Israel, to be sure, has its own special relationship to journalism and propaganda, which a film like NAZA was uniquely poised to disrupt. Hasbara, the Hebrew word for “propaganda,” was once an elegantly managed media ecosystem built on the grammatical obfuscations of New York Times and BBC headlines, on the one hand, and the self-serious “shoot and cry” films like Waltz with Bashir (2008) and Lebanon (2009), on the other. In these films, soldiers come close to reckoning with their war guilt, but only as personal trauma devoid of political context. Like most bad apologies, these stories seem like self-justification more and more as they progress: It was my first day on the job as tank gunner; these terrorists keep using civilians as human shields; mistakes were bound to happen. As Prime Minister Golda Meir once said, “We can forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but we can never forgive them for forcing us to kill their children.”
After a few post–October 7 news cycles, however, the hasbara began to crumble, and Israel launched a new stopgap: a campaign of international intimidation, blatantly corrupt media spin by powerful ideologues like Larry and David Ellison, and an unprecedented massacre of combat zone journalists. For Edward Said’s generation, the task of overcoming Israeli propaganda meant outspending and outmaneuvering an elegantly managed ideological apparatus. For the directors of NAZA, the challenge was simply finding the courage to tell the truth at a time when Western powers had given the green light to any and all forms of repression, reprisal, and bloodshed.
For the time being, American film is still contained by its more or less subtle ideological apparatus, rather than outright skullduggery against filmmakers. Recently, the Warner-Paramount merger put a long list of media properties (CNN, HBO, TBS, BET, et al.) on the same path for political reeducation that CBS suffered under Ellison hatchet woman Bari Weiss. The move is a part of a longer historical assault on America’s ability to understand itself or the rest of the world. Corporate media conglomeration was already a corrosive force in American newsrooms, as were the economic pressures that came with the news avoidance of the Trump years, a result of his “flood the zone” approach to political theater and scandal. And that’s to say nothing of what social media has done to impoverish news outlets.
A great effort is undertaken to keep Americans ignorant of certain truths — particularly when it comes to our history of military interventions. And once the job is done, it’s hard to see one’s own country clearly. Sometimes the only way to recognize our own propaganda is to watch how another country’s falls apart.