The night before I saw the movie at a press screening, Michael Sfard, an Israeli human rights lawyer who was a consultant on the film, told me that it was “a movie about Tel Aviv,” the sophisticated, stylish city in which Sfard himself lives. He meant that it’s about the educated, cosmopolitan Israelis serving in elite units. Not the violent ideologue politicians or a few bad-apple soldiers on whom Israelis blame some of the wanton violence in Gaza, but rather the people making day-to-day decisions.
More than halfway through the film, Yuval Abraham, who conducted the interviews and co-directed the movie with Rachel Szor, asks one of the subjects if he realized that he was taking part in a genocide. This interviewee has already said that he found the work to be fun, because staying up late with your buddies, working toward a common goal, is fun. Now he agrees calmly, indeed casually, that yes, he has been taking part in a genocide.
The word doesn’t appear in the movie again.
A different but similarly contested term, on the other hand, appears over and over, landing with brutal force every time. The term is “terrorism,” or “terrorist.” At least one of the A.I. systems used by Israeli intelligence identifies suspected terrorists by patterns of phone calls and social connections, among other data.
Does the system make mistakes? Of course it does, one interviewee readily acknowledges. He continues: A baker whose shop is near Hamas headquarters, for example, might have patterns of movement and contact that, to A.I., look similar to those of a Hamas fighter. (Just such a case is described in the podcast “The Gaza Chef,” produced by the German newspaper Die Zeit, which built on some of Abraham’s reporting to examine the targeted killing of a man named Mahmoud Almadhoun, who ran a soup kitchen near a hospital Israeli intelligence had identified as a Hamas stronghold.)
Once the system categorizes the person as a terrorist, he becomes a human target. Members of his family or staff could be killed along with him. This is where NAZA comes in: the acceptable number of additional casualties rises along with the perceived importance of the human target. It may be 20, 50 or even 100. People.