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Naza: When a Film is the News Transcript

Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Yossi: The first thing that we learned about the film was not about the film at all. It was the standing ovation. Nearly 25 minutes of a standing ovation.

 

Donniel: I can’t imagine what it’s like to be clapping your hands for 25 minutes without interruption. There’s something so profoundly totalitarian about that. It was a declaration of disgust of Israel, independent of the movie. And if you don’t show your disgust well enough, it’s like you sin if you only have 22 minutes of disgust. I embrace all criticism. But with this movie, I found myself, like, from the beginning just shutting down.

 

Yossi: What you’re describing, Donniel, is a textbook case of how not to galvanize the society to have a moral introspective conversation.

 

Donniel: Hi friends, this is Donniel Hartman and Yossi Klein Halevi from the Shalom Hartman Institute, and this is our podcast, For Heaven’s Sake, in collaboration with Ark Media. Today is Tuesday, September 15th, and our theme, which echoes the conversation of every single Israeli today, the theme is Naza: When a Film Is the News.

 

For those of you who don’t yet know what Naza is, go on any news site, whether social media news, Times of Israel, Jerusalem Post. It’s bigger news in Israel and in Europe. It’s not huge news in the United States. The New York Times has a little article about it. But this is what Israelis are talking about. Naza stands for the Hebrew term Nezek Agavi, which means collateral damage. And it also—and again, I’m doing a little commentary right now—the name Naza also echoes Gaza and it echoes Nazi. But again, assuming that this is well thought through, it’s a very powerful, emotive title, and it’s the news.

 

We’re in the midst of Saudi Arabia possibly imploding. Our election cycle, new polls have come out, which are presenting a continued shift to a stalemate. All there.

 

But what most Israelis are talking about, or at least what has attracted deep attention of Israelis, is this movie and debating it. A movie that none of us have seen. A movie that nobody has seen. A movie that ostensibly argues that Israel had a systematic policy to stop worrying about collateral damage.

 

Now, just again, on a pure legal sense, civilian deaths are accepted within the context of a just war as long as the civilian casualties aren’t targeted and that they are part of collateral damage. Collateral killing—I remember Moshe Halbertal once suggested, stop using the word collateral damage. It’s collateral killing. It’s like damage is like to a cup, a table. It’s like someone is dying here, collateral killing. And as long as it also is proportionate to the military benefit and the security that you’re accruing from this act.

 

And so everybody understands that in the context of war, civilian casualties are inevitable, especially in the context of a war such as Gaza. But the argument of this movie, which we’ve all seen one-minute little clips here and there, is that Israel ostensibly systematically embraced disproportionate civilian deaths and even was willing—like it didn’t—while in the past this is something that limited our behavior, here it was almost, we embraced it as part of our policy.

 

And the argument then of the movie is genocide, even though it doesn’t even have to make that—is that Israel is trying to wipe out. If you’re not fighting Hamas and it’s not really collateral killing, but it’s the objective that you have, then basically this is Israel committing genocide under the umbrella of a war. 

 

This is the argument, and it interviews 24 anonymous soldiers on a rooftop in Tel Aviv, extensively from the 8200 intelligence brigade, who are describing how Israel functions in the war. And no one has watched the movie in Israel yet, but there’s a few dimensions to the movie. Unlike the Kristof article, where there were arguments, “We did this, we did this. Look at what we’re doing,” there’s something happening here even without knowing.

 

It’s the effect of the movie. The condemnation of it without knowing the details is, it’s the title itself. You don’t even have to watch the movie to have an opinion about the movie. And the amount of editorials which have come out from people who haven’t watched the movie is very interesting because we all more or less know where this is going.

 

And so let’s talk about Naza. What is it? And let’s do it in a number of rounds. The first one, what is your first response? Then let’s go, what’s your second response? Then what’s your third response? And in each one, let’s peel it back more because each level is talking about Israeli society. Because Naza, while it’s a film that won an award in the Venice Film Festival, we’re talking about it not as a European phenomenon, not in the film festival context, but as an Israeli phenomenon, as something that’s happened to us. Now, this film, it talks about what happened to Gazans, but it also is a very powerful window into Israeli society. So, let’s tell the story. What was your first response to the movie?

 

Yossi: You know, the first thing, Donniel—

 

Donniel: Which you didn’t see.

 

Yossi: Which I didn’t see. And the first thing that we learned about the film was not about the film at all. It was the standing ovation. Nearly 25 minutes of a standing ovation.

 

Donniel: After the film was shown at the film festival.

 

Yossi: I can’t imagine what that would feel like. I can’t imagine what it’s like to be clapping your hands for 25 minutes without interruption. There’s something so profoundly totalitarian about that. And you know what? It’s great on Israeli social media. People have been circulating this wonderful piece from Solzhenitsyn, from The Gulag Archipelago, where he describes a meeting with Stalin and everyone is afraid to be the first one to stop applauding because you’ll be taken out and shot. And he said people were being carried out on stretchers. That was the only way you could actually stop applauding.

 

Now, that was not the case here. But what was happening there? What was happening in the mind? I can’t think of being in any situation where someone received a five-minute standing ovation that I was a part of. Two minutes, three minutes, you’re already ready to pass out. You know, like, when is this going to be over? Twenty-five minutes. So something’s happening there. And I was trying to understand what was happening, and I felt, you know, forgive the pun, I felt nauseated.

 

Donniel: I really—

 

Yossi: Yeah, that may be my first pun on For Heaven’s Sake.

 

Yossi: So it’s a good one, though, may I say.

 

Donniel: It’s not bad. You just pulled it out of nowhere, and that was pretty clever. And it deserves it.

 

Yossi: The standing ovation deserves it.

 

Donniel: And I saw a series of photos that were taken during the 25-minute ordeal where the director of the festival is repeatedly looking at his watch, and then you see him signaling, “Not yet. Not yet.” And then he does the signal. So what was he trying to achieve? The previous record for a standing ovation at the Venice Festival was last year. I think it was 23 minutes. He wanted to break that because that would then give more gravitas to the film. And so the whole thing is staged. It’s a setup. 

 

And I was trying to think, Yossi—and really, this is total speculation, and yes, I’m looking at this through my own particular lens—but what could, what might have been in the minds of these people? What did they think they were celebrating? An act of tremendous courage, that here’s an Israeli coming from this thoroughly corrupted society, a society that has committed genocide and won’t own it. 

 

The Germans at least eventually apologized. We are, you know, we have nothing to apologize for. We are today the embodiment of evil. And here’s the good Israeli. You know, there used to be good Germans. Now there’s a good Israeli. And I felt that they were honoring him the way that one would have honored, for example, the members of the White Rose, which was an underground Christian movement in Nazi Germany. They were all beheaded. These were the heroes that the filmmakers are in the tradition of the White Rose. And so this is, for me, I’m watching this and I’m just feeling sick.

 

Donniel: It’s interesting. So we’re doing the first round, very immediate, and it’s interesting. 

 

Yossi: Does that speak to you at all? 

 

Donniel: This, the Germans—

 

Yossi: Never mind the Germans.

 

Donniel: But the first thing that I related to  was also the standing ovation. And it’s interesting, even in your first response, you have an articulate historical correlation. This is when Yossi is doing just spontaneous—

 

Yossi: Of exactly—no, no. For me, for me—

 

Donniel: It goes straight, you know? This is your immediate world of association.

 

Yossi: Speaking from—

 

Donniel: Your kishkas. 

 

Yossi: Yeah, okay. Speaking from the kishkas. 

 

Donniel: This is your immediate thing. It comes out as a history lesson. Great. I can’t wait to hear the second round, like as we get deeper and deeper, because this was already very, very thick. Because I didn’t sense—I don’t have any Nazi Germany associations. But that 25-minute standing ovation, first of all, I’m committed never to go to the festival. It’s like, again, I’ve had standing ovations a couple of times in my life after about 15, 20 seconds. Even my mother, of blessed memory, is embarrassed. You know, it’s like, okay.

 

Yossi: Well, now they’ve set a new standard for standing ovations. Anything less than 25 minutes is an insult.

 

Donniel: But the point is, what are you afraid of? Like, and part of me is, it was a declaration—in many ways, I don’t know if I want to say a declaration of war—but a declaration of disgust of Israel. That’s what it was, independent of the movie. Like, this is, we are standing up now and declaring our disgust. And if you don’t show your disgust well enough, it’s like you sin if you only have 22 minutes of disgust.

 

There was that dimension. My first response—and we’ll get into the movie in the second response—is I also, it was just this theater was also a deep expression of the loneliness and the alienation of Israelis. So my first response was not even the movie. Now we’re going to get to the movie, Yossi, what was your second response as you think about the movie? But before even the movie, this environment, and I think about how quickly things have changed and how almost the obligation to be disgusted by Israel exists in certain sectors in the world.

 

It’s not anti-Semitism. It doesn’t have that dimension. It has a moral self-righteousness. It’s a—I think it comes from a different place, but that you are, if you’re a moral person, you’re obligated to be disgusted by Israel, and you have to show that you are, that you are as seriously disgusted to the extent that you’re going to do a 25-minute standing ovation. 

 

And it was lonely. There was a sadness that was associated with that, and a sense of alienation also from the people in the room, regardless of what you think about the movie and what you think about Israel. Just that degree had a—you were speaking about a fascist, Stalinist—it had a fanatic dimension to see the hatred, the demonization of Israel at that level of fanaticism. And it’s one thing to criticize, but 25 minutes? That was the first level. That was like my first, second, and the sadness. Let’s now delve into the movie, and let’s—what was your second perspective?

 

Yossi: So, thinking about the film itself, I felt it was a missed opportunity, a profound missed opportunity for Israeli society. We desperately need a conversation here on what might have gone wrong. And I—and I’m still phrasing it as a question because I don’t know, and most Israelis don’t know. We don’t have anywhere near a total picture. What we all, or most of us, do sense is that the total picture that’s being presented in that film is a lie.

 

And so the question that we have to start confronting is: did we abuse the category of, as you call it, collateral killings, which is an inevitable category in any war, even more so in a war under the conditions that the IDF had to fight, where we’re fighting an enemy that doesn’t wear uniforms, that deliberately blends in with civilian society, that takes over civilian infrastructure like hospitals.

 

And generally, when Israelis discuss the question of collateral damage, it ends there. But there’s a next step. Yes, I think most of us accept the fact that there is no way around some collateral damage, and maybe under the conditions in which we were fighting, a great deal of collateral damage. But does that cover everything? Does it explain all the decisions?

 

And when you come to us with a blanket indictment—and now, again, I haven’t seen the film, so I don’t know whether he’s making an explicit connection with genocide or just implied, but clearly from the reaction that we’ve seen so far—

 

Donniel: Implied is enough.

 

Yossi: Exactly, that’s what’s being conveyed. You’ve shut down conversation. You’ve lost us. And that’s why, you know, it’s so interesting because initially I thought, you know, we’re having this conversation when no one has even seen the movie yet. Then I thought, well, we’re actually right to be responding viscerally with such contempt and rage because we understand what the move is, right?

 

Donniel: My second stage, I was aware of something happening to me that I know is profoundly unproductive. Because in Hartman parlance, we have a category called X-happened in educational analysis, and one that we’re now working extensively together on updating it, is: how do you respond when somebody says to you something immoral happened under your watch or by you? We called it X. So the classic X was, “Was there a Nakba or not?” And now we have brand new X’s: genocide, apartheid, colonialism. There’s something immoral that you’re doing. And how do you respond? 

 

Now, the classic response of advocacy, which we have seen to be educationally unproductive, is what our colleague Yehuda Kurtzer called historical disputation.

 

Yossi: Outright denial. 

 

Donniel: It didn’t happen, right? Someone says, “X happened. You’re committing genocide.” Our response is, “Genocide didn’t happen.” And we could respond to that with the legal definition. You know, like, as Tal has lectured to us, and we are all now experts, genocide means ABC. It’s an intent to destroy in all or in part a society or all of the above. And without the intent category, it’s irrelevant.

 

And if all of you read in the Wall Street Journal, just, you know, it’ll be in your show notes, how they’re trying to now change the category of genocide so that you don’t need to have intent so that they could then accuse Israel. You know, well, Amnesty International did something very similar with apartheid. They shifted apartheid from being about racial separation to a war between—

 

Yossi: So we know.

 

Donniel: So X happened. One of the responses of those who are very committed is, “It didn’t happen.” It didn’t happen, and there’s all these explanations of how it didn’t happen. There’s other ways to defend yourself. There’s moral justification. There’s, “It happened, but it wasn’t my fault.” There’s realism. “It happened, but it’s inevitable. This is war,” or whatever. “This is reality. The real world functions this way.” And the last category is accountability. Yes, it happened, and I have to deal with it, which is what you are saying about what we eventually have to do in the war in Gaza.

 

Yossi: Yeah. We at least first need to understand what happened. Did something go wrong? And to address, and to have room for that conversation.

 

Donniel: But the first thing, as this was presented, I went, “It didn’t happen.” Like, I watched the minute—I watched the minute-and-the-minute video clip showcasing the movie. It had two features to it. One was this anonymous person who you don’t see. Therefore, in other words, there’s no way to validate anything in this documentary. None whatsoever. You don’t see the people. You don’t know who they are. There’s no way for you to follow up. It’s all live interviews. There’s no factual documentation, which is—it has its own interesting story.

 

One was a soldier saying, “Yes, we were given permission to kill a Hamas terrorist.” And we asked, “Till what number?” Even till 500.

 

Yossi: 500 civilians. 

 

Donniel: So here it is: collateral killing, 500 to 1, is kosher.

 

And everyone in this country knew that’s a lie. Everyone knows, because first of all, if that had happened, then the number of casualties—not over a three-year or a two-year-and-a-half-year period of war—it would have, the numbers would have been astronomical. Like, they grew by 10, 20, 100 constantly, with tens and tens of bombs. We bombed the amount of bombs, the amount of targets that were in the tens of thousands. And if that was a ratio, you’re talking hundreds of thousands.

 

And we know, like we remember, we know that the condition of collateral killing was different in the war of Gaza than it was in the past. We know that, and it shifted, and for that we do need to have an accountability. We have to talk. Was it justified? Was it not justified? You know, was it necessary to bring back deterrence? Was it necessary for the context of their hiding in behind their civilian population? All of the above is a conversation that I wish we would actually have, which is your stage two.

 

But once he said 500—was they asked him, “To what number were you allowed?” “500.” Immediately I said, “Didn’t happen.” Like, I don’t have to—the movie became irrelevant to me. Like, the first didn’t happen. I don’t even have to think about it. And people know me. I know things that have happened. I know. You say you don’t know, and it’s fair enough. I’m not saying—I’m not saying that therefore everybody else has to agree with me. I know that things have happened. I think most of the world knows that profound things have happened. But this didn’t happen. And so immediately I said, this movie is uninteresting.

 

And then the second stage of this little video clip—and look it up on YouTube. Look up Naza on YouTube and you’ll see it—is they—the proof is that there’s a soldier saying that for every apartment in Gaza, every single house and apartment, there is a file for if we bomb it, what will be the number or the extent of collateral killing that will happen? And this was evidence that Israel was embracing it, when in fact that’s a proof of the opposite.

 

Yossi: That’s right.

 

Donniel: Because, wow, we actually have someone who went to the effort to actually count and to see what will be the price. Now, if I want to commit genocide, bomb away. Like, we actually—there’s a file to—

 

Yossi: That’s a crucial point, how much effort it is to actually put together this data and then to basically supply room for a conversation.

 

Donniel: So I’m looking at this and I’m saying this is evidence of our moral failure.

 

Yossi: And I’m saying what’s—it’s the opposite.

 

Donniel: So I was in this strange place because I want a conversation about Israel’s policy on collateral killing. I don’t believe that Israel committed genocide in the sense of trying to kill masses of people. I do believe that there were leaders in the Israeli government who are still there today who want all Gazans gone. And if all Gazans are gone and they have the intent to do so, that intent constitutes genocide. 

 

Genocide is not a function of how many people you kill. If you want to destroy this, but in the army, in the actions of the army, in pursuing the war, was there the—was there an intent to do? I don’t believe there was. I don’t believe there was. I believe there might have been some governmental, certain ministers, all of the above.

 

Yossi: The point you’re making is really important, and I just want to linger on it for a moment, because when you build your argument around an Israeli conversation that’s really a debate about collateral damage, the moment you’re in that parameter, you’re in that conversation. You’re not in a genocide conversation.

 

Now, you could abuse it. Yes, we can argue about whether we abuse the category of what you and I are calling collateral killings. And that’s the crucial conversation we need to have. But when you take that conversation and turn it into its opposite, which is an indiscriminate—it’s the exact opposite.

 

So I’m watching it, and then I found myself in a very psychologically complicated place for me to be in. Right? Because I’m all in. I, unlike so many people, actually even like most people, I embrace all criticism.

If someone criticizes me, I don’t want to waste it. I don’t want to get into, “Who are you? Do you have it? Is it right? Is it wrong?” It’s just like, I don’t want to embrace it as right. I just want to embrace it as something that I have to take into account.

But with this movie, I found myself, like, from the beginning just shutting down. And then the gap between me and the 25-minute ovation, or—and then many people around the world—and I’m all in for a moral conversation, it’s like I found myself profoundly frustrated with myself, but I didn’t want to change because this movie was over for me. Like, it was a morally insignificant event.

Yossi: Now, what you’re describing, Donniel, is a textbook case of how not to galvanize the society to have a moral introspective conversation. And, you know, we’re speaking in the period between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. This is the most intense period of the Jewish year for self-introspection.

And for this film to come out—it came out on Rosh Hashanah—for this film to come out now, at a time when really so many Jews were examining our individual acts of wrongdoing, and then you get hit in the face with this.

And again, I come back to what I said earlier about a missed opportunity and what a squandered moment this is, especially on the calendar, the Hebrew calendar.

And there’s another element here that’s something I want to pick up on what you were saying a moment ago, which is that you’re open to criticism no matter what the source. In this particular case, I think the source matters because—and again, you touched on this earlier—we have no way of verifying any of these accusations. Everything’s anonymous, and the incidents themselves are vague enough so that we don’t know how to verify.

In a case like that, you really need to trust the filmmaker. You need to trust the messenger because I don’t know who these other witnesses are. And what I know about this filmmaker is that he comes from the anti-Zionist Israeli fringe.

And I saw an interview with him recently where he was speaking in Arabic to a Middle Eastern audience, and he was saying, “My goal is to help the Palestinians, even the power differential with Israel.” And the way to do that is by getting the world on their side. My goal is to galvanize world opinion.

So I see this is a guy who’s not coming with clean hands. He has an agenda, agree with the agenda or not, but how can I trust him when he’s produced a film that I have no way of verifying and his motives are unclear?

Donniel: I think your argument is very strong. I just never—it’s interesting, I never make that argument. But I’m not attacking it because you’re right in this case. Who are we trusting here? So, it’s like one thing, you know, if Kristof—

Yossi: I can’t trust the witnesses because I don’t know who they are. 

Donniel: It’s one thing Kristof says something. So then everybody could attack Kristof. Like, your first thing is, well, who’s Kristof? You remember we had this, you know, “Who’s Kristof? Who is he?” And then, “Oh, don’t you know he writes all these things that aren’t verified,” and blah, blah, blah. But some of the things he does are serious. Oh, no. 

Yossi: Let’s not go back to—

Donniel: No, no, but I’m not. But I’m saying, but like, that’s an example. Okay, but he made specific claims. And so if empirically you can’t train a dog to rape a person, that’s actually something that’s worth—like, there’s a claim that I could—

Yossi: Right. 

Donniel: So, I also, in general, I hate the ad hominem attacks. You know, “Who are you? How could you do it? Are you against me from the beginning? Could I trust you?” Even though I accept that in this case it’s different because there’s no way to validate anything. It’s just—

 

Yossi: And you know, how is it that he couldn’t find even one former member of the intelligence unit who’s ready to go on camera?

Donniel: Okay. First of all, we don’t know. None of us have seen them, but there’s ostensible, there is—there’s nobody. It’s all anonymous.

Yossi: Everything’s anonymous. 

Donniel: All of those are great, but it’s like I’m in a strange place because I don’t want to do that, right? It’s like—and I don’t want to do it about this issue. I don’t want to do it about this issue.

Yossi: Especially about the issue.

Donniel: Especially about the issue, because I think this is a—I think Israel used certain self-defense arguments to relax the category beyond where it should have been relaxed, you know? And we have so many examples that we’ve seen. You know, there’s a camera that’s filming us, so it’s endangering us. So, let’s fire a tank to take out the camera, and 12 journalists or aid workers get killed, you know, like in here.

So, like, we know something in the operational ease of pulling a trigger was wrong in Gaza. Doesn’t mean it was all wrong. Doesn’t mean the war was unjust. It doesn’t mean we’re committing genocide. It just doesn’t matter. There was stuff.

And here I’m finding myself in a place that I’m not—it’s not natural. And then when I’m looking at the way—I know, as our colleague, you know, we were talking about this before in our research seminar—as our colleague Elana Stein said, this is going to be required watching in every campus, and then it’s going to be fact.

And here I want to add the other dimension: not only am I frustrated with myself, even though it’s interesting, this was, like, for me, it was just self-evident. 

Yossi: There’s no greater indictment of this film than the fact that Donniel Hartman is coming out against it.

Donniel: I don’t, I don’t hold—I don’t hold myself in such high regard that there’s no greater—

Yossi: But allow me to.

Donniel: Okay. Thank you very much. It’s much appreciated. But what’s even more frustrating for me is to know how futile this is. And this is an even deeper sadness than the 25-minute ovation, because it’s going to be shown and it’s going to become like Bible, and precisely because it can’t be refuted. That’s what religion is.

Religion, one of its greatest strengths is that no religion worth its salt offers a claim that’s refutable. To survive as a powerful religion, everything has to be, you know, it’s just—you can’t refute it. It’s my belief, and you can go, and so here it is. You can’t refute it. It’s going to be scripture.

Yossi: And the messenger is Israeli.

Donniel: That’s your thing. I don’t care if it’s Israeli. It’s just—

Yossi: No, I’m saying that will add to the credibility.

Donniel: Ah, that’s interesting. That’s interesting. I accept that. But even if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t matter if this became, through this little film—or this big film festival—this 80-minute video, unverifiable, with flaws abound, is now going to be sacred doctrine. And I know that sacred doctrine, when your primary defense is historical disputation, you’re irrelevant.

Yeah. And so there’s a sadness of, they got us for what? Like, they got us. And that was my second round, and maybe my third round.

Do you have another round of this? It’s a big deal because then you wonder, you know—and again, I want to quote my colleague Yehuda Kurtzer. And I’m quoting, you have to know, one of the great blessings of our work is we get to sit in a research seminar together every week for a couple of hours with you know, you and I and Yehuda and Elana and Masua Sagiv and Tomer Persico, a whole team of people, and a whole group where we learn from each other.

And one of the things that Yehuda mentioned—and maybe that’s the reason why I shifted here—is that this is part of this. This isn’t a movie. This is part of the assault. This is part of the multifront war that we’re engaged in.

And in a multifront war, you respond to it very, very differently. It’s not maybe this, because this wasn’t criticism. Maybe this is just part of that war. The film is an act of war.

So it’s like, it’s an interesting feature. Do you have, you know, let’s do one last round, because each one of these has such a deep effect on Israeli society. Do you have another level of response that you wanted to share?

Yossi: Yeah. There’s something that this film points to about how Israel has been—how this war has been critiqued, which—and this film is an extreme example of it, but it’s a pattern that you see running through much of the extreme criticism against Israel, and that is erasing Hamas from the equation.

This is not a war that Israel fought against a terror regime. It’s a war that Israel declared against the civilian population. And you saw this very strongly in the work of Omar Bartov. Omar Bartov is the Israeli-born, once again, Holocaust historian, who wrote a series of op-eds for The New York Times that were seminal in helping frame the conversation and helping lay the ground to accuse Israel of genocide. 

Donniel: Is he the one who says, “I’m a genocide expert”?

Yossi: Yes.

Donniel: He’s the one who always says, “I’ve researched genocide. I am aware, and therefore.”

Yossi: No, no.—it’s actually what he says is, “I’m a Holocaust expert and I know genocide when I see it.” 

And what’s so striking in his work on Gaza is that he doesn’t deal with the battlefield conditions. This is not a battlefield. It’s a killing zone. And yes, a Holocaust historian would look at killing zones. But how do you look at a war and erase the battleground? And so it’s not there. And I’ve started reading his book. Hamas is almost an afterthought.

Donniel: I noticed you said “started reading.” You probably put it—

Yossi: It’s really hard for me to get through this stuff. I need a research assistant to sum it up for me, to give you the cliff notes. Really, it’s painful. It’s actually sometimes physically painful to read this stuff, and not for the reasons that they were hoping it would be painful to read.

And so here again, where’s Hamas? Where are the hundreds of kilometers of tunnels? Where are the thousands of booby-trapped apartments? It’s not there. And so the eraser required to get to these conclusions, the systematic eraser of the other side, is, I think, a crucial part of this. And this film, it seems to me, is really in some ways the peak expression of that.

Donniel: You know, my last—and what this will conclude response was, or experience of the movie, was the Israeli response to it.

First of all, the extensive conversation, the declaration of the minister of culture that we’re going to withdraw the citizenship of the directors, as if they could do that. It’s just—you can’t take away people’s citizenship. It just doesn’t matter.

But the unproductive response, not only that X didn’t happen, just as a sadness to its lack of effectiveness, because facts should matter. And to know that we’re in a world where facts don’t matter is a profoundly frightening place, not just for Israel, just in general. The whole world is just a strange place. But it wasn’t just that. It was, again, the Israeli return to anti-Semitism. And that’s not to say that there aren’t anti-Semitic dimensions to it.

Yossi: You mean as our default response?

Donniel: And that doesn’t mean, you know—and I think a Jew could be anti-Semitic. Like, you know, they could, as you said. I don’t—it’s like, if there’s a definition, there’s certain categories, you know, it’s to turn a Jew or Israel into the evil doer. I don’t care who does it. Anti-Semitism could exist even if it comes from a Jew.

It doesn’t make it kosher, you know. And it might be—and some of the people in Venice at the film festival might have been anti-Semitic. I have no idea. I’m not sitting here. I don’t know. But this—the frustrating return—constantly to ascribing everything to anti-Semitism. And I hope I’m not insulting your upbringing, but, like, it is just so ineffective. It’s not good for us. This goes to your second point. It just shuts us down, but it just makes us so irrelevant in the world.

There’s a very interesting article, a declaration by the foreign minister, I think of Norway, is it? Where he said, you know, and they’re considering now turning assistance of anybody who does any trade with settlements into a criminal act punishable by three years in prison. 

I don’t want to get into the nature of that. That’s a whole other conversation.

Yossi: Which we should have at some point.

Donniel: We should have, to talk about what Miliband’s—I recommend that everybody read Miliband’s speech, and there’s a whole thing for the foreign minister of England. Maybe we could also—we should put that also in the show notes. These are important things to read. 

But he said something. He said, for years Israel has been able to intimidate us by saying that you are an anti-Semite when you criticize Israel’s violations of international law. And in a profound statement, he said that defensive shield which has enabled you to intimidate us, that defensive shield is now gone. Now our challenge is there’s actually, at a time where anti-Semitism is growing, and at the same time it’s becoming less effective as a tool. 

And when I look at my country, you know, and maybe Yehuda’s right, this is part of the war. This film, this is an assault. This is an attack. And we don’t know, like, how do we survive in this realm of discourse? And how do we reacquire friends who aren’t going to give a 25-minute standing ovation, but who might have a question? And so my last fear was to look at this movie and to ask, it’s like, this is not an easy time. But what do we need to do? I’m sensing that you want to say something.

Yossi: I do. I do. I actually want to just briefly talk about the filmmaker. I saw an interview with him yesterday on Israeli TV with Raviv Drucker, who’s one of Israel’s preeminent journalists, very thoughtful, and it was a real interview and not a frontal attack. It was really trying to understand what the film is about, whether the filmmaker considered all of the different angles, why did you leave out, for example, comparing how Israel waged this war with other armies in similar situations?

And I want to have two opposite thoughts about the filmmaker. One is how childish he is, and he could not have hoped for a softer interview from an Israeli journalist. Drucker was really fair with him, and he was so thin-skinned. He kept saying to Drucker, “Well, go make your own film if you don’t like—if you think I left this out.” What? That’s just a childish answer.

But the other response that I had was, this is an Israeli kid. And what touched me, despite myself—I did not want to be moved by him—but he said, Drucker asked him, “Are you worried about coming back to Israel?” And he said, “Of course I’m worried. Israel’s my home. I want to continue living in Israel.” And suddenly it just hit me: this isn’t a self-declared enemy of Israel. This is one of our kids. And I think he’s really gone off in a deep way, and he’s done enormous harm to us.

But I suddenly felt protective toward him because we know what he’s coming back into. He is now the most hated person in the state of Israel. There are people in this country who are literally unhinged by the last three years, and I’m reading responses by former hostages that worry me. People are raging against this kid who has done enormous damage to us. So it’s like, this movie has activated something.

And I’m, first of all, so I’m worried about two things. I’m worried for his physical safety because this is not the society that we hope for, where even extreme critics, even extreme deviants, are exposed to violence. So I’m worried for him, and I’m worried for us. I’m worried what this is bringing out in us.

Donniel: Oy, to say, “May you live in interesting times.” Naza: When a Film Is the News, and when the film activates everything, different dimensions of each one of us.

Stay tuned, my friends. Yossi, it was a pleasure being with you.

Yossi: Great to be with you.

Donniel: And maybe I’d like to wish all of our audience again a good year. G’mar Chatima Tova, everyone.

Yossi: Shana Tova, everyone.