Oded Balaban

On “I watched NAZA and it is neither deserving of praise or denunciation,” by Gabi Mitchell

Oded Balaban — University of Haifa — balaban@research.haifa.ac.il

Gabi Mitchell watched “Naza” in a European cinema and published in Invisible Boundaries (Issue 108, https://gabimitchell.substack.com/p/issue-108-i-watched-naza) a review that offers itself as the middle ground, “neither deserving of praise or denunciation.” His starting point is honest, and it must be acknowledged so as not to caricature him. He begins by granting that the suffering of Palestinian civilians is undeniable, accepts that the film’s testimonies “may well be accurate, in part or in full,” holds that a society must confront the evidence of crimes committed by its own army, and defends the right of Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor to make the film, against Culture Minister Miki Zohar’s threat to strip them of their citizenship.

He is more careful than others who have written about the same film. That is precisely why his text carries out an operation that runs through almost the whole discussion of “Naza.” The operation is announced in a single sentence: “I won’t pretend to adjudicate those allegations.” Mitchell suspends the question of truth, the question of whether crimes were committed, and moves the entire discussion to the form of the film, to what he calls its “artistic choices.” And although he grants that those testimonies could be true, he does so while postponing the question: he adds that they “may one day be substantiated with further reporting and research.” But to grant that something may be true, and may one day be proven, is not to ask whether it is true now; it postpones the question. The concession of possibility is itself the form of the evasion: it admits what is at stake and files it under “one day.” He complains that the film gives almost nothing of what would let one test what it asserts: dates and an operational timeline (when each strike was decided and carried out), an explanation of how the army decides whom to attack and who commands whom, information about who the interviewed soldiers are (their rank, their unit, whether they made the decisions, carried them out, or merely witnessed them), and some external corroboration that would tie each testimony to verifiable facts. He demands of an eighty-minute documentary the full apparatus of a war-crimes tribunal, the very instrument he admits he cannot operate.

A documentary is neither an expert report nor a court file; its proper mode is disclosure and testimony. Measuring cinema by a juridical yardstick lets one dismiss the film without ever ruling on the facts themselves, which was the very thing he had said he would set aside. And the assumption underlying the whole reproach, that whatever is not proven on screen thereby becomes doubtful, is not a conclusion but a premise he never submits to examination.

His review makes two claims. First, that “Naza” levels grave accusations without giving the viewer any means to test them. Second, that through its framing it turns a reproach of the army’s conduct into a verdict on Israeli society. I grant much of the first and part of the second. The film may indeed be poor in method, and the distinction between responsibility for one’s institutions and the guilt of each individual citizen is correct and worth preserving. My objection is a single one, and it bears on the procedure. Mitchell declares that he will not judge whether the accusation is true, and from that renunciation he lets a judgment about the film’s form stand in for the examination of the facts. The question he brackets, whether crimes occurred, is the only one that finally decides the matter, and it is the one his method evades.

There is more. Mitchell accepts that the journalistic record exists, the reporting on “Lavender” in +972, Local Call, and The Guardian, and accepts that he has read it. His own knowledge confirms the plausibility of the witnesses, and still he faults the film for not showing him on screen what he already knows. The complaint is aimed not at the truth of what is said but at the film’s pedagogy. And here he reaches a point his review does not see. The accusation of “Naza” is deeper: the mechanism for accountability no longer works. To fault the film for not providing the tools of that accountability is to fail to notice that the absence of those tools is precisely what the film denounces.

His second objection carries more weight. Mitchell holds that the film’s framing turns the denunciation into a verdict on Israeli society, and he is right that the aesthetic pushes toward that reading: the Tel Aviv rooftops, the restaurants set over testimonies of civilians gunned down, the echo of “The Zone of Interest,” the arc that ties Gaza to the Nakba. That suggestion is in the film; he does not invent it. He is also right on the substance. Collective guilt, the idea that every citizen answers equally for what his army does, is false, and Mitchell shows this well, with the more than fifteen hundred signatures of filmmakers and journalists, the forty-three human-rights groups, and the words of Rachel Goldberg-Polin, which are enough to see that a uniformly indifferent society does not produce all that. The distinction between responsibility for the institutions one empowers and the individual guilt of each person is correct, and must be preserved.

But that valid point bears on one plane, the plane of framing, and leaves the other untouched. The film works on two registers at once. On one, it names a concrete chain of responsibility, and Mitchell himself lists it when he glosses the title: Naza is the military acronym for collateral damage, and responsibility runs from the analyst who marks the target to the commander who sets the threshold, to the officer who approves the strike, and to the political leadership that sets the policy. On the other, through its images, the film suggests something about society as a whole. Mitchell is entitled to resist that second suggestion, and he is right to. What his objection does not reach is the first register: that the aesthetic hints too much about Tel Aviv does not make a single testimony about the army’s conduct false. Granted in full, his best objection disputes how the film looks at society, not whether what the soldiers recount actually happened.

The weakest assumption lies in the comparison with “Shoah.” Mitchell notes that Claude Lanzmann’s film came forty years after the events, when the historical record of the Holocaust was already established, whereas “Naza” stages accusations still “contested.” But that criterion, which does not admit testimony until the historical record is closed, would render illegitimate any documentation made while the crime is happening or has just happened. By that rule, a “Shoah” filmed in 1945 would also have been premature. And the facts remain contested, in large part, because they were left uninvestigated: for three years the government has refused to order a state commission of inquiry, as was done after every previous war, and it is that refusal the film makes visible. To demand that already-closed record as a condition for listening to the witness is a recipe for perpetual deferral, the very “wall of denial” that Abraham names. The testimony of someone who took part is not an act of faith; it is evidence to be weighed, which is exactly what Mitchell does while claiming it cannot be done. And a residue of paternalism remains in his worry about “the millions who may see it” and take it “on faith,” especially since he immediately invites every viewer to watch the film and reach their own conclusions.

None of this erases the review’s merits. Its observation about Lanzmann is apt. Whereas in Lanzmann’s “Shoah” the witnesses and the bystanders are interviewed and their words caught on camera, Szor’s “Naza” renders the residents of Tel Aviv as mute figures in the background of someone else’s testimony. And the defense of the directors’ right to make the film, against those who would punish them, is legitimate.

But the heart of the matter remains. To refute the form of a denunciation is not to answer that denunciation. What Mitchell says of Szor’s film when he condemns it, that its artistic choices stand in for the evidence its argument needed, is a fair description of his own review, which lowers the critique of artistic choices into the place of the question it promised and avoids, the question of whether the testimonies are true.

This article first appeared on 17 October 2026 in Oded Balaban’s Substack. The Spanish version, “Criticar la forma no responde la acusación”, is here.