(KNOXVILLE, TN) There’s a powerful scene in Moroccan-French-Israeli filmmaker Simone Bitton’s 2004 documentary “Wall,” which tells the story of the construction of the West Bank barrier, a 448-mile – or 721-kilometer – network of walls and fences dividing large parts of the West Bank from Israel.
A concrete slab is slowly lowered into place in order to complete a section of the wall. Inch by inch, the vibrant, hilly Palestinian community on the other side gets smaller and smaller.
And then – just like that – a world that’s a stone’s throw away is gone.
As someone who studies the restrictions placed on Palestinians, I often think about this scene as a microcosm of Israel’s decades-long use of walls, checkpoints and surveillance technologies to seal off Palestinians from the rest of society.
Nowhere is this dynamic more evident than the Gaza Strip, which Israel fenced in during the 1990s and has blockaded since 2007, citing security concerns and the threat of militant attacks.
Thanks to these barriers, the immense suffering of Palestinians in Gaza – more than 70,000 of whom have been killed as a result of the Israel-Hamas war since 2023 – has been difficult to document. The Israeli government largely bars international journalists from entering the Gaza Strip independently, while Palestinians in Gaza are generally not allowed to leave the Gaza Strip.
But the Sept. 10, 2026, premiere of Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’s film “NAZA” at the Venice International Film Festival has put the spotlight on the ongoing tragedy in Gaza without relying on footage of gruesome corpses or bombed-out neighborhoods.
The film consists largely of anonymous testimony from 24 members of Israel’s military and intelligence services. They discuss the ways in which Israel has used artificial intelligence to target Hamas officials, despite knowing the attacks will also generate large numbers of civilian casualties. The title, “NAZA,” comes from an acronym for the Hebrew phrase “nezek agavi,” or “collateral damage,” and it’s the Israeli military’s threshold system for how many civilian casualties are acceptable in its military strikes on Gaza since the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks. Hamas-led militants from Gaza launched those attacks in southern Israel, murdering 1,200 people – mostly civilians – and also taking about 250 hostages.
To me, part of the film’s power lies in its focus on the clinical way of carrying out strikes on Gaza from a distance. But the Israeli military’s approach could only work after systematically isolating the Palestinian people over the course of decades.
Unseen victims
In addition to constructing walls and blockading Gaza, Israel has enforced separation of Palestinians by restricting or denying permits to Palestinians wishing to enter or work in Israel through aerial surveillance and through the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
Both the visual language and the content of “NAZA” reflect and reveal how knowledge of Palestinian suffering is often mitigated in Israeli culture, politics and daily life.
The film juxtaposes audio of Israeli soldiers’ testimony with shots of the Tel Aviv cityscape at night. In these interviews, the soldiers map out how targets are chosen, how attacks are planned and how much leeway is given for civilian casualties.
The victims themselves are largely unseen, despite their close proximity: Tel Aviv sits a mere 43 miles – or 70 kilometers – up the coast from the Gaza Strip.
The choice to film primarily at night, in darkness, using disembodied voices to tell a story not depicted on camera, further highlights the extent to which these events have been obscured in Israel and around the world. Perhaps that’s why the Israeli government has gone to such great lengths to discredit the film, saying it contains “deliberate distortions of reality.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has threatened to revoke the citizenship of its directors.
In response to the interest and backlash surrounding the film, the filmmakers announced that “NAZA” will be available to stream for free, for anyone to see, beginning in November 2026.
Breaking through
“NAZA” highlights a psychological distance between attacker and attacked that was enabled by AI, computer screens and the physical isolation of the targets. Yet it is far from the first film to call attention to the invisibility of Palestinians.
Elia Suleiman’s 2002 dark comedy “Divine Intervention” repeatedly stages scenes in which Palestinian characters are stuck at or try to get around an Israeli military checkpoint. And Yoav Shamir’s 2003 documentary “Checkpoint” chronicles everyday interactions between Palestinians and Israeli soldiers at checkpoints in the West Bank and Gaza.
Other films center on acts of transgression or protest. Hany Abu-Assad’s 2013 drama “Omar” and Ameen Nayfeh’s 2020 drama “200 Meters” both feature Palestinian characters who break the law and surreptitiously cross the West Bank border into Israeli territory, exposing themselves to physical and legal danger.
“No Other Land” – the 2024 documentary that netted Abraham and Szor an Oscar, along with fellow directors Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal – points the camera on Palestinian protest movements against land expropriations and home demolitions in the West Bank. In the 2011 film “5 Broken Cameras,” Palestinian farmer Emad Burnat captures his West Bank village’s struggle against the construction of a massive wall that chokes off farmland and access to vital resources. Even as his cameras are repeatedly damaged or destroyed, Burnat refuses to stop documenting the resistance.
Crying while shooting
“NAZA” also points to another phenomenon: how isolation and separation encourage complicity. The physical distance between Israeli soldiers and the people they target may make it easier to go along with or ignore what is happening.
In this way, “NAZA” grapples with a trope in Israeli films and literature of exploring the guilt of Israeli soldiers. Sometimes derisively referred to by critics as “shooting and crying,” the thematic framework of these films has been criticized for focusing on Israeli moral anguish at the expense of Palestinian experiences and perspectives.
For example, S. Yizhar’s 1949 novel, “Khirbet Khizeh,” which was adapted into a film in 1978, tells the story from the perspective of Micha, an Israeli soldier fighting in the 1948 war that established the state of Israel. He’s part of a squad that expels Palestinians from their village, and his ensuing guilt provokes a crisis of conscience that haunts him for years to come.
Decades later, the 2008 animated documentary “Waltz With Bashir” follows the film’s director, Ari Folman, as he plumbs his repressed memories of his participation in the 1982 Israeli invasion of Beirut and how he inadvertently helped Lebanese Christian Phalangist militia fighters carry out massacres of Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.
The “shooting and crying” genre was largely accepted in mainstream Israeli culture, with “Khirbet Khizeh” taught in Israeli schools for decades. But the Israeli government’s hostile reaction to “NAZA” perhaps signals not only the growing intolerance of dissent in Israel, but also a fading cultural and political concern with the morality of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory.
Whose voices get heard
The centering of Israeli perspectives in these earlier works – as well as in “NAZA” – also shows how violence against Palestinians can be given greater credence when it’s described by Israelis themselves.
Recent Palestinian narratives about Gaza, such as “From Ground Zero” and “Thirteen in Gaza,” have garnered some attention and praise in the film world, but nowhere near the same amount as “NAZA” has in the weeks since its premiere.
Even “No Other Land,” which is centered on a Palestinian village, features an Israeli journalist and filmmaker, Abraham, documenting the protests and confronting Israeli soldiers, and may not have received the same acclaim if it had been made entirely by Palestinians.
Yet, despite these many barriers, Palestinians have never stopped finding ways to make themselves heard. In addition to films like “Omar” and “200 Meters,” videos and images shared directly to social media have allowed Palestinians to connect directly with audiences and shape global awareness of their plight, especially since the current war in Gaza began.
They have been able to bypass the physical barriers that have long restricted their movement – and the cultural barriers that have often kept their experiences out of sight.
This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Drew Paul, University of Tennessee
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Drew Paul does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
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