I have many relatives who will almost certainly refuse to watch this film because it presents a reality they are unwilling to confront. Yet for anyone who values the truth over comforting dogma, the documentary Naza is essential viewing.
What distinguishes Naza is its structural choice to document mass atrocities not through the eyes of the victims, but through the testimonies of the perpetrators. The film features interviews with 24 Israeli soldiers involved in remote strikes and operations targeting Palestinian civilians in Gaza. In doing so, it serves as a critical historical record—exposing the Israeli military’s institutional indifference to Palestinian life.
Listening to these combatants rationalize their roles in widespread destruction inevitably brings to mind the bureaucratic detachment famously examined in the aftermath of the Holocaust. The defense of “just following orders,” reduced here to automated workflows and technical coordinates, is chillingly familiar. Hearing the descendants of Holocaust survivors using similar systemic rationalizations is simultaneously ironic and deeply unsettling.
Naza is harrowing, difficult, and profoundly important. By letting the soldiers convict themselves in their own words, the film strips away political abstraction and exposes the mechanics of modern warfare in its most dehumanizing form.