Giulio Meotti is an Italian journalist with Il Foglio, a Middle East Forum fellow and writer of a twice-weekly column for Arutz Sheva. He is the author, in English, of the book "A New Shoah", that researched the personal stories of Israel's terror victims, published by Encounter and of "J'Accuse: the Vatican Against Israel" published by Mantua Books, in addition to books in Italian. His writing has appeared in publications, such as the Wall Street Journal, Gatestone, Frontpage and Commentary.
The New York Times, which apologized and had to remove after publication an unfortunate sentence from an article on NAZA (the sentence was: “Israelis continue largely to see themselves as victims of October 7"), is the only misstep in an operation chiselled to perfection, with the pro-Palestinian communications machine running at full speed.
The documentary by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, in which anonymous voices accuse Israel of genocide, is a kind of “Merchant of Venice" with the IDF in place of Shylock. The creditor who becomes the executioner. Premiere it at one of the world’s most prestigious festivals and show it to a handful of journalists, film critics and celebrities already aligned with political correctness. Late entry into competition: NAZA is announced in Venice on 24 August.
“Not bringing it would have been cowardly," says the director of the Venice Film Festival, Alberto Barbera.
Win a prize. Beat the applause record. Spark a chorus of enthusiastic reviews that denounce “Israeli genocidal policy." Make sure Israeli politicians and military officials condemn it, with some ministers evoking the loss of citizenship for the two directors. Present that condemnation as further proof of the film’s courage. Ignore Hamas’s enthusiasm for the film as an embarrassing detail; the Israeli condemnation exhibited as further proof of truth.
Thus, once fixed on the big screen, a myth is much harder to dismantle. Now the documentary is hailed in the world’s movie theaters.
Venice was the perfect stage.
Last year it was “The Voice of Hind Rajab" that received a standing ovation of 23 minutes and 50 seconds, later sold to the press as “the longest in the history of film festivals." The film does not take viewers to Gaza, but to Ramallah. The story unfolds in the offices of the Palestinian Arab Red Crescent. We do not see the Gaza neighbourhood from which Hind’s family was fleeing. We do not see Israeli forces, Hamas terrorists, the tunnels, the evacuations or the warnings. The tragedy is severed from the events that precipitated it. The war becomes an abstraction. Responsibility lies only with the Israelis, who are never named. The Jewish State exists only as a faceless, voiceless presence: an invisible force, pure evil.
Meanwhile Gal Gadot and Gerard Butler had to give up being seen in Venice. The former because she is Israeli, the latter because he raised funds for the Israeli army. It seems that about a hundred Italian pro-Palestinian Arab actors and directors did not want to see them in Venice and asked that Gadot and Butler be boycotted. No scandal.
Then NAZA arrives.
24 and a half minutes of applause, just enough time to surpass “The Voice of Hind Rajab," with director Barbera watching the clock waiting for NAZA to set the new record. Meanwhile Susan Sarandon at 79 donned the clothes of victimhood (“I am excluded from Hollywood because I am pro-Palestinian").
The Guardian, a British newspaper with a glorious past and an ideological present, is the film’s main producer and will now stream it for free. The same Guardian that hosts articles by Marwan Barghouti: serving five life sentences in an Israeli prison not because he dreams of “peace," but because he ordered the killing of many Israelis in the Second Intifada. Since 2 January 2001, the day it published an article by Faisal Bodi titled “Israel has no right to exist," the Guardian has made anti-Israelism an editorial badge of honour.
And here the producers of NZA enter the scene.
They are the director of the highly awarded “The Zone of Interest," Jonathan Glazer, and his producer, James Wilson. On Oscar night, Glazer caused a scandal by saying he did not want his own Jewishness and the Holocaust used to justify Israel’s war against Hamas. In NAZA coinciding with Israel’s commemoration of the anniversary of the Holocaust, we see the façade of the Tel Aviv Cinematheque and the programme that includes “Shoah," Claude Lanzmann’s masterpiece.
Shortly afterwards, one of the military figures who all appear in shadow in the film recalls a trip to Poland with his family to honour the memory of his ancestors who were exterminated and then says: “The Nazis were the devil, but what am I?"
A refined blow. The Shoah is not denied: it is used as a mirror for Israel. There is no need to erase Auschwitz. It is enough to reflect it onto Israel.
But Lanzmann, who died in 2018 in Paris, was one of the filmmakers most committed to Israel’s defence and also made a five-hour documentary titled “Tsahal" on the Israeli army.
The analogy with “The Zone of Interest" is taken up by Guardian columnist Arwa Mahdawi in an article published on 12 June this year, referring to an advertisement by actress Gwyneth Paltrow for a residential complex in Herzliya. The thesis is that Israeli civilians living eighty kilometres from Gaza are complicit in Nazi-style evil.
Also involved in NAZA is +972 Magazine, an Israeli far-left outlet which has received grants from the Open Society Foundations every year from 2018 to 2024, totalling $562,900. George Soros’s Open Society has always been aligned against Israel. It is not a conspiracy. It is an ecosystem. This does not prove that Soros and the Open Society financed NAZA.
But the funding and the context are not irrelevant. Apart from reader donations, over the years the magazine that produced NAZA has also received funding from foreign foundations linked to progressive causes (“How we are funded" on their site is very transparent), such as the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and the Heinrich Böll Foundation. The latter is linked to the Green Party in Germany.
Let me repeat: It is not a conspiracy, it is an ecosystem.
This year a film financed by Qatar (a financier of Hamas) through the Doha Film Institute, “La Maison du Vent," instead won the Lion of the Future in Venice. Of more than eighty films in contention this year on the Lido, eight were projects supported by the Doha Film Institute. And here we return to NAZA. Because James Wilson, one of the producers of NAZA and Jonathan Glazer, its executive producer, are also the producers of “The Voice of Hind Rajab," financed by the Doha Film Institute.
It does not matter that Israel dropped seven million leaflets on Gaza, made more than seventy thousand direct phone calls, sent more than thirteen million text messages and left more than fifteen million pre-recorded voice messages to inform civilians of the need to leave combat zones, indicating where to go and which route to follow, or that it used drones equipped with loudspeakers.
None of this matters to those who accuse Israel of “genocide." Who built the tunnels? Who occupied them? Who stored weapons there and held innocents hostage? Who declared that the tunnels were meant for fighters rather than civilians? Not relevant.
The twenty-five minutes of applause for NAZA were not for the film: they allowed Venice’s cultured and well-off audience to reassure themselves of their anti-Zionist passion (but not antisemitic, they repeat, since they always find a Jew ready to blame his own people).
Would they have applauded an Israeli documentary that described with the same meticulousness Hamas’s methods, the 1,200 Israelis killed in less than three hours, the thousands of tunnels dug under Gaza? Would the Venice hall have stood up?
Someone, perhaps. Perhaps twenty-five seconds.
Because, to put it in the words of Soviet writer Sergei Dovlatov, “progressive humanity demands of Israel a noble suicide."
The next anti-Israel applause in Venice will last twenty-six minutes.