While a student at Yale, I took
Charlie Musser’s seminar on documentary films on a whim, after having taken two
courses oriented to film narrative (not screenwriting). Because my studies were
mainly in philosophy of religion, historical theology, and history at Yale, I
think neither Charlie nor I knew quite why I was taking his course. At the
time, I would not have thought that I would be writing on the genre thirty
years later. The film, NAZA
(2026), makes my earlier endeavor entirely worthwhile, and integrated into
my main academic areas of study and research, which include ethics and
political theory. The documentary “examines ‘the systems behind the mass
killing of Palestinian civilians’” in Gaza, and as of October, the theatrical
release was being extended due to so many sold-out showings.[1]
The Venice Film Festival awarded the film with the Special Jury Prize, and the
two filmmakers, Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham, “received a record-breaking
25-minute standing ovation at the festival.”[2]
The film can be interpreted as documenting the magnified harsh effects that unchecked
power over other people can have when those others are dehumanized. It is
interesting how close “NAZA” is to another infamous word, NAZI.
Another film, The
Stanford Prison Experiment (2015), is based on the actual psychology
experiment in which a group of college students were randomly divided into
prisoners and guards. In the simulation, the guards presumptuously violated the
rule against the use of violence because their power went to their heads like
strong drink effects a sailor. The experiment dramatized in the film showed
just how dangerous unchecked power can be in the hands of the human brain. I
contend that the same phenomenon was playing out in the ministers of Israel’s
government for three years as of September, 2026, for the holocaustic genocide that
those human beings unleashed on the Palestinian people, in extreme
disproportion to the harm and deaths inflicted by Hamas in one attack in
October, 2023, has involved even the
pathological dehumanization of another people. It is interesting, therefore,
that Naza and Nazi are so much alike even just as words, for the Nazis readily
dehumanized Jews, which goes beyond merely declaring them to be enemies of the
state.
The documentary NAZA “features
interviews with 24 Israeli military intelligence officers, soldiers and
whistleblowers.”[3] In
the film, those people “describe how Palestinians are being targeted and how
strikes are carried out using AI and automated surveillance in military
targeting systems—despite Israel being away that civilians are present in
targeted areas.”[4]
Targeting civilian dwellings was something that Russia’s President Putin was
also doing as part of his military invasion of Ukraine, so such targeting does
not in itself distinguish the Israeli government ministers. More insidious is
the Israeli leveling of entire cities in Gaza, and thus relegating over a
million inhabitants to live in tents for years in de facto concentration camps
in Gaza.
That the entire population was
intentionally made homeless conveys the fittingness of the accusation by the
International Criminal Court of crimes against humanity and the conclusion of
the UN that Israel was committing a genocide. The ICC also found sufficient
evidence for a genocide taking place to be highly probable. Relatedly, Abraham
and Szor have said, “We made this film out of a sense of obligation to use our
position as Israelis to examine the systems behind the mass killing of
Palestinian civilians for which our country is responsible.”[5]
If mass killing is not sufficient to signify a contention that Netanyahu
and his ministers were conducting a genocide, then the underlining
dehumanization of the Palestinians not only in Gaza, but also in the West Bank,
and thus as a people, surely is sufficient for the label of genocide to be fitting and appropriate, and thus entirely valid. Implicitly relating Naza to Nazi, the
filmmakers went on to say, “While filming over the past three years, we found
ourselves asking the very questions that were asked by our grandparents’
generation and throughout the 20th century: how does one group of people
allow the total dehumanization of another? What do the inner workings of such a
system look like?”[6] In
Nazi Germany, they looked like Adolf Eichmann efficiently coordinating the
trains coming and going from the concentration camps. In Naza Israel, the inner
workings included U.S.-made bombs leveling entire neighborhoods in Gaza, shooting
Palestinian children for fun, and outright stealing (in the West Bank).
The fact that Nazi Germany was
not a “one off” by 2023 suggests that what had been assumed to be an extreme aberration
of absolute power was actually a manifestation of what the prison experiment in
California found—that the human brain and absolute power over other people are
dangerous together. In other words, the fallible human brain cannot be trusted
to be vested with such power as can incur even the assumption of
dehumanization. By implication, a coalition of the willing—of militaries from
around the world—should have mobilized to Ukraine as soon as the Russian
invasion began and to Gaza as soon as entire apartment buildings were being
bombed. Absolute, unchecked military power should be resisted by counter-power
because of the human brain’s inherent vulnerability to a warping of cognition
and perception, as well as to denial and rationalization, from having a lot of
violent power over other people or even a people. Large nation-states did not
exist during the long hunter-gatherer period in which natural selection formed
our species; not even large organizations, whether governments or corporations,
existed. So, it should be no surprise that our brains are ill-equipped for the
massive power made possible by large organization of people, money, and destructive
equipment. Nazi Germany was not an isolated case; Israel proved this to the
world in the mid 2020’s, and the documentary NAZA documents this point
if viewers step back to see the big picture behind the film.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
