Unlike the Venice Film Festival, where the documentary NAZA received a record 25-minute standing ovation, the sold-out screening I attended greeted the film's end with stunned silence. The credits rolled. The lights went up. We traipsed to the exit. No one said a word. That seemed a much more fitting response than the one in Venice. Ever since, I have been pondering what exactly our stunned silence meant. Was it shock at the horrors inflicted on Gaza? Not really. Barely any of the destruction and mass-killing was shown. We have seen far, far more of the genocide live-streamed on our phones. Was it the fact that none of the interviewees appeared to regard the official figure of nearly 75,000 dead in Gaza, and more than 175,000 maimed, a Hamas-inspired fiction, as the Israeli government continues to claim, with the western media following suit? In fact, the strong impression conveyed by the military insiders interviewed by the film-makers is that the true death toll is likely to be far higher. Was it the astonishing lack of self-awareness and reflection among most of the interviewees, who spoke drily – mostly indifferently – about the technical aspects of Israel’s innovative AI systems, which drove target selection to destroy homes and kill Palestinians on an unprecedented, industrial scale? Selected from more than 100 Israeli military personnel who spoke to the film-makers off camera, the chosen 24 included some who had helped engineer what they called a “factory” for murdering Palestinians. Others operated this production line, killing by algorithm, as though, in their words, they were playing a “video game“. According to the interviewed soldiers, for every person suspected of being in Hamas, however junior their status, Israel authorised the killing of between 20 and more than 100 NAZA – the Hebrew acronym for Palestinian bystanders, including women and children. When Hamas carried out its one-day attack on Israel in October 2023, the Israeli military claimed the group had around 30,000 fighters. In addition, Israel – and its AI machinery – connected a far larger portion of the population to Hamas, if only because individuals worked for the Gaza government’s political, bureaucratic and administrative arms, from school teachers to doctors and nurses. The film’s interviewer, Yuval Abraham, put to one interviewee a simple observation about the maths. According to the logic of Israel’s NAZA doctrine – permitting potentially dozens of civilian deaths for every Hamas-linked target – almost the entire 2 million inhabitants of Gaza were viewed as acceptable “collateral damage”. The intelligence official mulled this point for some time, as though it had never occurred to him, before agreeing. This is an extract from my latest article NAZA is not just about Israel and Gaza. It’s about the evil lurking in us all. Find a link to the rest in the reply post below ⬇️