If you’ve heard anything about a new film called Naza, you could be forgiven for thinking it was less a documentary than a piece of anti-Israel propaganda made by dissident Israelis determined to convince the world that their own country committed genocide in Gaza.
Despite looking, at first glance, like some deeply cursed mashup of “Gaza” and “Nazi,” the film’s title, ‘Naza’, comes from Israeli military shorthand: nezek agavi, the Hebrew term for collateral damage.
Its filmmakers, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, were already well known from No Other Land, the Israeli-Palestinian documentary about displacement in the West Bank that won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature in 2025. So Naza arrived with both anticipation and suspicion, especially among Jewish and pro-Israel audiences who had viewed No Other Land as selective and misleading in its presentation. I was one of those people.
Since premiering at the Venice Film Festival, where it won the Special Jury Prize and received a 25-minute standing ovation, Naza has been engulfed in a political firestorm. For starters, how does anyone clap for more than two minutes without their hands falling off? I don’t even think Mussolini ever got that.
The backlash has been so intense that the Israeli Culture Minister has threatened to revoke the citizenship of the two filmmakers. Ironically, some in the pro-Palestinian world have criticized the film for centering Israeli moral anguish over Palestinian voices. (You literally can please no one these days.)
On a recent episode of the For Heaven’s Sake podcast, Israeli author Yossi Klein Halevi called the 25-minute ovation “profoundly totalitarian.” His co-host, Donniel Hartman, described it as “a declaration of disgust of Israel independent of the movie.”
They’re not wrong.
Oddly enough, though, almost nobody arguing about Naza has actually seen it.
But I have.
Naturally, I decided the sensible thing to do was to see it during a nor’easter, attending its North American premiere at the New York Film Festival at Alice Tully Hall in Lincoln Center.
