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.Independent analyst.Published On 18 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 killed and orphaned was already known and difficult to grasp, as were military “procedures”). These Israelis said they had “closed their hearts” in response to the huge, intentional death toll in the Israeli towns and villages surrounding Gaza. They claimed they would not and could not feel pity for anyone who had committed such atrocities, or for anyone related to them. Activists on the Israeli left believed that if Israelis were exposed to images from the already nearly deleted Gaza, they would head for the streets and call for a stop to the war. These activists were soundly rebuffed.