There are moments when intellectual dishonesty ceases to be merely objectionable and becomes morally grotesque. The international celebration surrounding “NAZA," the incendiary documentary created by filmmaker Yuval Abraham, along with Rachel Szor, both Israelis, represents precisely such a moment.
The film, which received the Special Jury Prize at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, has been embraced in certain international cultural circles for advancing grave allegations concerning the conduct of the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza. Yet to countless Israelis, former hostages, soldiers and bereaved families, the applause in Venice was not an innocent celebration of cinema. It was another spectacle in which Israel’s enemies were furnished with accusations against the Jewish state by Israelis themselves.
And now disturbing questions concerning Abraham’s associations make the episode still more troubling.
According to published reports, Abraham has maintained a longstanding relationship with Palestinian Arab journalist and activist Ahmed Alnaouq, whom Abraham has reportedly called a “close friend" and “partner." The two men established the Across the Wall initiative in 2019, providing a platform through which Palestinian Arab accounts were translated for Israeli audiences.
That relationship acquires considerably greater significance because, according to The Jerusalem Post, Alnaouq serves as vice president, treasurer and an outreach and advocacy officer of Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor. The newspaper describes Euro-Med as Hamas-linked and reports that Israel has designated the organization as a terrorist organization since 2015. Israel’s Diaspora Affairs Ministry identified Euro-Med founder Ramy Abdu as a Hamas operative.
These facts cannot simply be waved away as inconvenient biographical trivia.
They demand attention because “NAZA" arrives during an international campaign in which Israel is routinely depicted not as a country defending itself after an unprecedented terrorist atrocity, but as the principal villain of the conflict that Hamas initiated on October 7, 2023.
That inversion is unconscionable.
Israel did not awaken one morning and arbitrarily decide to wage war in Gaza. Hamas-led terrorists penetrated Israel’s sovereign territory, barbarically massacred over 1,200 people and dragged more than 250 hostages into nightmarish captivity in Gaza.
Families were annihilated. Communities were devastated. Young people attending a music festival were hunted. Men, women and children were abducted.
That is the indispensable beginning of this story, yet it is not in the film. “NAZA" has entered the international cultural bloodstream as another vehicle through which Israeli soldiers can be portrayed before the world through allegations of criminality while the circumstances that forced those soldiers onto the battlefield and their incomparable standards to avoid civilian casualties recede into the background.
The Israel Defense Forces has categorically rejected major allegations contained in the film. IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir described the documentary as being “based on blood libels, a deliberate distortion of reality and false and grave accusations against IDF soldiers and commanders."
Those words should resonate throughout every theater in which this film is screened. These soldiers are not abstractions. They are the sons and daughters of Israeli families. They are reservists who abandoned careers, businesses, universities and young children because their country had suffered the most devastating terrorist attack in its history.
They entered an extraordinarily dangerous battlefield to defend their communities, dismantle Hamas infrastructure and help bring Israeli hostages home. Many never returned. Others returned without limbs. Others returned carrying psychological wounds that may accompany them for the remainder of their lives.
And yet, while these men and women were risking everything, an international cultural establishment apparently found another Israeli production willing to place their conduct in the dock. There is something profoundly perverse about that spectacle.
Former hostage Eliya Cohen has articulated the outrage with an authority few others possess. Cohen spent 505 days in Hamas captivity after being wounded and abducted on October 7. Israeli soldiers fought in Gaza while he remained imprisoned. He subsequently accused the filmmakers of degrading the very people who fought to rescue him. “They can’t degrade the people who fought day after day to return me back home and fought so that our families could live here," Cohen said.
That sentence should be contemplated alongside the applause at Venice. Cohen was not watching the Gaza war from a European film festival. He was living inside its nightmare. When he speaks of soldiers who fought to bring him home, he is speaking about actual men who entered hostile territory while Hamas held him captive.
He further accused the filmmakers of “spreading lies" about those soldiers and warned that such representations could contribute to hostility against Israelis and Jews internationally.
That concern cannot be dismissed as paranoia. Across Europe, North America and elsewhere, Jews have confronted an explosion of hostility since October 7. Israelis have been harassed because of their nationality. Jewish institutions have required extraordinary security. Demonstrations ostensibly concerned with Gaza have repeatedly produced rhetoric attacking Israel’s very existence.
Into this atmosphere comes an Israeli film accusing Israel’s own soldiers of horrifying behavior. And because its creators are Israeli, their nationality itself becomes a rhetorical weapon. “Even Israelis admit it," Israel’s detractors can proclaim.
That is what makes productions such as “NAZA" uniquely valuable to those seeking to demonize the Jewish state. An accusation delivered by an avowed enemy of Israel is easily recognized as hostile. An accusation delivered by an Israeli filmmaker can be packaged as confession.
The distinction is enormous. Abraham’s relationship with Alnaouq consequently deserves public examination.
Reports indicate that Alnaouq holds senior positions at Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, which the newspaper describes as Hamas-linked. The report also says Euro-Med has circulated allegations including accusations concerning Israeli “organ theft" and claims involving police dogs and prisoners.
There is more. According to The Jerusalem Post, Alnaouq has said that his brother Ayman was a “member of the resistance" killed by Israeli security forces in 2014. Hamas’s Qassam Brigades subsequently eulogized Ayman, publishing an image showing him carrying a machine gun and wearing Hamas insignia, the newspaper reported.
This emphatically demonstrates why questions about Abraham’s associations, worldview and journalistic judgment cannot simply be dismissed.
Abraham is entitled to choose his friends and professional partners. The public is equally entitled to know who those people are. And Israelis are entitled to ask whether relationships of this nature have influenced the ideological prism through which their country and its soldiers are portrayed.
The furious reaction within Israel is therefore hardly mysterious. One activist described Abraham as “consumed by hatred for his own people," while another invoked the writings of Berl Katznelson (an intellectual founder of Labor Zionism) during the bloody Arab pogroms that took place from 1936-1939 in British occupied Israel.
Katznelson asked a searing question: “Is there another people among the nations whose own sons have descended into such intellectual and spiritual distortion, so that everything their own people do, all that their people create and all their suffering, is contemptible and hateful to them, while everything done by their people’s enemy - every act of robbery, every murder and every rape - fills their hearts with admiration and devotion?"
Those words were written in another generation, amid another murderous assault upon Jews. Yet their invocation today reflects the anguish of Israelis who cannot comprehend how, after October 7, some among their own countrymen appear more determined to indict Israel before the international community than to communicate the enormity of what Israelis endured.
That anguish should not be underestimated.
Israel today confronts not merely armies, terrorist organizations, missiles and drones. It confronts an international information war in which language, imagery and allegations can be deployed with extraordinary effectiveness.
Hamas understood this from the beginning. Israel must defend its citizens militarily while simultaneously confronting an international narrative that frequently strips military operations of their context.
The IDF has undertaken extraordinary measures designed to warn civilians before attacks, including evacuation notices, telephone communications and other warning mechanisms. Those efforts are inconvenient to a simplistic narrative depicting Israeli soldiers as bloodthirsty marauders.
So too is the reality of Hamas operating from an intensely urban environment. So too is the reality that Hamas started the war. So too are the hostages. So too are the murdered Israelis of October 7.
The international campaign against Israel functions most effectively when these realities disappear.
That is why the controversy surrounding “NAZA" transcends cinema. The issue is not whether a movie is aesthetically impressive. It is what happens when accusations against Israel are transported into an international environment desperately receptive to anything that can be used to portray the Jewish state as uniquely malevolent.
A standing ovation does not transform allegations into truth. A film festival prize does not confer historical omniscience. And an Israeli passport does not make every accusation uttered by its holder incontestable. Quite the opposite: when an Israeli filmmaker makes allegations carrying potentially devastating consequences for his own country and its soldiers, the public has every reason to examine his record, his associations and the ideological environment surrounding his work.
Israel's adversaries hardly require additional ammunition. They have spent decades attempting to transform the Jewish state from victim into perpetrator, from a nation defending its citizens into an international defendant perpetually required to justify its existence.
After October 7, that machinery accelerated rather than abated. Within hours of massacred Israeli bodies being recovered, demonstrations against Israel had already begun. That historical obscenity should never be forgotten. And neither should the men and women of the IDF who entered Gaza because their country had been attacked.
Whatever international celebrities, activists, diplomats or filmmakers may say, Israeli soldiers did not create October 7. They responded to it. They did not kidnap Israeli children. They went searching for them. They did not construct Hamas’s terrorist infrastructure. They were ordered to destroy it. They did not begin this war. They were summoned to fight it. That is the moral reality that must never be permitted to disappear beneath cinematic spectacle.
Yuval Abraham may enjoy the adulation of international audiences prepared to applaud accusations against Israel. He may receive prizes, favorable headlines and invitations from cultural institutions that have demonstrated an insatiable appetite for Israeli self-indictment.
But Israelis have every right to reject the narrative being presented in their name and its creator. They have every right to defend the soldiers who stood between their families and those who perpetrated October 7. And they have every right to ask why an Israeli filmmaker with a documented longstanding partnership with a senior figure in an organization that is linked to Hamas is being celebrated abroad while Israel's defenders are portrayed through allegations the IDF itself has emphatically rejected.
History will ultimately judge the conduct of this generation. When it does, the thunderous applause of an international film festival will matter considerably less than the reality of what happened on October 7 and what followed. Israel was attacked. Its citizens were massacred and kidnapped. Its soldiers answered the call. Those soldiers deserve to be remembered as the men and women who stood between the Jewish state and those determined to destroy it - not reduced to caricatures for the approbation of audiences eager to believe the worst about Israel.
And no prize bestowed in Venice can alter that fundamental truth.
Fern Sidman, a former NY correspondent for Arutz Sheva, is the current editor-in-chief of The Jewish Voice, a New York based publication. Her writings can be accessed at tjvnews.com, ariellah@aol.com