Venice prize for ‘NAZA' draws a citizenship threat from the culture minister and censure from the opposition
Miki Zohar said he would move to strip Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor of Israeli citizenship. Liberman and Gantz attacked the film too, which is the part that describes the electorate.
NAZA, by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, the co-creators of No Other Land, won the Special Jury Prize at the 83rd Venice Film Festival on Saturday. The Hollywood Reporter describes a documentary built on testimony from 24 Israeli military officers “outlining the systems and protocols they allege Israel uses to target and kill civilians in Gaza”; the synopsis cited by Haaretz says it reveals “in detail the systems behind Israel’s calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza” after October 7. On Sunday, Culture and Sport Minister Miki Zohar said, in the Times of Israel’s translation, that “as culture minister, I will immediately act to revoke the Israeli citizenship of these despicable directors for betraying the country,” calling the filmmakers' “searing self-hatred” a betrayal. TheWrap, working from a machine translation of the Hebrew post, adds a line tying the win to the cinema-funding reform Zohar says he led so that Israeli citizens “will no longer have to pay from their own pockets” for such work.
The hardest number in the affair is a claim, not a finding. The Times of Israel’s Sunday liveblog reports that the military “denies ever planning or carrying out a strike during the war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip in which 500 civilian deaths were anticipated,” following such claims in the film; Arutz Sheva carries the spokesperson’s phrasing as “the IDF categorically rejects these allegations.” The Files has not seen the full IDF statement. The condemnation was not confined to the coalition. Yisrael Beytenu chairman Avigdor Liberman called the filmmakers “enemies of Israel” and the film “a slanderous account against Israel,” per Arutz Sheva; the same outlet’s homepage reports Benny Gantz saying “revenge was never the purpose of the fighting,” a line The Files has seen only in a teaser. The director told Haaretz the crew will do “everything” to distribute the film in Israel “as widely as possible.”
Assessment: Zohar cannot do what he said he would do. Revoking citizenship runs through the interior minister and the courts under the Citizenship Law; the culture portfolio has no such instrument. The operative threat is the one buried in the truncated clause — the cinema-funding reform, which is a real lever over who gets financed next. Read Liberman and Gantz, not Zohar, for what the day means: both sit in the anti-Netanyahu bloc, both went at the film unprompted six weeks before a ballot, and their calculation is that there is no centre-right vote in defending it. That consensus, not the ministerial bluster, is what will shape distribution inside Israel.