Trusting your audience: What NAZA could learn from Fauda's latest season - editorial

Two Israeli productions arrived before global audiences within days of each other, both shaped by the trauma of October 7. Yet they approach Israel’s reckoning very differently. The fifth season of Fauda, now streaming worldwide, turns revenge inward and forces its Israeli characters to confront its cost. NAZA, the Venice Prize-winning documentary by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, takes a different direction. Its argument appears settled before its evidence is weighed.

Israeli self-criticism has never been absent from Israeli culture. Fauda itself is proof. The series has spent years showing Israeli operatives as brave, impulsive, traumatized, and sometimes disastrously wrong. Season five goes further. Its central theme is blood revenge, born from the October 7 massacre, and the story refuses to offer revenge as closure. The characters pursue it, suffer for it, and discover how little comfort it provides. Their pain is real, yet the series still allows the audience to question what to do with it.

Trusting the viewers enough to leave judgement open

Serious art can expose wounds without pretending that one moral interpretation explains every decision made under fire. It can look directly at Palestinian suffering, Israeli leadership failures, and the brutality that war produces, while preserving context, uncertainty, and human agency. Fauda has never required viewers to believe every Israeli action is justified. It trusts them enough to leave judgment open.

NAZA asks for a different kind of trust. The film is built around interviews with 24 Israeli soldiers and intelligence personnel whose identities are concealed. They make grave allegations about targeting decisions in Gaza, including claims that mass civilian deaths were knowingly built into military operations. Those allegations deserve examination. They also demand exceptional scrutiny. The IDF has categorically rejected them, arguing that the anonymous speakers’ identities and military roles cannot be verified.

Anonymity does not invalidate testimony, especially when whistleblowers fear professional or legal consequences. It does, however, place a heavier burden on filmmakers making claims of extraordinary scale. Viewers cannot assess the sources’ rank, access to information, direct involvement, or possible motives. When a documentary presents testimony under those conditions, its framing becomes even more consequential. NAZA’s public presentation leaves little sense that the central proposition remains contested.

Treating disputed testimony as a final judgment

The response in Venice only sharpens that concern. NAZA received a lengthy standing ovation and won the Special Jury Prize on Saturday. Festival applause can measure emotional force, artistic admiration, or political sympathy. It cannot verify an allegation. Yet the danger is that the prestige surrounding the film will allow audiences far removed from the operational realities of Gaza to treat disputed testimony as a final judgment on Israeli conduct.

Abraham has already spoken in precisely such moral terms. After the award, he referred to crimes committed by Israel and argued that outside pressure would be needed for accountability. The filmmakers are entitled to reach harsh conclusions. Audiences are equally entitled to ask whether the film genuinely tests those conclusions or mainly assembles testimony that confirms them. A documentary carrying accusations of systematic mass killing should invite scrutiny at least as intense as the scrutiny of Israel it demands.

Culture Minister Miki Zohar’s threat to seek the filmmakers’ citizenship revocation does not strengthen that scrutiny. It weakens Israel’s argument by replacing a factual dispute with a loyalty test. The proper response to disputed claims is to challenge methodology, expose omissions, publish evidence, and demand precision. If NAZA’s case is flawed, the flaws should be demonstrated in public. Israel gains nothing by making the filmmakers themselves the issue.

Fauda offers the more confident model. Its creators rewrote the season after October 7 because reality had overtaken the story they planned to tell. They did not respond by turning Israelis into saints. They gave their characters grief, rage, helplessness, and an appetite for revenge; then allowed those impulses to carry consequences. The result is recognizably Israeli because it refuses the luxury of simplicity.

Israeli artists should challenge the country they come from, especially after a war that has left Israelis and Palestinians carrying immense loss. The standard should remain intellectual honesty even when it unsettles ideological comfort. Fauda’s power lies in asking what vengeance does to the people who pursue it and letting the answer remain painful and unsettled. NAZA arrives with far more sweeping claims and far less visible uncertainty. When art begins with a verdict, audiences should be especially careful before mistaking conviction for proof.