Israel would rather not watch NAZA

The backlash against the Gaza documentary is part of a broader refusal to confront the reality of the genocide.Published On 18 Sep 202618 Sep 2026NAZA (Hebrew acronym for “collateral damage”), the documentary made by Yuval Avraham and Rachel Szor, has yet to secure an Israeli distributor or a public screening, despite its creators’ stated intention to show it widely in the country. Various senior executives, from the Israeli military chief of staff to the minister of culture, promised that they were about to “take steps” against the creators of the film. Other than stripping them of their Israeli citizenship (considered a remarkably rare measure), what those “steps” could be was unclear. However, one refrain dominated the outrage directed at Avraham and Szor: Those condemning the film had no intention of watching it.It is important to emphasise that this oath to refrain from watching the film was authentic. In a way, it is a variation on a theme that became prevalent throughout the first months of the “war”. When images of devastation began to emerge from Gaza, many Israelis wrote that they could feel no pity for the children of Gaza (at the end of 2023, the number of children kill...