Israel Fears NAZA. Why Don’t Our Films Scare Anyone?

Israel, to be sure, has its own special relationship to journalism and propaganda, which a film like was uniquely poised to disrupt. Hasbara, the Hebrew word for “propaganda,” was once an elegantly managed media ecosystem built on the grammatical obfuscations of and BBC headlines, on the one hand, and the self-serious “shoot and cry” films like (2008) and (2009), on the other. In these films, soldiers come close to reckoning with their war guilt, but only as personal trauma devoid of political context. Like most bad apologies, these stories seem like self-justification more and more as they progress: ;;. As Prime Minister Golda Meir once said, “We can forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but we can never forgive them for forcing us to kill their children.”NAZANew York TimesWaltz with Bashir Lebanon It was my first day on the job as tank gunner these terrorists keep using civilians as human shields mistakes were bound to happen

After a few post–October 7 news cycles, however, the hasbara began to crumble, and Israel launched a new stopgap: a campaign of international intimidation, blatantly corrupt media spin by powerful ideologues like Larry and David Ellison, and an unprecedented massacre of combat zone journalists. For Edward Said’s generation, the task of overcoming Israeli propaganda meant outspending and outmaneuvering an elegantly managed ideological apparatus. For the directors of , the challenge was simply finding the courage to tell the truth at a time when Western powers had given the green light to any and all forms of repression, reprisal, and bloodshed.NAZA

For the time being, American film is still contained by its more or less subtle ideological apparatus, rather than outright skullduggery against filmmakers. Recently, the Warner-Paramount merger put a long list of media properties (CNN, HBO, TBS, BET, et al.) on the same path for political reeducation that CBS suffered under Ellison hatchet woman Bari Weiss. The move is a part of a longer historical assault on America’s ability to understand itself or the rest of the world. Corporate media conglomeration was already a corrosive force in American newsrooms, as were the economic pressures that came with the news avoidance of the Trump years, a result of his “flood the zone” approach to political theater and scandal. And that’s to say nothing of what social media has done to impoverish news outlets.

A great effort is undertaken to keep Americans ignorant of certain truths — particularly when it comes to our history of military interventions. And once the job is done, it’s hard to see one’s own country clearly. Sometimes the only way to recognize our own propaganda is to watch how another country’s falls apart.

One glaring difference between the filmmakers and their counterparts in American media is that they took their subjects’ moral crisis seriously to begin with. It’s what gives the film its subversive power. When our veterans talk about their feelings of guilt for their participation in the global war on terror, our media treats it as symptoms of a psychological illness, one with a medical solution. A article from 2024 called “” is representative of the genre. The article spends most of its length illustrating the deteriorating lives of veterans suffering from hallucinatory PTSD, on the one hand, and inconclusive science about a new kind of head trauma, on the other. Questions like, are treated as unrelated asides.NAZANew York TimesA Secret War, Strange New WoundsWhat war were these soldiers fighting? In what region of the world were they located? What were they aiming their guns at exactly?

The soldiers profiled were a part of the US war on the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. Because the political cost of boots on the ground was too high, the US elected for a strategy of overwhelming artillery bombardment at a volume and tempo not seen since Vietnam. The result was an unknown number of civilian casualties. The article begins with a haunting encounter between a veteran and the ghost of a little girl, covered in dust, who appears to him repeatedly in his home, following him from room to room, “[staring] at him with a glare as dark and heavy as oil.” The author states that the soldier thought the IS fighters he killed had put a hex on him, even though the figure haunting him wasn’t an enemy combatant.

Yet it takes the author of the piece sixty-seven more paragraphs to ask what gunners like these were even aiming at. The answer: nothing in particular. The soldiers, from a top-secret special forces group known as Task Force 9, were firing into Raqqa in a grid pattern, indifferent to who or what they were hitting. Sometimes when they would elect to actually find targets, according to the ’own reporting, they would deliberately select “mosques, schools, dams and power plants.” The group, it turns out, had been given “broad authority to use heavy firepower” by President Donald Trump. The article doesn’t spend any time exploring the psychological effect this kind of mass murder might have had on the soldiers or, for that matter, on the lives of the people on the other end of the shelling.TimesTimes

Some Americans might say it’s unfair to compare our veterans to the IDF soldiers profiled in , but Israel’s conduct against Palestine isn’t that far from the atrocities we’ve visited on neighboring countries during the war on terror. The war in Iraq destabilized one of the most developed states in the region and killed as many as a million people, by some estimates. Throughout the war, the US did everything it could to exacerbate interfaith and tribal conflicts — the very tensions Saddam Hussein, deploying his own bloody methods, had successfully suppressed throughout his rule. This US strategy of tension included hiring notorious war criminal as a consultant to train the Shia militias who had infiltrated the interior ministry. Steele was one of the US handlers of the Salvadoran death squads deployed during their civil war, and he shared that experience with the Shia Wolf Brigade, which made a name for itself torturing and murdering Sunni civilians and insurgents alike with power drills.NAZAColonel James Steele

Our military even shared Israel’s enthusiasm for the outright leveling of cities. During the Second Battle of Fallujah, the US forces damaged or destroyed roughly 70 percent of the city’s buildings. And that’s just what we did in Iraq during the war on terror. One could go on about overt and covert antiterrorism operations reaching across the Middle East, all the way into Africa, and the extraordinary rendition and torture program that spanned the entire globe.

The only person in global politics who seems interested in adjudicating America’s war crimes is Netanyahu himself, who routinely invokes Hiroshima and the Allied carpet-bombing of Japan and Germany whenever he receives calls for restraint from Joe Biden or Trump. As long as America fails to atone for its own historical guilt, nations like Israel will continue to claim our example as a legal precedent.

It’s not just our politicians who have failed in this enormous task. The development of the American mind — our education, our culture, even our medical practices — evinces a trend toward mental and historical oblivion. In her recent book, , Catherine Liu traces the history of the PTSD diagnosis as a well-intentioned project by antiwar veterans and psychiatrists to address the unique psychological dysfunction veterans experienced during the Vietnam War.Traumatized

Where they failed, the filmmakers succeeded. addresses war guilt head on in something like a public version of the talking cure, where exploring memories of war and complicity in war crimes is not only therapeutically valuable but politically volatile as well. The doctors who lobbied to include PTSD in the DSM, by contrast, treated guilt itself as a symptom of a mental disease. We often refer to mental disorders like depression and PTSD as “diseases” or “illnesses” even when there is no physiological trace. This use of medical terminology and symbolism was useful at the inception of psychoanalysis to get guilt-ridden Victorians to open up about oedipal fantasies, but as Liu points out, over time this relationship between therapy and the medical establishment resulted in drug companies displacing talk therapy in the search for cures and the development of the DSM from a statistical tool maintained for the US Census Bureau into a therapeutic tool whose use is required by insurance companies. The end result is that when veterans talk to us about their guilt, we talk to them about whether or not their helmets are doing a good job of protecting them from concussions.NAZANAZA

American war films have shared this myopic conception of the meaning of war, which is a shame, because many, like (1978) and (1979), are in fact great works of art made with extraordinary skill and ambition. It’s hard not to feel like some of the effort was wasted, though, when you measure the worth of these films against their own moral aims. Was the point to arrange artistic elements in a pleasing way? Or to stage a drama in a particularly conflict-prone environment? Or was it to change America’s attitude toward these pointless imperial adventures abroad?The Deer Hunter Apocalypse Now

If it was the latter, even the best war films fail. François Truffaut famously stated you could never really make an antiwar film, because even the most horrific depiction of war feels exciting and heroic on screen — even some of its darker moments. There are plenty of anecdotal reports of soldiers amping themselves up for battle by watching the “This is my rifle, this is my gun” segment of Stanley Kubrick’s (1987).Full Metal Jacket

The main problem with these films, though, is their narcissism. The filmmakers never make a serious attempt to understand what it’s like to be on the receiving end of American munitions. Pakistani British novelist Kamila Shamsie, in her wonderful essay “,” shows how rare this gesture is in American letters. She highlights the example of John Hersey’s as the exception that proves the rule. Hersey was the rare American author who actually went to visit the country we bombed before writing about it, and his book is built of six stories that grew out of interviews he did with survivors of the blast. is as concerned about how it would be read in Japan as it would be in America.The Storytellers of EmpireHiroshimaHiroshima

The Palestinians, for their part, have not only always made great films but have made ones that make vital political gestures. Their filmmakers often employ styles that are popular in the international art house cinema of their time, sometimes to better effect than those they’re imitating. (1984) is a great film about Palestinian and Lebanese feminism and struggle in the mode of one of those Agnes Varda or Jean-Luc Godard films that wander between documentary and lyrical vignettes. (2009) uses the loud, ironic design of early-2000s Wes Anderson movies for comedy about an apartment that changes hands between an Arab and Jewish family during the Nakba. Neither film feels derivative of the styles they’re borrowing. The gesture the filmmakers are making is something like butting into a conversation at a party and gently steering the conversation toward what they really want to talk about. This not only has worth as a means of breaking through our heavily propagandized notions; it has a deeper moral purpose of returning cinema to the promise it once held as a means of international conversation, where the meaning of war isn’t personal, psychological guilt but a relationship between two peoples, both of whom deserve justice of one kind or another.Leila and the Wolves The Time That Remains

When making a film as a political gesture, timing is also key. The “shoot and cry” films are often made years, sometimes decades, after the conflict has ended, when the dead are buried, the maps redrawn, and the spoils of war long since divided. There’s little the hand-wringing liberals can do to enforce retribution for the crimes of their state at that point. It’s important that directors Szor and Abraham are making this film now, when there’s still a chance the truth can affect an escalating situation. A thin hope, maybe, but a welcome one in this uniquely hopeless age.NAZA