NAZA, Abraham and Systems

I went to see NAZA this week. Its subject, as many will know, is the destruction of life and property in Gaza. Its content is almost entirely rooftop shots of anonymised Israeli intelligence soldiers reporting on how decisions that led to ‘collateral damage’ in Gaza were made. The documentary has been the subject of adulation by some – including many long-established haters of Israel. And the subject of vituperative attack by others – including many long-established defenders of Israel.

This isn’t an attempt to set the film in context. I know who started ‘it’ on October 7^th and I have nothing but absolute anger and disdain for those terrorists and deep empathy for those left in pain and mourning because of that awful attack, but this is my reflection on the movie and its connection to the central idea in this week’s – and perhaps the entire year’s Torah reading.

I'm also linking to a rebuttal of the movie written by someone who claims, " firsthand knowledge of how strikes were reviewed and approved" and disagrees with the movie's claims. I didn't understand the movie in the way Miron suggests the movie would be understood, and may well be understood, by some or even many viewers. For me, the rebuttal, while important, doesn't change my views. I understood the counter-factual claims as focusing on degrees, rather than in absolute terms.

I felt two things watching NAZA.

The first was a lack of surprise. In part, that’s because the movie isn’t airing revelations never-before discussed, but largely because … what else had I expected? What else could have served as connective tissue coupling the public announcements of Israeli politicians to those images of Gazan rubble and loss of life? Surely there was always going to be a chain of humans – Israeli soldiers – quantifying other humans – Palestinians both culpable and innocent – as numbers? I know the claims that Israel’s army is the most moral in the world and that warnings are shared and that investigations into accidents take place, but the way in which anger was and is expressed in Israel – and anger is clearly justified – and the scale of destruction in Gaza meant, as much as I would have wished to believe otherwise, that hearing and watching soldiers breaking down exactly how that connective tissue functioned was heartbreaking but not surprising.

The other thing I felt was a sense of the imprisonment of the interviewees and everyone else featured in the movie. (NAZA is not a film about the imprisonment of either hostages or Gazans – those stories also deserve attention). Time and again, director Yuval Abraham, who appears in the shot during these interviews, asks whether these soldiers ever raised concerns, or refused orders to wreak destruction, and these soldiers – who are identified as progressives, inhabitants of secular, liberal Tel Aviv no less – explain their inability to turn away from actions one considers Retzach Am – genocide – and all know are deeply ethically problematic. The interviewees share how they were (are?) imprisoned in a system which not only forced them against their ethical nature, but eviscerated that ethical nature away. There are others who appear imprisoned in the movie – intercut in the movie are cutaways of random inhabitants of Tel Aviv, partially obscured, filmed from the same rooftops used to film the interviews. They appear inside boxes, also seemingly trapped in this system, also disconnected from the ethical weight of the destruction being visited just miles away. I felt imprisoned myself; I wanted to get up and leave the cinema several times. My own sense of imprisonment, as a viewer in this country so far away, connects to something Rabbi Lev Taylor observed about his viewing of NAZA this week - https://simlev.blog/2026/10/22/reflections-of-the-experience-of-watching-naza/, “In truth,” Rabbi Lev writes, “we [British viewers of this movie] have been morally lucky. None of us really knows what we are capable of resisting until we are instructed to commit war crimes and know the price if we do not.”

But yet, at the heart of this week’s Torah reading; at the heart of the entire Torah, is the election of Abraham who provides a commanding model for how to respond to a system that feels overwhelming. Avram, as he appears in Parshat Lech Lecha, is the first עברי - Hebrew – he crosses over – ויעבר - to stand on the other side of the river. To be a Hebrew is to be someone willing to cross over and stand on the other side of systems that are not good. His crossing over is at the heart of the two great Midrashim that articulate why and how Abraham is so important for us as Jews; the Midrash in which Abraham stands up to the great ruler Nimrod and rejects the call to bow down to any false god (Bereishit Rabba 38:13) and the Midrash in which Abraham looks out over a burning castle and asks a question no-one before had ever asked (Bereishit Rabba 39:1), “How is it possible that this castle burns and there is no ruler to look after it?”

That is to say, it’s very hard to stand against societal failure, but it is the defining quality of Abraham, every prophet ever since and, I think, still our continued task. As painful and as partial as NAZA undoubtedly is, I’m grateful to have seen it.

Shabbat Shalom