00:00Why is NASA causing outrage in Israel?
00:02The documentary film NASA received a record 25-minute standing ovation at the recent Venice Film Festival
00:08and won the festival's special jury prize.
00:10In Israel, the reaction has been very different.
00:13Miki Zohar, the culture minister, accused its directors, Rachel Zor and Yuval Abraham, of treason
00:17and called for them to be stripped of their Israeli citizenship, a call endorsed by PM Benjamin Netanyahu.
00:23The film features testimony from 24 Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers,
00:27revealing the controversial tactics used by the Israeli military in Gaza.
00:31The title, NASA, comes from a military acronym for the expected civilian collateral damage in any airstrike.
00:37The testimony suggests that Israeli target selection in Gaza, guided by AI and automated surveillance,
00:42involved knowingly killing thousands of Palestinian civilians.
00:4620 NASA, 20 civilians killed for one Hamas member, is the basic benchmark for acceptable strikes.
00:52But one interviewee claims that in one bombing, 500 civilian deaths were approved.
00:56NASA's most shocking revelation is not the massive scale of the killing or even the coldness of it,
01:01but the proficiency, said Mamoun Mushtaha in Israeli magazine Plus 970.
01:06Interviewees coolly described taking lives like a routine errand.
01:09One even likened it to a video game.
01:11The Israel Defense Force denies many of the allegations,
01:14and some of the claims do seem quite dubious, said Ariel Ozzaram on Israel's I-24 News.
01:19According to Hamas' own statistics, the largest single strike during the conflict killed 132 people,
01:24far below the 500 death figure claimed in the film.
01:27Since the interviewees speak anonymously,
01:29we don't know their rank or their motivation for speaking out, said the Jerusalem Post.
01:33Their testimony alone cannot be a final judgment on Israeli conduct.
01:37But attacking the filmmakers certainly does not help.
01:39It weakens Israel's argument by replacing a factual dispute with a loyalty test.
01:43This debate is being played out purely on the basis of emotion in Israel, said Eli W. Kowaz in Haaretz.
01:49The film has not even been released there yet,
01:51but there have already been angry protests outside the home of one of the filmmakers' parents.
01:56Such outrage shows how detached Israelis are from the global conversation about the Gaza war.
02:00While the rest of the world has seen reams of coverage,
02:03Israeli media has mostly averted its eyes from the suffering in Gaza.
02:06Consequently, to many Israelis, the film feels like not just an attack on their country,
02:10but an attack on their reality.
