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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.
These are voices that I, as a Palestinian, would probably have no access to. It is doubtful that other journalists would have been able to reach them either.
In this sense, the film is important. It exposes a part of the story that Palestinians may not be able to reach on their own: not what was done to us — we know that — but how Israeli soldiers made their decisions, with which technology, and according to which orders.
This is a film about Israelis, made by Israelis and directed first and foremost at Israeli society. Its purpose is not to give Palestinians a voice, but to make Israelis look in the mirror. There is nothing wrong with that. On the contrary, it is essential that Israeli society confront the crimes it committed and that were committed in its name, and ask how all of this was possible.
Abraham and Szor say that “without an honest reckoning with what happened in the dark, none of us will be able to see the light.” I have no problem with that. My problem is that I am the mirror. My family is the mirror. Our homes, our schools, our children are the mirror.
To some extent, we are the backdrop — or, more accurately, the raw material — through which Israelis look at themselves. After three years of an ongoing genocide, Gaza is becoming the vehicle through which Israelis ask what they did, how they did it, and what it means for their own moral standing.
After all, the journey out of the dark is indeed a moral one. But must the Palestinian — me, my family, and all Gazans — become the victim through whom the perpetrator constructs their own process of repair?
In a discussion about the representation of enslaved Black people, Saidiya Hartman asks a question I constantly return to: “Does the pain of the other merely provide us with the opportunity for self-reflection?” Once Israelis have seen what was done to us, once they have begun asking, “What did we do?” “What have we become?” “How could we have done this?” — what happens next?
If that is where the process ends, then something essential has been missed. We Palestinians pay the price of the crime once. Then, a second time, our suffering is turned into an opportunity for the perpetrator to confront their own conscience.
I do not object to Israelis looking at themselves through what they did to us. What I find difficult to accept is the idea that their way back to morality should be paved with our suffering.
And yet, I find myself caught in a contradiction. In almost any process of confronting a crime, the perpetrator must look directly at what they have done, and the victim will inevitably be part of the picture. How can we speak about what happened in Gaza without the Palestinians being present? How can we demand repair without the society that harmed them first acknowledging what it did?
Perhaps, then, the question is not whether the Palestinian appears in the picture, but what happens after the Israeli looks at it. Is the movement toward repair limited to self-reflection? Or does it require Israelis to accept responsibility and redress the injustice they have inflicted on Palestinians?
Preventing the next harm
In parallel to the discussion surrounding “Naza,” the Israeli comedian and TV host Lior Schleien posted an especially disturbing video of a conversation with a high school student (which he has since removed at the request of the teenager’s parents). The boy states that “every Arab in the world should die,” and that “I have no problem killing 50 Arabs and dying.”
The boy is about to enlist in the army, and he will be given a rifle. If he says now, before putting on a uniform and before being handed a weapon, that he would massacre Arabs if given the opportunity, the question is not only what we will think in a few years if we see him sitting in the dark in front of a camera, detailing what he did. The question is what we are doing now to prevent it.
Perhaps that is the difference between self-reflection and repair. We can leave the Palestinian as an object of contemplation and ask what was done to them and how it was done. But the Palestinian must also be a subject: someone whose suffering compels Israeli society to act, whose voice presents demands and calls for accountability.
The boy in Schleien’s video is here now. What is the education system doing about it? What is his school doing? What is Israeli society doing? What are its institutions doing? How do we confront a social climate in which a teenager can contemplate massacring people simply because they are Arabs? And what do we do to prevent him and others from turning that desire into action?
That, in my view, is where repair lies: in education, in the law, in institutions, in policy; in preventing violence and limiting power; in taking responsibility for the harm already done and preventing the next harm. This is a process that must come from Israelis and take place within Israeli society.
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And perhaps this is also where the distinction I am searching for lies between the filmmakers’ intention and the function the film may serve in the society that watches it. I do not demand that its creators solve all of this. They did what they could. The film can hold up the mirror. It can make it harder to deny what was done, as the directors say. But the mirror is not the repair itself.
If the film causes more people to see, understand, oppose, demand accountability, and exert real pressure to stop the atrocities, that is a good thing. But if it ends with Israelis looking in the mirror, being horrified by the figure reflected back at them and asking how they did what they did, the Palestinian will remain the raw material of Israel’s own internal morality tale.
A version of this article was first published in Hebrew on Local Call. Read it here.
