The North American premiere of NAZA at the New York Film Festival on Saturday became a flashpoint in the escalating war over narrative control, as directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor defended their exposé of AI-driven killing in Gaza against a backdrop of unprecedented state retaliation. With Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pushing legislation to strip the pair of their citizenship—branded by Abraham as the “criminalisation of journalism”—the Lincoln Center screening laid bare the chasm between the documentary’s evidentiary weight and the political fury it has ignited.
A Film Forged in Secrecy
Shot covertly on Tel Aviv rooftops over two years, the 80-minute documentary constructs its case through the testimony of 24 anonymised Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers. They describe a mechanised bureaucracy of death: algorithmic systems—referred to by the acronym NAZA—that calculate permissible civilian casualty ratios before a missile is ever launched. The film reveals how these “target factories” operate largely at night, striking private homes and wiping out entire family units, children included. It is a portrait of industrialised impunity, built on reporting from the Guardian, +972 Magazine, and Local Call between 2023 and 2025.
The project arrives with heavy pedigree. Abraham and Szor, two of the four creators behind the Oscar-winning No Other Land, premiered NAZA in Venice earlier this month to a historic 25-minute standing ovation and a Special Jury Prize. Yet the acclaim has been matched by a ferocious institutional backlash.
Netanyahu’s Offensive: Citizenship and Treason
The threats are not abstract. Days before the New York screening, Netanyahu stood at the UN General Assembly—just across Central Park—and declared Israel’s campaign in Gaza the “opposite of genocide,” dismissing critics as liars. He singled out NAZA, vowing to advance laws revoking citizenship for those who “smear” soldiers, explicitly naming Abraham and Szor. In a subsequent interview with Makor Rishon, he likened the film to “launching dozens of ballistic missiles” at the state.
Culture Minister Miki Zohar echoed the treason accusation. IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir pledged the military would use “every tool at our disposal” against the filmmakers. The rhetoric has licence violence: earlier this month, right-wing agitators besieged Szor’s parents’ home in central Israel, with one demonstrator demanding the “death penalty for traitors.”
Abraham addressed the missile metaphor directly during the post-screening Q&A. “Throughout the history of investigative journalism, very often granting confidentiality to sources is a means to pursue the truth,” he said. “This film could not have been made any other way and because the crimes are ongoing, we felt that it was important to make it.”
Protests and Counter-Narratives on the Pavement
Outside the theatre, the conflict played out in miniature. A few dozen protesters waved Israeli flags and signs demanding audiences “learn the facts” of the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks, which killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians. A truck circled the block with LED screens branding NAZA “propaganda dressed up as a documentary.”
Inside, Abraham refused the binary. “It’s in the film and it’s completely unjustified,” he said of the October 7 massacres. “But it also cannot justify what you’ve seen in the film. It doesn’t justify the slaughter of so many civilians in Gaza.” He warned against a world where “rightful empathy to Israeli victims is weaponised by leaders like Netanyahu—cynical people who promise nothing other than perpetual occupation and war.” It is a zero-sum game, he argued, and one the audience should refuse to play.
A Global Release Amid the Storm
The pushback has galvanised a formidable defence. Over 1,500 Israeli film professionals, 43 human rights organisations, major international festival directors, and global press freedom groups have rallied behind the pair. The distribution plan remains aggressive: a theatrical rollout across 55 countries next month, followed by a free, global digital release on the Guardian’s website in November—a deliberate bypass of gatekeepers.
The New York premiere carried a specific resonance. “These soldiers are talking about what has been done with the taxpayer money of the people sitting here,” Abraham reminded the crowd, referencing the $3.8bn in annual US military aid. The connection is the film’s central thesis: the machinery of death documented in NAZA is not solely an Israeli project; it is a shared one.
Why it Matters
NAZA has transcended the festival circuit to become a stress test for democratic accountability in the algorithmic age. The attempt to criminalise its creators—using citizenship as a weapon against dissent—signals a dangerous evolution in how states manage uncomfortable truths. If the architects of a system that calculates the “acceptable” death of children can silence the witnesses by branding them traitors, the infrastructure of impunity is complete. The film’s imminent free release ensures the evidence cannot be disappeared; the fight now is whether the world’s democracies will continue to fund the machinery it exposes.
