Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor write:

Over the past three years, we conducted night-time interviews on the rooftops of Tel Aviv with 24 Israeli soldiers who played an active role in Israel’s onslaught on Gaza. Most of them were intelligence officers, working behind screens and participating remotely in the mass killing of Palestinians.

Their testimonies form the basis of “NAZA,” a new documentary we directed — produced by The Guardian and James Wilson and executive produced by Jonathan Glazer — that premieres this evening at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival.

We interviewed these soldiers not because this was the only way to know what Israel has done in Gaza. Anyone who has seen the devastation in the Strip, listened to Gaza’s residents, or simply took Israeli leaders at their word should have recognized this truth years ago.

We made this film for one simple reason: We understood that testimonies from officers and soldiers in the army that annihilated Gaza — those who conducted the surveillance, who calculated how many innocent people were likely to be killed in each house, and who repeatedly gave the green light to bomb entire families — would make it even harder to deny the crimes. And that denial is part of what allows these crimes to continue until today. [Continue reading…]

Ayat Abou Shmeiss writes:

I have known and respected Yuval Abraham’s work for years. In my view, simply making this film is a courageous act in Israeli society. The Israeli soldiers and intelligence personnel who appear in it speak in their own words about how the system they operated within functioned. They are not describing an isolated crime or an offense committed by one soldier or a handful of soldiers.

These are voices that I, as a Palestinian, would probably have no access to. It is doubtful that other journalists would have been able to reach them either.

In this sense, the film is important. It exposes a part of the story that Palestinians may not be able to reach on their own: not what was done to us — we know that — but how Israeli soldiers made their decisions, with which technology, and according to which orders.

This is a film about Israelis, made by Israelis and directed first and foremost at Israeli society. Its purpose is not to give Palestinians a voice, but to make Israelis look in the mirror. There is nothing wrong with that. On the contrary, it is essential that Israeli society confront the crimes it committed and that were committed in its name, and ask how all of this was possible.

Abraham and Szor say that “without an honest reckoning with what happened in the dark, none of us will be able to see the light.” I have no problem with that. My problem is that I am the mirror. My family is the mirror. Our homes, our schools, our children are the mirror.

To some extent, we are the backdrop — or, more accurately, the raw material — through which Israelis look at themselves. After three years of an ongoing genocide, Gaza is becoming the vehicle through which Israelis ask what they did, how they did it, and what it means for their own moral standing.

After all, the journey out of the dark is indeed a moral one. But must the Palestinian — me, my family, and all Gazans — become the victim through whom the perpetrator constructs their own process of repair? [Continue reading…]