By Seth Mandel
Tuesday, September 22, 2026
The title of the “documentary” NAZA, which
received a mandatory Stalinesque record-breaking ovation at the Venice film
festival, is an acronym for the Hebrew term for “collateral damage.” It
concerns a system developed by the Israeli military to predict the collateral
damage of any strike before it is approved.
And that explains why the project, made by Yuval Abraham
and Rachel Szor, has landed with a thud rather than an explosion—at least
outside any venue in which participants were required to clap.
Why would Israel need a system to calculate the
collateral damage of a near-term strike before it’s approved? There are three
possibilities.
The first: So the IDF can reduce civilian casualties. If
one needs approval for a strike, and one is required to note for the record how
many people would die in that strike, one is less likely to have that strike
approved.
The second: So the IDF can increase civilian casualties.
The assumption here is that Israelis are psychopaths who gamify war and
therefore they will only carry out a strike if the collateral damage is above
a certain level.
The third: For no reason at all. According to this
theory, the IDF doesn’t care how many people die in a strike. It has gone
through the effort and high cost to design a world-leading technology to
predict collateral damage because… someone needed a cool party trick? I guess?
This multiple-choice question is easy: The only possible
answer is the first, that the purpose of NAZA is to reduce civilian casualties.
Does that automatically let Israel off the hook for every
single anonymously sourced claim in the anonymously sourced film? No, of course
not. There is the possibility that the casualty limit was too high during the
most recent war. Nobody has shown this to be the case, however, and that is
unlikely to change.
The film hasn’t been screened widely because the
filmmakers didn’t want the IDF to have a chance to respond to the allegations
before launch. That’s because the point of the film isn’t accuracy in reporting
but to establish a baseline narrative in which Israel is guilty until proven
innocent. But what has been available thus far does not bode well for the
possibility that the full film establishes NAZA as a tool of civilian death.
For example, the film’s biggest accusation seems to be
that NAZA returned an estimate of 500 casualties for one strike. Since there is
no record of such a strike—and the Gaza Healthy Ministry, as Hamas is often
called in news reports, is famous only for inflating numbers like the floats in
the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade—the conclusion one is left with is the
following: NAZA said 500 would die and the IDF commander in charge called off
the strike.
But again, the filmmakers have been hiding the film they
are so proud of from the general public until their narrative can gain a firm
footing. So it’s possible they have something damning. More likely, they simply
don’t understand what they’re looking at. Who are the soldiers interviewed?
Nobody knows. We have no evidence that the filmmakers spoke to anyone who knew
anything about complex high-tech IDF systems and the officers who oversee their
use.
Should we have expected this? Yes. Last year, Abraham
wrote a piece
intended to have the same effect: establish a narrative, bury the
counter-evidence. The claim was that the overwhelming majority of casualties in
Gaza were civilians according to the IDF’s own calculations. To
demonstrate this, Abraham referred to a database of known terror
operatives from only two groups operating in Gaza and considered any death not
on that list of operatives to be a civilian.
In other words, it doesn’t account for unnamed deaths,
for unknown operatives, for any militant or combatant who wasn’t on Israel’s
list for just two terror groups, etc.
The share of civilian casualties given by the article is,
therefore, entirely debunked by the article itself. You just have to read far
enough past the headline.
The level of sloppiness in that story made it very clear
that this was not a “documentarian” whose work could be trusted without
extensive re-reporting.
The larger point, to me, is that this is another example
of a broader problem among Israel’s critics: They take something Israel has
done as a means of protecting civilians and turn it around into a nefarious
sci-fi plot.
You can see this mode of argumentation in Israel’s
determination to evacuate neighborhoods before dropping heavy bombs on them.
The number of bombs dropped, together with the physical destruction of the
bombed area and the low numbers of civilian casualties in those specific
bombings combine to show that the IDF stalled its own offensive in order to
move Palestinian civilians out of harm’s way. So the world decided that these
evacuations were themselves the crime, some form of “ethnic cleansing” or other
crime.
In some cases, Israel’s humanitarian steps undermine its
legitimate military aims. It delayed the progression of its Rafah mission
during the war until it could evacuate the area, ultimately moving nearly a
million Palestinians out of harm’s way. So, again, the world called the Rafah
evacuation the crime.
And so it is with Israel’s efforts to avoid civilian
casualties by forcing commanders to record the number of expected deaths from a
strike before approving it. NAZA’s impact has been limited by its
implausibility, but no matter: Everyone knows you should never be the first one
to stop clapping.
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