NAZA: The Normalization of Atrocity: A film that cannot be unseen

12. 10. 2026 / Muriel Blaive

 

The film brings together the anonymous testimonies of 24 Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers involved in the surveillance, targeting, and bombing of Gaza. They describe how targets were selected, how algorithms were used, how civilian casualties were calculated and authorized, and how operations resulting in the deaths of entire families became routine. The title itself, NAZA, is an Israeli military acronym referring to collateral damage, a bureaucratic euphemism for the civilians expected to be killed during an attack on genuine terrorists.

There is, of course, a particular historical difficulty in confronting atrocities committed by the state of Israel, founded in the aftermath of the Holocaust as a homeland for Jews, six million of whom had just been murdered. Our societies insist, quite rightly, on the singular horrors of the gas chambers and on the fact that the Holocaust was unprecedented in its industrialized extermination of European Jews. The difficulty arises when this experience of unparalleled victimhood fosters a sense of moral exceptionalism that can make it tempting to view atrocities committed by the Israeli state as fundamentally different from those once inflicted upon Jews. Historical exceptionalism can thus offer a misleading form of moral reassurance.

Yet historical victimhood confers no exemption from moral responsibility. Whether the destruction of Gaza meets the legal definition of genocide is an important question, but it should not obscure the mass killing of civilians, the destruction of entire neighborhoods, and the immense scale of war crimes. Such atrocities require no comparison with the Holocaust to be condemned, nor does their moral gravity depend on whether they are ultimately classified as genocide. The dignity of victims is not a competition, and the recognition of one atrocity must never depend on the denial of another.

You have to trust the system

What is so chilling about NAZA is the form of mass murder it exposes: killing increasingly mediated by technology, algorithms, and the logic of a video game. Human beings become targets on a screen and responsibility dissolves into procedures. At one point, a participant describes having had doubts and turning to his supervisor, who tells him: "You have to trust the system." This soldier still hesitates, still questions, still has a conscience; but the answer is to stop questioning and trust the machinery.

It would be tempting to blame artificial intelligence, but algorithms do not decide by themselves what human lives are worth. Someone designs and programs them, establishes the targeting criteria, and determines how many civilian casualties are considered acceptable. One of the witnesses describes a supervisor accepting a threshold of 15% civilian losses – that was subsequently exceeded anyway. These are human decisions, delegated to machines and then presented as if the machines themselves bore responsibility.

As a historian familiar with the testimonies of soldiers during the Second World War, I found the parallels deeply unsettling. I kept thinking of Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, in which she examines how Eichmann invoked orders and procedures to evade individual moral responsibility, and, more broadly, how ordinary people can participate in atrocities while convincing themselves that responsibility lies elsewhere. And then there is something singularly disturbing about Gaza: the enjoyment that one soldier now recalls with shame. When he first began directing drones to drop bombs, he recalls, it could feel like “zeh kef” (“it's fun”), almost like playing a video game.

From the pursuit of terrorists to collective punishment

A few days ago, I praised the Netflix series Fauda for its portrayal of the pursuit of terrorists responsible for the atrocities committed on October 7, 2023. The desire for revenge against the actual perpetrators who murdered one’s family or friends is perfectly understandable, even if one may question particular methods. But the distinction between targeting actual terrorists and targeting an entire population is fundamental. What NAZA documents is something altogether different. One witness describes a prevailing attitude: that no one in Gaza is innocent, not even children. Once such a degree of dehumanization is reached, there is virtually no limit to what can be justified – any massacre can be rationalized.

Witnesses describe being instructed by their superiors to systematically destroy buildings, not because of any immediate military necessity, but precisely to ensure that the inhabitants would have nothing to return to. The destruction of homes and neighborhoods was, according to these testimonies, not an incidental consequence of warfare but a deliberate objective. Several witnesses also describe pressure to carry out as many bombings as possible while Israel still enjoyed sufficient international legitimacy, correctly anticipating that this legitimacy would gradually erode. International tolerance was thus treated as a temporary opportunity to intensify military operations before the political window closed.

The silence of those who know

What makes the film particularly chilling is the isolation of those who question what they have done. Only 24 people testify on screen, out of what must have been hundreds or thousands involved in these operations. They describe not only their own doubts, but the indifference of their colleagues, who do not share those doubts and do not want to hear them, and of Israeli society more broadly, which does not want to listen either. Of course, we cannot know how many others experienced such moral doubts or were troubled by what they witnessed. But the testimonies suggest a social environment in which questioning itself becomes unwelcome.

One testimony particularly struck me. A soldier recalls visiting the Nazi concentration camps in Poland with his school class and being horrified by what the Germans had done. He subsequently became determined to join an elite military unit and worked hard to be accepted. I could not help thinking of Yoav Shamir's remarkable documentary Defamation (2009), which I have often cited in my own work. Shamir examined, among other things, Israeli school trips to the concentration camps in Poland and the way Holocaust memory was transmitted to young Israelis. His film exposed the dangers of the political instrumentalization of Holocaust memory, not by questioning the historical distinction between Nazi perpetrators and Jewish victims, which is beyond dispute, but by showing how that distinction can be projected onto contemporary conflicts. The problem arises when the historical experience of Jewish persecution is mobilized to portray Israel as the perpetual innocent victim and its adversaries as the successors of the Nazis, thereby discouraging critical reflection on the Israeli state's own actions and responsibilities. Some Israeli parents were already questioning these excursions, precisely because they feared their children were being subjected to emotional and ideological conditioning rather than historical education. Nearly twenty years later, the testimony in NAZA offers a chilling illustration of the attitudes against which Shamir was warning. The memory of historical victimhood, instead of fostering empathy for other victims, can become a source of moral certainty about one's own innocence and righteousness, even when participating in atrocities against others. The problem is not Holocaust remembrance itself, but what happens when remembrance becomes an instrument of collective identity rather than critical reflection.

The film is also remarkably intelligent in its construction. It reminds us of Benjamin Netanyahu, decades ago, defining terrorism in terms of the indiscriminate killing of civilians. The irony of hearing that definition against the backdrop of what the film documents is devastating. There are echoes of Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (1985), and the extraordinary juxtaposition of Tel Aviv coming to a standstill for Yom HaShoah, the annual commemoration of the Holocaust, while the bombing of Gaza continues and a desperate father searches through the rubble for his children – the heartbreaking last scene of the film. The contrast is almost unbearable between a society capable of solemnly commemorating the victims of one historical catastrophe while remaining largely indifferent to the suffering inflicted in its own name.

Throughout the film, there is also the contrast between the perfectly normal life continuing in Tel Aviv and the horror unfolding in Gaza. Again, as a historian of the Second World War, I found this unsettlingly familiar. Atrocities do not require the suspension of ordinary life; they can coexist with restaurants, cafés, family celebrations, commemorations, and the comforting conviction that one's own society is fundamentally decent.

One atrocity does not cancel out another: escaping victimhood competition

Yet it is absolutely crucial to hold two realities in mind at the same time. October 7 was a horrific massacre perpetrated by terrorists, whose crimes deserve punishment. The grief, outrage, and desire for justice of the victims' families are entirely legitimate. But can this justify the mass killing of civilians, especially of children, or the systematic destruction of Gaza? One atrocity does not cancel out another. Antisemitism is unacceptable, just as the dehumanization of Palestinians is unacceptable. There is no moral contradiction in condemning both Hamas's atrocities and the massive war crimes committed in retaliation by the Israeli military. On the contrary, the same moral principles demand both.

As a historian, I cannot help thinking of the principle formulated by the German historian Bernd Faulenbach after reunification, when Germany had to confront the memory of both Nazi and Stalinist crimes. Faulenbach argued that Nazi crimes must not be relativized by reference to Stalinist crimes, and Stalinist crimes must not be minimized by reference to Nazi crimes. It was an attempt to escape victimhood competition – the temptation to use the suffering of one group to diminish or disqualify that of another.

We desperately need the same principle today. There is no need to establish a hierarchy of suffering, to count the dead in order to determine whose suffering deserves recognition, or to engage in martyrological scorekeeping. The crimes must be investigated and judged on their own terms, but the dignity of the victims is never a matter of arithmetic. Every murdered civilian matters. Every child matters, whether Jewish or Palestinian. Human dignity is not conditional on belonging to the right people, or on having suffered more than someone else. What the film exposes is not simply the destruction of human lives, but the denial of the humanity of those whose lives are being destroyed.

And this is precisely where the comparison with the Holocaust becomes meaningful without implying equivalence. The historical circumstances, the methods, and the scale may differ, but the mechanisms of dehumanization, the abdication of responsibility, the normalization of violence, and the willingness to exclude entire categories of human beings from the sphere of moral concern are disturbingly recognizable across different historical contexts. Recognizing these mechanisms is not relativizing the Holocaust; it is taking seriously what the study of that history can teach us.

Impossible to unsee

As a Czech viewer described it yesterday in a testimony published in Britské listy, when NAZA ended, the audience remained sitting in shocked horror. I experienced exactly the same reaction today: when the film ended, nobody moved or spoke. Part of what makes the film so devastating is that it leaves so little room for the comforting explanations through which we ordinarily distance ourselves from atrocities. These are not incomprehensible monsters acting outside history; they are ordinary human beings, operating within institutions, obeying instructions, trusting procedures, sometimes questioning, sometimes enjoying what they do, and living in a society that largely prefers not to know.

I feel immense admiration and gratitude for the courage of those who agreed to testify, despite the personal and social consequences they may face, and for the filmmakers who brought their testimonies to light. NAZA is an excellent film. Devastating, indispensable, and impossible to unsee.