Chérifat

Was the stunned silence at the end of NAZA's screening our discomfort at the soldier who readily confessed that Israel had committed a “genocide” in Gaza – and that from the outset his goal, and that of everyone he worked with, was to kill as many Palestinians as they could get away with. In his words, he personally used Israel’s military AI systems to oversee the killing of “thousands” of Palestinians. He called this period of his military career “insanely fun”. Another interviewee who was responsible for the mass-murder of Palestinians observed that, not only was he serving in Israel’s most prestigious intelligence unit, 8200, but that he had secured one of the unit’s most prized jobs. He noted how envious other officers were of his position in the automated killing machine. Was the stunned silence our revulsion at the fact that interviewee after interviewee rationalised their participation in the slaughter and maiming of many tens of thousands Gaza’s children with variations of the excuse “I was just following orders”? One called himself a “small cog” in the machinery of murder. Was the stunned silence our unease at the participant who noted that he had been raised to hate Germans because of the Holocaust, but then admitted that he was now struggling to see the difference between what the Nazis did and what he had done in Gaza? Was the stunned silence borne of audience recognition that AI’s frictionless, impersonal acts of surveillance, target selection and execution in Gaza are already being rolled out much closer to home? That clever, career-minded, obedient young people, just like the ones who engineered Israel’s AI system of absolute control, of inescapable surveillance, of unfeeling murder are designing the same automated system of judge, jury and executioner for us? What we see on the screen is the prototype for a new kind of AI-enhanced security state, one that will serve as a Pitiless Panopticon in which we are all prisoners. One where even the democratic pretence of rulers being accountable to the ruled collapses. This is an extract from my latest article NAZA is not just about Israel and Gaza. It’s about the evil lurking in us all. Find a link to the rest in the reply post below ⬇️

I spent three years watching the horror of Gaza, three years writing about it, and three years protesting it. NAZA does none of that. It's an updating of the famous Milgram experiment in social obedience. It's a foretaste of the terrifying dangers of the AI rollout. And it's a case study in the human capacity for evil. If you want more of the *what* of Gaza, NAZA will disappoint. If you want the *why*, seek it out. My full review in the reply post below ⬇️

QED. No self-reflection from you.

That's factor one: circumstance.

Some people are responding to the headline of my latest article on the film NAZA with: "There's no evil lurking in me. It's just those Israeli soldiers." There are two things that make any of us capable of committing evil acts: 1. Finding ourselves in circumstances that, we are persuaded, call for evil. 2. Lacking the capacity for deep self-reflection. Those of us who have never found ourselves in the first situation have never really been tested on whether we have that second capacity. If you're absolutely certain that you could never do what those Israeli soldiers did in Gaza, then you have either done a lot of self-reflection or none at all. We have faced one test already: whether we protested the Gaza genocide with all our might or stayed quiet. But that test is the lowest bar there is. Would we still keep our humanity if we were persuaded the stakes were personally much higher for us and our loved ones, as many Israelis were persuaded in relation to Gaza. NAZA works, at least for western audiences, because on one level it makes us identify with the Israeli soldiers – they look and sound like our own children – while on another it shows the utter depravity of what they are rationalising to themselves and to us. It pulls us in and repulses us at the same time. It causes huge cognitive dissonance in western audiences – the reason most people walk out in stunned silence. That may lead to the kind of deeper self-reflection needed before western publics refuse to allow their leaders to collude in genocide. But it may also lead some, those less able to self-reflect, to entrench in their connivance with evil. We can't blame NAZA for that. The film offers us a chance to open our eyes. But each of us must decide whether we are willing to see or remain blind. If you want to read beyond the headline, you can find a link to my article in the reply post below ⬇️

That's not what I am saying at all. No one is born evil. But the socialisation process invariably inculcates a capacity for evil. Call it tribalism, if that is more palatable.

Probably. But having seen the film, any applause seems inappropriate – and 25 minutes of it more like the audience were trying to salve their consciences.

It doesn't diminish responsibility. It widens it. We are all capable of evil, and we are all capable of overcoming it. It's a choice, and each one of us is responsible for the choice we make.

People struggle with the word "evil" because of its religious connotations. As I said to someone else, think of it as tribalism, if that is more palatable. No, people are not born evil. But the socialisation process invariably inculcates a capacity for evil.

There was a deeper reason why the film NAZA left the entire audience speechless. This film isn’t about the tangible, visible horror of Gaza. It was about something more hidden, something far closer to home. This was about the horror lurking within each of us. What the German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil”. We were stunned, I think, by the realisation that the 24 Israelis up on the screen – each of whom admitted, often dispassionately, sometimes a little proudly, carrying out the most monstrous of crimes – could have been our son or daughter, our brother or sister. The only reason to applaud, as happened at the Venice Film Festival, it seemed to me, was to drown out the still, small voice of one’s conscience asking, “Might I have done as they did? Might my children?” NAZA is a gut punch not because it tells us anything we did not already know or suspect about Israel and Gaza. The enclave’s Palestinian journalists showed us daily the evidence of the genocide, before each was picked off by Israel’s AI machinery – in the largest slaughter of media personnel ever recorded. No, the film tells us something far more shaming. It tells us who we are. It tells us exactly what the pillars of our western “civilisation” stand on. Today’s western privileges were built on a long history of naked, racist colonialism – of greed, of pillage, of slavery, of genocide – that we have never truly renounced or forsaken. Israel continues that tradition for us, both in sharpening colonialism’s technical efficiency with endless, murderous experimentation on a captive Palestinian population and in obscuring our own complicity in this barbarity. That is the reason why it was so effortless for our leaders to collude in Israel’s genocide: to supply the bombs, to pass on the intelligence, to provide the diplomatic cover, to excuse the “excesses”, to crush the protests. NAZA silences us not because of the monstrosity of what Israel did but because it serves as irrefutable proof of our own monstrosity. Our societies watched it all and did nothing. We are all guilty. This is an extract from my latest article NAZA is not just about Israel and Gaza. It’s about the evil lurking in us all. Find a link to the rest in the reply post below ⬇️