A Dutch movie theater had scheduled an Oct. 7 screening of “NAZA,” a documentary widely seen as anti-Israel, but appeared to have removed it from its online schedule amid an outcry on Thursday.
Filmhuis Lumen in Delft, near Rotterdam, this week initially scheduled screenings of “NAZA” on Oct. 4, Oct. 7 and Oct. 11, making it one of the first theaters in the world to screen the film following its premiere last week at the Venice International Film Festival. The film won the festival’s Special Jury Prize.
The theater then dropped the Oct. 7 screening of the film, which alleges that Israel systematically targeted Palestinian civilians during the war against Hamas in Gaza. Israeli officials and others have dismissed the film as a mendacious instrument of anti-Israel propaganda. The change followed criticism online, including on Lumen’s Facebook page, over the Oct. 7 screening.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned “NAZA” as an “intolerable” and “terrible” film that “slanders IDF soldiers” and portrays Israeli soldiers as war criminals. The film was co-directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor and named for the Hebrew military acronym for “collateral damage.”
Filmhuis Lumen did not reply by press time to a JNS query about what led to its decision to drop the Oct. 7 screening, which would have fallen on the third anniversary of Hamas’s massacres. Hamas terrorists and other Gazans killed about 1,200 people on Oct. 7, 2023, among other atrocities.
Oded Nir, a member of the Consulting Board of the Israel Defense and Security Forum, also known as Habithonistim, condemned the decision to screen the film on that date and said it was indicative of indifference in Western Europe to Israeli casualties.
Nir, an Israeli musician who lived in the Netherlands for 19 years before returning to Israel last year, told JNS that Delft was “a quiet and picturesque place. And as Ze’ev Jabotinsky wrote in ‘Shir Betar’: ‘Quiet is squalid, an abandonment of blood and soul.’” Jabotinsky was a right-wing Zionist leader who founded the Betar youth movement in Riga in 1923.
Lumen has previously screened anti-Israel films, including “No Other Land,” “The Voice of Hind Rajab” and “Palestine 36.” It did not advertise screenings of recent films that represent the mainstream Israeli narrative, such as “We Will Dance Again,” “Screams Before Silence,” “One Day in October” or “Of Dogs and Men.”
