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The Israeli documentary \u201cNAZA\u201d<\/span> will make its North American premiere tomorrow at the New York Film Festival on the heels of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu\u2019s vitriolic speech<\/a> at the United Nations, which was met by mass protests, arrests<\/a>, and diplomats walking out. Other Israeli documentaries have screened at Lincoln Center, including one at the New York Jewish Film Festival in January<\/a> on the movement for LGBTQ+ rights or another about an October 7 hostage. But this film, co-directed by Yuval Abraham<\/a> and Rachel Szor, has proven extraordinarily controversial in its home country, reviled by nearly every sector of media and politics.<\/p>\n The documentary, which is composed of anonymous interviews with those active in Israel\u2019s military and intelligence service during the war against Gaza, depicts extensive, highly detailed confessions of their participation in the mass targeting and killing of Palestinian civilians. The film\u2019s title comes from the Israeli military\u2019s system for assessing collateral damage, an interface that one of the anonymous confessors says can map out every building in the Gaza Strip and predict what civilians may be killed in an airstrike. One man who used the NAZA interface remarks in a clip<\/a> from the film that the military once approved a single strike the system calculated would kill 500 Palestinians, and said the system makes no distinction between adults and children.<\/p>\n The revelation of the film\u2019s existence \u2014 its world premiere was at the Venice Film Festival earlier this month after being produced in secret for three years \u2014 sent shockwaves through Israeli society. Two contradictory claims have begun to dominate discussions of the documentary, at the highest levels of both the Israeli government and the military brass, both aiming to neutralize the film\u2019s reach and the ability of its filmmakers to continue working. The first is that the film released highly sensitive and classified information about the Israel Defense Forces\u2019 operations in Gaza, contravening the law<\/a>. The second line of attack claims the film is a complete fabrication, a hoax, and in the words of IDF Chief of the General Staff Eyal Zamir<\/a>, a \u201cblood libel.\u201d Key Israeli politicians argue Abraham and Szor are aiding the enemy in wartime, with National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir calling them \u00a0\u201cfriends\u201d of Hamas<\/a> who should be held accountable as such.<\/p>\n While some opponents of the current Israeli government, such as Yashar leader Gadi Eisenkot, have attempted to tack in a more liberal direction by saying \u201ccriticism is legitimate\u201d<\/a> \u2014 while also decrying the film for \u201cpresent[ing] a distorted and one-sided picture\u201d at a time when \u201cthe State of Israel [is] in a time of distress\u201d \u2014 both the Israeli state and the army have begun proposing legal action be taken against the filmmakers, with their citizenship in particular coming under attack from not only Culture Minister Miki Zohar, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself.<\/p>\n In an unprecedented move, Netanyahu announced on September 16 in a video message posted<\/a> on social media that his government would \u201crevoke citizenship from anyone who defames IDF supporters abroad\u201d in addition to raising the fine for defamation \u201ctwentyfold\u201d to 1 million shekels (nearly $330,000 at the current exchange rate) to punish them further. Calling out the \u201cNAZA\u201d filmmakers specifically, Netanyahu went on to say \u201ctheir place does not belong with us.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The phenomenon of revoking Israeli citizenship is not novel. Earlier this year, two Palestinians from East Jerusalem<\/a> were convicted of security offenses and stripped of their Israeli nationality, which paved the way for their deportation to either the occupied West Bank or even the Gaza Strip. But revoking the citizenship of Israeli Jews on any kind of similar grounds is without historical precedent. Both Abraham and Szor \u2014 who also co-directed the documentary \u201cNo Other Land<\/a>\u201d \u2014 are Jews born in Israel, have no Palestinian ancestry, and no public record of citizenship for any other country.<\/p>\n Proposals have been made in the past for the revocation of Israeli citizenship from certain Jews, most notably Yigal Amir, who killed Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. The far-right assassin, who is from an Orthodox Jewish family, was the subject of a public petition demanding his citizenship be revoked. But the Israeli Supreme Court rejected it on the grounds that \u201cthe dignity of the right\u201d<\/a> for every Jew to acquire and have Israeli citizenship overruled the \u201cdignity of the murderer.\u201d Now, for the first time, a sitting Israeli leader is advocating for the so-called \u201cdignity of the right\u201d to be overturned, not for murder, but for mere \u201cslander,\u201d in Netanyahu\u2019s description, against the Israeli military.<\/p>\n Although Israeli politicians and other officials have categorized the filmmakers as antisemites spreading lies about the Jewish people, Abraham and Szor are not explicitly anti-Zionist in the way that other prominent critics of Israel, like the historian Ilan Papp\u00e9 and the architect Eyal Weizman, have defined themselves, or even how a Communist member of Israel\u2019s Knesset, Ofer Cassif, has defined himself. Both co-directors have openly stated their belief in a future where both Israelis and Palestinians \u201care equally sovereign and free<\/a>.\u201d Abraham himself has said Israelis have a \u201cright<\/a>\u201d to \u201csovereignty and security in this land,\u201d just as Palestinians do.<\/p>\n Despite these threaded needles, the Jewish filmmakers of \u201cNAZA\u201d now find themselves in the position of being treated much the same way Palestinian citizens of Israel are: as though their citizenship was bestowed upon them in error, a mistake of history where convenience trumped logic, a catastrophe that needs to be rectified immediately.<\/p>\n The Law of Return \u2014 the idea that every Jewish person, even those who converted to the religion and have no ancestral ties to the land of Palestine, should be allowed to \u201creturn\u201d to their homeland, to settle, to live, and to be treated as an equal alongside every other Jewish person, no matter their birthplace \u2014 was one of the fundamental building blocks of the Zionist project. But the Law of Return did not become law until 1950, and the Citizenship Law, which defined the terms of its larger eligibility, did not become law until 1952, four years after the State of Israel\u2019s founding.<\/p>\n For a short period in Israel\u2019s history, citizenship had no clear definition, but it required quick clarification, not just because it is a key part of any fledgling state, but because they needed to be able to define which Arabs, who remained inside Israel\u2019s new borders on temporary \u201cred card\u201d permits after the Nakba, could be allowed to stay, and who could be removed as an illegal infiltrator. Then-Agriculture Minister Dov Yosef remarked<\/a> plainly during a cabinet debate in 1949: \u201cWhen we publish the citizenship law and a person is found not to be a citizen, we can then deport him.\u201d<\/p>\n Citizenship was granted in limited quantities to the Palestinians who had been able to remain inside the newly established Israel and did not confer all the rights it supposedly guaranteed. Palestinian citizens of Israel remained under control of a military governance system up until 1966, with their movements strictly controlled and their political activities restricted to rein in criticism of the Jewish state they now found themselves living under.\u00a0<\/p>\n The discourse about citizenship has taken on an unmistakably Americanized character, one defined by a larger \u201cLove it or leave it\u201d mentality.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n The Law of Return, considered \u201cinalienable\u201d by many politicians, where any concrete restrictions must entail tearing of the law in its entirety, contained seemingly contradictory restrictions within its formally expansive framework. Israeli Communist Party leader Meir Vilner<\/a> noted back in 1950, during discussion of the Law of Return in the Knesset, that even though Jewish citizenship was technically expansive, it still entailed restrictions to those who \u201cendangered \u2026 the security of the state,\u201d a vagueness that Vilner opposed on the grounds that it could be used by the government \u201cagainst sections within the Jewish people.\u201d The Polish-Israeli anti-Zionist intellectual Israel Shahak noted in 1975<\/a> that all the punishments normally doled out against Arabs, including losing their citizenship, remained theoretically possible against Jewish dissenters under Israeli law, but only \u201cracism\u201d against Arabs had prevented setting that precedent.<\/p>\n As the United States became Israel\u2019s primary benefactor in the 1960s and 1970s, previously dormant discussions about the grounds for revoking Israeli citizenship from Jews began to reemerge. They coalesced around insufficient connection to Israel, with some aiming to establish a system of permanent residency, disallowing citizenship for Jews who did not spend enough time inside the Jewish state. After 9\/11, these proposals took on a much more ideological, and much more far-right, character.\u00a0<\/p>\n The Israeli right was soon overtaken with the possibility of revoking the citizenship of those it considered to be aiding the enemy, with Arab citizens of Israel being the primary target. But anti-Zionist Jews were also in their crosshairs, including members of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish fringe sect Neturei Karta, or Jews who were insufficiently supportive of Israel, like Israeli journalist Gideon Levy. Calls for \u201cloyalty oaths\u201d from both Arabs and Jews became a cause c\u00e9l\u00e8bre for people like then-Deputy Prime Minister Avigdor Lieberman in the late 2000s, who would insist on the equality<\/a> he advocated for by saying, \u201cIt\u2019s not racism. The test is loyalty, not their religion.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n A certain McCarthyist strain familiar to Americans under the Bush administration, looking anywhere and everywhere for national disloyalty, was confirmed in 2007 by Likud MK Gilad Erdan, who would later become Netanyahu\u2019s ambassador to the United Nations during the height of the war on Gaza in 2023. Erdan claimed revoking citizenship would not be wrong because the U.S. also had a basis for revoking citizenship based on \u201cdisloyalty to the state,\u201d<\/a> which included \u201ccitizens by birth,\u201d and that there was a threat that needed to be dealt with, even from Jewish people inside the State of Israel, who did not recognize Israel\u2019s \u201csovereignty.\u201d<\/p>\n The Second Intifada and the disintegration of the so-called Israeli-Palestinian peace process<\/a> preceded these events, but now, the discourse about citizenship has taken on an unmistakably Americanized character, one defined by a larger \u201clove it or leave it\u201d mentality that allows for officials like Ben-Gvir to post<\/a> about putting Jewish and Arab politicians who oppose the unfettered expansion of Zionism on planes to be deported. <\/p>\n By virtue of their criticism of Israel, the self-proclaimed representative of the Jewish people, they become enemies of the Jewish people, and therefore in the minds of the state\u2019s most ardent defenders, politically Arab, and therefore able to be viewed as an existential threat just the same.<\/p>\n\n