NAZA’s debut at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival didn’t just bring home the Special Jury Prize for codirectors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, it put a spotlight on a much deeper problem festering inside Israel’s security system. For years, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have poured resources into sharpening their battlefield tactics, mastering urban warfare, and building sophisticated realtime intelligence networks. Still, when it comes to fighting in the global arena of public diplomacy, Hasbara, they’re lagging badly. The world has moved on; information spreads in the blink of an eye, traveling along digital highways at the speed of light. Meanwhile, Israel’s communication strategy is stuck in slow motion, lumbering along with the cautious, riskaverse habits of a longgone era. Where fast, flexible engagement is needed, there’s only silence or red tape.
From the start, NAZA makes its intentions clear. The title itself is a jab, drawing from the Hebrew acronym for “collateral damage,” Nezek Agav, and tweaking its sound to echo “Gaza.” Right away, the wordplay signals that the film isn’t pulling any punches. Nearly the entire narrative rides on the anonymous testimonies of twentyfour people who claim to have served in Unit 8200, Israel’s elite signals intelligence and cyber warfare branch. With its edgy interviews and staged scenes, the film paints Israeli targeting as a coldly mechanical process, run by algorithms with no moral filter. Audiences see a machine at work: target lists generated on autopilot from mountains of intercepted phone calls, software churning out civilian casualty estimates without bothering to separate fighters from bystanders, and rankandfile operators greenlit to accept civilian deaths with hardly a second’s thought. The numbers are big and intentionally shocking, tens of thousands of Palestinians flagged as targets, twenty seconds per strike for automated crosschecks, junior analysts rubberstamping casualties before lunch.
But let’s set the film’s factual distortions and cherrypicked legal analysis aside for a minute. There’s a bigger, more immediate failure: how the IDF’s Spokesperson’s Unit responded to a media crisis that everyone should have seen coming. When NAZA got applause in Venice and headlines began piling up, the military chose to play it safe, issuing a dull, stock statement saying they needed more time to review the footage before responding to the details. That’s a staggering lack of preparation. Abraham published these exact same accusations in +972 Magazine and Local Call more than two years earlier, and the story flashed around the world, picked up by The Guardian, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and more.
Israel’s defense establishment had more than two years to figure out a strong, visually engaging counternarrative, one that explained the legal oversight, the need for such technology, and the layers of human review in these targeting systems. Instead, they repeated the same bureaucratic stonewalling that failed last time. Tossing out blanket denials and nitpicking the anonymity of sources doesn’t hold water, not when two dozen articulate, confident former intelligence officers step up in Venice and make their case in front of the world.
Part of the problem is homegrown, and it’s coming from the top brass. For years, Israel’s military leadership boasted about their AI systems and datafusion wizardry, using it as a sales pitch for local voters and international investors alike. Former Chief of Staff Aviv Kohavi didn’t shy away from describing the IDF’s “Matrixlike” computational prowess. Official publications loved buzzwords like “target factory” to show how efficient and unstoppable they had become. But by borrowing these scifi terms for their own PR, defense leaders basically handed critics and filmmakers the perfect dystopian language to use against them, making it easy for outsiders to reframe technological progress as moral failure.
As military communications stumbled, domestic politicians saw an opening for grandstanding. Culture Minister Miki Zohar branded the filmmakers as traitors, even demanded their citizenship be revoked. Prime Minister Netanyahu and his coalition partners jumped on the bandwagon. But the tactic backfired at once. Instead of discrediting the film, the outcry unleashed a flood of international coverage about censorship and intimidation. The filmmakers got publicity money can’t buy. Thanks to this blunder, what might have been a niche controversy exploded into a European cultural sensation, fêted by critics and festival juries alike.
Warfare today is about more than firepower or maneuvering troops. Every weapon and every tactic now needs a readymade media playbook, with clear stories told across every platform, from press conferences to social feeds, the moment an allegation breaks. Israeli combat units are nimble in the field, but on the information front, it’s chaos: bitter infighting, fractured leadership, and a total misread of how fast and relentlessly news travels today.
That’s the hard lesson from the Venice Film Festival. Winning on the battlefield is not enough; a country can dominate militarily and still lose where it counts, on legitimacy, on public trust, on the right to define its own story. Oldschool press releases and bureaucratic caution haven’t just failed, they’ve put the IDF on the defensive repeatedly. When military silence and political bluster fill the vacuum, opponents seize the narrative and turn it against you. Until Israel fully integrates public diplomacy as a strategic, coordinated part of its national defense, it will keep getting outpaced and outmaneuvered on the world stage. The vulnerabilities are real, and the costs keep rising.