The great Italian success of “NAZA,” the film of lies about Israel that purports to be a documentary, compels us to return to Vasily Grossman’s famous observation: “Look at the substance of what the antisemite says, and you will discover all his characteristics.”
The reasoning behind the special award presented to “NAZA” at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival provides a neat summary. The film, which in three days was seen by 843,000 Italians and grossed 1.806 million euros, remains in theaters, showing on 424 screens.
It was honored because it depicts “the basic mechanisms of the mass extermination planned by Israel, revealed by those who designed and carried it out.”
The supposed soldiers who make these accusations appear as unidentified dark silhouettes. Yet their claims are accepted by audiences without question and seized upon like a club with which to criminalize the Jewish state.
How widespread, then, in the Bel Paese is the desire to destroy Israel and shame the Jews!
Yet the alternative would have been easy. What would it have taken to expose, or at least seriously discuss, a film that is clearly—and legitimately—a work of fiction produced by whomever it pleases, including an enemy of Israel such as The Guardian? It could be treated as a propaganda leaflet or simply as entertainment, like a pornographic film or a cartoon.
Instead, its protagonists reveal horrific things in darkness and with disguised voices. They are presented as soldiers of a genocidal and racist Israel, exterminators of innocent people.
But for anyone who does not accept Palestinianism as a substitute for human rights and historical reality itself, other information is readily available.
John Spencer, the well-known military analyst, has argued that even accepting figures controlled by Hamas, the ratio of combatants to noncombatants killed in Gaza—1:1.12, or at most 1:1.4—would represent an extraordinarily low proportion of civilian casualties in urban warfare.
There are other realities that “NAZA” ignores: Gaza’s population has grown; enormous quantities of food and medicine have entered the territory, even as supplies have been looted by Hamas; and Yahya Sinwar understood that the deaths of women, children and other civilians could serve Hamas’s propaganda purposes, while the terrorist organization embedded itself among the population and used civilians as human shields.
Above all, the film obscures why the war began: Israel was forced to defend itself after the Hamas massacre of Oct. 7, 2023, when some 1,200 people were murdered, others were raped and brutalized, and 251 people were abducted to Gaza.
The IDF has now issued a painstaking, point-by-point response to the accusations.
It says it has never intentionally targeted civilians; that the claim that predetermined numbers of civilians may be sacrificed depending on the importance of a military target is false; and that the notion that 500 civilian deaths could be authorized to eliminate a single combatant is science fiction.
Artificial-intelligence systems, the IDF says, do not independently make targeting decisions. Decisions intended to safeguard civilians remain in the hands of professionals, including intelligence personnel and legal advisers.
Nor, according to the IDF, is authorization for a strike granted automatically.
Leaflets, telephone calls, “knock on the roof” warnings, evacuation routes and designated safe zones have all been employed to protect civilians. Strikes have also been called off when the risk to innocent people was judged too great.
If the witnesses in “NAZA” claim that AI systems themselves make decisions about whom to kill, they are either ignorant or lying.
And finally, “NAZA” arrives at one of the oldest accusations of all: that Jews want the blood of children.
It is an echo of the ancient blood libel—the accusation that Jews murdered children and used their blood to make Passover matzah.
There you have it.
Perhaps someone should make a documentary about that—with witnesses and packed Italian cinemas.
