How do human beings rationalize genocide? NAZA provides a chilling look

A scene from NAZA, directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor. Photograph: NAZA/The GuardianView image in fullscreenA scene from NAZA, directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor. Photograph: NAZA/The GuardianHow do human beings rationalize genocide? NAZA provides a chilling lookOmer BartovIt’s easier to blame brutes and sadists for extreme violence. But as we see in the documentary, modern genocides are fueled by people who are uncomfortably recognizable

Werner Best, a senior SS official and jurist who helped organize the Nazi death squads that murdered hundreds of thousands of Jews, is also known for his statement: “We must destroy the enemy without hating him.” He belonged to a younger generation of Nazi technocrats, who despised the foul-mouthed, beer-bellied, brown-shirted “old fighters” of the Nazi party in the 1920s, and believed in organizing genocide neatly and dispassionately. After the fall of the regime, Best escaped justice for the rest of his long life, dying peacefully in Germany in 1989. His chilling statement came to my mind while I was watching the film NAZA.

I grew up in Tel Aviv and have visited there often in recent years. That is why the interviews with 24 Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers, which make up this documentary, felt strangely familiar. The conversations are conducted at night on rooftops, and the camera scans the cityscape, lingering on apartment windows as their inhabitants watch TV and make dinner. The landscape was intimately recognizable, and I felt a natural affinity with those people living their lives. I also recognized the way the interviewees talked – their speech patterns and choice of words. They reminded me of my son, who served more than a decade ago in the intelligence unit many of them might have belonged to.

But the dispassionate, technical and calm tone of the 24 men and women, as they describe in great detail the killing of people in Gaza, who are just as human as those in the surrounding buildings, brought back other associations – with men like Best and his ilk. It is the disjuncture between the familiar and intimate, on the one hand, and the coldly efficient and murderous, on the other, that makes this film unforgettable and an important statement about the world we currently inhabit.

When modern societies engage in extreme violence, they rely on two types of people: those who beat, torture and kill at close quarters, and those who plan, organize and order the killing at a safe distance from the actual gore of it all. Many people prefer to believe the brutes and the sadists are responsible, largely because they are not like “us”. But modern genocide is the product of those who belong to the second category: the technocrats, bureaucrats and cold planners of extermination, who don’t get their hands dirty.

View image in fullscreenA scene from NAZA. Photograph: NAZA/The GuardianThis is by no means unique to Germany or Israel. It was also the case in the Cambodian genocide, in Rwanda, in the genocide of the Armenians, in the destruction of the Herero – there were always those who provided plans, orders, legitimizations, bureacratic apparatuses and technical means, and those who cracked skulls, wielded machetes and fired bullets point blank. The latter exist in any society. But a genocide cannot occur without the former.

Read moreNAZA is the Hebrew acronym for nezek agavi, or collateral damage. As is the nature of acronyms, the term NAZA distances the operatives even further from what the term stands for, which is itself a mere euphemism. One does not ask how many human beings the operator may condemn to death by targeting a suspected enemy; one does not even ask how much collateral damage may be inflicted. One simply asks, “How many NAZA?”

Most of what the film tells us was already known through investigative journalism from the last few years, published in outlets like the Guardian, +972 magazine, Local Call and the New York Times. But hearing from the very people who operated this sophisticated system of surveillance and targeting provides a crucial perspective.

It is a perspective that is rarely seen – intelligence personnel are chosen for their ability to keep secrets, stay out of the public eye, focus on their tasks and keep their emotions at bay. The combat warriors are always more visible. The silent men and women directing the bombs in dark, air-conditioned rooms, get little attention.

But perhaps more important is the fact that these 24 men and women expose what happens when the distance between them and the horrors they inflict breaks down: as they enter the homes of those they are about to kill by hacking their phones, hearing their voices, seeing the photos they took of their loved ones – briefly seeing them as normal human beings before they blow them up. For the viewer, the moments where they grapple with the scale of the killing they took part in are the most revealing.

In Gaza, the amount of approved NAZA depended on the seniority of the target, reaching hundreds of innocent civilians, according to the interviewees. Even if 20 NAZA, which became a benchmark, was applied to each of Israel’s tens of thousands of targets, “you end up with all of Gaza”, one of the soldiers concedes. “I just don’t know what to do with this understanding,” he adds, confronted with the reality of what “accomplishing the task” actually implies after having disciplined his imagination not to dwell on this reality.

View image in fullscreenPeople search buildings destroyed during airstrikes on 18 November 2023 in Khan Yunis, Gaza. Photograph: Ahmad Hasaballah/Getty ImagesAnother operative, when asked if he thinks Israel committed genocide in Gaza, says: “Yes. Completely.” The killing, after all, was intentional and calculated.

Trying to comprehend his own actions, he professes disappointment in himself for taking part in the system. How does he explain it? He admits that at the time, his “hormones were going crazy”. He called his work on airstrikes “insanely fun”; they provided “a sense of meaning”. Was he thinking about the people in the building being bombed? “Zero. Not at all. I’d move on to the next mission.” He rejects the idea that he did not consider the victims human. “We just wouldn’t talk about those things.”

“There aren’t really any Arab haters in my unit,” says another interviewee. “It’s an elitist unit, full of people from Tel Aviv.” There’s no “extreme dehumanization”, he said.

These are not the sadists of the popular imagination of what genocide looks like. They are not the typical supporters of extremist ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. Many are upper-middle class graduates of the best schools who joined prestigious intelligence units, perhaps with the expectation of moving on after their army service to the hi-tech industry. But they, along with the fighter pilots, are responsible, it appears, for the vast number of civilian casualties in Gaza. What motivated them to rain down so much death and destruction? An officer ponders this question briefly: “All I can say is that we’re completing the mission. That was the mission.”

1:55NAZA – official trailerThe notion of killing as “fun” is crucial. Thirty years ago, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen described in his 1996 book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, how German perpetrators enjoyed shooting people in the back of the neck and crushing babies against walls. They were the sadists. The “fun” recalled in NAZA is different – it has to do with the operatives performing at a high level, under great pressure, what they were trained to do, demonstrating their professionalism and efficiency. American drone operators sitting somewhere in the United States reportedly went through similar experiences as they dropped bombs on Afghanistan and Iraq.

There are many explanations for their inability to imagine, in real time, the horrors they wreaked on fellow human beings. Hannah Arendt famously spoke about a bureaucratic banality of evil, exemplified by Adolf Eichmann’s inability, or refusal, to imagine the moral calamity of his actions. This is of course not a unique propensity among Israelis or Germans. Stanley Milgram, who conducted an experiment at Yale University on obedience to authority in the 1960s, noted the phenomenon. When people are told by a figure in a doctor’s gown – or in this case a superior officer – that this is what “the experiment requires” (in Milgram’s case, administering electric shocks to subjects who give the wrong answers) many, though not all, will do as they are told. “You must trust the system,” one man in NAZA recalls being told.

Read moreDuring the Nuremberg Tribunal in 1945, German defendants argued that they had only been following orders. Indeed, within the system that they were part of, what they did was perfectly legal and could be richly compensated. The court, however, rejected this defense. There is such a thing as unlawful orders, it argued, and that notion has also been widely recognized, including in both the United States and Israel. It means that if an order appears blatantly contrary to ethics and morality, one is allowed to refuse it. Indeed, one must refuse it or become complicit in the crime.

We should be glad that the 24 spoke out, even as they admit to having participated in the destruction of Gaza. Their testimony provides unique insight into how ordinary people get conscripted into a machinery of death. After all, in the end, even the most technical and detached form of distant killing is performed, at least for now, by human beings, who think and feel and mostly act just like the rest of us.

Omer Bartov is the dean’s professor of holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University and the author, most recently, of Israel: What Went Wrong?