Why Britain's liberal Zionists must watch NAZA

Like many who watched NAZA, the documentary by Israeli directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor who interviewed members of an elite Israeli army unit supplying targets for genocide, I did not learn anything that Middle East Eye had not reported every day for the last three years. That The Guardian is playing catch up by putting its name to this film is good news. It took that organisation two years of total war in Gaza until September 2025, to change its editorial position and recognise genocide was taking place. By that time, at least 70,000 Palestinian people had been killed and all of Gaza had been levelled. That’s a long time for a liberal newspaper to be denying a holocaust. But I did wonder who else should be sitting beside me in the cinema. New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters My first choice would be the man of the people, the British Prime Minister Andy Burnham himself. Was not his first act as Labour leader to apologise for the party’s record on Gaza? Did his Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband not become the first to align Britain to the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that confirmed the illegality of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem? The two men said repeatedly that they "get it". But what did they get? For the first time in this conflict, NAZA screened the testimonies of men and women from an elite unit responsible for selecting targets for the Israeli airforce. By the way, this is only the start. There are more testimonies to come from the Israeli army that set about trying to push a whole nation into the sea. As we already knew, they could hear everything that was going on in each apartment of every block in Gaza. Each mobile phone acted as a microphone. They knew how many members of each family were left inside and what the civilian death toll would be of each strike. They calculated each strike to maximise the casualty rate. One interviewee drew on a notepad how they did it, block by block. The occupancy was colour coded and logged before and after each strike. The genocidal 'elite' Lavender was an AI programme designed to detect "low-level Hamas operatives". It had a high error rate that resulted in civilian deaths, but that was not a defect of the system, according to its users, but a key feature. Abraham said that according to people who have used the system, it marked 37,000 Palestinians in Gaza, roughly one half the deaths that took place. I survived Gaza's horrors. I watched NAZA to learn how Israeli soldiers live with it Read More » The AI programme would trigger a strike when it detected the cries of delight of children like "Baba is home". The men in Tel Aviv could then hear men, women and children burning alive or being buried in rubble in confirmation that the strike had hit the right target. There were long pauses in the interviews that Abraham conducted on the rooftops of downtown Tel Aviv. These occurred when he asked these soldiers what they felt about what they did. One said he did not question it, because he trusted the system. Another said his colleagues watched the screen when dogs ate the bodies of Palestinians who had been shot trying to collect food at the aid distribution points, but he himself could not watch it. But how were the food gatherers to know where the shooting line was? It was marked in blood, the soldier replied in a matter of fact voice as if this was obvious. It did not matter who crossed the invisible line. A little boy appeared on their screens and he was shot dead too. These soldiers represent an elite of Israel’s army and by extension Israeli society. They are famed for their digital skills. It takes a lot of selection to arrive at this creme de la creme. They are not settlers waving guns and sticks. They don’t appear to be religious fanatics. After a shift at work, they blend seamlessly back into a secular city. You can imagine them in sushi bars or yoga classes. They live in and are from the beating heart of secular liberal Israeli society, the sort that prides itself on having built a metropolis on a desert. These are also the very Israelis who would go on demonstrations against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s judicial coup or the shortage of affordable housing. Abraham asked one of them how many Palestinians he thought he had killed. He had to think about that. Was it hundreds or thousands?, Abraham persisted. Probably thousands, he replied casually. I struggled to find contrition in their voice. This is a Gen Z genocide. One even said he enjoyed it. He said he went home happy a mission had been accomplished. Burnham’s boilerplate thinking Back in London, Miliband’s stand against Israel lasted all of ten days. Within that time he had meekly accepted the expulsion of 20 British diplomats, as a response to UK sanctions, and the downgrading the British consulate in East Jerusalem to the diminished status of a mission. Meanwhile, Burnham also quickly tacked back to mainstream, boilerplate thinking. He condemned the Green Party motion that Zionism is racism as "antisemitic". By which historical or moral precedent does an Israel that organises and continues to enact a genocide have a right to exist? So there is a very obvious but urgent question both men should now answer. They cannot dodge it by saying it's a matter for the courts. They cannot pretend they have not heard. If the State of Israel is planning, organising and enacting a genocide in real time and the cream of its liberal youth engage in that project without a murmur, what romantic idealised view of Israel do Burnham and Miliband support? Which version of the Zionist dream is moral? Which Israel passes muster? Did Pol Pot’s Kampuchea, Pinochet’s Chile, Apartheid South Africa or the Third Reich have a right to exist? They did not. It took world wars, revolutions and much blood shed to dismantle them. By which historical or moral precedent does an Israel that organises and continues to enact a genocide have a right to exist? Because one thing is for sure: this genocide is planned and organised. When Israeli generals say they know where every bullet is going, they are not lying. Unlike the US officers that committed the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam, Israeli military planners are not covering up their crimes. A new security doctrine? There are two classes of critics or sceptics to break the near consensus that ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the occupied Palestinian territories is in Israel’s interests. The first are highly informed military or security former officials who have left their jobs and now stand back to look at the chaos. Gaza is not an aberration - Israel planned this genocide decades ago Read More » Tamir Hayman, a former head of the army’s intelligence directorate, who now runs the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), an influential think tank at Tel Aviv University, is one of these. Hayman found ten principles of a new security doctrine which, although it has never been written down, had been put into action over the last three years. One of these is that Israel considers itself permanently at war. Peace is a naive error. "War is necessary, and preventive war is preferable because it secures a significant achievement at the outset. Its intensity may vary with circumstances, but its constant presence is an asset to national security." This is how Hayman summarised the mood. Another key element of the new security doctrine was that any pact with an Arab state was to be considered temporary and tactical because Israel thought they were not real nation states but collections of tribes lacking a foundational national vision. So the Abraham Accords are a sham? The United Arab Emirates, please note. Another principle was that Israel’s security was enhanced by establishing "communities and outposts in all areas of friction with the Arab population, in Judea and Samaria [the occupied West Bank], and in security zones in Syria, Lebanon, and the Gaza Strip". This kills two birds with one stone. It eradicates the Palestinian national cause and "further contributes to the destabilization of the 'synthetic' Arab states". Far from being illegal, the settlements should be considered a vital component of Israel’s national project. And here comes the killer line: Israel can only exist if it establishes the primacy of its Jewish identity over its democratic values "even at the cost of eroding its democratic values". How interesting, but how true. Israel: the 'criminal state' The second category of critics are those with a long memory. The author and journalist Sarah Helms interviewed Yaakov Sharett, the son of one of Israel's founding fathers, in Tel Aviv when he was 92 years old. His father, Moshe Sharett, was Israel's first foreign minister and its second prime minister from 1954 to 1955. The interview took place three years before the Hamas attack but it was prophetic. Yaakov Sharrett told Helm:"Now, at [92]-years-old, I realise that the story started with the very idea of Zionism, which was a utopian idea. It was meant to save Jewish lives but at the cost of a nation of occupants who inhabited Palestine at this time. The conflict was unavoidable from the beginning." What moral values does Israel show that Britain's liberal Zionists are proud to identify themselves with? He added: "I am not afraid to say that the treatment of the Palestinians today is Nazi treatment. We don’t have gas chambers, of course, but the mentality is the same. It is racial hatred. They are treated as subhuman." Sharrett branded Israel a "criminal state" and said: "Seeing the difference between antisemitism and criticism of Israel is crucial. To be honest, I am amazed how in 2019 the world outside accepts Israeli propaganda." This leads me to the second category of people that should see the NAZA film. In fact it should be compulsory viewing for them. Britain's liberal Zionists, the people who persist in the myth that they are life's permanent victims, and who are the first to jump on the bandwagon that pro-Palestinian marches are "hate marches" and that anyone who criticises them or their leaders is antisemitic. These people continue to view Israel as a lifeboat for Jews cast out by the rest of the world. They identify themselves as "Friends of Israel" while simultaneously clinging to their liberal identity. Guardian readers in fact. Whom do they think they are a friend of ? What moral values does Israel show that they are proud to identify themselves with? The Jewish right to self-determination? Really? No matter how many lives this right costs to enforce? Or is it a two-state solution? Not if they took note of Hayman’s warning. Hayman depicts an Israel permanently at war, and permanently occupying all the land from the river to the sea. This is the doctrine of the conqueror who despises the conquered. Such an Israel is no respecter of other people’s national aspirations or claims. The Palestinian national narrative is seen as "an inauthentic Western narrative rooted in post-colonial guilt". Gabi Eisenkot, Yair Lapid, Naftali Bennett - the opposition leaders all threatening a Netanyahu comeback - are of the same mould. Let’s assume Hayman is exaggerating for effect and this security doctrine does not exist. What exists is an Israel that has no intention of withdrawing from Gaza, or southern Lebanon, or southern Syria, and whose settlers are on the rampage, A visiting delegation of European diplomats does not need to be beaten up by settlers to understand that the facts on the ground undermine the foreign policy of every major European power, every UN resolution about the issue, and fortify every case currently before international justice. Either a liberal or a Zionist After three years there surely is enough evidence of the genocidal intent of Israel’s military, political leadership, future leadership and population as a whole. NAZA: Why the world watches only when Israelis document genocide Dr Omar Abdel-Mannan Read More » When a man with an Arab name attacks a Christmas market or a synagogue, or ploughs a van through a crowded thoroughfare, the immediate reaction of the country in which this takes place is to link this act to an evil ideology. Islam itself is held to be responsible. So why do we shy away from using the same logic about Israel and Zionism, especially when mass murder is not the work of an individual, but a whole system? Of course mass murder still needs a cover of respectability. And US President Donald Trump, in endorsing Netanyahu’s candidacy for reelection, has done just that, by describing him as a “warrior prime minister". But the gap between Burnham, Miliband and Trump is not as wide as they imagine. The British continue to peddle the myth that one day, with the right alignment of the stars, and after enough killing, two states will be sharing falafel together. Liberal Zionism is unsustainable. You can be a liberal or you can be a Zionist but you can not be both. Try as he might, Miliband cannot hold the line between an Israel that exists as a legitimate power within the green line of its 1967 borders and an illegal Israel, a permanent occupier, permanently at war with one fifth of its population and all its neighbours. To maintain this distinction, decades after it has been buried by Israel’s settlement expansion, is worse than delusion. It's a political and moral toxin. It's a pact with the devil, and as with other forms of Faustian pact, it brings you down with it. The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.