In NAZA, anonymised members of Israeli intelligence discuss their remote execution of the assault on Gaza. Photograph: The Guardian View image in fullscreen In NAZA, anonymised members of Israeli intelligence discuss their remote execution of the assault on Gaza. Photograph: The Guardian NAZA Calling the shots: what NAZA says about perpetrator cinema The documentary detailing Israel’s mass killing of civilians in Gaza is the latest film to give a voice to those who carry out atrocities – confronting viewers with some of the most difficult questions of all
Prefer the Guardian on Google A re we still talking about the banality of evil? When that overworked phrase was first used by philosopher Hannah Arendt, it described the blank persona of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. Now, in NAZA , anonymised members of Israeli intelligence discuss their remote execution of the assault on Gaza. The comparison to Hitler’s Germany, while understandably controversial, is made by a subject themselves. If they are banal, it is a modern, oddly familiar kind. These are articulate, middle-class millennials. They say they are leftwing and non-racist. Put differently, they could be Guardian readers.
And yes, one remarks , they have been conducting a genocide.
The work of directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor is shattering. But we have been shattered before by the firsthand accounts of people who carry out atrocities – sometimes called perpetrator cinema. In 2013, director Joshua Oppenheimer released The Act of Killing , an astonishing film involving members of 1960s right-wing Indonesian death squads. It was lavishly acclaimed. Since then, it has only kept feeling painfully relevant.
View image in fullscreen The Act of Killing (2012). Photograph: Everett Collection Inc/Alamy Before that, documentary wild card Errol Morris made Standard Operating Procedure , interviewing US soldiers who abused Iraqis at the notorious Abu Ghraib jail. Edging into drama, you might even include Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest , where the commandant of Auschwitz lives happily with his wife and children. (Glazer is an executive producer of NAZA, which is produced by the Guardian.)
Read more Questions gnaw through them all. To begin: who is it that commits crimes against humanity? The answer can feel inconclusive. NAZA is filled with Tel Aviv high-fliers, some citing as justification the horrific attacks of October 7. But the American troops of Standard Operating Procedure are ordinary grunts in the “war on terror”. Meanwhile, in The Act of Killing , ageing street thugs recreate their murders of trade unionists and teachers as the action movies they imagine them being. Flamboyance blooms in the abyss.
In every case, what we see won’t leave our heads, even as we flail for an adequate response. The late critic Roger Ebert famously called movies “ empathy machines ”. But these films short circuit the machinery. How can we empathise with people who seem to show no remorse?
For some, NAZA presents a bigger problem than that. The Israeli government has floated stripping Abraham and Szor of their citizenship, among other threats. But even for audiences far from the Middle East, the film is hard to deal with. We may feel anguished just as we are reminded how safe our anguish is. We might even think about that most unfriendly word: complicity.
But perpetrator cinema is about more than complicity. It is about the attempt to fathom the perpetrator. Discussing NAZA on the Jewi…