It sounds absurd, but last week the mainstream pro-Israel establishment and parts of the radical pro-Palestine movement actually agreed on something. They had found a common target.
The film is NAZA, an 80-minute investigative documentary by Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, two of the four directors behind the Oscar-winning No Other Land. Drawing on testimony from 24 Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers, many of whom carried out their roles remotely, the film examines the technological and bureaucratic system behind Israel’s war in Gaza and how, the filmmakers argue, it turned mass civilian death into an operational feature of the war rather than an accident. NAZA received a 25-minute standing ovation at its Venice premiere and later won the festival’s Special Jury Prize.
The backlash began almost before the applause died down. And it came from two camps that rarely find themselves on the same side of the Israel-Palestine debate. Yet both are attacking a film they haven’t actually seen.
Israeli politicians and journalists responded with a wave of attacks on the film and its directors. Naftali Bennett, former prime minister and now a leading candidate in Israel’s 2026 election, called it “a horrific blood libel against our sons and daughters.” Avigdor Lieberman, former defense minister and head of Yisrael Beiteinu, called the directors “Israel’s enemies” who “took the war that was forced upon Israel after the October 7 massacre and turned it into a spectacle of slander and blood libels against the State of Israel, against the IDF, and against our magnificent fighters!” Culture Minister Miki Zohar went further, accusing the two directors of treason against the state and threatening to strip them of their Israeli citizenship.
It is hard to ignore the trend toward radicalism in Israeli society since October 7th. It is harder still to ignore how little space the current political spectrum leaves for that conversation. From Netanyahu’s coalition and the religious extremists within it to the opposition itself, none of them seem willing to discuss the war crimes and serious accusations leveled against the army for its conduct in Gaza and the West Bank.
Some go further, treating the very acts behind those accusations as something to celebrate. Five Israeli reservists accused of sexually abusing and torturing a Palestinian prisoner, after a leaked video appeared to show the assault, were publicly embraced by some supporters. Others have called for dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza or starving its roughly 2 million residents. Meanwhile, the government has pursued plans for what it calls the “voluntary migration” of Gazans, which critics describe as a euphemism for making conditions in the Strip so intolerable that Palestinians have little choice but to leave.
Netanyahu’s opposition, for their part, rejects accusations of war crimes or crimes against humanity outright. Some have gone further, invoking one of history’s most notorious antisemitic tropes, the blood libel, to discredit Jewish, Zionist Israelis who want to entertain this conversation at all.
In doing so, the political establishment imagines a world that stopped on October 7, and that what happened that day justifies everything that followed. But what does it say about a democratic state when politicians threaten to strip dissidents of their citizenship because they are angry about what their own army has done? At minimum, threatening citizenship over political dissent is the reflex of an authoritarian state, not a democratic one.
On the other side, radical figures in the pro-Palestine movement attacked the directors for criticizing Hamas. Ali Abunimah, who runs The Electronic Intifada, went after Yuval Abraham after Abraham criticized Hamas. Palestinian writer Susan Abulhawa, who has expressed support for Hamas in social media posts and called October 7th "a spectacular moment that shocked the world," argued that the filmmakers had done nothing to deserve Palestinian gratitude simply because they had not pulled the trigger themselves.
For Bennett, Liberman, and the pro-Israel establishment, the offense is that the film exists at all, that two Israelis would stand in Venice and accuse their own army of the deliberate mass killing of civilians, and that the conversation should center solely around the atrocities Hamas committed on October 7th.
For Abunimah, the offense is closer to the opposite: decrying that an Israeli who condemns both Hamas and the occupation is being given a platform at all. The simple fact of condemning Hamas, a terrorist group that has committed myriad horrors against Palestinians and Israelis alike, is enough to discredit Yuval in his eyes.
For Abulhawa and others in the radical pro-Palestine movement, the criticism centers on the directors’ identities as Israelis, and on the sense that the world listens to Israeli voices in a way it has never listened to Palestinian ones.
It is worth saying plainly, from a Palestinian and pro-Palestinian perspective, that the atrocities of October 7 were horrific and inflicted real harm on Israelis. Saying so takes nothing away from what has happened since. There is now an extensive record of alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Israeli forces in Gaza and the West Bank, and the scale of death, displacement, and destruction in Gaza has far exceeded that of October 7. One atrocity does not cancel out another. NAZA, through the testimony of Israelis who participated in the war, adds another account to that record.
It is also worth confronting figures like Abunimah and Abulhawa from within the pro-Palestinian movement. Their history of antisemitic rhetoric and expressions of support for Hamas have undermined the Palestinian cause they advocate for, both politically and strategically. Their response to NAZA follows the same pattern, defending Hamas and enforcing ideological purity rather than engaging with a film centered on Palestinian suffering and the testimony of Israelis who took part in the war.
There is one argument from the pro-Palestine side worth taking seriously: that Gaza’s residents have been saying for years what this film now documents, that they were being targeted as civilians rather than treated as collateral damage. Yuval, the film’s director, has already acknowledged as much himself.
But survivors’ testimony alone has never been enough to move the needle. It requires the testimony of the people who carried it out, and Palestinians have never had access to those people—until now.
If the objection to NAZA is ultimately about who made it, there is a basic tension here. The film puts Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers on the record describing what they witnessed and participated in, and it brings those accounts of Palestinian suffering to an international audience. Dismissing that work because its directors are Israeli risks discounting the testimony itself.
That is especially difficult to justify when neither the pro-Israel critics nor the pro-Palestinian figures attacking NAZA have actually seen the film.
For the pro-Palestinian movement, the response also exposes the limits of boycott politics and ideological purity tests. There are liberal Israelis, including the filmmakers behind NAZA, willing to confront what their own military and government have done and to support Palestinian self-determination. Treating them as unacceptable partners because they are Israeli narrows the space for political cooperation. So does defending Hamas despite the atrocities it committed against Israelis and Palestinians, or allowing antisemitic rhetoric into a movement advocating for Palestinian rights. Abunimah and Abulhawa have both faced criticism on those grounds, and their attacks on a film they have not seen only sharpen that contradiction.
There is no path out of this conflict that does not eventually require Israelis and Palestinians to work with people on the other side. That means Palestinians need Israeli partners willing to confront what their government and military have done, just as Israelis need Palestinian partners willing to condemn the killing of innocent civilians and reject groups like Hamas.
That cooperation will always be uncomfortable. People will disagree about history what justice should look like. But if the standard is that no Israeli can be an ally to Palestinians, or that acknowledging Palestinian suffering is a betrayal of Israel, then there is nowhere to go.
The filmmakers behind NAZA have chosen to listen to Palestinians, examine the actions of their own side, and put testimony from Israeli soldiers before the public. Palestinians do not have to agree with them on everything to recognize the value of that work. Israelis do not have to accept every conclusion in the film to engage seriously with what those soldiers have said.
Whatever comes next will require more people willing to do that across the divide, not fewer.
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