Netanyahu vs NAZA: The Documentary’s Sources Are the Target

Netanyahu wants to identify the sources of NAZA while A Fidai Film reopens a Palestinian archive seized in 1982. Two films, the same dispute.

Netanyahu wants to know who spoke. Not figuratively. The Israeli prime minister has asked the attorney general, the chief of staff and the director of Shin Bet to identify the soldiers and officers who appear anonymously in NAZA and to proceed, if grounds emerge, over violations of information security, criminal defamation and damage to Israel’s diplomatic and security interests.

The documentary by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, which won the Special Jury Prize in Venice, gathers 24 anonymous testimonies from inside the military and intelligence apparatus. The team says, however, that over the course of three years it spoke with more than one hundred sources. The Israeli military disputes the film’s conclusions and denies some of its most serious allegations.

Up to this point, however fierce, the script is recognizable: an investigation accuses an institution, the institution denies the allegations and tries to call the sources into question.

Netanyahu vs. NAZA: the problem is no longer only the film

The response stops being about what NAZA claims and begins to be about who had the right to claim it.

Military Advocate General Itai Ofir has pointed out that a criminal case would require concrete evidence of security violations or disclosure of classified material. In the meantime, however, the political demand is already broader: find the witnesses.

James Wilson, the film’s producer, observed at the London Film Festival that much of the most aggressive reaction comes from people who have not seen the film.

Even more elegant is the response on cinematic terrain. Israeli embassies have promoted NAZA: The Real Story, a counter-film made by an Israeli lawyer and reservist that imitates NAZA‘s own visual grammar: anonymous interviews, Tel Aviv rooftops, the atmosphere of nocturnal confession. In its early versions, the site hosting it even listed Abraham and Szor as directors and displayed the festivals of the original documentary.

To fight a film accused of falsifying reality, the response therefore began by copying its packaging: postmodernity sometimes works for free.

A Fidai Film: who really owns the testimony?

At almost the same moment, Kamal Aljafari’s A Fidai Film, made in 2024 and arriving on the True Story platform, returns to circulation.

Here the question is older. The film begins with the archive of the Palestine Research Centre in Beirut, seized by the Israeli military during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon: books, newspapers, photographs and audiovisual materials from Palestinian history, some of which are said to remain in the hands of the Israeli military apparatus.

Aljafari has said that he managed to recover only a fraction of the images, working through people who had access to the materials. Some, he says, built academic careers studying that archive without returning it to the Palestinians. Some even worked in postcolonial studies.

In the film those images are re-edited, the degrading captions added by Israeli authorities are covered with red marks and verses by Palestinian authors appear in their place. It is not simply recovery: it is a dispute over ownership of the gaze.

Placed side by side, the two films tell stories from different eras and use different materials, but they end at the same point. Whoever controls the sources, the archives and the conditions of access does not merely intervene in the story: they help decide which story will be able to exist.

And perhaps that is why a documentary can become serious enough to require an investigation into its witnesses, while an archive taken forty years earlier can still need to be liberated frame by frame.