Ask Haviv Anything - 147: Are the allegations in NAZA true?

Episode Date: September 15, 2026

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Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Ask Habib Anything. This is another Q&A episode where I answer questions from our subscribers. Several of you have asked about Naza, the documentary by Yuval Avraham and Rachel Schor, that premiered at Venice on September 10, won the special jury prize, and apparently received a 25-minute standing ovation.

It's also generated an extraordinary political upheaval. uproar in Israel. Everyone's talking about it and been talking about it for a couple of days. I haven't seen the film. It's not showing to Israelis. It's not available for Israelis. So I can't give you a verdict on its evidence on what it claims, on whether it proves what it claims. What I can do is try and explain why I approach this film very skeptically, why the vast majority of Israelis do so as well? And what would actually make its allegations, at least some of them, possibly even persuasive? And also why some of the reactions to it, like a 25-minute standing ovation, deserve a lot of skepticism as well. Based on the published accounts, the film basically

argues that Israeli targeting in Gaza. Systems that included the use of AI. This is something that one of the filmmaker's Yuval of Rahm has written about in the past, has made claims about in the past, but mostly very permissive allowance for civilian casualties, what is called the C.D.E.s, the collateral damage estimates, or Naza, Nesik Agavi, which is collateral damage in Hebrew and is the title of the film. They're very permissive allowances for collateral damage and decisions about where and when to strike, enabled the deaths of a great many Palestinians over the course of the war, especially in the early months of the war, in ways that are unlawful, immoral, unnecessary to the military effort.

That seems to be the central claim. And the film uses testimony from 24 anonymous military and intelligence insiders. The allegations include, for example, choosing to strike Hamas commanders at home, despite the presence of their families in the evenings, rather than during the day in the places they are out in public and I don't know what, assuming that during the day around other Hamas fighters, maybe in a tunnel or in some fortified place,

the army would have more trouble, less trouble, but that willingness to strike their home when their family is around them, treating civilian deaths as an acceptable feature of a system that is built to produce targets rapidly and go after them rapidly because the army tried to destroy as much of the Hamas infrastructure and also as much of the chain of command as quickly as possible in the early days of the war, really in the first few weeks. And that created a system where civilian deaths weren't treated with as much care

as they should have been, to the point, the movie claims, of vast criminality. Some accounts of the film describe a much broader argument about destruction and displacement serving grandkids, serving grand strategic aims. Not all accounts do. I haven't seen the film yet because they don't want me to see the film yet. These are very serious allegations.

Now, a lot of the online rhetoric about this talks about how the Israeli army knew there would be civilian deaths and still carried out air strikes. That online chatter is stupid. It's just a misunderstanding of what even the movie apparently claims. estimating civilian casualties of a future strike before ordering that strike is mandatory under international law. It's part of how you judge proportionality, whether the possible or likely collateral damage is proportional to the military necessity of the strike. And there's no one answer to that. It has to be weighed with how important is the target, how likely are you to destroy the target, what the likelihood is of civilian casualties, whether you've taken. and mitigating steps to prevent civilian casualties.

The claim being made by people who are supporting this movie online is that that prediction of civilian deaths proves that killing civilians was the objective. In other words, every attack literally had a number of civilians expected to die and the Israelis pulled the trigger. And that's not just wrong. It's the opposite of what they think they're claiming. But also the truth, which is that that's evidence that they were doing the calculations required to carry out a war morally, doesn't prove that the final decision was careful or humane or lawful.

All of that means that so much of the support that this film is enjoying and the conclusions that just countless mobs of ordinary people are drawing from the film should be completely ignored. It's a complete misunderstanding of what the film claims, or apparently claims, and what the IDF actually needs to do and is required to do by morality and the laws of war. What do I need the film to show? I need the film to demonstrate that target identification wasn't reliable, that the intelligence was so bad it literally couldn't be relied on. That means that accepting huge civilian, potential civilian cost is illegitimate, that military. military value claims are crazy inflated. Some random local guy with a gun is not a legitimate reason to drop a bomb on a building. But someone core to a military hierarchy is, potentially, especially if you've put out leaflets

and sent SMS as telling people to evacuate the building. And whether the casualties really are excessive, excessive compared to the military gain, right? I want to know if there are feasible precautions and if they were ignored. and if they were ignored, not individually at a single moment, but at scale. Those are substantive allegations. And if Israeli officers from the brigade command or the division command where these decisions were made on air strikes, from the intelligence corps, where they built the bank of targets,

if they were there and know what they're talking about and have something to say on this, I actually want to know. But if a film or its audience treats the knowledge, that civilians might die as proof of murder, then it's blaming Israel for literally following international law. Horror, moral horror, is an appropriate response to civilian death and war. It's not proof that a military strike was immoral.

It's proof that war itself is hell. An attack of civilian deaths that speeds up the defeat of Hamas is moral and necessary and horrible. This is the Geneva Connoisse. conventions. This is the basic outline of how international law understands war. None of this is special or new information. And I'm dwelling on it here because so much of the conversation on the internet coming at every Israeli who goes out there doesn't understand this point. So I'll be watching for that distinction when I watch this film, when it finally gets here somehow allows us to watch it.

Do they go beyond just wallowing in the horror of the very fact that there is collateral damage in war, or the collateral damage estimates is the thing they're harbend, and prove actual wrongdoing. Do they actually prove that wrongdoing? Or is it just a bunch of hearsay? The interviewees are all anonymous. And the framing from what reports you can read right now is unbelievably tendentious.

It's unbelievably activist. The journalist Raviv Droker writing in Ha'Aritz, the newspaper in Israel, most likely to be most sympathetic, to the conclusions drawn by Yuval Avraham and Rachel Schor and the filmmakers. Raviv Durkir actually saw the movie

and he wrote, for example, in his op-ed in Ha'aritz, between testimonies, we see people dining in Tel Aviv restaurants. One soldier says all he cared about was completing the mission. Another explicitly draws a comparison to the Nazis.

A third describes how much he enjoyed the work. The impression is that killing innocent Ghazin-Jjjjj, children was fun. But could his enjoyment have come from believing at the time that he was helping to strike at Hamas? Raviv Durkir explicitly says in this op-ed that he trusts the integrity of Yuval Avraham and then questions his most fundamental framing and conclusion. He can't help but wish the film had been, quote, truer to reality. You know, Raviv, I respect the polite way you're framing this, but you're saying it's an impressionist painting, not a documentary.

There's this throwaway concern in Raviv's column, again, which is explicit at the beginning about the integrity of Yuvat-Evram. The film also offers, Raviv writes, no comparison with how other armies have fought terrorist organizations embedded in civilian populations. And there's this sentence. At one point, Hamas is you, civilians as human shields comes up, only to be sharply dismissed. But there's considerable convincing evidence that Hamas used civilians as human shields. Chamas placed infrastructure and command centers and schools and hospitals. It makes no sense to leave that out. That's what Raviv writes. And Raviv is right, unless it makes perfect sense to leave it out, because you're

trying to create an impression. And then the question becomes, well, what have you lost? What if you deliberately jettisoned overboard in your moral impressionism. There is good reason to be skeptical of these particular filmmakers. And that skepticism doesn't exonerate Israel. It doesn't prove Israel even. It has no bearing on the specific decisions made in the war at those early days with the airstrike campaign. But there's good reasons to be skeptical about these particular filmmakers.

One of them is an earlier investigation. by you Val Avraham involving, by the way, the Guardian, which also helped to produce this film, the British newspaper The Guardian. It was about the claim reported in August of 2025 that 83% of those killed in Gaza were civilians. 83% of those killed in Gaza were civilians is a very high civilian ratio.

I want to be precise about what they reported then because I'm going to criticize the accuracy and honesty of it, and so I have to meet a high standard of both in order to criticize theirs. The August 2025 investigation reported that an Israeli intelligence, military intelligence database listed 8,900 named Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters as dead or probably dead.

That was the running tally assessment in Army intelligence at that time. And the overall reported death toll was then about 53,000. And Yuvala Blan's article in the magazine 972 suggested the headline claim just said outright that at least 83% of the dead were civilians because the army had the names as combatants in those organizations of 17% of the dead. Now inside the article sort of buried in there, there is an acknowledgement that the database missed unidentified fighters. people who fought without formal membership but were recruited

Hamas was paying literal cash for people to just join the fighting forces as they were depleted in combat with the IDF. It talks and mentions recruitment. There was massive recruitment to refresh and rejuvenate the ranks. And its response to those concerns

was this dismissive, well, but the overall death toll could also be undercounted. We don't know. It's complicated. It's chaos. Maybe. Or maybe not.

It then takes that 17% combatant death, cites a conflict researcher who compares it to other conflicts. If that 83% civilian death toll was the final death toll, what other conflict wouldn't match? And the result was a headline that said 83% of Gaza war dead are civilians, a headline blasted out virally into the world by the Guardian. And the most powerful punchline in the article was

an extreme rate of slaughter rarely matched in recent decades of warfare. But was it true? Was it even a reasonable inference from the available data? Fighting age men are hugely overrepresented in the death toll. A lot of caveats matter here. Not all fighting age men who die in a war were combatants, obviously. but it does suggest that quite a few of them were combatants and that there's a policy when it comes to targeting.

And when the public framing has none of that, none of the details that made the headline almost certainly untrue, then and now, almost certainly far from the truth, then and now. But that's the headline that travels internationally. And it's presented as an extraordinary civilian death percentage. And the extraordinarilyness of it, the cruelty of it, the brutality of it,

the comparison to the only kinds of conflicts that have it are these horrific massacres, and not urban combat on the scale of, for example, muscle in 2016. And it's presented as a finding of Israel's own intelligence. In other words, don't blame me, I'm just telling you what Israeli intelligence assesses. It was framed as I have this expose, this leaked document from Israel. Israeli intelligence. And then the headline, the thing that people will actually read without any of the qualifications that even inside the reporting are anemic.

Nobody carried that part of the message. Certainly nobody watching it on TikTok or reading it on their X-feed as it scrolls by. Enraged and knowing this new fact about the war and never knowing that it is not actually true. the Guardian headline that went viral, the headline had no caveats. I think the gap was intended. I think it's unreasonable to think that it wasn't.

I think the authors meant for a dramatic conclusion to circulate with a force that the actual data and their actual qualifications could not sustain. I don't think that's the percentage of combatant deaths in Gaza. And I don't think you, Yuvall Avraham and the Guardian thought that.

I really actually think that they tried to create a false image. I'm assuming competence. You could argue it was incompetence. I think these experienced journalists understand that a headline will reach people who don't read the caveats at a vast scale. And that that sort of bait and switch is routine in Yuvall Avram's work. I don't know a headshol's work, but I have read a few things by Yovatavraham

and found it repeatedly. And this matters for the film, because this is a film that tries to make a similar argument about Israeli intentions using Israeli sources, so to speak, in ways that we can't corroborate, and in ways that we don't know that the data was carefully managed to actually demonstrate the conclusion. Authentic real information can be made to carry a conclusion.

it has not established, and that could be completely false. A real database can be presented so misleadingly that you're telling a lie. And by the way, a real officer in the movie can describe a real event, and the editor can draw a completely unjustified conclusion about what that event proves. For example, there could be a reason to loosen the CBE requirements for an airstrike temporarily for military purposes that a captain in a control room

doesn't know because he's not part of the discussion but is horrified by in real time and if you don't know that context you can't assess the decision or the results of the decision that doesn't mean the testimony is false it means trust matters and these are people who have done too many things

to make sure that that trust is going to be hard to come by when it comes to explaining any of this to Israelis. I don't think Israelis are the audience and we'll come back to that. So I don't think they care about proof and evidence and us being able to actually examine the steps between their testimony and their verdict. I mean, who on earth cares enough to actually do that? And who's going to listen to those who do?

And that's the point. The claim is made. It crosses continents. It hits the social media feeds of billions of people. A tiny percentage will click through. Almost none will care or notice the counterarguments chasing after it like these distant whispers on the wind. And that's before we address the point that the interviewees were anonymous. There's so much demand to trust.

Avraham, that he authenticated identities, that he checked their access to the actual events they described, to the decision-making process they're supposedly talking about, to compare independently obtained accounts of any of this. His record is not exactly the record of a careful self-critical journalist when it comes to this specific question. And then there's the question of funding, an editorial culture. They matter profoundly.

they shape what questions get asked and which answers get rewarded. The Guardian's role here is relevant to my assessment of the film's editorial judgment, especially given the Guardian's role in that last thing they did together. Foreign funding doesn't discredit evidence, certainly not automatically.

Sometimes domestic audiences and domestic funders and domestic consumers can punish unwelcome truths, things they don't want to hear. There's a role for having many sources of funding to a conversation. But it nevertheless creates an incentive structure that can't not be there. It's unavoidable. And the incentive structure in this case leans extremely heavily in one direction

when you interpret the data that you're holding. The test of honesty in a case like that is what someone does when the evidence complicates the story. So they want to tell a story. Their audience wants to hear a story. We are watching these filmmakers carefully pick and choose their audience and know what their audience wants. They're very experienced old hands at this. What happens to evidence that complicates the story that robs you of the easy sort of plucking at the heartstrings? that gives the story power and virality.

What happens to that stuff? Can somebody like Yuval Abraham, I don't know him, tell the parts of the story that don't fit his narrative? And that brings me to the larger story, to the military context, to the part that I find most conspicuously missing from the accounts of this film that I've read. Try to remember the immediate aftermath of October 7. the army was catastrophically surprised.

The border defense concept, the system, the physical system, but also the concept, had completely failed. Civilians had been massacred. Hostages had been taken in huge numbers. Commanders didn't know how badly the intelligence had failed. It had already missed this, the great attack, the invasion. What else was it missing? For a military planner, that last question was the fundamental question. Once your assumptions have shattered, that comprehensively, that completely,

you have to ask yourself what else you don't know? Are more attacks coming? Is this the first stage of something bigger? Was Hamas the opening shot in a much larger surprise, strategic surprise? Once you know you've completely failed, you don't know how big your failure really is. and then on October 8 Chisbalah opens fire and begins shelling Israeli cities and towns and would continue

for many, many months. And Iran's foreign minister goes to Beirut. And in Beirut, Iran's foreign minister talks about the danger of the wider war. And he says, Hezbollah is prepared for it. The threat of that second front,

that's not some kind of invention years later to excuse Israeli decision. That is the unfolding crisis. That is how the planners interpret the need to go after Hamas in Gaza at that moment. Military commanders genuinely feared a fully coordinated

regional invasion plan. Even the ones who didn't think that was what was happening. Even the ones who were very we know there was a debate in the cabinet. And Galant, the defense minister at the time, had a debate about this in the cabinet. Gallant said, we have to go to Lebanon, Chesbelae, immediately now. We have to open a two-front

war immediately on October 8. And Netanyahu said, no, I I don't think they want to get into the war. but wants to get into a ground war. That's a debate both of them have talked about publicly. The possibility of escalation, the difficulty of judging it after that scale of intelligence collapse. That changes your assessment of urgency.

That very reasonably changes your assessment. And if that's true, and you have the prospect of a ground war in Gaza against an enemy that's operating in a tunnel network you've seen being built, but you never quite understood its purpose. and now you understand its purpose, underneath a densely populated territory.

My understanding of Israeli planning at the time was that commanders feared very heavy losses going in. Some of the estimates that leaked from discussions at the time said there could be thousands of dead IDF soldiers. The whole concept of entering Gaza with ground forces was something that terrified military commanders for years. They were more deterred than Khmer. ever was by that tunnel network.

And so the commanders were desperate to stabilize the fronts, to carefully make sure that Hezbollah does not open that second front, to very quickly and dramatically and urgently cut down Hamas's capabilities in the south. Everybody's bracing for potentially what could happen with Iran, with Syria. and those are commanders willing to risk those assessments of thousands of IDF dead to achieve that stabilizing of the front by as quick as possible and as comprehensive as possible a shattering of Hamas's military capabilities just to restore the basic defensive posture of the IDF after that scale of a surprise.

The army, when it changed the rules of engagement and the rules of collaboration, and the rules of collateral damage, the restrictions on collateral damage, at the time, explicitly cited the tunnels and fighting from populated areas. This was part of the public discussion because of that sense of urgency.

As I understand the Israeli commander's arguments on this question, it was to avoid allowing Hamas time to regroup, not allowing Hamas to, to preserve its command structure and prepare further attacks, many of which had already been planned ahead and who knows how far ahead they planned. This was a spectacular success. They had managed to compartmentalize so totally from Israeli intelligence

that everything was a surprise, and once that's true, you have to assume the worst at every corner, at every turn. That looked a lot more dangerous at that moment than it did before October 7 and than it does today. So targets that were judged too costly are not urgent to not. or not worth the risk to civilians were reassessed because the military advantage had changed. It was that much more important militarily to cut that enemy down to size, that Hamas hierarchy, the Hamas infrastructure, those Hamas capabilities to carry on more surprises potentially at that scale.

Because you are expecting Chisbalah at some point to enter. You're actually expecting that after October 7. Now, you can disagree with that sense of instability, that sense of a need to restabilize those fronts as a desperate military need, an urgent military need. But you have to understand it when you're trying to understand decisions being made by Israelis that you're criticizing from years later and far away. The fact that the same number of civilians on October 6th, near a legitimate military target about to attack Israel, would have held off a strike, and after October 7 permitted a strike, doesn't mean that strike is immoral or unlawful.

the one taken after October 7. Because the military situation is fundamentally changed. And so the military benefit, which is what it has to be proportional to, what the potential collateral damage has to be proportional to under international law, the military benefit is fundamentally changed. The urgency of disrupting, taking out a Hamas commander, disrupting the command and control hierarchy of Hamas, were much, much greater.

And it wasn't clear what the alternatives are in the combat zone, in military tactical terms. And these questions are not excuses and they're not marginal. They're fundamental to any account of these decisions. Now, it's obviously true, and this is important, that a commander may have very good reasons for being very alarmed, very worried, and still approve a strike that's indefensible. That's completely possible.

Fear can make your judgment sharper and fear can distort it dramatically. and the desire to protect soldiers is a legitimate reason to shape your tactics, but it's not a legitimate reason to exact unlimited costs from civilians. There's not a clear and obvious answer to everything. Everything is in flux, but there's a system for making these decisions in which you're not allowed to ignore all of the different pieces. A legitimate military objective is,

not necessarily mean that the means you pursued it with are legitimate. But here's something that's even more true. No assessment of Israeli actions at the time, including changes to the CBE, that leaves out those considerations is an actual assessment of Israeli actions. What commanders knew, what they believed, is fundamental to these moral questions and to these legal questions. And what information was reasonably available to them? What they actually could know on the ground, how much they could trust that intelligence, how reasonable the assessments were. And when you're done pearl clutching and impression making, is this movie going to answer these questions? Is it going to even acknowledge these questions? And if it's not, it can't answer the question

it claims to raise. There is reporting, good reporting. that tells us that the rules changed over time. Repeatedly. There was a New York Times investigation, not suspected of being madly in love with the Israeli war effort in Gaza. Put it that way. New York Times investigation

that very critically described that the loosening of collateral damage rules at the beginning, and then the re-tightening of rules, beginning on, I think it was November 5th, and then more tightening of requirements in December, and more tightening of requirements in January. In other words, as the situation stabilizes,

and Hezbollah and Iran are understood to be at least delayable fronts, even if not neutralized fronts, they're still bombarding Israel. An IRGC, Iranian general, is literally sitting in the Shore Council of Hezbollah ordering the rocket strikes. The Hezbollah bombardment of Israel

was an Iranian assault on Israel. But it was contained. They wanted to show they're doing something for Gaza without entering a ground war with Israel. It took a while for the Israelis to understand that that's what was happening because they no longer trusted their intelligence for good reason. So as the situation stabilized and Chazmullah and Iran were understood to be uninvolved, first of all in the Hamas decision to attack on October 7,

but also going forward that they were hedging. The Israeli military forces saw restrictions on airstrikes steadily restored. And every piece of that debate is legitimate. were they restored enough, where they restored quickly enough, how long did it take for that understanding? Is the understanding the only thing that's relevant? Were they still, even taking all that into account,

completely criminal airstrikes? These are all totally valid questions. None of it's in any of the coverage I have found on the movie. Not that there's no serious account of any of these issues, grappling with them, questioning them, they're not apparently, apparently. I haven't been able to see it. not mentioned.

The reviews describe in the movie some procedures, some deaths in Gaza, and they're the conclusions of the filmmakers. I haven't found a mention of an examination of the military dangers that commanders actually believe they faced, and how those beliefs should affect their decisions or our judgment of their decisions. I will eventually have the chance to watch the film. If it makes broad claims about what the military intended, and it rips out that whole context,

then it isn't raising moral questions. It is refusing to raise those moral questions. It's refusing to grapple with them. You can't assess a decision while treating the circumstances in which it was made, especially circumstances directly relevant to the decisions and somehow morally irrelevant. I'll say more than that.

If it was a documentary about a single incident, a single strike, and a claim that it was criminal. The bar would be much lower, but the broader the claim about the war, about what drove the military campaign, what drove the rules as they changed, loosened and then retitened,

the more you have an obligation to confront other explanations for those decisions, including the explanation of the actual military context the commanders faced as they made these decisions. And for God's sense, sake, you can't erase Hamas from an account of civilian danger in Gaza.

As if Hamas's operational decisions, operational strategies don't matter. You dismiss the tunnels when you're trying to assess what it actually takes to go after Hamas. The extent of Hamas's use of civilian infrastructure, which is massively documented now. Even UN

agencies haven't been able to avoid it entirely. None of these things stop being true because acknowledging them complicates your indictment of Israel. Hamas's conduct doesn't cancel Israeli obligations under Israel's, by the way, international, you all know I'm very skeptical about international law. I think it doesn't actually protect any of us. But the laws of armed conflict are Israeli domestic law. Israel didn't just sign some of these international treaties. It adopted these rules as its own law. And those obligations, Hamas's conduct doesn't cancel them, nor did Israel's obligations to fight

in certain ways, make Hamas' conduct irrelevant to the military decisions on the ground. If you can't see both, you can't assess these decisions. And finally, I want to say something about the reception, because the reception of this movie is a separate story with its own special significance. This film, on September 10, when it was screened at Venice, received a 25-minute standing ovation. Think about how long that is. At some point, looking around at each other, still clapping, 12 minutes in, 17 minutes in,

22 minutes in, it becomes a collective act. It becomes a public declaration of fealty, of belonging. It's not a response to a film or to a war. I can't tell you what was in the mind of every person standing there. Maybe some were responding to the extraordinary cinematic artistry of it. I haven't seen it. Maybe some were genuinely moved in a unique way to produce the unique, unprecedented ovation, standing ovation of that type,

to the testimony, to how devastating it was. Maybe. Or to the courage they attributed to the directors. Maybe. I suspect that something much more political, much more cultural, was actually happening in that room. And that suspicion is connected to the wider protest movement on the Gaza War. Something unique happened with the Gaza movement. Something reordering of left-wing politics in the West.

And it stands out. The combination of the global reach of these protests, 40,000 events counted by one think tank, some of them just immense protests, the repetition of these protests, the regularity week in, week out, the duration of the protests, the accumulated participation, how they shared vocabulary across national boundaries. This is something that we've talked about. Just agnosticly, it's not enough to say this was opposition to a war because there have been huge wars, worse wars, wars with tremendous amount of Western involvement. That didn't draw a tenth or a hundredth of this scale. of participation, weekend after weekend, across very different cultures and societies, the same conflict being this recurring, organizing principle for a new politics. It's a phenomenon distinctive

enough that it deserves an explanation. It needs an explanation. Social media explains how a movement can spread and how he can synchronize. It doesn't really explain why this conflict sustains that mobilization. When other terrible conflicts, also visible on the same platforms, don't generate that response. Western support for Israel. Americans are fond of saying on this question, well, I pay for the Gaza,

I give aid to Israel. I'm culpable in the Gaza war. And it's reasonable to feel a special responsibility for what your government enables. But not if you're Spanish, or Danish, or Indonesian, all places. that saw the same exact phenomenon even bigger than in America.

So what is the phenomenon? Why does Israel so often become more than a country whose actions have to be judged? Yeah, there's a war, of course. It becomes a symbol. And not just a symbol of a war. It becomes a symbol of everything wrong with the world. And opposition to it, to the country, becomes a declaration of moral worth. Somehow, according to the mayor of New York, this is deeply intertwined with racist policing in America.

According to the British left, it's deeply tied to imperialism. And according to the French left, French intellectuals remembering their own colonization in Algeria, it's somehow deeply connected to colonialism. And if you listen to Australian academics, it's settler colonialism. I hate to say this, because my goal really is to try and raise. the bar, make the challenge that this movie needs to meet. And by the way, if it meets it, we should say it. But the history of anti-Semitism becomes relevant here. European societies have repeatedly made Jews symbols of the evils they themselves fear or reject. Fear in themselves and project out of themselves onto the Jew and then can stand opposed to it. Centuries of

dealings with the Jews, that is how Christians talked about it in Europe. The vocabulary changed when ideology changed. Religious accusations gave way to political ones. The greedy Jews practicing usury gave way to, you know, Jewish capitalists if you were a communist or Jewish international cosmopolitan communist if you were, you know, a Nazi or a fascist. Jews in all those cases are accused of corrupting society or destroying it through revolution. These old prejudices adapted new moral vocabularies. That's something that Max Weber taught us, right, that a society can secularize

but maintain the mental habits of its old religious foundations. I think part of that habit of positioning the Jew in that way, which, you know, became unpopular for a while after the Holocaust, I think it survives in this treatment of Israel. And I want to say why,

and I don't want to make it too big. It's not the explanation. But, you know, it's meaningful that the longest ever-standing ovation was for this movie about Israel. And the second longest-ever-standing ovation was last year for another movie about Israeli villainy.

That doesn't mean Israel isn't doing something wrong or the movie doesn't show a crime. But that scale of cohering, of a kind of identity in that moral stance that will leave you standing there making this collective act of demonstrating 25 minutes of clapping. Israel is the concentrated embodiment of Western evil that when you stand against it are purged of that evil

is what I see. It's part of the mobilizing power of this movement. It's that deep, old, European habit and idea and mental framework. And it's hard to explain the unique scale of this without at least noticing that that is a deep underlying way in which Jews have been treated in the European imagination and in the Western imagination.

Centries of culture, centuries of habit, of mental habit, is right there. And the warning sign for it is the report. placement of actual people and real choices with a moral symbol. Israel is pure evil, has all the agency, all the guilt. Palestinians have no politics, no internal struggles, nothing that needs to be understood. Hamas's ideology, Hamas's decisions, a century of a theological development that produced Hamas's literal fighting strategy, something that people in this podcast will be very familiar with

at this point. And every episode I do on this, there's always book recommendations. You're not supposed to stop with me, and you're certainly not supposed to only read my favorite authors. But know the concepts, know these driving principles. Palestinians are deeper and richer and more sophisticated and more serious and have a history of ideas and culture that's totally missing from the conversation of them, as pure martyred victims. Hamas' ideology matters, and its decisions are driven by deep thoughts and ideas. And to treat them as peripheral because the conclusion, the narrative already has its villain, then you're not assessing the morality of Israeli decisions.

Folks, I mean, you know me, okay? There's the next inevitable caveat. I have to make it. not everybody necessarily knows me. That doesn't make Palestinian suffering not real. It doesn't make a particular accusation false. A real crime can be actually reported by people who misunderstand the wider conflict.

It can be seen and put on the agenda by people with prejudices of their own. And we still have to look at that crime, and investigated it, and understand it. the point is not that this therefore says the movie has nothing to teach us. Maybe it does. The point is that the reception becomes questionable. How much of the moral identity of this audience is invested in this movie's claims. How difficult it then becomes to correct anything when it's proven wrong. That is absolutely relevant. That does absolutely make the source.

the cultural source of this strange phenomenon of a 25-minute standing ovation relevant. We have to see the movie. We have to examine the evidence, not because of Rachel Shor and Yuvall Avraham, but because there is a claim that these are real officers in the IDF, telling us things that happened in a war. And that's separate from the deeper cultural phenomenon that is signaled by the reception of the movie overseas. And that the second longest standing ovation in the festival's history was last year in another movie about Israeli villainy. And finally, I'll say one final thing about the Israeli reaction. A friend of mine suggested that the uproar in Israel, the prime ministers talked about it, there's anger, there's rage, as a minister of government

who threatened the culture minister who threatened to strip Hachel and Yuval's citizenship, which he doesn't have remotely the power to do, but he wanted everybody to know that if he had the I were to do it. He would do it. Opposition people talking about it. Israeli social media sort of set on fire by it. My friend suggested that that fact alone said that this movie is important because it suggests that Israelis don't want to face a truth. It feels to him like a defense mechanism, right? Israelis are angry because they're defensive about a truth that don't want to look at. Yeah, that's possible. People can become angry. because somebody has exposed a fact they would rather suppress.

But people also become angry because they believe they've been misrepresented, because they distrust the messenger, because somebody has found it useful to amplify their anger. Several political pundits have already written this in Hebrew. I don't know if it's been out there in English. The Israeli controversy was a few mentions by a few politicians. And then a couple of days after the showing, the screening, maybe on the 12th, it exploded. And it exploded, I think, from my experience of it, who knows what the algorithm is warping in my sense of things,

in the right-wing algorithm, in the right-wing ecosystem of Israeli social media. The Israeli election campaign, there's an election at the end of October, the Israeli campaign, until now, had basically been video and counter video by opposition and coalition over October 7, over Netanyahu's responsibility for the failures of October 7 for the concept, the strategic concept that led to it, containing Hamas, funding Hamas through Qatari money, for his response during the massacre

and for what came after the massacre. This was a very uncomfortable territory for Netanyahu. It wasn't helping his polling. And then came this movie. and a couple of left-wing politicians in the Progressive Democrats Party who said things like, basically, they said, let's hear it out. Maybe there are things we need to learn from this movie. And then suddenly Likud found another topic, a much more comfortable topic to campaign on.

A campaign about defending Israeli soldiers against hostile outsiders and their domestic allies, Yuval and Ghehrer been called traitors many times in the last three days, is much more familiar ground and much more comfortable ground than whether or not Netanyahu is responsible for October 7. And so there's a visible effort now in the Likud campaign to raise the profile, and it's across the board, and to connect this film to the opposition.

If Eisenkod wins the election, the people who will come in are people who sort of, support dragging our soldiers before the international community and libeling them and slandering them. That's now the Likud campaign. The political usefulness can totally coexist with sincere outrage. I think Israelis really distrust the messengers and haven't seen the movie because nobody will show it to them and therefore really distrust the message. And also it's extremely politically useful to specifically those forces

on the right that want to paint the left that way in its entirety. So I wouldn't get too excited by the Israeli debate around this film as signaling what maybe the filmmakers hope it would signal. It looks to me like it's empowering the exact opposite. Because of all these really good reasons to be genuinely skeptical. And since, again, I haven't seen it, even as it's spreading across the world, let me end with what I would want to see in it. What would actually matter when I see the film?

And we'll close with this. I want to know whether the witnesses that the film brings forward had the access they claimed they had. I want to know whether their accounts are corroborated or accurate. I want to know whether it distinguishes what someone personally observed from what they inferred because they themselves are primed by political opinion, which is legitimate to see something that maybe isn't exactly the only a possible interpretation of what's happening. I want to know whether it tells us what was known about a target

and the civilians nearby, what alternatives existed, and what happens when officers raised concerns within the hierarchy. That's what I want to know. I want to know if it was taken seriously. I don't need every decision to have been accurate. It was a war. With an enemy deliberately maximizing civilian casualties, that a tunnel system that is the most comprehensive bomb shelter system and history of war into which no civilian can step foot in three years is a an enemy that deliberately seeks to maximize civilian casualties that's our only leverage over the Israelis.

And there is real desperation, certainly in those early months, and there is real unclarity and instability. And I don't need every decision to have been the right one. I need to know that there was a process that was a good process. And I need to know whether the movie distinguishes between a defensible account

of a particular crime. Maybe that was the word. a wrong thing. Maybe that particular crime was a genuine crime. There can't have not been crimes. I mean, we know there have been. There are indictments filed in Israel, quite a few. And a much broader claim that the purpose of the war was the destruction of civilians. None of those questions are answered for me by applause in Venice, especially way too much applause to be about the movie itself. none of them can be answered by an Israeli minister who's just glad to get October 7 off of everybody's social media feeds

I'm still very skeptical I think there are good reasons to think that the filmmakers the way they move from information to conclusion and we need to scrutinize the political culture that celebrates those conclusions and Israel has really good reasons to fight Hamas and the dangers of those opening weeks have to be at the center of any serious account of the military decisions taken then.

And there still might be criminal cases here that we need to know about. Just because the filmmaker is a tendentious activist with that background who will play fast and loose with the facts in the past, doesn't mean the officer in the film describing something has nothing important to tell me. I'm open to it. That's the truth of it.

And I suspect that I'm going to be very disappointed. Partisan activists, political activists, very tendentious activists, when they bring evidence to support a political argument that they're making, you have to take that argument with a huge grain of salt, with a bucket of salt. But sometimes they also find evidence that everybody else missed because they're very incentivized to look for it. And the answer is to actually examine it carefully. These are Israeli voices in this movie.

And that means that, for me at least, they're going to get a hearing. Some of them may have actually been in the room. And I want to know what they saw. And I want to know how we jump from that to the conclusion of the movie maker, but I also want to draw my own conclusions from hearing them. Friends, my people,

we can handle a bad truth if it's true if officers made decisions that should not have been made we should know and we're not going to pretend like there's nothing else to know in no context and we can just have these explosions of moral emotions but we still need to know it still matters and we can also handle

another cycle of falsehoods dressed up in this moral preening vocabulary that ultimately is not true. It could be either. It's a little worrying that it isn't really addressed to Israelis. But sooner or later, we will see it and we will know which it is. We are too strong. Our enemies are too real and openly genocidal and threatening,

even if our haters pretend not to see that, to actually be swayed from knowing the truth. by the political costs or the emotional costs of either one. We should insist on accuracy from our critics, and we should insist on honesty from ourselves. I suspect this movie is a lot less than they claim it is. But I might be wrong. Either way, my standard is going to be straightforward and the same.

I'm going to try to understand the circumstances, examine the evidence, and correct, the places where we got wrong. Thank you for joining me.