Two pieces of Israel-related television landed his month, and between them they illustrate perfectly how the world has decided to see this war. One is Naza, an Israeli documentary that just won a prize at Venice for accusing its own army of “genocide”. The other is Fauda, the Netflix drama that has just done more to explain October 7 to ordinary viewers than two years of Israeli diplomacy managed.
Put the two side-by-side and something interesting happens: the one built to be taken as fact collapses under its own logic, while the one that never claimed to be fact turns out to be the more honest account of what actually happened.
Let’s start with Naza.
This new and repulsive documentary by hard-Left Israeli filmmakers, which uses supposed testimony from anonymous Israeli military insiders to bolster the “genocide” lie, is actually quite good, as what it actually delivers, if you sit through all 80 minutes of it, is a pretty good case for the defence.
The film, co-directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, premiered at the Venice Film Festival this month. It received a 25-minute standing ovation – of course it did – and walked off with the festival’s Special Jury Prize.
Its title, appropriately, is the Hebrew military acronym for “collateral damage”. Twenty-four anonymous Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers described a war machine that, on their account, killed Gazan civilians “not by accident. But by design.” The genius of the propaganda, of course, is that they dug out unhinged Israelis – Israelis! – to condemn themselves (see Theobald of Cambridge).
One person calls it “mass killing on an industrial scale.” Another criticised an AI targeting system, nicknamed “Lavender”. Al Jazeera’s own write-up needed no persuading, covering the premiere under the headline “the Israeli film revealing new layers of the Gaza genocide.” The verdict was reached before the lights were even up, which, as a symbol, tells you everything you need to know about everything.
None of it can be checked. The IDF’s rebuttal is blunt: the witnesses’ identities, ranks and units cannot be verified, and several of them claim knowledge of “national strategy” that, as the army drily points out, junior soldiers are not generally briefed on. A film built entirely on testimony nobody can name, and nobody can cross-examine, is not evidence. It is a very well-edited blood libel, produced by unhinged Israelis, now with a Golden Lion nomination.
Here is the detail its loudest defenders keep skating past. The film’s own thesis, spelled out by its interviewees, is that anticipated civilian deaths were calculated in advance: not caused by accident, but factored into the decision before the trigger was pulled. So the inversion is complete: this is the behaviour of Hamas.
In truth, of course, every target is assessed for expected military advantage against likely civilian harm – as is required of every democratic military – and a strike is called off when the harm would be “excessive.” Naza and the IDF, in other words, actually align, to some extent, on the mechanism. They disagree on the verdict.
Conclusion? A film that spends 80 minutes showing us how Israel does the sums has managed to prove that Israel is not guilty of the very crime of which it is being accused. They’re not very bright, these traitors, are they?
Now to better, if no less sobering, news. Fauda returned to Netflix this month with a season painfully built around October 7 – several members of the cast fought on that dreadful day and in Gaza thereafter – and it has done something no Israeli public diplomacy has managed in two years: it has brought mass audiences all over the world, including the Arab world, face-to-face with the truth.
Episodes seven and eight, which re-stage the day of the atrocities, were filmed by a cast and crew with rather more skin in the game than Naza’s anonymous witnesses; one actor was wounded fighting in Gaza, a member of the production team was killed in the war. They have received an IMDb rating of 9.3.
One post doing the rounds this week claimed that Italians, who seem to get more of their news from box sets than bulletins, were only now grasping what Hamas actually did that day; many, influenced by propagandists like the deplorable makers of Naza, had seemingly assumed that it had simply been a case of Israeli “genocide.” In other words, a Netflix drama has quietly succeeded where three years of official Israeli messaging has failed.
We must treat that anecdote with the scepticism a single viral post demands. But the reaction to it from viewers tells us a whole lot more. Nobody has to verify Fauda’s witnesses, because nobody is claiming it’s a documentary. It is the trick in reverse: fiction that turns out truer than the film claiming to be articulating facts.
Because Fauda makes nothing up. The actors were there on the ground. All the facts and scenes are based closely upon reality and have been verified multiple times; what the drama contributes is the emotional punch and the global exposure to populations that place entertainment far above news consumption.
As Hannah Arendt once remarked, the best art has “so transparently displayed the inner truth of the event that it became possible to say: Yes, this is how it was.”
Consider the two audiences, side by side. One is a festival jury in Venice, giving rapturous applause to unverifiable testimony that confirmed what it already wanted to believe (there was also, I suppose, a small number of viewers who retained their powers of critical thinking; for these discerning souls, the film set out to prove genocide and ended up producing a masterclass in the very calculations that distinguish a lawful war from an illegal one).
The other is an ordinary Netflix audience, sitting at home, watching a drama and coming away for the first time actually understanding what happened on October 7. It set out to entertain and did more for Israel’s case than its own government has managed since October 7.
Guess who is the winner here?
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