By: Julian Holbrooke
(SeaPRwire) – Culture Minister Miki Zohar wants to strip citizenship from directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor after their documentary NAZA won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival last week. The eighty-minute film claims the IDF uses artificial intelligence to pick targets in Gaza, turning collateral damage into a gamified routine. Officials in Tel Aviv erupted instantly. Zohar called the award treasonous. Former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett branded the project a horrific blood libel. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir dismissed the creators as a disgrace. Avigdor Lieberman labeled them enemies of the state. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stayed entirely silent.
The official posture from military channels insists that every strike relies strictly on human approval. Defense defenders argue that dismantling Hamas requires messy urban combat with no magic buttons available. The political class frames the documentary as a cynical bid for foreign applause among anti-Semitic critics. Yet the underlying panic stems from exposing how machine learning handles human termination at scale. Anonymous intelligence insiders interviewed in the film describe target selection systems as insanely fun. That exact phrase dismantles the sanitized PR of modern defense technology. It reveals an unsettling reality about automated warfare pipelines.
Behind the political threats of revoking citizenship lies a desperate attempt to police narrative control over military software. Israeli law permits passport revocation only for severe treason or terrorism under exceptional judicial limits. Zohar holds no legal mandate to execute his threats. Past court actions against critical media like the film Jenin, Jenin or journalist Uri Blau show a persistent pattern of judicial crackdowns on internal dissent. The state treats military secrets as sacred borders. Exposing the machinery behind AI target identification shatters the illusion of clean, computerized deterrence.
The geopolitical pendulum now swings toward severe crackdowns on domestic creators who challenge military telemetry. When algorithms decide who lives or dies in urban combat, software code becomes a combat zone itself. Punishing filmmakers will not erase the existence of automated targeting systems. The algorithmic machinery keeps running behind closed doors regardless of festival applause or ministerial rage. State actors can strip citizenship on paper, but they cannot delete the code that turns human lives into pixels on a battlefield screen.
Author bio: Julian Holbrooke, an overseas international relations analyst who frequently contributes to major European daily newspapers, specializing in defense technology policies and state-level surveillance architectures.