Palestinian Hamas terrorists stand guard at a site as Hamas says it continues to search for the bodies of deceased hostages, in Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip, Dec. 3, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Stringer

Let me be blunt: NAZA is an ugly film, not aesthetically, but morally.

It markets itself as an investigative documentary, but real investigative journalism requires two things entirely missing here: cross-referencing conflicting sources, and an actual effort to verify the facts. Instead, what we get is purely cinematic staging: people sitting in dramatic, moody lighting, speaking like witnesses in a courtroom, telling stories no one bothered to verify.

​This isn’t journalism; it’s stage direction. Even the title itself wasn’t an accident: Whoever chose an acronym that sounds so provocative to European ears wasn’t being subtle. They wrote a headline. And when that headline made the rounds at international film festivals, it didn’t meet an audience looking for truth; it met an audience that already knew what it wanted to hear, served on a silver platter, in Hebrew, straight from Israelis.

​Yet this film is merely a symptom. The underlying problem is far older and broader than our partisan divide, where each camp claims victimhood while blaming the other.

On the Israeli right, the formula is simple: The more extreme the rhetoric, the louder the online echo chamber, and the safer the seat in the next primary. An MK calling to “wipe out Gaza” or another waving a sledgehammer he can barely lift with a whole battalion backing him up aren’t just producing fleeting moments; they are producing products.

They are manufactured specifically for our domestic screens, but they land on a completely different table: the desk of an ICC prosecutor in The Hague hunting for that exact quote to build a case. There, nobody cares about context, and nobody remembers the reality of Oct. 7. There is only a quote, and a quote speaks for itself.

​On the Israeli left, the mechanics differ, but the outcome is identical. A former prime minister casually throwing around the term “ethnic cleansing” in foreign media because it sounds sharper in European salons isn’t offering legitimate criticism; he is signing an indictment. A retired general discussing harm to infants as if it were standard operating procedure isn’t whistleblowing. He is handing out a signed warranty. In international legal arenas, there is zero distinction between an admission of guilt and critical political commentary when it comes from a nation’s own former leader or general.

Once uttered, no IDF spokesperson can undo the damage, because the court is no longer dealing with enemy claims; it is dealing with testimony from one of our own.

​That is the bitter pill: This isn’t a case of one side causing damage while the other simply makes innocent mistakes. Both sides, one chasing base clicks, the other chasing international applause, are torching the very same barn. And the soldiers left to put out that fire with their own lives on the ground aren’t the ones who lit the match, nor are they the ones behind the camera.

​I no longer care which side thinks it holds the moral high ground, right or left. What matters is who pays the ultimate price, and who simply keeps counting likes and traffic.

Itamar Tzur is an Israeli scholar of Middle Eastern history and the author of The Invention of the Palestinian Narrative. He holds a B.A. in Jewish History and an M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies, both with honors. As a senior member of the Kedem Forum for Middle Eastern Studies and Public Diplomacy, Tzur leverages his extensive academic research to provide deep, contextual insights into regional dynamics.