA as a tool of civilian death.
For example, the film’s biggest accusation seems to be that NAZA returned an estimate of 500 casualties for one strike. Since there is no record of such a strike—and the Gaza Healthy Ministry, as Hamas is often called in news reports, is famous only for inflating numbers like the floats in the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade—the conclusion one is left with is the following: NAZA said 500 would die and the IDF commander in charge called off the strike.
But again, the filmmakers have been hiding the film they are so proud of from the general public until their narrative can gain a firm footing. So it’s possible they have something damning. More likely, they simply don’t understand what they’re looking at. Who are the soldiers interviewed? Nobody knows. We have no evidence that the filmmakers spoke to anyone who knew anything about complex high-tech IDF systems and the officers who oversee their use.
Should we have expected this? Yes. Last year, Abraham wrote a piece intended to have the same effect: establish a narrative, bury the counter-evidence. The claim was that the overwhelming majority of casualties in Gaza were civilians according to the IDF’s own calculations. To demonstrate this, Abraham referred to a database of known terror operatives from only two groups operating in Gaza and considered any death not on that list of operatives to be a civilian.
In other words, it doesn’t account for unnamed deaths, for unknown operatives, for any militant or combatant who wasn’t on Israel’s list for just two terror groups, etc.
The share of civilian casualties given by the article is, therefore, entirely debunked by the article itself. You just have to read far enough past the headline.
The level of sloppiness in that story made it very clear that this was not a “documentarian” whose work could be trusted without extensive re-reporting.
The larger point, to me, is that this is another example of a broader problem among Israel’s critics: They take something Israel has done as a means of protecting civilians and turn it around into a nefarious sci-fi plot.
You can see this mode of argumentation in Israel’s determination to evacuate neighborhoods before dropping heavy bombs on them. The number of bombs dropped, together with the physical destruction of the bombed area and the low numbers of civilian casualties in those specific bombings combine to show that the IDF stalled its own offensive in order to move Palestinian civilians out of harm’s way. So the world decided that these evacuations were themselves the crime, some form of “ethnic cleansing” or other crime.
In some cases, Israel’s humanitarian steps undermine its legitimate military aims. It delayed the progression of its Rafah mission during the war until it could evacuate the area, ultimately moving nearly a million Palestinians out of harm’s way. So, again, the world called the Rafah evacuation the crime.
And so it is with Israel’s efforts to avoid civilian casualties by forcing commanders to record the number of expected deaths from a strike before approving it. NAZA’s impact has been limited by its implausibility, but no matter: Everyone knows you should never be the first one to stop clapping.
