newsGAZA AND NAZA: Netanyahu’s men unite against a new enemy – two Israeli film-makers
Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham – calls made to demolish their homes in Israel
While the multi-millionaire pop star Ed Sheeran continues his “Loop” tour of America, two Israeli film-makers are accused of being “Enemies of Israel.” TREVOR GRUNDY reports –
By now, surely, we’ve all had enough of Ed Sheeran and Macklemore telling the world about what is – and what isn’t – happening in Gaza.
The real story lies elsewhere.
One question is –
- What is going to happen to the two Israelis who made the film NAZA, a documentary which purports to tell the true story of Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) and their alleged war crimes in Gaza.
One answer could be –
- Wait and see. At the end of the day, there’s always tomorrow. But it is more than likely the film-makers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor will be drop-kicked out of Israel without a home to return to.
In Israel, both are contenders for the title of the two most self-hating Jews in the fairly short (1948 onwards) history of Israel.
NAZA was shot in Tel Aviv and the actors are un-named men who serve the Israeli military machine. The 80 minute film exposes the IDF role in the mass killing of Palestinian civilians during the conflict.
Produced by The Guardian and British producer James Wilson’s JW Films, the film was selected for the main competition of the 83rd Vencice International Film Festival and was awarded the Special Jury Prize.
Israel’s Culture Minister, Miki Zohar
He descries the two film-makers as ” despicable.”
On 14 September 2026, shortly after the Venice awards ceremony, The Guardian reported that Israeli culture minister, Miki Zohar had used the social media platform X to declare that he would “act immediately to revoke the Israeli citizenship of these despicable creators Abraham and Szor for treason against the state.”
Benjamin Netanyahu subsequently announced that his government would seek to pass legislation to revoke the citizenship of Israelis who “defame” Israeli soldiers abroad, citing Abraham and Szor in the statement.
I haven’t been to Israel since 2000, so what I know comes from reading books, newspaper articles, listening to the radio and watching television programmes.
I’d like to go back and find out for myself. But, as said, journalists aren’t allowed in to confirm or clarify claims that IDF planners backed by powerful AI companies have slaughtered upwards of 75,000 mainly women and children in Gaza since October 2023 when over 1,000 Israeli partygoers were killed by Hamas terrorists and over 200 Israelis were kidnapped and held for months.
But silence is never golden.
Whose interests are served by banning journalists from seeing what’s going on in Gaza?
On September 12 this year, Salman Rushdie said on a BBC radio programme that we live in an age where if things are not documented then they never happened.
But the longer governments hide the truth the worse it is for them when it explodes and blows them sideways into hell.
The Nazis did not document the Wannsee Conference in January 1942 but that didn’t mean the Holocaust wasn’t being planned.
Does anyone with a brain between his or her ears need to know what happened next?
Israel says that it is the only functioning democracy in the Middle East.
When I visited Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Netanya and other parts of Israel I was surprised at the openness of most young Israelis and the way rabbis spoke about what happens when the flames of hatred have been lit and wafted in any direction the fire-makers chose.
Desmond Stewart, author and Arabist
Praise for free press in Israel
On the subject of the freedom of the Press, Israel has some strange bedfellows – the late Arabist, author, scholar and Mosleyite – Desmond Stewart was one of them.
Stewart wrote regularly for The European, a monthly magazine edited by Oswald Mosley’s wife, Diana, from 1953 to 1959.
He travelled widely throughout the Middle East, spoke passable Arabic and only visited Israel at the end of his fairly short life.
In his last book “The Palestinians – Victims of Expediency” (Quartet Books, London / New York) in 1983 he said how surprised he was that the Press was so free and open in Israel.
He did not live long enough to finish this important and well-informed book.
The Epilogue was written by his friend, the Biblical scholar and translator /moderniser of the Psalms in the Jerusalem Bible, the late Alan Neame.
This is part of what he said –
”Those of us who are not Jews cannot begin to imagine the cumulative effect over the centuries of casual contempt, deliberate insult, imprisonment, torture, enslavement, proscription, isolation, forced conversion, rapine, confiscation, deportation, expulsion and sudden massacre of sustained butchery. With such a traumatic past, what idealistic and dynamic people, escaping from the house of bondage, might not over-act and over re-act, driven by subliminal motives and incomprehensible to a culturally distinct, conservative and pre predominantly peasant, race whose overlords these fugitives suddenly become? If we Europeans cannot imagine it, how much less can they at the Islamic end of the Mediterranean!”
Neame said that Stewart had been impressed in Israel “by the freedom and vigour in controversy of the Israeli press: its willingness to protest against the government’s often brutal treatment of its Palestinian subjects. Leaving aside the censorship imposed on the Palestinian press for a moment, where else, he asked, between Athens and San Francisco is free and lively journalism to be found?”
What a tragedy if the only country in the Middle East with a functioning democracy provides neighbouring states with more ammunition to expel, ridicule and then remove the citizenship of men and women they don’t like and who they fear.
Open eyes. Can’t you see them – Arab propagandists scratching their heads, calling for lackeys with keyboards and bank accounts for brains being ordered to ask – “Why should we apologise about expelling critics we don’t like? Taking away the passports and citizenship of people who criticise our armies? Israel does the same and she’s the only functioning democracy in the Middle East.”
These are dangerous days. The enemy is silence and a self-serving belief by powerful politicians that what is not documented never happened.
Author Trevor Grundy in Israel
Trevor Grundy is the author of “Memoir of a Fascist Childhood” published by William Heinemann in 1998 and Arrow Books in 1999. He visited Israel as a guest of Laniado Hospital in 2000 and the following years toured parts of the United Kingdom talking to Jewish students at universities and colleges and religious leaders about Fascism in Britain, Germany and Italy after the Second World War. About his book, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, said it is an important work that describes the poisonous nature of Fascism.