It’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

Opinion 

Israel

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

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

 

Fri 9 Oct 2026

 

"The term NAZA distances the operatives even further from what the term stands for, which is itself a mere euphemism"  

 

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.

This 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.

NAZA 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... READ MORE https://www.theguardian.com/global/commentisfree/2026/oct/09/naza-mass-killing-gaza-israel 

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