I watched Naza, by the Israeli journalists Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor. Tears came to my eyes, and so did anger. I let them settle before I began to write, because one must think beyond the blow and the drama. I am aware that I will add little to everything that has already been said about the film and about Gaza. This text stems from a personal ethical impulse. I feel entitled, and bound, to honour it.
Naza is filmed at night, on a rooftop, against the softly lit serenity of the buildings of Tel Aviv. The city rests undisturbed, indifferent to what is being said and to what is happening sixty kilometres away. The interviewees belong to various divisions and branches of the Israeli military, but we never see their faces. They are silhouettes. Their voices have been digitally altered; the opening caption tells us. They fear persecution, perhaps even death, at the hands of the very system in which they took part and which they helped to build. Before it has truly begun, the documentary has already said almost everything. To be heard, the truth appears already mutilated: without names, without faces, without voices of its own. Everything that begins to be revealed is part of an ‘enterprise’.
Let me clarify three things from the outset. I condemn without reservation the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023, in which hundreds of people were murdered and hostages were taken captive, later to be used as bargaining chips. Nothing I write here relativises or excuses those crimes. Here, Israel means the State, its government and the political and military apparatus responsible for the conduct of the war. The Israeli people (Jewish, Muslim, Christian or of any other faith) fall outside that designation. The comparison between ‘Naza’ and other historical processes of naming and dehumanisation is limited to a linguistic mechanism: stripping the victim of name, face and humanity in order to turn them into a manageable category. It neither establishes a complete equivalence between events nor attributes collective guilt to Jews.
The Hamas attack was the trigger for a machine that already existed, prepared over years, perhaps decades. The images of Israeli officers learning Arabic in the 1970s are not there by chance. There is accumulated knowledge, doctrine, training, institutions, surveillance and an operational capacity that has been progressively refined. The language of the other, which might have been a place of encounter, was incorporated into a structure of domination.
I call it an ‘enterprise’ because of everything the word contains: organisation, specialisation, division of labour, technology, administration, productivity, objectives and results. It lies far beyond the inventive start-up trying to break into a market. This is a mature enterprise, operating at the cutting edge of global military technology. It produces rigorous and permanent surveys of Gaza’s built environment; it cross-references satellite and drone imagery, telecommunications signals, intercepted communications, movements, addresses and family relationships. According to the testimonies gathered in the film, it uses artificial-intelligence systems and programs capable of selecting targets, managing information and optimising attacks. The weaponry is merely the visible end of the process. Before the bomb, there are precise data and maps, information updated by the second, specialised engineers and a chain of decisions determining where it will fall.
What is most disturbing is the motivation of these individuals. Many pursue excellence in what they do with the same commitment they might bring to a technology giant such as Google or Meta. They want to solve problems, improve results, increase precision, surpass previous achievements. They are engineers and specialist technicians, far removed from the image of the brute-force soldier, the interchangeable operative, mere cannon fodder. They design complex systems and anticipate the operational consequences of their decisions. Technical intelligence applied to warfare has reached an extraordinary degree of sophistication. Tragically, the disjunction from moral conscience seems to grow in equal measure.
One of them says, in essence, that it is the bomb that kills; he merely optimises the place where it should fall. The sentence is perfect in what it reveals. Physical causality is attributed to the bomb, as though the object possessed a will of its own; human causality dissolves into the verb optimise. The euphemism is cynical and perverse. Intelligence remains confined to the technical realm, severed from moral responsibility. They know how to calculate the consequences while excluding from the calculation the lives being sacrificed and the human meaning of their destruction.
It is in this context that the word ‘Naza’ appears. Another interviewee worked on mapping buildings in northern Gaza. He knew how many people were inside a building, where they lived, who came and went, whether a member of Hamas was there or someone who had belonged to it in the past, how many women, children, elderly or sick people were within its walls. The knowledge was precise enough to rule out the excuse of ignorance. Before the bomb fell, their deaths had already been anticipated, counted and accepted. What is perverse is that these casualties no longer appeared as people. They were ‘Naza’. They ceased to be men, women and children. The designation stripped them of their humanity. They became an operational variable, an acceptable percentage, almost a score in a video game. Indeed, the video-game metaphor recurs throughout the testimonies. Saying ‘child’ might provoke empathy or a crisis of conscience. Saying ‘Naza’ allowed the work to continue without remorse. The word does not merely describe the victims; it makes them administrable.
There is an unbearable historical irony in this. In a State whose identity is profoundly shaped by the memory of the Holocaust, a military apparatus uses a bureaucratic category to erase the humanity of another people. The comparison with ‘Juden’ goes no further than this mechanism: turning singular human beings into a category upon which one can act. Dehumanisation often begins there, when the proper name disappears and conscience learns to deal in abstraction. Within the machinery, a person ceases to have a name and exists only as ‘Juden’ or ‘Naza’.
The film describes a rule: according to one of the interviewees, for every man suspected of belonging to Hamas, up to twenty-five ‘Naza’ could be admitted. In other words, killed. The number was established before the attack, as an acceptable margin of civilian deaths. Suppose those twenty-five civilians were five families of five. Fathers, mothers, children, siblings, grandparents. The presence of a single presumed target was enough for the attack to go ahead. In the accounts of the ‘enterprise’, one suspect rendered twenty-five people expendable. They knew they were there.
The journalist asks what they heard on the intercepted calls. Nothing remarkable, they reply. Everyday life: conversations, televisions playing, arguments, children crying. After the bombings, they would hear people searching for one another, trying to locate their loved ones, someone saying that a father or an uncle had died. The category said ‘Naza’; the intercepted voices gave back children, fathers, mothers, grandparents, real families. What dangerous people were these? I ask again: what dangerous people were these whom the State decided to eliminate with bombs?
Some of the interviewees are confronted with what the drones recorded: bodies left to be eaten by dogs, people desperate for food, neighbourhoods demolished and set ablaze. The inevitable question arises: when they saw, heard and knew all of this, what did they think? The answers return to the ‘enterprise’: it was my job; Hamas caused this; the orders were to push the Palestinians south; everything had to be erased so that no one would want to return. One of them, only one, acknowledges the existence of a genocide. And cries. Others remember the joy when an objective was achieved: the camaraderie, the sense of success, the enjoyment. One of them says he would finish work and go for a drink with his friends.
Where had the conscience of these individuals gone? Had it disappeared?
Perhaps it had not. Perhaps it divided itself, narrowed itself, anaesthetised itself. A person keeps it at home, loves their children, worries about their friends, laughs, drinks, lives an ordinary and banal existence. Then they go to work and cease to perceive the same humanity in those who appear on the screen. The task is fragmented, responsibility travels upwards through the chain of command, technical language replaces bodies, physical distance erases the face, repetition turns the intolerable into routine, and the approval of the group functions as moral confirmation.
The question ceases to be ‘should I do this?’ and becomes ‘did I carry out what I was asked to do properly?’ One locates. Another calculates. Another authorises. Another loads. Another fires. No one considers themselves the murderer of the dead child, although the child dies through all of them.
Hannah Arendt explained this mechanism as few others have. The ‘banality of evil’ describes the possibility of monstrous acts being committed through routine, administrative language, conformity and the suspension of one’s own judgement. The expression says nothing about the scale or gravity of the evil, nor does it imply stupid perpetrators. Obedience explains. It does not absolve. Function asks whether the job was done properly. Conscience would ask whether it should have been done at all.
Machiavelli can help us understand the mind of those who design power. La Boétie, those who submit to it. Arendt, the machine in which each person carries out only their allotted part. Yet none of them fills the abyss that opens before us: what had to die inside a person for them to be able to hear a child crying, calculate where the bomb would fall and then go out for a drink with friends? It is beyond me. I find it incomprehensible. However many times I turn it over in my mind, I do not understand.
Netanyahu does not build an ‘enterprise’ of death on his own. No historical leader has ever built his machine alone. A system of this sophistication requires institutions, chains of command, engineers, soldiers, civil servants and thousands of acts presented as ordinary work. The narratives are the true monstrosity: defence, inevitability, security, the absolute guilt of the enemy, the absence of alternatives, national supremacy, the religious legitimation of territorial domination. The more they polarise, the more recognisable the enemy becomes; the more they name him, the easier it becomes to act against him. They turn political and moral choices into technical necessities. The system does not need to extinguish every conscience. It need only teach each conscience to look at its own small part. It need only promise that history, the nation or God will justify the rest.
I do not understand any genocide. I did not understand Auschwitz when I visited it. I did not understand it when I read Primo Levi or watched Schindler’s List. I did not understand it in history books. I can study the mechanisms, the propaganda, the fear, the obedience, the calculation and the diffusion of responsibility. I can describe how the machine is built. I still cannot understand how one human being can look at another human being (a child, a mutilated woman, a man desperate for food) and carry on or kill. Cruelty is part of the human condition, as Saramago said. At this level, my understanding reaches its limit.
I wrote in Hotel La Solitude: ‘There is in human beings an insubordinate, promiscuous root, trace and nourishment of a weed, a seed created in survival mode that millennia of evolving intelligence have failed to extinguish.’ I still believe the same. Naza shows that intelligence has not defeated that root. It has given it satellites, drones, artificial intelligence, surveillance systems and an industrial capacity for destruction. We have become extraordinarily competent without necessarily becoming better.
There is no justice in the world as a law of nature. History possesses no moral mechanism that will eventually reward the innocent and punish the guilty. Justice exists only when human beings build it, precariously, against force, fear and the weed. When I say that those responsible must pay, I mean judicial accountability, and I reject all violence, hatred or revenge. But I will say it without euphemism: they need to sit their arses down in The Hague. Governments, leaders, chains of command, perpetrators and accomplices must answer, on the evidence and according to the degree of their involvement, for the thousands of innocent people killed by decisions that were human before they became technical.
The documentary ends with images of Gaza transformed into a landscape in which scarcely one stone seems to remain upon another, Sodom and Gomorrah after God’s command. A father searches for his wife and children beneath the rubble. He calls them by name among the concrete and the bodies trapped underneath it, but no one answers. Suddenly, in despair, he turns on his dead son: ‘Didn’t I tell you to look after your sister? Why didn’t you listen to me?’
That accusation is the very extremity of grief. The man can no longer locate the source of his suffering or reach those who caused it. His mind searches for someone close enough for him still to address and finds his own son, himself a victim. For an instant, the father tries to reconstruct the vanished order of the family: father protecting son, son protecting sister. That order was crushed along with the house. Grief has lost its address. Amid the rubble, the man calls for ‘Salmah’. A proper name standing before an ‘enterprise’ that knew only ‘Naza’.
Before these final images, the film returns to a 1986 interview in which Benjamin Netanyahu defines terrorism: ‘My definition of terrorism is the systematic and deliberate attack: the murder, maiming and intimidation of innocent people, of civilians, for political purposes.’
He would know how to define himself.
