Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor. Foto: Ondine goat CC BY-SA 4.0.

The Israeli documentary NAZA received a thunderous ovation, but who still gives a damn about the makers’ credibility? Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor previously made No Other Land, a film built on falsehoods, and won an Oscar for it. These days, a documentary apparently doesn’t need to be factual to succeed: demonising Israel is enough.

You may have heard about it, or perhaps not. At the Venice Film Festival, two Jewish-Israeli filmmakers — Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor — received applause lasting more than 24 minutes. It wasn’t spontaneous. Alberto Barbera, the festival’s director, orchestrated the applause and kept precise track of the time until the ‘record’ had been reached. This applause was meant to be a statement.

It brought to mind scenes from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s book The Gulag Archipelago, in which Party members were compelled to applaud Stalin, and no one dared be the first to stop:

‘The applause went on and on — six, seven, eight minutes! They were done for! Their goose was cooked! They couldn’t stop now till they collapsed with heart attacks! At the rear of the hall, which was crowded, they could of course cheat a bit: clap less frequently, less vigorously, not so eagerly… Nine minutes! Ten!… Insanity! With make-believe enthusiasm on their faces, looking at each other with faint hope, they had to keep clapping till they fell where they stood, till they were carried out of the hall on stretchers.’

NAZA

What was the Venice audience applauding? The documentary NAZA has not yet been released to the general public, so we have to rely on what the makers and early viewers say about it. The makers interviewed 24 Israelis, said to be (former) IDF soldiers and intelligence personnel who are not shown recognisably on camera and remain anonymous throughout.

Before every strike, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) weighs up whether that strike is justified. If that assessment shows the risk of civilian deaths is disproportionate to the strike’s military value, the strike is called off. NAZA — the film’s title — is an acronym of the Hebrew term for collateral damage: unintended harm or civilian casualties.

The bizarre thing about this documentary is that it actually shows that Israel — unlike Hamas, Iran, the Houthis and Hezbollah — has a process for assessing the military value of a strike against the risk to civilians before giving it the green light. In fact — though the film probably doesn’t mention this — within the IDF, legal advisers’ rulings on the lawfulness of a strike are binding. That is an exceptional degree of caution. And yet the filmmakers and their fans claim this film proves Israeli war crimes.

The anonymous informants claim, in fact, that the IDF accepts large numbers of civilian deaths disproportionate to the military value of its strikes. The IDF is also said to be using AI to make decisions without human oversight, which would result in civilian deaths being given less weight. It is the old genocide accusation in yet another guise. The film is presumably called NAZA for a reason: a term almost no one has heard of, but which calls to mind the term Nazi.

A critical interview

Raviv Drucker — an Israeli investigative journalist who was allowed to see the film in advance — interviewed filmmaker Yuval Abraham. Drucker pointed out that the informants’ anonymity made it impossible to verify whether their vague, sometimes implausible allegations held up. Yuval said he knew enough additional detail to vouch for the informants’ reliability, but that he had kept this to himself in order to protect these witnesses. He admitted he hadn’t been able to verify everything, but he found the allegations credible enough.

Drucker noted that NAZA barely touches on Hamas’s role. Anyone who wants to talk about civilian casualties in Gaza should also talk about the vast tunnel network that civilians are barred from sheltering in, and about Hamas’s habit of fighting in civilian clothing and hiding in schools, mosques and hospitals. Yuval waved this aside.

His main defence against Drucker’s criticism was that Drucker should just make a better film himself. Yuval also invoked the authority of the British newspaper The Guardian, which produced the film. But both Yuval Abraham and The Guardian have spread falsehoods about Israel before.

A dubious track record

In August 2025, for instance, The Guardian ran an article with the suggestive headline that 83% of the dead in Gaza were civilians. This story spread around the world. It was nonsense, because of the absurd threshold that had been devised: only dead militants whom Israel could identify, and who were verifiably members of a terrorist group, counted as combatants. Every killed terrorist who didn’t meet these unusually strict conditions counted automatically as a civilian. One of the authors of that article was Yuval Abraham.

The rest of Yuval’s record inspires little confidence either. Besides the Guardian, he publishes in other far-left or jihadist outlets, all of which are hostile to Israel. He has also been close friends for years with Ahmed Alnaouq, a Hamas activist. Investigative journalist Eitan Fischberger examined both this friendship and the suspicions surrounding Alnaouq himself.

No Other Land

On top of that, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor have previously proved to be unreliable. Together with several Palestinian activists, they made the film No Other Land, about alleged ethnic cleansing by Israel of the Masafer Yatta area. The film won an Oscar and was praised worldwide as a brave protest against Israeli oppression.

What got less attention was the lack of factual evidence supporting No Other Land. Firstly, Masafer Yatta is situated in Area C of the West Bank, which, in accordance with the Oslo Accords, is under Israeli control. Secondly, aerial photographs dating back to 1945 show that the area was uninhabited, contradicting any claim of continuous Palestinian habitation there.

Because the area was uninhabited, the IDF used it from the 1980s onward as a military training ground, although Israel did allow Palestinians to graze livestock there between training exercises. But over the past few decades, Palestinian activists moved in to create ‘facts on the ground’. Their illegal settlement became a hub for terrorism from which numerous attacks were carried out.

A dubious accusation

The success of No Other Land — which, incidentally, borrows its title from a well-known Israeli song — once again made two things clear. Firstly, that an accusation against Israel is immediately taken as proof, and secondly, that such an accusation is, by definition, guaranteed to be met with applause.

Outside Israel, the factual problems with No Other Land have received far less attention. But for many Israelis, Abraham and Szor’s success rests on an indictment of Israel that ignores crucial facts. As a result, few Israelis believe these activists have now actually brought serious abuses to light.

What’s more, if the filmmakers and their sources genuinely believed this was true, why didn’t they report it to the IDF? The IDF has a special investigative unit where people can file complaints about possibly unlawful military action. Instead, these filmmakers and their sources chose to pour their accusations into a film. It is also entirely possible that they broke the law by disclosing classified information without authorisation. Israel is accordingly considering criminal prosecution of the filmmakers and those interviewed.

The IDF has issued an initial response, but could not yet respond substantively, since it has not yet been given access to the film. Apparently, Yuval and Rachel consider it more important to win worldwide applause for their accusation than to let the accused know what he is accused of. After all, they know from experience that almost no one cares about a fair legal process when it concerns Israel.

[text tweet: This is simply true. But the demonisation of Israel has now spiraled so far out of control that it is seen as propaganda from a fascist regime. All the ‘Have-you-got-your-shekels-yet?’ trolls, line up.🙄]

Anger in Israel

The anger in Israel over NAZA runs deep. Israelis who bravely fight to protect their country are being portrayed as criminals. The Dutch Public Prosecution Service can casually turn a blind eye when opportunists whip up the crowd with ‘Death to the IDF!’ But by now Israelis can expect a Jew hunt almost anywhere in the world, one that is then excused as a response to ‘Israeli war crimes’. That is what NAZA is fuelling.

IDF soldiers risked their lives, and many lost them, in their attempts to free the hostages. Many soldiers also lost their lives because of the way Israel is fighting in Gaza. The IDF could simply have flattened Gaza from the air, but instead sent troops in and even warned civilians ahead of strikes, which turned IDF soldiers into targets.

Every Israeli knows that Israel is safe only because of the IDF, and almost every family mourns a fallen soldier. These are the people NAZA is now trampling on. The IDF can make mistakes too, and Israelis are not shy about criticising it when it does. But the vicious caricature that NAZA paints is a world away from reality.

On top of that, Israelis feel betrayed. They are used to jihadists and extremists of every stripe telling lies about Israel. But Yuval Abraham is an Israeli Jew. One grandfather lost almost his entire family in the Holocaust; the other had to flee Yemen. To Israeli Jews, Yuval is ‘one of us’. That someone like him is doing this makes it all the more painful.

Inversion

Perhaps the worst thing about this film is the makers’ claim to moral superiority. That was on display in Raviv Drucker’s interview with Yuval Abraham too.

Yuval presented himself as the brave rebel who had dared to make this film, while journalists like Drucker supposedly wouldn’t dare. It’s the world turned upside down. Yuval’s films can count on a warm welcome around the world, while fact-based films about Israel are more likely to be cancelled. They simply don’t fit the narrative.

All those people standing and applauding at the Venice Film Festival — did any of them even spare a thought for Hamas’s many war crimes? For its relentless attacks on Israeli civilians, and its terror against the people of Gaza? Did those sheep in the audience, clapping along on cue, spare a thought for the Palestinian children used as human shields?

Too many people are sheep, and a herd can always turn into a mob. Yuval Abraham proclaims himself to be the brave rebel, but he chose the mob. Against his own people.

Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor deserve no applause, but scorn.

 

This article was originally published in Dutch.

You can support the work of Maaike van Charante at repelsteeltje.backme.org

Want to stay up to date with new articles and podcasts? Follow Maaike on Twitter.