Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
These days, it can feel deeply comfortable to condemn Israel.
You get to feel brave without risking much. You get to denounce power, invoke human rights, bemoan “Palestinian suffering,” condemn war, and leave the theater convinced that you have taken the morally difficult position.
Except increasingly, in Western cultural institutions, condemning Israel is not the difficult position. It is the applause line.
That is what makes the reception surrounding “NAZA” so revealing. The new documentary, directed by Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, just received a Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival. Its official festival description does not cautiously say that the film investigates disputed Israeli military conduct. It describes its subject as Israel’s “calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians.”
The wording matters because the accusation is already embedded in the premise. “Calculated.” “Mass killing.” Before the evidence has even been weighed, before competing explanations have been considered, before the audience has heard the first witness, the prosecution has effectively delivered its closing argument.
Documentaries are allowed to take positions. Filmmakers are allowed to be angry. Israeli filmmakers are allowed to be critical of their own country.
But when you make one of the most serious accusations imaginable against a democratic country fighting a terrorist organization that invaded its territory, massacred its civilians, and dragged hostages into Gaza, you do not get to substitute moral certainty for evidence. You certainly do not get to transform applause into proof. And questioning such an indictment means refusing to accept a standard in which the accusation itself is treated as evidence merely because the accused is Israel.
The word “calculated” does enormous work here. Every military campaign involves calculation. Commanders calculate targets, weapons, civilian risk, danger to their own soldiers, intelligence confidence, and the consequences of allowing an enemy force to survive. War is, among many other terrible things, an exercise in calculation.
But “calculated killing of civilians” suggests something radically different: not merely that civilians died or that commanders knew civilians might die, but that civilian death itself was the objective. That is the difference between tragedy and murder, between military action and deliberate slaughter.
If that is the accusation against Israel, then prove it. Do not imply it through editing, language, or emotional association. Prove the policy. Prove the intention. Prove the chain of command. Demonstrate that civilian deaths were not the terrible consequences of fighting Hamas in a densely populated environment but instead the desired outcome of Israeli policy.
If the allegation concerns reckless targeting, establish reckless targeting. If it concerns specific commanders, identify what they did. If it concerns systematic policy, demonstrate the system. The more extraordinary the accusation, the more precision should be required.
Instead, Israel is frequently denied those distinctions. Civilian death becomes evidence of intent. A failed strike becomes evidence of doctrine. An individual allegation becomes evidence of national character. Israeli explanations of battlefield conditions are dismissed as propaganda before they are evaluated, while accusations against Israel acquire credibility from the sheer gravity with which they are delivered. That is not skepticism. It is a predetermined framework of guilt.
“NAZA,” an Israeli military acronym derived from the Hebrew words nezek agavi (non-combatant casualty), relies on testimony from 24 anonymous Israeli military and intelligence insiders. That could be important evidence. Anonymous sources can expose genuine wrongdoing, and their anonymity does not make them dishonest.
But anonymity does place an even greater obligation on filmmakers to demonstrate what each witness actually knows. What did each person personally observe? What came from secondhand information? What was their position? What could they reasonably know beyond their own unit or operation? What intelligence was available at the time? Were the accounts corroborated by documentation? Were conflicting explanations investigated? Were exceptional incidents being presented as representative policy?
Twenty-four sources can establish a devastating case, but twenty-four sources are not twenty-four omniscient observers. A soldier can know exactly what happened in one incident and still have no basis for explaining the strategy of an entire war. An intelligence officer can understand one targeting process without knowing every consideration weighed by commanders elsewhere. A witness can accurately describe something horrifying and still interpret its larger meaning incorrectly. None of this invalidates testimony. It simply means testimony must be tested.
Curiously, that insistence on context and complexity often works in only one direction. When Palestinians or Hamas are discussed, suddenly history matters. Grievance matters. Trauma matters. Power disparities matter. Desperation matters. Political objectives matter. Violence must be understood within a broader historical framework.
Yet when Israelis act, context is frequently treated as excuse-making. The result is a bizarre moral system in which the motivations of Israel’s enemies must be understood, while Israeli motivations are presumed to reveal something sinister about Israel itself.
That asymmetry becomes even more dangerous when allegations against individual Israelis begin expanding into judgments about the entire country. A soldier’s conduct becomes the essence of the IDF. The IDF becomes the government. The government becomes Israeli society. Israeli society becomes Zionism. And eventually, often without anyone explicitly defending the logical leaps in between, an accusation concerning wartime conduct becomes an indictment of Jewish sovereignty itself.
Israel did not merely do something wrong; Israel becomes the wrong.
This is one reason criticism of Israel so often feels different from criticism directed at other countries. Britain can wage a disastrous war and remain Britain. America can devastate cities in wars stretching across decades and remain America. France can carry the baggage of colonial brutality without anyone seriously proposing that French national sovereignty should therefore disappear. Arab states can commit horrifying abuses without those abuses becoming an international referendum on whether Arabs should possess states of their own.
Israel, however, is repeatedly forced to defend not merely its policies but its existence.
A Palestinian civilian death can quickly become an argument against Zionism. A reprehensible act by an Israeli soldier becomes evidence about Jewish nationalism. A mistaken strike becomes evidence that the Jewish state is fundamentally illegitimate. Israel is treated not as an ordinary country capable of wrongdoing, but as an experiment whose permission to exist must constantly be renewed.
That is why October 7th cannot be relegated to background context. October 7th was not simply a date that happened before the Gaza war. It was the event that caused the war. Thousands of Palestinians crossed into Israel, attacked communities, murdered civilians, massacred young people at a music festival, and kidnapped people (including babies, children, and the elderly) into Gaza.
Israel then made a decision that almost any country subjected to a comparable attack would make: The organization responsible could not be permitted to retain the military capability and territorial control necessary to repeat it.
There are legitimate arguments about rules of engagement, proportionality, targeting decisions, intelligence failures, political leadership, and the conduct of specific soldiers. But those questions cannot be answered honestly by quietly removing the reason Israel went to war in the first place.
Yet this is precisely what happens in much of the international conversation. Hamas becomes scenery. The tunnels become scenery. The hostages become scenery. Rocket fire becomes scenery. Armed combatants operating inside civilian environments become scenery. The Israeli communities living close enough to Gaza to hear the explosions become scenery. Israel’s response is then isolated from everything preceding it and examined as though the IDF simply entered Gaza because Israelis woke up one morning eager to destroy Palestinians.
That framework creates a grotesque strategic incentive. Hamas can choose the battlefield, operate from civilian areas, build military infrastructure under populated neighborhoods, initiate a war, retreat into those neighborhoods, and then allow Israel to inherit almost all moral responsibility for the consequences of the battlefield Hamas helped create. If civilian proximity makes military targets effectively untouchable, the lesson for every terrorist organization in the world is obvious: surround yourself with more civilians.
Hamas does not have to defeat Israel militarily, because it cannot. Its strategic objective can instead be to make Israel politically unable to fight. If Israel cannot attack Hamas because Hamas has embedded itself among civilians, Hamas has found a strategy that converts Palestinian vulnerability into military protection. Any humanitarian framework that refuses to confront this reality does not merely misunderstand the war; it risks rewarding the tactic that helps make future civilian suffering inevitable.
The invocation of Nazism in the discussion surrounding “NAZA” makes the problem even worse. One documentary participant invokes the Nazis while reflecting upon Israeli conduct. This comparison has become painfully familiar. Israel is not allowed simply to be wrong. It must become Nazi Germany. The Jewish army must become the Wehrmacht (Nazi Germany’s unified military force). Palestinians must become the Jews. And the descendants of Holocaust survivors must be informed that they have become what once tried to annihilate them.
The comparison is not merely offensive. It is historically incoherent. The Holocaust was not shorthand for “many civilians died.” It was not simply a military campaign in which a powerful country caused catastrophic casualties. It was a state-directed project to identify, isolate, deport, enslave and systematically exterminate an entire people because of who they were.
Jewish children were not killed because German officers believed militants were operating near their homes. They were killed because they were Jewish. There were no Jewish armies launching attacks from Warsaw neighborhoods, no Jewish battalions crossing into German towns and murdering civilians, and no Jewish government openly committed to destroying Germany.
To use Nazism as the conceptual framework for Israel’s war against Hamas does not illuminate history. It obliterates the distinctions that make history meaningful. Worse, it turns the defining catastrophe of Jewish history into a rhetorical weapon against Jewish self-defense. The implication becomes almost sadistic: You survived the Nazis only to become them yourselves.
That framing has enormous power because once Israel has been transformed into Nazi Germany, normal political analysis ends. Zionism becomes fascism. Israeli military action becomes genocidal by definition. Negotiation with Israel becomes collaboration with evil. Jewish sovereignty becomes morally contaminated. This is why Nazi analogies should make audiences more skeptical, not less. The more emotionally explosive the comparison, the more rigorous the evidence required to sustain it.
Nor should anyone be impressed by the argument that Israeli filmmakers themselves are making the accusation. “Even Israelis say it” has become one of the laziest rhetorical shortcuts in the anti-Israel discourse. Israel is a fractious democracy in which citizens disagree vehemently about almost everything. Israelis protest their government. Israeli newspapers attack their leaders. Soldiers criticize the army. Activists oppose military policy. Politicians accuse each other of destroying the country.
This is not evidence that the most extreme Israeli criticism must therefore be true. It is evidence that Israel contains the kind of internal political dissent characteristic of a free society.
An Israeli passport is not a certificate of objectivity. If an Israeli defending Israel can be biased, so can an Israeli attacking Israel. If nationalism can create blind spots, ideology can too. Yet Western audiences frequently grant Israeli critics a peculiar form of credibility: If someone from inside the country condemns it, the condemnation is treated as practically self-authenticating. The filmmaker becomes a kind of hostile witness for the prosecution, valuable precisely because his nationality can be deployed as proof that the indictment must be true.
That is intellectually unserious. Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor should be judged by the strength of what they establish, not by the country listed on their passports.
Underlying all of this is another impossible expectation: Israel is expected to wage war without producing the horrors of war.
Israel is subjected to a different logic. It is expected to destroy Hamas without damaging the physical spaces from which Hamas operates, to protect its soldiers while assuming extraordinary risks, to move civilians away from fighting without being accused of forced displacement, to warn civilians without having those warnings described as psychological warfare, and to eliminate military commanders even when those commanders deliberately surround themselves with civilians.
Eventually the standard becomes impossible by construction. Whatever Israel does becomes incriminating. If it does not warn civilians, it is monstrous. If it warns civilians to leave, it is accused of ethnic cleansing. If it uses air power, it is indiscriminate. If it sends ground troops, it is invading. If it does not destroy Hamas, it has failed to protect its population. If it destroys Hamas while civilians die, the deaths are used to argue that Israel never had the right to wage the war at all.
The trap matters because Israel does not need to be perfect in order to deserve defending. That is perhaps the most important point for Israel’s supporters to understand. There is no need to insist that every Israeli military decision was correct or that every allegation against an Israeli soldier must be false. Some accusations may be true. Some soldiers may deserve punishment. Some commanders may have made appalling decisions. Israeli governments have certainly made mistakes, and the country should investigate credible allegations aggressively.
But after saying all of that, one should be able to say something equally clearly: Israel is still allowed to exist. Israel is still allowed to defend itself. Israel is still allowed to destroy organizations that massacre its citizens. Jewish sovereignty does not disappear because an Israeli soldier commits a crime. Zionism does not become illegitimate because an Israeli government makes a disastrous decision. The existence of wrongdoing within Israel is not evidence that the existence of Israel is wrong.
That distinction is constantly erased. The rhetorical progression has become almost formulaic. The argument begins with civilian casualties, then becomes war crimes, then genocide, then apartheid, then settler colonialism, then Zionism itself. Eventually the conclusion arrives where many activists wanted to begin: There should be no Jewish state.
Israel has become a vessel into which a particular class of Western cultural institutions can pour an entire worldview. Colonialism, racism, militarism, nationalism, oppression, genocide: Israel is expected to carry all of it.
The story becomes irresistible because every role has already been assigned. Israel is powerful, therefore guilty. Palestinians are weaker, therefore innocent. Israel is a state, therefore oppressive. Hamas is stateless, therefore resistance. Israel has an army, therefore violence. Palestinians suffer, therefore the most damning explanation for that suffering must be true.
No serious conflict can be understood through such kindergarten morality. Yet once this narrative becomes culturally dominant, evidence is sorted according to whether it reinforces the story. Testimony accusing Israel is courageous truth-telling. Testimony complicating the accusation is propaganda. Palestinian violence is contextualized. Israeli violence is essentialized. Palestinian fear is humanized. Israeli fear becomes a political pathology.
The result is an environment in which people congratulate themselves for resisting propaganda while reproducing one of the most rigidly predetermined narratives imaginable.
The paradox is that Israel must be found guilty before the evidence is heard because a fair hearing of the evidence will ultimately exonerate them.
Joshua,
Again clear example of another misguided attempt at Tikun Olam by Jews who have little understanding of the Torah and its teachings! It’s no different with Liberal Jews here in America like Jewish Michigan AG (Nessel) in her Queen Esther moment (NOT) who stated that Jews should vote for the antisemite democratic candidate, El-Sayed, b/c Jews should care more about saving humanity than their own safety!! You can’t make this stuff up -> total ignorance of Judaism!!