NAZA asks what happens when the people who carried out a war become its witnesses

The documentary NAZA is directed by Israeli journalists Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor — the same filmmakers behind the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land — and produced by Jonathan Glazer, director of the Oscar-winning The Zone of Interest.

It won the Jury Award at the Mostra in Venice, where it premiered, and received one of the longest-standing ovations of any film festival.

The documentary, whose name is a Hebrew acronym for "collateral damage", has been caught in a spiral of controversy. On one side, people are calling out the attention it received compared to other pieces by Palestinian filmmakers, and on the other side, the Israeli government has put the filmmakers in the crosshairs, going as far as demanding the revocation of their nationalities. 

The documentary breaks down the anatomy of a genocide from inside its machinery through a detached, almost omniscient third-eye point of view.

It weaves together footage from October 7, speeches, including one by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in which he defines terrorism, shots of Tel Aviv, and, most importantly, interviews with members of Israeli occupation forces. The filmmakers interviewed 24 Israeli officers, whose identities have been blurred.   

The reactionary discourse fails to see this documentary for what it is.

Without discrediting all the journalistic and documentary work done by Palestinians themselves from the eye of the storm in Gaza, this investigative film sits in a different category because it is what we call in the legal world a  "declaration against interest."

A declaration against interest is an out-of-court statement made by someone that goes against their own legal, financial, pecuniary, or penal interest at the time they made it.

Why does it matter? Because genocide is unique among international crimes in requiring proof of purpose. The death toll and the destruction, despite being undisputed, are not sufficient to meet the legal threshold.

Dolus specialis, i.e., the intent to destroy the group, is the hardest element to prove in international law because it requires access to a perpetrator's state of mind. If the perpetrator is an organised army, this entails having access to the administrative drill beyond the legal esquive  of "collateral damage," "military necessity," and "proportionality".

Intent of this magnitude is not something an army documents for the record. Thus, having the officers themselves describe the intent as something they executed, and now, at personal and legal risk, admit to from inside the chain of command, is the very condition that makes a declaration against interest credible in the first place.

No one invents a confession that costs them this much.

Under Article 28 of the Rome Statute, a commander or superior can be held liable not only for what they ordered but also for what they knew or should have known was happening under their command and failed to stop.

The interviewees described a targeting and approval process, a calculated ratio of expected civilian deaths, and repeated authorisation up a chain. This is testimony that reaches upward, toward command liability, even though the people speaking are not the commanders.

What the film's own framing insists on is a "premeditated, calculated, and intentional act", and pre-empts both defences of human shields and proportionality simultaneously. 

The Rwanda tribunal convicted largely on the statements of people who had participated in the killing and later spoke. Nuremberg relied heavily on internal military records and perpetrator admissions.

What sets NAZA apart from war journalism is that it is closer to a deposition than to a documentary. It falls under the lineage of what was admitted in the aforementioned tribunals. 

The law does not ask whether the perpetrators felt remorse. The confessions of these officers were not wrung out under duress or delivered with the catharsis of guilt. The filmmakers asked about the facts and procedures.

The documentary's aesthetic is very sober. It reflects the coldness and eeriness of the topic at hand by letting the camera zoom in and out on a heartless, nonchalant Tel Aviv that goes on. 

The apparent irony exacerbates the impact of said confessions. "It’s like a video game," says one officer.

The middle-class, self-proclaimed majority left-wing officers mentioned an AI programme that maps the calls from and to phones belonging to known Hamas members and transplants the pattern onto phones they have under surveillance.

The owners who verify the pattern are then attacked invariably at night. They also delve into the logistics involved in "cleansing" northern Gaza and in sniper attacks on Gazan civilians. 

The accusation that this is nothing Palestinians haven't already said, and the charge of hypocrisy embedded in the attention it received, misreads what kind of object this documentary is.

We are not in the face of a narrative competing with other narratives for airtime. As a matter of fact, truth does not require a legitimacy card to be told.

Palestinians, despite being the primary victims of Israel's ongoing crimes, do not hold the monopoly of truth. If only victims ought to be allowed to narrate their own destruction, their testimonies will be perpetually contestable by anyone willing to claim the account is one-sided, biased, or unverifiable precisely because it comes from the aggrieved party.

What breaks that isolation is two accounts coming from two directions at once. 

The clearest confirmation of this documentary's significance is not coming from critics or juries. It is coming from the Israeli government itself.

Miki Zohar, Israel's Minister of Culture and Sport, did not call the filmmakers liars. He called them traitors. What he is saying concretely is not "this isn't true," but "you shouldn't have said it."

Under such circumstances, the question of the legitimate messenger is quite sterile, both cinematically and legally.

The real question the discourse should focus on is whether the truth is finally on the record and being told exactly by those whose interest is to conceal it. 

Chaima Gharsallaoui is a journalist and filmmaker from Paris

Follow her on Instagram: @chaimagharsallaoui