What is "Naza"?
For those who haven't heard of it yet, it's a recent documentary about Israel's war in Gaza following the October 7th, 2023 Hamas attack.
Short reminder: on October 7th, 2023 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_7_attacks), a significant contingent (thousands) of heavily armed Hamas fighters penetrated the Israeli frontier with Gaza and went on a killing spree, taking several hundred hostages and killing and maiming about 1200 people (mostly Israelis).
In retaliation, Israel launched a massive offensive against the Gaza territory. It is estimated that around 70 000 people (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgpd1x00exo) were killed by Israel's army (IDF, Israel Defense Forces, also known in Hebrew as Tsahal) in the following 2-3 years. Comparing the two figures (1500 killed or taken hostages by Hamas with 70 000 killed by Israel) already strikes any objective observer as disproportionate. Israel's claimed enemy was Hamas, the terrorist militia responsible for October 7th, but Hamas never counted so many people. In the movie, one of the Israeli military intelligence officers being interviewed estimates the number of Hamas affiliates at a grand 40 000.
The Naza documentary
was created by two Israeli journalists and produced by Western media outlets such as The Guardian and mk2 cinema (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/MK2). It therefore has close to impeccable credentials (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marin_Karmitz) and cannot be accused of "anti-semitism" in good faith.
The documentary's core topic is precisely that: the civilian, non-Hamas people that were killed by IDF in its war against Hamas. The fact that the IDF killed innocent civilians, including young children, cannot be disputed. The movie itself ends with gut-wrenching images of the protruding legs of dead children, squashed between collapsed concrete floors of a Gaza building bombed by the IDF. The very "Naza" concept (civilian casualties associated with a mission to kill a Hamas operative) is an IDF concept.
Watching this movie sparked three questions in my head.
How could "7th of October" have happened in the first place?
Israel started its war in Gaza almost instantly after October 7th. The Israeli defense apparatus didn't, on the face of it, act shocked or reeling or surprised. Their response to the atrocities of Oct 7th came instantly.
What the movie explains is that Israel has created and controls the communications networks in Gaza. They can and do listen in to all the phone conversations in Gaza. They are staffed and equipped to do so, and do it on a routine basis. They pick up every call and can hear any and all conversations and have the advanced software in place to spot patterns and make deductions from what number was calling what other number, from where, at what time, and from what has been said. That capability existed and was exploited since the very deployment of the phone communication network in Gaza, not in response to October 7th (obviously).
The Naza documentary explains how the IDF elite intelligence units then used systems called "Lavender" and "Where's Daddy" to find out where the Hamas operatives were living (their homes), when they came home, and then strike the building and kill them and their whole families ("Naza", collateral damage) at night, in their sleep.
Considering that, how could have Hamas mounted an operation such as October 7th, 2023, that mobilized and coordinated several thousands fighters without the same IDF elite intelligence units getting wind of it and thwarting it in advance?
How? It just doesn't make sense to me.
The only explanation I can come up with is "conspiratorial": they knew, and they reported on what was being prepared by Hamas, but they were ordered by the Israeli government to stand down and not do anything, to let October 7th happen. Very cynical indeed, but it would be totally "par for the course" with the callous way in which the Israeli government kept behaving afterwards; with its blatant disrespect for human lives and human rights.
The impact of this documentary on supporters of Israel
Let me state clearly that I'm not a supporter of Palestine as such. I am rather irritated that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has had such a disproportionate influence on the world for so long. A huge diplomatic effort has been spent by so many for so many decades to try to find a solution for a regional conflict that, prima facie, does not obviously deserve more attention than the conflicts in Yemen, Sudan, Ethiopia, Libya, Western Sahara, Kashmir, Myanmar, etc. - regional conflicts which the world treats as such. It is not clear to me why European countries, for instance, should have spent so much more effort dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (for so many decades now) than dealing with other horrific regional conflicts spotting the planet.
I also tend to believe that the Islamic religion, at this stage of its evolution (parallels can be drawn with the era of the Inquisition in the Christian religion history), is currently incompatible with Western civilization.
On the contrary, I am a great admirer of the Jewish people and of their resilience against millennia of persecution. Because I've studied biology and I believe in evolution, I find it plausible that the extreme selective pressure to which the Jews have been submitted during so many centuries led to the Jewish population becoming smarter on average than other populations who enjoyed a more average history. Jews are generally a highly educated people. But as Theodore Roosevelt is believed to have said, "
“To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.”
What Naza implicitly asks is whether the behavior of the Israeli government and the IDF has stayed within the bounds of (western) morality.
Perhaps (at least in part) because of what I pointed out above, Israel has many supporters in the West. I would be curious to know on how many of them did watching Naza have an impact? How many of them have watched this documentary and maybe began rethinking their support for Israel.
Is Israel a terrorist state?
In the movie, one of the interviewees (Israeli military intelligence official) clearly and unambiguously qualified what he himself did as "genocide". Another one struggled with a moral dilemma: having visited Poland and the WW2 concentration camps, and Germany, he says: "I still think those Nazis were evil, but then what am I?"
What Naza makes clear is that after October 7th, the Israeli state has systematically and deliberately targeted civilians for political goals: in order to force the Palestinian population to migrate toward the South of the strip, the IDF has systematically destroyed residential buildings in the North of the territory, with a tolerance threshold of 25% civilian occupancy: the numeric example in the movie is the destruction of a group of 8 buildings that is estimated by Israeli intelligence to have resulted in the death of approximately 80 civilians who were not suspected nor accused of anything. In other words, the IDF knew that their strikes were likely to cause the death of around 80 innocent civilians and yet they deliberately targeted their homes. And this was done not just once, but systematically. They murdered, maimed and menaced innocents, civilians, for political goals: decreasing the level of menace to the Israel territory from the potential of armed Palestinian militants firing rockets at Israel while hiding behind built-up areas in Northern Gaza.
It turns out that that fits the exact definition a young author, Benjamin Netanyahu, current Israeli prime minister, was giving to terrorism in 1986 (https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=675498394342819)
Conclusion
I have great admiration and affection for the Jewish people who are overwhelmingly bright, generous, humane. The very existence of this documentary is a miracle: it's been created by Jewish journalists who have put their conscience, their humanity and their sense of morality above their allegiance to the state of Israel. And it's been funded by Jewish people who did the same.
But I wonder whether it's time we began to consider that the exercise of democracy in Israel has led to the worst of the Jewish population coming out on top and taking the reins. One does not have to support the Palestinian cause, the Palestinian state or anything like that to see that what the IDF did on orders from the Israeli government is plain wrong and inhuman.
And I cannot help but wonder what will be the effect of these events on the security of the same state of Israel going forward.