Naza and the Function of Perpetrator Cinema

Hey, on the nose listeners. Before we get started, I want to invite you to Jewish Currents Live on October 11th in New York City at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. If you're a listener to this podcast, you know that I've long believed that we need places to dig into the hard questions facing the Jewish left and the left writ large. That's why we're organizing JC Live. In partnership with dozens of other organizations and magazines, we're bringing together thinkers, organizers, and artists from across our movements. This year's event is going to be the biggest and most ambitious gathering we've ever put on. With appearances by Molly Krabapple, Kionga Yamada Taylor, Andrea Longchew, Hassan Piker, Fadi Karan, Masha Guesson, and more. We'll also be featuring live tapings of the popular podcast, Know Your Enemy, and Between the Covers, and performances by Wallace Sean and Laura Alkaslossi. I hope you'll join us on October 11th. Get tickets at Jewishcurrents.org/live. That's Jewishcurrents.org/live. And for the real freaks, the next day, Jewishcurrents is co-sponsoring an event with a Jewish diaspora movement, an all-day skill-building bootcamp for new Jewish institutions in Brooklyn, where we'll be talking about everything from capacity-building to decision-making to fundraising to coalition-building. You can register for the event at givebutter.com/jdm-skills. That's givebutter.com/jdm-skills. I'll put both of these links in the show notes. Hope to see you there. Hello, and welcome back to On the Knows the Jewish Currents podcast. I'm your host, Arielle Angel. Today, we're going to be talking about Naza, the film by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Shore, speaks to 24 members of an elite intelligence unit who orchestrated the bombardment of Gaza and killed thousands upon thousands of people. The film is called Naza. It means collateral damage. It's the word that the soldiers were using to delineate how many uninvolved people they could kill to hit a single "target." The film has been discussed a lot recently, particularly after a 25-minute standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival. I saw the film this past weekend at its American premiere at the New York Film Festival. It is a brutal film. I'll just say that upfront. A lot of the reporting about the systematic killing using targets generated by AI was previously reported by Abraham in 972 and the Guardian. But the film adds texture to this story with the way that the soldiers talk about what they did. Not just how they did it, but also why they did it, whether they ever thought about what they were doing. The intimacy that they had with those they were killing as they were listening to them in their homes before they dropped the bombs. There has been a lot of discourse about the film. From the left, there's been criticism about the decision to keep the soldiers anonymous. Obviously, in journalism, it's very common practice to allow for anonymity if it's the only way that you can get certain information. But, of course, since these are war criminals, a lot of particularly Palestinian commentators have been criticizing the decision to allow them to be anonymous. There's also been a lot of discussion of the fact that the world is now listening to Israeli filmmakers, even though Palestinians have endlessly documented the genocide. Hundreds of Palestinian journalists have been killed documenting the genocide and wondering whether it takes in Israeli to make the genocide real. And then on the right, of course, especially in Israel, there has been incredible incitement against the filmmakers. Mob showed up at Rachel Schroer's parents' house, also at the offices of Siham-e-Komit, local call, which is where a lot of this reporting was originally published in Hebrew. There's been talk of revoking the citizenship of the filmmakers. They have not returned to Israel yet. There was a mural painted of them that called them traders, that shows them in the sites of targets. It is a very, I think, scary time for them. Very few people on all sides of this have seen the film at this point. Today, we're going to talk to two people who have seen the film. Today, on the podcast, I have Rami Yunis, a filmmaker and journalist and Palestinian citizen of Israel. He is the co-director with Sarah Emma Friedland of Lid, a documentary that tells the story of his hometown of Lid since 1948. Rami, thank you for joining us. Well, thank you for having me. And I also have Joshua Oppenheimer, the director of the Oscar-nominated films, The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence about the Indonesian genocide. Joshua, really excited to have you here. Thank you for having me. So, I mean, first I just wanted to ask about your first impressions of this film. You know, it's a super heavy film when it was over at the screening I saw. It was, you know, quiet for a few minutes, even at a premiere before the applause started. I think that people were pretty shaken by what they had seen. So, I'm curious, you know, first impressions and also sort of your emotional reaction to the film. I don't know. It's like seeing the last three years all condensed while feeling at the same time, all the frustration from the Palestinian side. I really truly understand the criticism each and every one of them while also supporting Yuval and Rachel and understand their side and why they did it and the importance of their work as part of their bigger picture. I mean, if any mad Palestinians that are thinking that you guys are talking about a film that is here to whitewash Israel's crimes or this is a crying and shooting film, it is not. It is not, not at all. Watching these testimonies of those 24 soldiers explaining in details the cruelty and the coldness of how they execute people. There are testimonies in this film that prove in my view the Israeli soldiers committed active genocide. But this is, again, even just saying this sentence made me frustrated because, I mean, we know all of this. Just look at aerial footage of Gaza. You can go now on Google Maps. They enabled it finally. Look at aerial footage of Gaza. It's a genocide. There's nothing there. There's nothing left anymore. So, I'm sorry, but I don't think that I need more testimonies to be validating this for me. However, as a journalist, especially a journalist that always scrutinize, I do know that once you make a claim, you need to make it airtight. And we, as the Palestinian people, I think when we have these testimonies from the Israeli soldiers, actually saying I knew that for the least important member of Hamas, I can kill 20 other members around him, 20 other people as collateral damage. That actually proves the point that you guys are doing this as a part of a systematic kind of a genocidal campaign. The film also did not humanise the soldiers or anything like that. It is not that sort of film. Yeah, I mean, I read something by a yacht Abu Shmaiz in 972 that basically says, like, I don't think that the film is even addressed to me as a Palestinian. It is not. And I think that that's fair. You know, Abu Shmaiz says, this is a film about Israelis made by Israelis and directed first and foremost at Israeli society. Its purpose is not to give Palestinians a voice, but to make Israelis look in the mirror. I mean, I'm just curious for you, as a Palestinian, like, was it hard to watch this film? Did it feel like it didn't have anything new to tell you? I mean, like, what was the emotional experience there? And also, I know that you're a journalist. I mean, do you have opinions about some of the journalistic decisions that they made in this film? I mean, frankly, I think that the critique that they shouldn't have been anonymous is kind of preposterous because the bigger picture here is, they need to get the story told. And it wouldn't have been told otherwise. I mean, it would be incredibly dangerous for these people to speak. If it's a choice between not having the story told at all or having it told anonymously, I think, you know, it's very clear what it should be like. But still, I'm just curious what it was like for you to watch the film. It needs to exist. Yeah, I watched it as a journalist. I tried to, you know, stay as professional as possible. I mean, it's obviously when you're dealing with these things, it's very hard to separate emotions. And I have been, as a journalist for the past three years, I haven't been doing anything in this field. So I had taken a break from journalism. And part of the reason was it was very difficult for me to separate my emotions from my, you know, professional work. And watching this, it put me in a place where I kind of felt all your trauma is condensed. Here's a rundown of the last three years. But now you also have this kosher stamp from the Israeli side actually saying, yeah, you were not imagining this. This really happened. And we did it because we wanted to kill people. I mean, they don't really say it the way I just said it in the film, but-- But they don't do. Yeah, I mean, I would say it's not so subtle. It's pretty direct. I mean, he asks one soldier, do you think it's a genocide? And he says, yes, we did a genocide. We knew that there were people in these places that we were bombing that were not involved, that were children, that were families of the people who we were targeting. And we did that knowingly. And we did it because it was easier for us. We intended to kill those children. We intended to kill those whole families. So I don't think it's that far off from what you're describing. You know what? I kept thinking about the TikTok videos from doing the genocide uploaded by the Israeli soldiers. So we got proof during that genocide, before the ceasefire, the fake ceasefire, that they were committing war crimes. So we have that on social media. And now we have it wrapped in a cinematic product. And we have the journalistic work done by Uval as well. So we kind of covered the documentation of the Israeli crimes in Gaza that proved beyond, I think, a reasonable doubt that there was a genocide there. Come on. Joshua, what about you first impressions of the film? I found the film utterly devastating because, first of all, for the last years now, the sheer reality of a genocide being perpetrated in my name as somewhat of Jewish descent and whose whole Jewish identity in my family structured around the experience of the Holocaust, to watch a film that makes it very clear that these people who this regime is committing a Holocaust, that's a film that's called "Naza," which is sort of somewhere between Nazi and Gaza, and whose fundamental subtext as a movie is we are Nazis. And what we're doing now is as systematic if modernized and updated as the Holocaust. It was just a gut punch of an experience, not because I did not know the details of the underlying facts, but both because it's shattering of any kind of liberal Jewish identity built around some exceptional idea of ourselves as because we survived the Holocaust where in any way different from any other national community, and I believe any national community, as defined as such, is capable of exactly these crimes. And also because unlike the heroic, utterly necessary, astonishingly brave articulations from the experience of survivors and victims, unlike that, this has the possibility of offering insight into the crime itself. Because genocide is not perpetrated by its victims and survivors. These are the human beings, whether you want to watch them or not, who are perpetrating genocide and wrestling in at mostly inadequate ways, maybe wholly inadequate ways. And we gaze at them, or at least I did, both feeling profoundly solid because these are human beings like myself, and terrified because it's evident that in their attempt to kind of deny their condemning themselves, they may escape justice, although I hope they don't, but they will not escape punishment because their lives are destroyed, either by the numbness and the sacrifice of any compassion that will follow from their attempts to deny the moral meaning of what they've done, or because they'll accept what they've done and realize the enormous toll is taken, then they might actually be able to do something good later in their life if they were truly to accept. But I think that was astonishing for me. And necessary, it's not the end all be, all this is not the final word, but I think it's necessary. - Yeah, it's funny, Joshua, you say that it's subtext about the Israelis now becoming the Nazis, but it's not subtext because one of the soldiers tells you all that he went to Poland, he learned about what the Nazis did, and he thought that those people were evil, but what does that mean about him? He says, I still think they're evil, but what does that mean about me? So it's not subtext, and it's funny that both you and Rami have said something that was explicit in the film and said that maybe they didn't really say that. I think that's evidence of just how strange it is for us to hear people saying the quiet part out loud. How strange it is to hear these confessions, how unused to it we are. Joshua, you made two films. The first film the act of killing was from the perspective of the perpetrators. The second film was from the perspective of the victims of the Indonesian genocide. And Mosab Abutoha, for example, the Palestinian poet, is saying, you know, I'm struggling to understand what this film is going to add to what I've already witnessed in Gaza and personally survived. Survivors have spoken. He's basically saying, you know, why would we have a film from the perspective of the Nazi officers? Why would they even need that? And when I spoke to you originally, you said that, you know, you were called a colleague saying to you, actually, like we don't need any more films about the Holocaust or like from a Jewish perspective, we actually need more films about the Holocaust from a German perspective. And I'm curious about that. I'm curious about how you think about having made a film about the perpetrator perspective and what that film actually does and what it can actually tell us. I mean, I'm also curious because at the end of your film, we're with this character, Anwar, who was, you know, in these killing squads in Indonesia. He spent the film kind of re-enacting these murders with a kind of seeming glee or not quite ambivalence. And then at the end, you know, also like Naza on a dark roof, he has this wretching fit that almost seems to speak on some level to what he's carrying inside this like torturedness. And I wondered about that because I don't know that we see quite the same physical or emotional response to what they've done from these Israeli soldiers. Maybe they're too close to it. But I do wonder about whether we're actually witnessing something from the perpetrators that we can call human. That's all a long way of asking why make perpetrator cinema. I think in order to understand a crime as a human activity, we have to look at the human beings who undertake that activity. Every act of evil in our history has been committed by human beings like us. There are no monsters among us. And that may seem like a provocative point, but I think it's the only hopeful point because if the world is divided into monsters and innocents, then the only righteous policy is to try and identify the monsters somehow and either contain them or lock them up or annihilate them. And if everyone's human, we can try to understand what conditions we need to build as human beings that make this kind of violence fundamentally unimaginable instead of so easily undertaken. So I think that while it's absolutely the case that there has been heroic and profound work made from the perspective of the experience of genocide, experiencing what it does to families, to communities. This is doing something fundamentally different. And I think it's aware of it. I think the shots through the windows of people in their homes is not just contrasting. It's not just saying, you know, this could be us. It's also showing people who are fundamentally safe and living in the kind of bubble of diminished compassion in which we bunkerize our lives and which we sort of can be inundated with images of suffering from around the world, not just from Gaza. And really not care or post something on social media, express outrage, pat ourselves on the back for doing so and then move on to something more fun. And I think that's cinematically and I speak now as a filmmaker kind of expertly woven through the film, the hypocrisy of everyone who claims distance from this and everyone who has the luxury of distance from these atrocities, all at the same time looking with a kind of razor sharp focus on the behavior of the perpetrator. And to some extent, to the extent that it's afforded by this particular moment in history in this particular format, to some extent the psychology of the perpetrators to the human psychology that makes it possible. I think there's no dry heaves from anyone in Gaza and you really don't see people's faces. There are moments where people begin to crack with remorse and that's a little surprising given that the interviewer is hostile and skeptical very often in his questions. And you have comments about identifying with the Nazis you studied when you traveled to Poland to study the Holocaust as a Israeli youngster. So I think a film about perpetrators is doing something fundamentally different than a film that's meant to expose the scale of a crime. or especially the very sacred thing that films me. The survivors can do in the look of silence. My second film about the Indonesian genocide comes from that perspective, which is to show that every single person who's destroyed is an entire universe, that the consciousness of one person is a universe. And when you kill someone, there's no measure of the destruction you've caused, quite apart from the suffering of everyone who's impacted by that death. And then I want to draw a sharp distinction between what the act of killing is doing as a film and how it was made versus this. The act of killing seems to be on the surface of film about the 1965 Indonesian genocide told by the perpetrators from their perspective. It's not. It's neither from their perspective, but most importantly, I don't think it's about the 1965 genocide. It's not about the crimes that were started 61 years ago tomorrow. It's about the regime of impunity and corruption and the corruption and trivialization of human culture that has flourished in the aftermath of a genocide where the perpetrators have remained in power. And the kind of forms of fantasy and denial that have flourished, that have allowed the atrocious to be celebrated as heroic. And that's fundamentally different than a film that's made while the genocide is still ongoing. That's fundamentally different. And the ethical questions involved with making NASA and the ethical questions with making the act of killing or the look of silence are fundamentally different for that reason. Everything down to anonymity, and whether you protect sources as you would as a journalist or whether you have other obligations to the whole question of what we can expect from perpetrators when years and decades have not passed yet for them to realize that they're living in an abyss partly of their own making. Yeah, I mean, I really struggled with what you were saying around like their lives are also already ruined. We don't know what's going to happen in Israel Palestine. We don't know whether this impunity will ever end. And there is a chance that they win, that the Israelis win. And then do these guys who basically are saying, look, it was part of the mission. Essentially, I was just following orders. Do they ever really reckon? Like, it seems like if society around them continues to celebrate them as heroes and to reify what they've done, they could be okay. I mean, I don't know, you know? And that feels unbearable, frankly, as a viewer. This is a very personal and philosophical questionnaire about what does it mean to be okay? I would do almost anything not to live in the shoes of any of the men or women we see interviewed in Gaza. It's a moral death that we are not. I am not in my life above and totally beyond. It lapsed at all of our doors. And I also think that, you know, there's a very important point that you made earlier about this not being a film necessarily made for Palestinians. You know, the act of killing made an impact in Indonesia and how the society talks about its past. And survivors in particular took the film up and used it to kind of show a society that for decades had been denying it anything had happened and said, look, it's evident there was a genocide here. But to some extent, I was crafting when I made the film a cinematic experience predicated on the provocation that for at least a moment, you will identify with, you will feel the humanity of Onwar and wonder, oh, no, if I had been born in his home in his family, walked around in his shoes, I would hope I would make very different decisions. But I'm terribly blessed never to have to find out. And this is no consolation for people who have lost loved ones. But I don't know that that cinematic experience was designed for someone who was precisely on the other side of that conflict. So survivors who would say they appreciated the film, I would welcome their appreciation because I understood it was they were speaking about its impact. But I never began to imagine that they appreciated the aesthetic and moral experience that I worked for all those years to try and craft because I don't think it is intended for them. - Yeah, I mean, I want to bring you into this, Rami, because Miraf Zanshan, the journalist, said something basically like that it's not about Gaza, it's not about the rules of engagement, it's a film about Israeli society and about how the most liberal, educated and light and socio-economic elites among us could carry out such mass killing. This is related Joshua to what you were just saying. You are in slight disagreement with this. What do you think about what the film is doing? Who it's for? - So Joshua was talking about the impact of the act of killing in what it did to Indonesian society. And I think that the rage we saw on social media on Gaza was the impact it made in its premiere and the Venice Film Festival, the 25-Minute Standing Ovation. I looked at Yuval's face and Makhil's face and they were clearly embarrassed by this. And I kind of get a sense, I know why you were embarrassed because they didn't want to make it about themselves, about them as Israelis and about the filmmakers. They wanted to make it about Gaza. And again, there's no shortage of evidence of what happened in Gaza. And here's the world again, clapping and cheering on the brave Israeli journalist slash filmmaker who exposed the truth. And I think it was Hanin Majedli in Haaret's article who's a Palestinian journalist that said, why do we still need the throat of the Israeli guy to say what we're saying for the world to believe? (laughs) But then again, you look at Yuval's work and you try to look it from his side and he has been using his privilege. The fact that he has access that I, as a Palestinian filmmaker slash journalist, would never have access to. I mean, can you imagine me exposing that kind of information and testimonies from inside a 200 unit from the Israeli army? I mean, I would be skinned alive. So it reminds me that I have a glass ceiling I would never be able to break. And the way the world received Gaza, and especially the Western world, you know, in New York. And the fact that it was produced by the Guardian, I mean, I'm sorry, but the Guardian are not part of the good guys. And this is a big deal, another big deal of why so many Palestinians were bolted against how the world received Gaza. We all have to understand that before October 23, we were living as journalists. We all thought, a lot of us thought that we were in a war against fake news. We all tried to expose fake news. I even had a show, I had a TV show exposing fake news. Then came Gaza. It wasn't about fake news anymore. It was about fake narratives. And who was pushing those fake narratives? It was Western legacy media. And now the way I see the struggle in journalism as people whose stories have been marginalized and almost hidden from mainstream audiences by these mainstream legacy platforms. I see my struggle against them is to expose them before they fake narratives and to find other platforms where I can tell my own narrative. - I've heard a number of Palestinians basically saying, I don't need this movie to speak for me. I know I have a voice. And there is something that I think all of us have to remember that it's not a zero-sum equation, right? And I think a lot of people are saying that. I mean, I have a few reflections on what you were saying. I mean, one thing that I felt watching it is that as someone who was watching all of the footage coming out of Gaza very closely, there were things that it was very clear to us if you were watching that footage that there was a kind of systematic destruction of homes, of schools, of hospitals. At the same time, there's something about hearing how that structure was developed and carried out that does put a frame on what it looked like. I mean, there is something structuring about the film that helps us understand, like, you know, also a lot of times when you see the images from Gaza, you're emotionally very activated because you're seeing horrible things and you're drawn into the horror of it first and foremost. And so the question of the system that structures all of that death falls kind of out of frame on some level, it's almost disembodied. And something that I think that the film does really well is actually brings us back into, you know, you hear the soldiers talk about how they listened to the families that they were going to kill before they killed them, how they listened to the baby's crying. - Daddy's home. - Daddy's home, exactly. - Yeah, waiting for the daughter to say on the phone to her mom, daddy's home, and then they would strike. And then this casually describing how they would commit a war crime and murder entire families and then go to a big viral street in Tel Aviv or Disney go to a street in Tel Aviv and have a beer with their bodies. And we have to go back to Merab Zunshan's tweet where she said it was a film on Israeli society. Well, yes and no, I do think it's a film about the act of killing, about the cruelty that is embedded in us in humans. And I don't think, I don't see Israelis as absolute eagles, of course not. I don't think it exists with all humans. Years ago, I did an interview with Hania Bosant, a Palestinian filmmaker and some Palestinians criticized him in the past for maybe humanizing Israelis, especially Israeli combat officers or police officers and so on. and I confronted him with that and he looked at me and just said, "Well, what do you think happens when you keep demonizing your rival opponent or even your enemy? What do you think happens to you? You lose something. When you demonize the person in front of you, you demonize yourself because you forget all humans." So at that moment, you don't see yourself as a human. And that resonated with me. That stayed with me. That sentence really stayed with me. And so my film is about the Nakaba of 1948, kind of provides the background to everything that's been happening for the past three years. We included testimonies from Palmach soldiers from 1948 and I kept thinking, "Am I humanizing them? Am I humanizing them? Am I just going to end up like a shooting and crying kind of sequence?" And I think the journalistic argument prevailed and I said, "No, we have to, Sarah and I agree that we have to keep them both because you know what? We're not playing that game. We're not demonizing the other side. This is their testimony and we're going to put it there and let the audience decide whether what they did was monstrous or not." I mean, I just want to say one more thing before bringing you back in, Joshua, it's that I have noticed, Swami, like the ways in which this film and also no other land before it has kind of split the Palestine movement in the US between Jews and Palestinians in some way because of the very divergent responses to it. And I think it goes back to what we've been talking about, like confronting the humanity of the perpetrator. It's also about confronting the humanity of the people in our lives who still need to be convinced. So our meaning Jewish lives because for most Jewish Americans, it's very clear who the film is for. They have many family members who they want to see the film so that they can help them break this attachment to Zionism and actually confront what it's actually doing. And like Mossab basically says to hell with these racists who can't see it at this point, you know, but I think for many of us, I don't think we're in a position to say like to hell with our mothers or whatever, you know what I mean. And so this is kind of some of the difficulty here. Well, as I said earlier, I can understand the rage and the pain underlying, you know, to hell with the racists who can't feel compassion sufficient that rises to condemning genocide when they see the images coming out of Gaza and the stories and the eloquent work coming out of Gaza and being made from that work. At the same time, how many of us are, even though there's fewer images coming out, how many of us are responding to the mass slaughter of the Rohingya or the killings in Sudan or the killings in Iran right now. I mean, how many of us have sufficient compassion to feel as I put it earlier, the sacrifice, which is unnecessary, mostly and grinding and destroying millions of lives all the time continuously throughout human history right now. So I think I can understand the rage and the horror, but I think it's a very important point when you say Ariel who can say to hell with our mothers and I, I have a family that is pretty resolutely anti Zionist, and still I want them to see this because I want them to be even more resolutely anti Zionist, I wanted to sink even deeper into their DNA. So I, that's one thing and I also think I think this absolutely is a film for Israeli society and it feels like this is exactly where we need a film that indites us as Jews, as Jews who either could feel but don't or who are convinced that we're right, that the policies that the genocide is actually warranted. And I think, you know, something else that keeps being said in what I've read about the film, you know, to hear people casually talk about mass killing is so upsetting. I remember when I was making the act of killing perversely, the most satisfying moments when you're shooting or these moments where you instantly recognize truth because it's not what you expected. Right, it's like I see that's how it is and you suddenly understand something about the world, you understand why it's that way, I remember interviewing and filming and filming crazy dramatizations and reenactments with perpetrators dozens of them. But to me, very quickly, their casual way of talking made sense to me, it wasn't like, oh, this is, I mean, it's easy to sort of hear a sound bite of it and think, oh, they're casual, they're remorseless, they're unaffected, they're inhuman, they're monsters, that's a simple chain of thought. But if you spend any time with it and I think this film compels you to spend some time with it, you realize right away, oh, of course they speak this way because they did it again and again and again. It speaks to the mass systematic nature of the killing that they're not going to be breaking down in tears when they describe each operation because it was only an only an operation because Daddy's home became a code word or a phrase. To me, the film gives you ample time for that to sink in and you're right that some of the things that we talked about being subtext addressed to the Jewish community and Israeli society are more than subtext. You said you know that the kind of reference that we are the Nazis here was more than subtext, but it also was brilliantly woven in as subtext like the decision to show the sign for the Claude Landsman retrospective at the Tel Aviv Cinematica. A place where I remember showing the act of killing and almost being booed out of the cinema because people were saying, you know, how can you show this to Holocaust survivors like us? And I remember the people complaining about that where you know in their 30s younger than I was and just feeling so demoralized, but it's such a precise, restrained, brilliantly crafted indictment of us as Jews. And of Israeli society as a genocidal society and of any society and institution that supports that that doesn't mean it is the end all be all or should be the end all be all of work about the genocide it should not be it must not be. And luckily it isn't because there's so much other excellent work that's doing other things, but this to me is a singular accomplishment and then you can question the grotesque nature of the film industry elevating directors as authors and sustained applause at Venice and Khan and red carpets and whether the directors might now wish they've released the film anonymously instead of putting their names on it as directors. One can question all of that and God knows I'm not above those questions myself. My name is on the act of killing it made a career for me while people who were more intensively involved and as creatively involved remain anonymous on those films. And not some moral complexity and probably a moral error that to some extent I've made, but I think as a work if we step back from that particular debate and question it is surgical precise and in a way that is immensely important. We're moving into the question of the impact of the film and Rami I want to start with you about like whether you think this actually can have an impact in Israeli society I mean we've talked around what's been going on a friend of mine who I spoke to you know one of the few the brave on the left. Basically said that he feels that the incitement against you ball and Raquel it's felt to him like it felt before the assassination of Rabin like that that it's at that level and pitch so I'm curious to hear from you first of all like what the response has been and how you've been seeing this and whether you think that Israeli society can see this one one quick thing that I will say is that Joshua to your point on the kind of authentic moment. I saw Michal Svard who is a human rights lawyer with Yeshteen after the premiere who said to me if you watch the film in Hebrew you can't deny it it's a different film to watch it in Hebrew because you can hear in the language the reality of what has happened in a way that maybe you can't exactly if you're reading the subtitle so you know the question of whether. The other Israelis will recognize this will be able to assimilate this is true is part of the question here because you do have some people who saw it already Israeli Americans or whatever who are saying it's one sided whatever that means for a film like this so I'm curious if it's for me whether you think it can have an impact in terms of the level of incitement I remember the Rabin comparison and a grief I mean even Palestinians from the more pure side who criticize another or you have been criticized you well since no other land. A couple of them actually erased their posts after they saw what was going on with Rafael's parents and with the death threats to you ball and the revoking citizenship or those threats. What's really scary here is the level of violence and I think what's happening with NASA and the difference between NASA and those tiktok videos from during the actual fighting when the Israeli foot soldiers were inside of Gaza is who were committing these actions you know it's not the Galani the simple soldier the foot soldier from the Galani brigade you know the lowest ranking soldier who's going a shit in Gaza and tearing buildings and killing people and all that. And then Israeli society can just say what do you want these are the margins of our society these are the hooligans that go to the army and commit all these atrocities. No, NASA shows something different this is the 8200 units these are the guys. died that will end up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in Palo Alto, in San Francisco, in Hollywood, California. These are the Gal Gadots of the world. These are the cream, the La Cream of Israeli society. And what's happening right now in the minds of many Israelis, including from the left, the liberal Zionist left, journalists like Revive Drucker, like I read his article in Aritz, after he watched Nazan, and I know Revive, and I could just tell that he was very emotional while writing this, because he ended up writing an article that is essentially an anti-durnism article. I think he was just like one sentence away from saying to you, "Well, why didn't you expose your sources?" It was very strange to read, I think if we really drill down into Israeli's collective psyche, you would see that they're short-circuiting at the moment. They're losing their minds, essentially. And I'm not talking about those Michelle Taroni and Hatel and all those right-wing characters from the Israeli social media, who are extremely violent and dangerous, I'm talking about mainstream Israelis, including from the left to scene, including people who work in Aritz, for example, who don't know how to really handle Nazan. And once the film is online and available for free, which I think is the right call, it's too soon to tell what's going to happen then, because there also I mean there's the Israeli election, Netanyahu keeps threatening another war with Iran or whatever, so it's really hard to tell. But I do think there should be, unfortunately, another big wave of incitement and nasty things against the filmmakers and against journalists and filmmakers who expose the truth in general in Israel, once the film is online and available for free. Yeah, so just to drill down on a few things that you said, I mean, you know, these soldiers are from elite units in Tel Aviv. They do not consider themselves like part of the settlement enterprise, they do not consider themselves like right-wing. One guy says like, I'm not from these Arab-hater units or whatever, you know. These are the liberal elite, you know, mostly Ashkenazi intelligence, people in intelligence. So this does really challenge the core of the narrative that it's not all Israelis and, you know, there's a certain kind of violent edge that is not representative. And I have seen basically commentary from an Israeli-American journalist who was at the same screening that I was at, that was like the point of this is to show that it's all of us, and this is why it needs to be fought. Like it's taking this point that you're making Rami, which is exactly correct, that this is, you know, embedded in Israeli society and saying, this is why we need to actually fight this because the message is that it's all of Israeli society. And I think because we're seeing this huge defense, hopefully that means that people are going to watch the film. But really, we don't know, like people are so defended around this. And I, you know, I watched, you probably saw this too, Rami, you've all first interview with Israeli television. And you've all just said to him, look, like I would love for you to do your own reporting on this. Like if you think I'm wrong, go do the reporting. But nobody else has reported at all on the mechanisms of genocide. I mean, Joshua, I feel like, you know, obviously in Dineshian, Israel are not comparable and you did this 40 years after the actual killing. But do you have any predictions about how Israeli society or how a society ends up actually processing this stuff over time? And what a film can do, kind of, how a film can actually create some movement? I think, first of all, I feel a resonance with the strategy of releasing the film for free online. That's what we did with the act of killing in the look of silence. And particularly in a country where the films were banned, that was a way of ensuring that they were seen by tens of millions of people, which happened and got them into the school curriculums for any teacher school courageous enough. But I think the defensiveness is very real and there, of course, going to hit that. And I think it does challenge people's self-conception, you know, I think that the act of killing came to Indonesia like the child and the Emperor's new clothes. And actually the participants in the act of killing talk about the film doing that. Adi's will country, the perpetrator says in the film, if we succeed in making this film, it will show everyone what they have long suspected that the so-called communists were actually not really the perpetrators here we were. And they've been lied to me. And in that sense, very, very quickly, because there was this kind of tinder box of silence built on fear, the film kind of pierced that and that confronted people with their shame. The shame of having remained silent, not spoken their conscience to loved ones to kids, not having questioned their parents about it. And I think confronted with that shame, which is the mechanism of the story that Emperor's new clothes, right? The child says it and then everyone feels embarrassed for not speaking the obvious. Will there be large swaths of Israeli society that feel like, yes, I think so. Will that create a backlash and polarization, and will they be drowned out by outrage and people who literally have built their lives atop, you know, recently seized Palestinian land and who have ambitions to seize as much as Gaza as they can to and eventually get rid of the garsons altogether? Yes, this is going to be inflammatory in a very necessary way. You know, I don't see a solution. I don't think we can prognosticate on how it will end or whether this will be ultimately a net positive or a net negative, but it opens a space just as that child in the fairy tale does to engage and build and fight for a process that allows us to take the next step and the next step and the next step and the next step. And that's, I think the only way change ever happens. So thank heavens, the film exists. Thank heavens is being made available for all Israelis to see. Thank heavens, the Fiorore about it will drive curiosity, hopefully then inside Israel, the people who are implicated by this film, do the work of using it to strengthen their movements and to reach out to people who otherwise have rejected the calls for justice for the Palestinian people. I think my fear is that this is not the stage that Israeli society is in and there aren't movements to speak of to run with it. I mean, Rami, I'm sure that you resonate with that. I mean, like, my fear is just that Israeli society, then the goal post move and they move towards basically saying, yes, we did this. Of course, we did this. We had to do it and to a more widespread acceptance of what was done. Because a lot of Israelis just talk in this rhetoric openly, you know, and others who don't speak this way openly feel this way. And so then the question is basically like, if they can no longer deny it to the world, maybe at least they can create more of a cushion in Israeli society for the people who had to do this or chose to do this as part of, you know, a societal project by affirming it. But that will happen. That will happen, but both will happen. And it will be a contest over which version of history prevails and also over who we are. And having people come out, it feels so defensive. And then to say that, okay, fine, if this shows that we're basically our best and brightest are sitting at desks just like Aikman and that's who we are and that we're going to embrace being Aikman and Himmler, then let them say that, get them on the record saying that. And then that will have its effect that there will be a backlash to that. Not everyone will embrace that and the world will not embrace that. And the diminishment of support for Zionism will be a consequence of that. So I think, yes, you're right, that will also happen, Ariel. And that happened in Indonesia with my films, too. It amplified the embrace and the celebration of genocide if that were even possible in Indonesia. It amplified it in some quarters from the military until in certain places it didn't. And new consensus is evolved as contest continues. Yeah. I do agree with Josh to some extent. The problem is, it's not just the past few years. These crimes that do not get recognized are kind of stacking on top of each other. We're talking about 48, we're talking about in the 50s, the military regime in the 60s and 67s. So it's been a lot. And the most crucial question is, how much more can we still take? There is no Gaza soon. If they keep on going on this trajectory, there will be no West Bank. And if you think it's going to end in the West Bank, no, it's going to come to us. This is what they're planning to Palestinian citizens of Israel as well. And I do believe, Josh, that once this starts happening to us, we will have more scenes that are very similar to scenes we saw in your film. And this is the scary part. And while I was watching, not enough for some reason, comments made by, not that in Pep Guardola, the legendary football manager kept kind of playing in my head. During the genocide, Pep Guardola was a very mainstream figure. He said that to him, it wasn't a question about Palestine. it wasn't a question of, you know, Palestinian children, it was a question of all children, all world children. He said, he said he would see what was happening in Gaza and then he would look at his kids and then he would see his kids in Gaza. Then he would think, I don't want this to happen to my kids or to any other kids. And if we don't stop it now, it will happen to them. And I do believe in this quote. I mean, I think that something that is happening that maybe Joshua and I are describing is that there's a parallel experience happening in watching this film for Jewish people who see their cousins, who see their family members like, let's take American Jews or whatever and saying, these could be my kids, you know, the ones who are doing the killing, not the ones who are being killed, like the opposite experience of having to see ourselves reflected in the seat of the killer. But I think that the power of this film for American Jews who are identified as Zionists, who see themselves as part of the Israeli project, even without being Israelis, is also that recognition, like having to actually put themselves in that position. And I do wonder, you know, I'll just share my thoughts as we're closing about the question of the impact in American Jewish life. You know, I think that this film should be brought in by every synagogue in America. And I really wonder if they're going to have the courage to do it, like the liberal Zionist rabbis who have been kind of on the verge of calling for Palestinian liberation, but like not when it counts, I guess. I feel like the question is whether they are going to embrace this film. And I have hope that this could change something in American communities, but I'm afraid that it won't. And that fear is really animating for me, because if nothing can get through, then what? I mean, Joshua, you were talking about how we have to confront the humanness, and we can't just isolate and annihilate those people who we deem to be evil. But what do we do when there isn't a way to break through? I mean, this does feel like a late Hail Mary in the American Jewish community to see if we can have an object around which to rally and change hearts and minds. I think this is a very, very important film for, I want to say more than American Jews, but certainly all American Jews to see. And all European Jews to see, Jews everywhere need to see this film. Because first and foremost, it's about what is being done in our name. And I, you know, recently I was at a screening of the act of killing not too long ago. And I thought, oh, this film is fundamentally different from when it came out, because since this came out, the shamelessness, which is so shocking in the act of killing, has become ubiquitous in late social media, early AI era, political, polarized culture, everywhere, certainly in the United States, under Trump, and under Maga, and clearly in Israel too, and the idea that this may not just mirror, but trigger even more shameless behavior where people say fine, call me a supporter of genocide, call me a Nazi, that will cause some destruction for some people. But it's also something very clear to react against. I mean, what to say, even this person is embracing the idea of being an ifment, as I said earlier, that's something we can organize around. And I think we're in a moment where American Jews relationship, America's relationship to Israel is profoundly changing. That's going to have big effects on Israel. And American Jews relationship to Israel is changing not as quickly, but is changing too. And this film is going to galvanize that and cases that and is extremely important. And no, it will not deliver everything you hope for. And very often, your fears about what it may unleash in some people will be realized. And the most terrifying thing about this conversation for me is imagining what that means for you, Rami, living as a Palestinian in Israel, and what those destructive forces which are easy for me to ring my hands about could mean for you. And also, I don't think we can place a messianic hope forgive the word in a single film or a single work apart. Just to give you just to give you an idea about, I was, I did an interview yesterday with Diyat Hajjah, he was a Palestinian journalist who has been covering police and crime. And he also writes for Haaretz, very critical of the police and very critical of Ben Vier. And him and I were speculating certain behavior by the Israeli police and we came to a very terrifying conclusion. So what's been happening at the moment in 48, and what I say for late, I mean, the historical Palestine, Israel, police have been raiding Palestinian weddings, homes for no reason, businesses. They're really starting to kind of roll up the population as the elections are getting nearer. There's an unprecedented crime wave and crime gangs that are operating within Palestinian society in 48. And police are absolutely doing nothing about it because the end of the day, Arabs are killing Arabs. So, you know, the establishment benefits. But now they have the perfect excuse to unleash police on us in the names of safety and security and the fight on crime. Ben Vier might target us as the next villain because they already did it to the gauzeans, you know, the Alhamdast and they're all gonna grow up hating Jews so we might kill them when their babies, why not. Same thing with the Palestinians, the West Bank, nobody's hiding that anymore. But what about Palestinians in Israel? Let's go after them as well. And you have Ben Vier was the Minister of Police. So we really have to be also vigilant of that. And I, you know, for me, I like to end on a good note and say that I do believe that, you know, as we're recording this at the end of September, I think it is a watershed moment. It is a historical moment, not because of the film, not just because of the film, but also because of what's happening globally in the world and talking about mainstream culture, even pop culture. We also what happened with Ed Sheeran. It no longer pays off to stay quiet, not even to not be pro-Palestinian but to stay quiet on the issue of Palestine. It doesn't, it doesn't pay off anymore, you know. So if you're an artist, might as well speak up against genocide. That's a good thing. And films like NASA will now be accepted in festivals. And I do want to believe that at some point this orientalistic racist approach towards the side of the victim, which is the Palestinian in this case, would be heard and our stories would be welcomed as well in these mainstream festivals. And finally stories from the victim themselves would be would be more accepted and hopefully mainstream. But we'll get to that once we stop the genocide. And that's the thing I keep telling my fellow Palestinians that we all need to understand, well, some of them are criticizing no other land. I remember my one and only answer is like, your criticism might be valid, but I don't feel I have the energy to have this conversation at the moment because right now children are being killed, massacred in masses in Gaza. And Palestinians are being targeted shot in the West Bank. So we need to stop this. You know, we need the world to be looking at us and to stop this. I don't care if Israeli filmmakers, Israeli journalists, I don't care who does it. We need to stop the killing of children, the killing of innocent people. So we're on survival mode at the moment. So any initiative, artistic, journalistic, it doesn't matter any initiative that, you know, lift the lid on the whole Israel-Palestine issue. The supports Palestinians that confronts Israel is what they're doing. Not just for the sake of Palestinians, but for the sake of Israelis themselves because they clearly do not realize how monstrous their society has become. So for the sake of both Palestinians and Israelis, whatever, you know, I don't know who's listening to this, but whatever you can do is welcomed. I think that's a good place to stop. Thank you, Rami. Thank you, Joshua, for joining me today. Thank you to our editor, Jesse Brennan, and as usual, subscribe to JewishCurrents.org. Thanks a lot, everyone. See you next time.