‘NAZA’ is forcing Israelis to reflect. But we Palestinians are not your mirror
Ayat Abou Shmeiss writes in +972 on 23 September 2026:
I’ll start with a confession: Not only have I not seen the film “Naza,” I also have no intention of seeing it.
The first reason is that watching it would be too difficult for me. Members of my family were killed by the same push of a button that one of the soldiers in the film’s promotional clip describes, as he speaks about the almost incomprehensible numbers of “collateral damage” that Israel authorized as policy.
A single airstrike in Gaza killed 35 people, a quarter of them members of my family — from a toddler to a 23-year-old who had just completed his accounting studies. I do not wish to sit in front of a screen, watching a soldier who may have been the one to press that button describe how he did it.
But there is another reason: To a large extent, I do not think the film is even addressed to me, as a Palestinian. I do not share the criticism from some of my people that the film takes away my Palestinian voice, nor do I think its creators made it to win sympathy or awards at the expense of the Palestinian story. We have told our story, and we continue to tell it.
Palestinians in Gaza told it in real time, sometimes at the cost of their lives. Journalists told it. Doctors who went to Gaza told it. Survivors told it. The stories are there in films, literature, paintings, videos, and testimonies. The Palestinian did not lack a voice until the Israeli soldier arrived and spoke.
I am reminded of what Mahmoud Darwish said in a 1996 interview with Israeli literary critic and poet Helit Yeshurun about the paradoxical situation in which Palestinians find themselves: “Interest in the Palestine problem comes by way of interest in the Jewish problem … So we are unlucky that our enemy is Israel, which has so many sympathizers in the world, and we are lucky that Israel is our enemy, because Jews are the center of the world. You have given us defeat, weakness, and publicity.”
In other words, the world is sometimes interested in us, the Palestinians, because it is interested in them, the Jews. Perhaps some of this paradox is at work around this film as well. But the more I thought about it, the more I understood that this is not what troubles me most.
The Palestinian mirror
I have known and respected Yuval Abraham’s work for years. In my view, simply making this film is a courageous act in Israeli society. The Israeli soldiers and intelligence personnel who appear in it speak in their own words about how the system they operated within functioned. They are not describing an isolated crime or an offense committed by one soldier or a handful of soldiers.