The Israeli Film Directors Pushing for a Reckoning in Their Home Country

Episode Overview

• This episode explores Naza, a Venice Film Festival Special Jury Prize-winning documentary by Israeli directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor (produced in collaboration with The Guardian's investigations desk) that features testimonies from 24 anonymous Israeli military intelligence officers and soldiers following the October 7 attacks.
• The discussion reveals how the Israeli military utilized mass surveillance, AI-driven targeting algorithms, and euphemistic language to conduct remote warfare from Tel Aviv, resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians inside private residential homes in Gaza.
• Host Rachel Abrams presses the filmmakers on the evidentiary backing of their most controversial findings—such as an approved airstrike anticipating up to 500 civilian casualties—against previous New York Times reporting and official denials from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
• The conversation examines the psychological reckoning of the middle-to-upper-class, liberal Israeli soldiers who carried out these strikes, alongside the fierce domestic backlash against the filmmakers, including death threats and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's proposal to revoke their citizenship.
• The episode concludes with brief news updates covering mutual airstrikes between Saudi Arabia and Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen, as well as a U.S. agreement to import Russian diesel fuel amid the war with Iran.

Key Concepts

• Euphemistic Language and "Naza": "Naza" stands for the Hebrew words nezek agavi, translating to "collateral damage" or "incidental damage." Israeli intelligence officers use the term as a substitute for human beings—referring to anticipated civilian casualties as "15 Naza" or "20 Naza" rather than 15 or 20 men, women, and children—which creates psychological distance from the lethal consequences of an airstrike.
• The Profile of Remote Warfare Operators: All 24 anonymous officers and soldiers interviewed in the film participated in mass surveillance or remote killing from within Israel, operating out of the main army headquarters in the heart of Tel Aviv, just 40 miles from Gaza. Rather than being right-wing extremists who vote for politicians like Netanyahu, Itamar Ben-Gvir, or Bezalel Smotrich, most belong to Israel's secular, well-educated, middle-to-upper-class liberal elite.
• Systematic Targeting of Private Homes ("Where's Daddy?"): Counter to the assumption that residential homes were bombed only when active military operations (like rocket launches or snipers) were occurring inside them, targeting systems deliberately waited to strike Hamas members when they went home to sleep at night because it was easier than striking them during military activity. A mass surveillance system called "Where's Daddy?" spied on targets' family members and alerted officers when the target entered the family residence, leading to bombings that wiped out thousands of Palestinian families and multiple generations.
• Intimate Audio Surveillance: Remote warfare from air-conditioned rooms in Tel Aviv was not limited to abstract visuals; intelligence officers could open the phones of targets and their family members to listen to live audio inside Gaza homes both before and after a bombing, hearing ordinary domestic sounds like television, prayers, a couple's conversation at night, or a baby crying.
• AI-Driven Targeting and the Problem of Scale: The military fed a machine-learning algorithm data on believed Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) military wing members so it could learn their phone behaviors (such as being saved in contacts as Hamas members, frequenting training compounds, or repeatedly changing numbers). The AI then scanned the phones of almost every single person in Gaza with a phone, assigning each a similarity rating. In certain military areas, this AI list was used as a "sole incriminator" without further verification despite a known error rate. Abraham hedges that the core issue with AI is not technical mistakes, but the scale it enables: marking tens of thousands of junior targets and designating dozens of houses for bombing with minimal human involvement instead of spending 1 hour to verify and bomb 1 house.
• Civilian Casualty Thresholds and Evidentiary Debates: One officer in the film claims a strike on a Hamas target was approved with the knowledge that up to 500 civilians could be killed or injured. While The New York Times previously reported that the IDF loosened restrictions and approved killing or injuring more than 100 people in a single attack, Abrams notes the 500 figure goes further, is disputed by the IDF, and lacks onscreen corroboration in the film. Abraham explains that omitting onscreen journalistic citations was a cinematic choice (no narration), but confirms that the filmmakers and The Guardian verified the 500 number through multiple off-screen sources and possess unpublished details on when and where the strike occurred.
• Official IDF Stance vs. Filmmaker Documentation: Over three years, Abraham wrote over a dozen investigative articles on IDF firing and surveillance policies, approaching the IDF for comment every time, and wove clips of Netanyahu defending the campaign into the film. In public statements, the IDF called the film a "distorted, misleading, and disingenuous picture," stating commanders devote "exceptional effort and detail" to mitigating civilian harm, legal advisors review strikes for international law compliance, violations are investigated, and Israel vigorously denies all accusations of genocide.
• Moral Reckoning, Context vs. Justification, and Perpetrator Psychology: Abraham notes that while the October 7 massacre (in which people he knew were murdered) caused immense trauma, it does not justify razing cities, massacres at food sites, shooting unarmed civilians returning to destroyed neighborhoods, or killing more than 73,000 people (mostly civilians)—nor the killing that continued for 2 years until the October 2025 ceasefire, and the over 1,000 Palestinians killed since that ceasefire. In the film, one officer realizes that knowing children are inside a target house makes their killing intentional, telling Abraham that, in his opinion, he took part in a genocide (retzach am). Another soldier reflects that after growing up in the Israeli education system viewing Holocaust perpetrators as "pure evil," he now has a "better understanding of the role of the perpetrator." Abraham strongly caveats that there is no comparison between the Holocaust and Gaza ("It's not the same"), but points to common patterns of dehumanization.
• Media Insulation and Domestic Backlash in Israel: The film contrasts soldier testimonies with Tel Aviv residents watching the 8:00 mainstream news, where terms like "terror targets" sanitize the war, before showing footage from Gaza only once at the very end to drive home the reality of the systems described. Despite the film not yet being released in Israel—where Szor notes there has been no conversation about what the country did in Gaza for the last 3 years—it received a 25-minute standing ovation at Venice while sparking severe backlash at home: Netanyahu compared the film to "ballistic missiles" and proposed legislation to revoke the directors' citizenship, protesters called for the filmmakers to be hanged outside Szor's parents' house, and friends and family warned the directors it is currently unsafe to return to Israel.
• Geopolitical and Energy News Briefs: At the end of the episode, Abrams reports that Saudi Arabia and Yemen's capitals were hit in Sunday strikes after Iran-backed Houthis struck an international airport in Riyadh (killing at least 12 people and injuring more than 300 in Saudi Arabia's deadliest attack in over a decade), while Saudi bombing in Yemen has killed 91 people since September 3 according to the Houthi-run Health Ministry. Additionally, President Trump announced an agreement to immediately import Russian diesel fuel to the U.S. to contain energy prices caused by the Iran war ahead of midterms, reversing years of Ukraine-war sanctions—though energy experts caveat the deal is unlikely to have a major impact on diesel costs.

Quotes

• At 5:39 - "It's like a euphemism, as a substitute for saying human beings. So, if an airstrike has an anticipated number of 15 civilian casualties, meaning 15, you know, women, men, children who are not the target of the strike, but the army knows it will likely kill them or harm them, then they use the word Naza. They use this word collateral damage. So they won't say 15 men, women, and children, they say 15 Naza or 20 Naza." - Yuval Abraham explaining how military terminology abstracts human life into numerical collateral damage.
• At 8:43 - "One officer describes a system called Where's Daddy, which spied on the family members of these targets through mass surveillance technology and waited to get signals or alerts that they are coming back to their houses." - Yuval Abraham detailing how mass surveillance was used to target suspected militants inside their private family homes at night.
• At 13:25 - "To me, the main issue here with AI is not the mistakes. I think the main issue with AI is the scale that it enables. When you have AI that can just mark, you know, tens of thousands of so-called targets, junior targets, that nobody in the army probably even remembers what their names are, and instead of spending, you know, an hour in order to bomb one house, you can designate dozens of houses for bombing with little human involvement." - Yuval Abraham clarifying why algorithmic targeting fundamentally accelerates the pace and volume of lethal strikes beyond human oversight.
• At 20:14 - "I think to me there's always this fine line between context and justification, right? Because context is not justification." - Yuval Abraham addressing how the trauma of the October 7 attacks explains the mindset of Israeli society without justifying the subsequent scale of civilian deaths in Gaza.
• At 29:30 - "And I do think that there will be no future to anyone if we do not have an honest reckoning with the present and with the past." - Yuval Abraham concluding why documenting insider military testimonies in Hebrew is essential for the long-term future of both Israelis and Palestinians.

Takeaways

• Audit institutional language for dehumanizing euphemisms: Recognize when organizations, militaries, or media outlets replace references to human beings with technical jargon or acronyms (like "Naza" or "terror targets"), and actively translate those terms back into concrete human terms to prevent moral detachment.
• Evaluate AI systems by the scale of action they enable, not just their error rates: When assessing automated decision-making or machine-learning tools in high-stakes environments, look beyond accuracy metrics to examine how removing human verification bottlenecks drastically multiplies the volume and speed of irreversible outcomes.
• Separate historical or emotional context from moral justification: When analyzing conflicts or institutional responses to trauma, maintain a strict analytical boundary between understanding the catalyst for a group's fear or anger and excusing the systemic methods or civilian harm that follow.