From Tantura to Gaza: History was not falsified, nor was testimony silenced

The Israeli documentary Naza attracted considerable international media and political attention after winning the Venice Film Festival’s Special Jury Prize, despite not yet having reached the wider public. Following its screening at the festival, the film received a 25-minute standing ovation, an unusual occurrence at such events. The film runs for 80 minutes. Its Hebrew title, Naza, means “collateral damage” that is, the number of civilians expected to be killed or injured when a particular military strike is carried out. The documentary examines the system used to select targets, including the reliance on artificial intelligence during bombing operations in Gaza, and explains the mechanism by which the number of civilians expected to be killed or injured as a result of a strike is calculated in advance. The film draws on a three-year investigation and the testimonies of 24 people from within the Israeli military establishment, including soldiers and officers whose identities were concealed in the documentary.

A similar documentary Tantura, released four years before Naza, did not generate the same level of media and political attention, despite the significance of the subject it addressed and the elements of overlap between the two films.

Tantura was screened at the Sundance Film Festival in early 2022 and focused on the massacre that befell the village of Tantura, all traces of which subsequently disappeared after the Alexandroni Brigade took control of it in May 1948.

The film drew its account from the thesis of University of Haifa researcher Teddy Katz who revisited the material on which his research was based. Katz conducted 140 hours of interviews with 135 Palestinian and Israeli witnesses, although he was subsequently attacked and his academic credibility challenged. Reports that the Israeli Ministry of Defence had concealed historical documents from the archives relating to the Nakba and the role of military operations in emptying Palestinian villages, some of which had already become available, helped spur the making of Tantura and a return to the documentation underlying Katz’s thesis. Following the film’s release, Haaretz published an investigation and called for a search for mass graves. The following year, Forensic Architecture drew on testimonies, documents, historical aerial photographs and other evidence to reconstruct the village digitally and identify sites believed likely to contain mass graves in the territories of 1948.

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Naza provoked a fierce reaction both internationally and within Israel following its screening, in contrast to Tantura, reflecting the change we are witnessing today in the aftermath of 7 October. Israeli Culture Minister Miki Zohar called for the citizenship of the film’s directors, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Zor, to be revoked and accused them of treason. Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir also asked the public prosecutor’s office to investigate the possibility that classified information had been leaked to the filmmakers. By contrast, more than 1,500 filmmakers, intellectuals and public figures signed a statement expressing solidarity with the film’s directors. An article published in Haaretz called for Gaza to be opened to journalists, while another warned against targeting any Israeli who speaks about the crimes in Gaza.

Both films document, through evidence, Israel’s policy of erasing the traces of Palestinians from their land. Tantura exposes how Israel erases Palestinian history from memory and the historical record, while Naza exposes some of the mechanisms through which the Palestinian presence is being diminished today.

The Israeli government’s reaction to Naza also reveals its policy of erasing the traces of crimes and suppressing testimony against it. The directors of Tantura and Naza, Alon Schwarz, on the one hand, and Yuval Abraham and Rachel Zor, on the other, are comparable in terms of their standing, although the latter two have become more widely known following Naza. Schwarz directed Aida’s Secrets, which was screened at Canada’s Hot Docs documentary festival and won the Audience Award at Israel’s Docaviv documentary festival. Abraham and Zor were among the four directors of No Other Land, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature last year. Yet the events surrounding the emergence of Naza have ultimately given its directors greater media prominence and international recognition. Following the events of 7 October and Israel’s war on Gaza, and its extension into the settlers’ war in the West Bank, international reports began increasingly to focus on the term “erasure of the Palestinians”. International sanctions against settler practices in the West Bank also began to intensify, culminating today in a qualitative shift in the international response of a kind Israel has not faced before.

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Since 2024, international reports have increasingly drawn attention to Israeli policies aimed at erasing the traces of Palestinians from their homeland. In early October 2024, a United Nations report entitled Genocide as Colonial Erasure linked Gaza and the West Bank, including Jerusalem, to a long trajectory of displacement and replacement. In February of this year, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights issued a report raising concerns about ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank amid escalating violence against Palestinians, the systematic destruction of entire neighbourhoods, forced displacement and demographic transformation. Another report, issued by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in May, addressed unprecedented levels of killing, mass displacement and the intensification of Israeli control over Palestinian life and land in Gaza and the West Bank, including Jerusalem. In June, Amnesty International issued another report entitled Erasing Everything Palestinian, focusing on the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Bedouin and herding communities in the West Bank. A Human Rights Watch report published in August concluded that settler violence was driving displacement, documenting the displacement of 117 Palestinian communities since the beginning of 2023 and highlighting the Israeli state’s material, financial and legal support for armed settlers. That same month, Haaretz revealed in a report that the Israeli military had formed and supported a number of armed militias operating inside Gaza that raided residential areas, opened fire, broke into and looted homes, and then set them ablaze, with the aim of driving Gazans from the areas in which they lived. This September, the same month in which Naza was screened, the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem issued a report entitled Israel’s Systematic Dismantling of Palestinian Collective Life in the West Bank, drawing on the testimonies of more than 2,000 Palestinians collected over three decades. The title of B’Tselem’s report perhaps recalls the systematic dismantling of Palestinian collective life in Palestine before and after 1948, in Gaza, and indeed within the territories of 1948 themselves.

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Palestinian society inside Israel is also subjected to a different form of violence, but one that serves the same objective of dismantling Palestinian collective life. More than 200 Palestinians are killed each year, particularly since 2023, as a result of crime and violence in Palestinian communities, while most of these crimes remain unresolved or are not pursued by the Israeli police. This stands in contrast to the situation in Jewish communities. A report published by Le Monde last August revealed how some Palestinian families have been forced to leave because of crime in their neighbourhoods.

Human rights reports and international and even Israeli journalistic investigations have become increasingly explicit and forthright in exposing Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians and linking them to the objective of erasing the Palestinian presence in the West Bank and Gaza, as occurred nearly eight decades ago.

The international response to Israel’s actions against the Palestinians has evolved and become more explicit. In 2024, the Netanyahu government faced a range of American, British, Canadian and European Union sanctions targeting settlers accused of violence, the displacement of Palestinians and the seizure of their property, as well as entities and organisations that support them. Although President Trump reversed these sanctions after taking office, such measures subsequently expanded among Western countries. This year, European countries have increasingly articulated their positions collectively. A joint official statement issued on 9 June 2026 by the foreign ministers of Britain, Australia, Canada, France, Norway and New Zealand confirmed that they had taken coordinated action, including sanctions and other measures, to hold extremist settlers accountable for violence against Palestinian civilians. The statement said that settlers “use violence to displace Palestinians”, that “settlement expansion and the establishment of outposts continue with the support and facilitation of the Government of Israel”, and that, “in some cases, settler violence takes place under the protection of Israeli security forces”. Perhaps the most significant development has been the shift from sanctions targeting settlers and the unofficial entities and organisations that support them towards measures directed at the settlements themselves, with Britain targeting networks that finance settlement outposts. This month, 12 Western countries, Britain, France, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden, issued a joint statement describing the situation in the West Bank as “rapidly deteriorating amid unprecedented levels of settler violence and settlement expansion”. The statement also linked these developments to the E1 project. Britain, France and Canada have announced moves towards imposing trade restrictions on settlement products, following Ireland, Spain, the Netherlands, Norway and Belgium, which had previously adopted similar measures.

Israel has not been able to change reality. Palestine was never a land without Palestinians, and the history of the Nakba will not be forgotten, however extensive the efforts to erase memory and conceal the documents. Nor can evidence of genocide and violations of international laws and norms be concealed for as long as the Palestinian people remain.

The question today, however, is whether these responses are sufficient to deter Israel from policies, actions and crimes that have extended throughout history and afflicted an entire people across successive generations, whose cries today have become a stain on the conscience of humanity.

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The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.