Propaganda works. And that is exactly what the latest work by the activist Israeli journalists and film directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor has done to Berlingske’s film critic Sarah Iben Almbjerg. The film’s content will send “a chill down your spine”, she writes in the headline of her review on 1 October 2026.
The film is called ‘Naza’, a Hebrew abbreviation for the term that Peter Vedel Kessing from the Institute for Human Rights refers to as ‘unavoidable collateral damage’, which is unfortunately an inherent part of all forms of warfare (and, naturally, urban warfare in particular).
For the film’s international distribution, the decision has been made – instead of, for example, the more understandable English term ‘collateral damage’ – chosen to retain the Israeli title, which to those unfamiliar with Hebrew may easily sound like a combination of the words ‘Gaza’ and ‘Nazi’. That the Nazi angle is intentional is confirmed by the directors’ use of the same type of cinematic devices that the film’s co-producer, Jonathan Glazer, employed to depict a Nazi concentration camp in his earlier film *The Zone of Interest*. The message is that the Israelis, just like the Nazis, ‘lived with what they did’, as is explicitly stated in the film.
‘Naza’ is not a documentary. If it were, an attempt would have been made to shed light on the subject from multiple angles. Here, the opposite is done: a host of claims are made, virtually none of which are substantiated by facts, challenged or put into perspective. The film’s directors clearly have a distinct agenda to portray the Israeli army in a negative light.
Israel is a democracy and thus has every conceivable (and at times inconceivable) viewpoint represented amongst its population. As in our Western democracies, there is an extreme left-wing in Israel that, at its core, hates its own country and its own culture. Here, one can seek a form of identity as a counter-citizen. It is within this segment that we find the film’s Israeli directors, who have a long history of spreading propaganda to the detriment of Israel.
For example, it was the same Yuval Abraham who was behind the false claim that 83 per cent of those killed in the Gaza War were civilians, which journalists from Danmarks Radio (DR), Puk Damsgård and Nanna Muus Steffensen, uncritically peddled in an article on dr.dk – despite the fact that the claim was based on anonymous sources and lacked internal consistency (the statistics only included named Hamas fighters and ignored the many unnamed ones).
In the film ‘Naza’, the participants are once again anonymous, and there is very little information about the positions they held in the Israeli army, or any other details that might help to verify the numerous claims. The descriptions of specific attacks are provided without dates, locations or secondary sources that could be used to verify the allegations.
Furthermore, the film has been produced and funded by the British newspaper *The Guardian*, which is also known for its, to put it mildly, critical stance towards Israel. The film’s purpose is not to inform. It has been created to pander to those who hate Israel from the outset, such as the audience at a film festival in Venice who took part in a standing ovation lasting a full 25 minutes – something one usually finds in totalitarian contexts, and which is reminiscent of Stalin’s Soviet Union or, more recently, North Korea. The screening in Venice was not a normal reaction to a film, but rather a veritable hate fest.
All the warning lights should have been flashing for Sarah Iben Almbjerg, who, instead of expressing scepticism about the film’s extreme one-sidedness and total lack of perspective, context and documentation, calls it ‘one of the most powerful things I’ve seen in a long time’.
By the time Berlingske’s reviewer wrote their review, there were already plenty of sober analyses of the film on the internet, as well as preliminary statements from the Israeli army, which has long since rejected the most serious allegations. So there is no excuse for not examining the matter with a critical eye.
Anyone who has been following the course of the Gaza war will also know that there has never been a single attack that has caused 500 civilian deaths – or anything anywhere near that figure, as is falsely portrayed in the film’s trailer. According to Palestinian sources, only three Israeli attacks have claimed the lives of over 100 civilians, of which the deadliest reportedly claimed between 126 and 143 lives. Could this be a case of isolated breaches of international humanitarian law? Perhaps. But that does not alter the fact that the Israeli army generally makes enormous efforts to comply with the laws of war.
Based on the casualty figures currently available from the war, one can conclude that around two to three civilians have been killed for every Palestinian combatant. It is a tragedy. But these figures are undeniably a far cry from the film’s central accusation of indifference towards – or, quite simply, deliberate attacks on – civilians.
The paradox, of course, is that the Israeli army’s strong focus on the unintended civilian casualties addressed in the film, is precisely an expression of the fact that, like all other democratic actors, it takes its obligations under international humanitarian law very seriously – in sharp contrast to Israel’s enemies, including Hamas itself, which, on the contrary, systematically seeks to maximise civilian casualties, not only on the Israeli side, but on both sides.
Sarah Iben Almbjerg describes another ‘case where they accepted 300 Naza’, that is, expected civilian casualties, in connection with an attack on ‘a person who may or may not be a Hamas sympathiser’. Later in her article, it is stated “how the Israeli military is happy to demolish several blocks of flats to target a single potential Hamas sympathiser.”
These are utterly grotesque claims with no basis in reality. Half of the Palestinians are Hamas sympathisers, or have at least, throughout the war, supported the attack on Israel on 7 October 2023 (at the start of the war, the figure was 75 per cent). Any sympathy amongst Palestinian civilians is by no means a factor when the Israeli army is fighting Hamas. Nor are the time, place or names of the individuals who were allegedly the targets of the operations specified here. If such incidents had taken place, would it not be relatively straightforward to identify them?
How an experienced journalist at Berlingske can allow herself to be misled on such flimsy grounds is a mystery. Yet Sarah Iben Almbjerg is indeed misled. Almost with her eyes wide open, in fact. For she herself writes, as a comment on the story of the 300 civilians killed: ‘They say that truth is the first casualty of war, but perhaps it is more accurate to say that humanity is the first thing to go.’
She has simply swallowed the propaganda hook, line and sinker.
For a critical review of ‘Naza’, I would refer you to the Times of Israel’s analysis or the Israeli Defence Forces’ official response to the film. Then one can conclude for oneself that ‘Naza’ is nothing more than a modern forgery, created with the same purpose as the infamous ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, in which the Russian Tsar’s secret police were said to have uncovered a worldwide, malicious Jewish conspiracy, or German propaganda films from the Nazi era. The latter, just like ‘Naza’, used false accusations, manipulated statistics and montages of unrelated footage to give the audience a fictitious sense of coherence.
So yes, it really sends shivers down my spine when a newspaper like *Berlingske*, which otherwise normally understands full well that propaganda is an integral part of any war, awards five stars to a propaganda film that is thoroughly steeped in lies and utterly untrustworthy. What’s next? ‘Der ewige Jude’: six stars?
Judge for yourself:
