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 ⬇️