It was dreadful to watch, and was excellently made.
Visually: the footage of homes, of rooftops and parks in Tel Aviv—the strange nationalistic rhetoric everywhere, inundating the imagery. Through windows, we see people lounging in their apartments, watching TV, keeping the “normal” possible— at one point the camera catches a pair of hands gently brushing crumbs off a table into cupped palms, the mundane actions of home. Slouched, supine, with little dogs in the lap, barefoot sole slapping the floor as one pads from living room to kitchen.
We witness Israeli homes to be distinct, however, in their imbrication of nationalism, of hatred, of fascism, in their comfy spaces. It glows on their news-aganda screens. They sprawl like big cats on their soft couches, despite Israelis being told incessantly that they are the unsafe ones. They can thus turn every Palestinian home into a node of wartime. The vulnerability and safety of resting, forcing one to think of the ways that Palestinian home is never a place to rest, to be safe, to be privately one’s own. The open hypocrisy of going home on stolen land and having a normal evening inundates every trace, every comment and atrocity, punctuating the rooftops. (I think I ought remember this as a white American, too.)
The journalist’s questions were unflinching. When discussing those who could not evacuate in Gaza, he asked after disabled people, asked if the interviewees felt—if they knew—they’d participated in a genocide.
An unexpected evil that this film revealed: the artificial intelligence called “Lavender”. When discussing the information model that decided which Palestinians to target and strike, it was called a tool—an oddly frustrating misnomer. Most people understand a hammer, or a saw, or a lathe. That could not be said for Lavender. The “algorithms”are not understood by the people that made them, eschewing everyone of accountability as it selects lists of people “tied” to Hamas in some way, somehow. It was specified to be nonspecific.
The thing that enrages me, that made me want to rip my hair out and leave blood on my poor Alamo seat, was the realization that the list will always be posthumously justified. Their categorization, their militaristic affiliation, their guilt, will always be determined after a person’s selection, not before. The model was given loose parameters—whoever’s phone has been in “contact” with something something something Hamas related—and so phone numbers are selected, with the assumption that the computer is a magic box, selecting through something of a higher order, a higher understanding, the guilt attributed not through evidence but through something worse than stochasm, worse than staticism. Through the barest thread of connection, a network that works in seven degrees of separation, making every phone interaction suspicious, rendering EVERY LAST PALESTINIAN GUILTY.
The most prolific killers in Israel are cosmopolitan, “leftist”—according to an interviewee—and elite, in ultra-modern Tel Aviv. They feel distant from the “war,” a whole 40ish miles from Gaza and atop the homes of others, and they believe in their distance. “We’re not Arab-haters,” said one; “But you’re responsible for the most deaths out of any Israeli,” said the journalist. Isn’t that fascinating, and nauseating. The leftist, the liberal, the cosmopolitan, using the blameless and sleek algorithms, & treating Palestinian deaths like a video game.
I wonder why these people would agree to be interviewed. One admitted he knew it was a genocide, and he had no moment of realization about that fact. While in the IDF, he merely took simple joy in “getting the job done,” in it “being like a video game.” He described the destruction of homes, the killing of families, as “enjoyable, very enjoyable.”
They would estimate the numbers they’d killed and, I suspect, wildly underestimate. One man realized he was killing people after seeing footage of 3- and 6-year-old daughters that he snuffed out. An accident of seeing too much, too closely, an abnormality slipped into the cracks of a normal day. Israeli normal, we see, is a nationalistic, empty, supremacist screed. A nothingness accompanied by mindlessness, by a divorce from accountability of all kinds. It is from a white supremacist playbook. It is the flattening of Palestinian humanity, language, into a demonization of PEACE itself, of shared humanity. Supremacists, not sane, will stop their cars in the middle of the road to salute people, for the purpose of annihilating others. Then they’ll get back in their cars and go home to watch more bullshit about how Israel has a right to exist.
It was a good choice, I feel, to end Naza with a Palestinian father and husband, calling for his entire family, dead in the rubble. And it was the worst choice possible. “My love,” he cried. “Salma. My love, I can’t hear you. I can’t hear you. My son, my son, where are you? Where are you? I can’t hear you. I told you to look after your sister. I told you to look after your sister.” I thought my eyes would fall out.
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