(Sept. 20, 2026 / JNS)

Imagine for a moment if a far-right U.S. filmmaker made an anti-black documentary with a variation of the “N”-word as the title, but without the “r” at the end.

The moral equivalent of such an obscene racist swipe, though aimed at another historically oppressed minority, was used in the title of a documentary written by the Israeli filmmakers Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham, and produced by The Guardian newspaper. This adds to the genre of pseudo-investigatory propaganda films alleging atrocities by the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza.

The film is called “NAZA,” based on an acronym for nezek agavi, Hebrew for “collateral damage.” Their linguistic choice of an acronym so close to the word “Nazi,” instead of the common English term, was not an accident.

In fact, evidence abounds that their decision to evoke the word “Nazi”—the most hateful epithet used to racially abuse Jews—in the film, which claims to examine “the systems … behind the mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza,” was consistent with the thrust of the documentary.

Though the documentary hasn’t been released to the public, reviews have made clear that it indeed attempts to evoke antisemitic parallels between Israel’s actions in Gaza and the Nazis’ extermination of Jews—a hateful analogy, as CAMERA has documented, that The Guardian has hurled at Jews several times since the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

First, the film was executive produced by Jonathan Glazer, director of “The Zone of Interest” (2023). That historical drama tells the story of Rudolf Höss, the Nazi Kommandant who led the Auschwitz prison camp during World War II and oversaw the mass murder of millions of Jews from 1940 to 1943. It explores how Höss and his family could reconcile their normal life while in such close proximity to a mass extermination camp.

“NAZA” evinces a similar theme. One of the outlet’s own reviews observed that it provides “ambient footage of [Tel Aviv] in all its eerie heedlessness and heartlessness,” as “the camera’s eye” often drifts “across the gleaming apartment buildings, zooming in on glimpses of prosperous lives just 60km from Gaza.”

Elsewhere in the film, an excerpt of Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 masterpiece documentary about the Holocaust, “Shoah,” is seen playing on a screen outside the Tel Aviv Cinematheque. As a review in The Hollywood Reporter concluded, that scene conveys that both works “bear witness to acts of genocide,” and that the film shows “the parallels between what happened and is still happening in Gaza right now and what happened during World War II.”

However, the degree to which the film is instructive relates not to any such historical “parallels.” Rather, it illustrates the way in which the reviews are informed by the anti-Zionist disinformation campaign that began almost immediately after the worst antisemitic atrocity since the Holocaust—one which, within days of the savage Hamas pogrom, began framing Israel’s response, before the IDF ground invasion, as genocidal.

This represents a genocide inversion given that the goal of Hamas senior leader Yahya Sinwar in launching the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks was, as The New York Times reported, based on secret intelligence documents for Iran and the regime’s other terror proxies to participate in a full-scale attack on that day, which would lead to Israel’s destruction.

Even beyond odious Holocaust analogies, the film’s premise, much like the genocide charge itself, doesn’t hold up to even the bare minimum of critical scrutiny.

First, the filmmakers never asked the IDF to comment on specific allegations made by 24 anonymous (purported) Israeli intelligence soldiers whose testimony they relied on. While the military has emphatically denied the charges from the film that have been made public, they’re still asking Szor and Abraham for a copy so that they can fully respond.

Further, when asked during an interview by Israeli investigative journalist Raviv Drucker if he attempted to corroborate the claims of the anonymous Israelis, Abraham acknowledged that he did not verify all of the cases behind the alleged mass civilian deaths. He also didn’t push back when Drucker noted that a central claim in the film—that Israel bombed buildings with no terrorist targets—is “simply not true.”

Abraham also crucially admitted that his investigation of the IDF’s conduct in Gaza didn’t explore the question of how other Western armies have dealt with fighting terrorist groups sitting in the heart of civilian populations. In other words, there was no benchmark cited to determine the success or failure of the army he excoriated for putatively disproportionate Palestinian civilian deaths.

Finally, there’s no indication that Abraham talked to other intelligence soldiers in the IDF to see how the claims of their anonymous sources comport with their experience in Gaza. As Lt. Col. Yair Miron, a former intelligence officer in Gaza, said on Israel’s Channel 7, “anyone even remotely familiar with the IDF’s procedures would know that the claims” in the film are “not even remotely true.”

But in The Guardian’s anti-Zionist kangaroo court, both in their news content and their recent foray into filmmaking, Zionists are seen as their misfortune. Thus, the anti-Israel verdict is predetermined, and exculpatory evidence is never allowed to be presented.