# malicious approval — X 热门讨论 (2026-09-14 14:57 UTC)

## @AmitSegal (Amit Segal) · 09-14 12:38 · ♥98 ↻25 💬11 Rather than the typical smiles and gratitude, self-important solemnity greeted attendees of the Venice Film Festival as Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor accepted the Special Jury Prize for their new anti-Israel film NAZA. The title is the Hebrew military acronym for collateral damage, and the resemblance to another word is not one the filmmakers appear to have worked hard to avoid.

The critically acclaimed libel is the Israeli far left’s contribution to a steadily growing genre: anti-Israel propaganda, what might be called Hague bait. From the people who applauded the historical revisionist epic Palestine 36 and the directors behind the false frontier western No Other Land comes the sci-fi dystopia NAZA.

In the world of NAZA, Israel is Skynet, using AI to identify and eliminate threats in Gaza. Framed around the anonymous testimony of 24 people who claim to have served in intelligence Unit 8200, the film paints a picture of target lists generated from data scraped off thousands of hacked phones, and an interface where an officer clicks a rooftop and reads off how many people inside will die, with no column separating the infants from the adults. One interviewee recalls an approval for a strike with 500 expected civilian casualties.

The laziest provocation should be dismissed first. NAZA uses AI the way it is used on lazy grant applications and doctoral theses: a buzzword covering a lack of substance. AI in military applications is naturally unsettling to many, but let us be clear about what it is. A tool, one that has existed in earlier forms for nearly 20 years and is integrated into every modern military, and, in targeting and tracking, one that saves lives and improves military effectiveness. In the right hands, better data means fewer civilian casualties and more Hamas ones.

NAZA alleges that the IDF’s hands are soaked in blood, but let us break the claim down. Unit 8200 is the largest single unit in the IDF; finding 24 people to “confess” slivers of information, then arranging those slivers to look like an indictment, is not exactly a bulletproof case against the State of Israel. That they are anonymous, faces blurred and voices distorted, certainly makes the country look more malicious, but it also leaves open whether they served in the army at all, in what role, or whether they had any involvement in the events they describe. The self-identified junior soldiers would have no access to national or military strategy, and some of the accounts refer to situations outside Unit 8200’s role altogether.

Meanwhile, not even the Palestinian casualty claims record a single strike that killed 500 Gazans, and those figures have not been shy of inflation. Even in the strike that eliminated Muhammad Deif and a Hamas brigade commander, perhaps the strike that most “justifies” a high collateral damage estimate given the seniority of the targets, real-time reports from Gaza cited around 80 Gazans killed, with a retrospective breakdown revealing that dozens of them were Hamas members. Even taking the Hamas-run health ministry’s numbers, the civilian-to-combatant ratio is somewhere around 2:1. Not 500.

It is worth emphasizing that the rogue-AI allegation made in the film and in Abraham’s original 2023 piece does not allege that oversight was absent, only that it was cursory, a claim the IDF, other officers and the facts on the ground dispute. Documents released under freedom of information confirmed that the finger on the button has always been human, and that strikes remain subject to legal approval.

But this film was not a critique of the IDF’s proportionality judgments, nor a commentary on the use of AI in war. It wasn’t intended to “start a conversation,” as many filmmakers are fond of saying. It was libel intended to demonize Israel.

Abraham gestured at dialogue, telling the room it was important that Israelis watch the film, before making his purpose clear, widening the appeal to Germans and Americans whose governments, he said, are blocking pressure on Israel and funding the killing. We have heard this speech before. At the Oscars he managed a passing reference to the hostages, nothing at all about October 7, before calling for a boycott of the country.

But all you need to know about this film’s essence is the record-breaking standing ovation. Alexander Solzhenitsyn famously described a Moscow conference in 1937 where the applause for Stalin’s name ran on because no one dared be the first to sit. They managed 11 minutes. Few things testify to the power and intolerance of the ideology NAZA belongs to quite like the fact that Venice managed 25.

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