Sebastian Ben Daniel (John Brown) writes:

For decades, the liberal camp in Israel has cultivated a convenient and effective defense mechanism. When faced with uncomfortable moral questions about Israel’s actions, responsibility could usually be assigned to the political fringes. The culprits were always the “bad apples”: hilltop youth, far-right ministers, a rogue infantry unit, settlers nobody in north Tel Aviv would invite to dinner.

This division of labor was remarkably convenient. The right committed the crimes; the liberals supplied the morality. The occupation and multiple rounds of war in Gaza, with all their ugliness, were things that “they” did, while “we” investigated abuses and protested to save Israeli democracy.

“NAZA” attacks that alibi. The film bypasses the usual villains and goes straight for the Holy of Holies of the Israeli elite: Unit 8200, which supplies the intelligence for airstrike targets, and the Air Force, which turns those targets into ruined buildings and dead families. The people placed under moral scrutiny are not settlers but graduates of top schools and elite military units who go on to universities and high-tech companies — exactly the people liberal Israel sees when it looks in the mirror.

That is the film’s most intolerable proposition. If what Israel has done in Gaza is genocide, then it is, in significant part, a liberal genocide. This is not because its architects call themselves liberals, but because the machinery of destruction depends on institutions staffed by the secular, educated, technologically sophisticated Israelis who imagine themselves to be the far right’s antithesis. The directors even deny the subjects the old Israeli “shoot and cry” ritual, in which feeling bad about violence somehow redeems it. [Continue reading…]