Herzog, Elor Azaria and NAZA: Today’s Israel openly applauds war crimes

Dahlia Scheindlin writes in Haaretz on 22 September 2026:

There’s an idiomatic Hebrew phrase, “we’ve been in this film before” – close to the English expression “we’ve been here before,” or we know what this situation means.

The phrase is the best way to capture the meaning of President Isaac Herzog’s surprise pardon of Elor Azaria on the eve of Yom Kippur. Azaria was convicted of manslaughter in 2017 by an Israeli military court for executing a wounded Palestinian attacker point-blank, long after soldiers had shot and fully incapacitated the man.

It is particularly ironic to process this pardoning of a soldier who killed a wounded man in light of the sweeping fury in Israel over the film “NAZA.” For two weeks, Israelis have emitted hellfire commentary, threatened unprecedented de-patriating and death against the filmmakers of the documentary that reveals alleged IDF war crimes in Gaza.

And yet when faced with another kind of film about what should have been viewed as a war crime, Israelis never even suggested that the incident was a lie, a fabrication or a blood libel, as per relentless accusations against “NAZA.”  There was no denial at all of what Azaria had done – only a full-throated embrace that lasted not 25 minutes like the applause for “NAZA” at the Venice Film Festival, but 10 long years, a crescendo ending with the presidential pardon.

An Israeli hero
After all, it was a film that sparked the controversy over Azaria. The footage was shot by a volunteer for the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem during the March 2016 incident. Two Palestinians, including 21-year old Abdel Fattah al-Sharif, had stabbed an IDF soldier at an army checkpoint in Hebron. Other soldiers quickly opened fire, killing one attacker and wounding al-Sharif.

He then lay incapacitated on the ground for 11 long minutes, while the video shows soldiers milling about, and ambulances arrive. Most ignore his supine, motionless body until one of the soldiers, later identified as Elor Azaria, walks over calmly and shoots al-Sharif in the head. The others barely seem to notice.

Instantly, Azaria became either a murderer or a hero, depending on your political view. For the Israeli state, he was a soldier suspected of committing a criminal act. Azaria was tried in a military court and convicted of manslaughter in 2017 after offering numerous false defense arguments. The actual motive was revealed by his own words, as a fellow soldier testified – that he simply thought the attacker should not be allowed to live. It was an extrajudicial vigilante killing if there ever was one.

At first, the controversy seemed to split the political and military leadership, but from the start, there was little doubt as to which side would prevail. Then-Defense Minister Moshe (Bogie) Ya’alon was deeply critical of the soldier’s actions, inviting intense political backlash from the top levels, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Against the background of what Ya’alon called “difficult moral and professional controversies with the prime minister, a number of other ministers and some members of Knesset,” Ya’alon resigned two months after the incident.

Netanyahu, ever the weathervane, at first gave anodyne statements about the need to protect IDF values, but quickly shifted to open support for the soldier. On the day Azaria was convicted, Netanyahu announced his support for a pardon; perhaps not coincidentally, a poll by Channel 2 (today Channel 12) that same day found that two-thirds of Israelis supported such a pardon. By later that year, then-Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who had replaced Ya’alon, also asked then-President Reuven Rivlin for a pardon.

The military court had sentenced Azaria to 18 months in prison; then-Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot reduced it to 14 months, and in the end, he was released after just nine months in jail. To this day, he has expressed no regret for his actions, and the IDF therefore recommended as recently as July that he not be pardoned.

Israeli observers, such as Haaretz’s Amira Hass, noted back in 2017 that it was only the film that put the incident on the public agenda. Numerous similar acts that were not filmed demonstrated a clear practice of shooting to kill any perpetrator, or even suspect – including before he or she perpetrated any act at all.

Shocking, not surprising
How things change. In July 2025, another piece of chilling footage documented another nearly point-blank killing. West Bank settler Yinon Levi invaded the Palestinian village of Umm al-Khair, near Hebron, and simply seized privately owned land to pave a road. While villagers approached to chase them away, Awdah Hathaleen filmed the events from about 20 meters away, according to reports. Levi pulled out a pistol and fired directly at him.

Hathaleen’s camera filmed Levi’s face, eyes and the barrel of his pistol before going dead. Few Israelis even noticed or cared this time; Levi was indicted a year later for shooting Hathaleen, becoming only the second settler to be indicted since 2019 for killing a Palestinian, according to New York Times reporting and the Israeli human rights group Yesh Din. In B’Tselem’s database, I counted 52 Palestinians killed by Israeli civilians in the West Bank from 2019 to April this year, and UN agencies record more settler killings of Palestinians since.

In other words, being pardoned by the president of Israel is shocking but not surprising. Anyone who was nevertheless shocked that Herzog, a longtime politician from the Labor Party, was the one to do it has been quickly reminded over the last few days that it runs in the family.

In 1986, his father Chaim Herzog, Israel’s sixth president, approved the unusual preemptive pardon for the Shin Bet agents who not only killed Palestinian bus hijackers after they were captured and bound, but who also participated in an elaborate cover-up in which the agents framed Israel’s own military forces, lying shamelessly to their own investigating authorities.  Herzog pardoned them before they even stood trial – just as he pardoned or commuted sentences of Jewish civilian terrorists during his term, following their convictions. In the Bus 300 affair, the Supreme Court backed the preemptive pardons for the Shin Bet agents, such that they never even stood trial.

The current pardon of Elor Azaria is the latest evidence that Israeli society has long become not only inured but supportive of crimes against Palestinians. Two days ago, a Palestinian killed an Israeli settler on the eve of Yom Kippur at a West Bank spring. At his funeral, settler leader Yossi Dagan, head of the Samaria regional council, called to “drain the entire swamp, not just to chase after the mosquito.” The language about killing all the mosquitos has been used by Bezalel Smotrich at least as far back as 2018, when I first noticed it.

Dagan went on to advocate for a huge military operation against West Bank Palestinians. When that happens, we’ll have more “NAZA” films about the collateral damage that looks very not unintended – and more indifference, accusations of lies or outright support.

I almost held back about “NAZA,” since like most Israelis, I haven’t seen it. For over a week, the fact that the film hasn’t been released in Israel, even for private viewing by journalists, has grated on my sensibilities. Israel’s response has been vicious, but it’s also unfair that the public hasn’t been given the chance to see it and react substantively.

Then I realized that we don’t need a new and mysterious documentary to know how Israelis will react to films about the war crimes our country is committing. We’ve got plenty of such films already.

This article is reproduced in its entirety