Montréal Informed Comment, – Hannah Arendt’s characterization of Eichmann as representing “The Banality of Evil,” the subtitle of her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, shocked many people. It was later criticized in the wake of the discovery of her protagonist’s antisemitic pronouncements, unknown during his trial.
The new film NAZA, documenting the inner mechanisms of the Gaza genocide brings the concept of the banality of evil front stage again. Except that this time we have the testimonies of two dozen perpetrators who, unlike Eichmann, do not face a tribunal but share their experience mostly in a casual and relaxed manner, some with pride in their accomplishment, others with remorse. They sound like normal middle-class men and women conscientiously doing their challenging hi-tech job. These Israelis embody something different from the Nazis who tried to hide their crimes from their own people, whom they feared would not support them. The new film is about the normality of evil in a society that has largely accepted the genocide taking place less than forty miles south of Tel Aviv.
The twenty-four perpetrators interviewed in the film belong to elite intelligence units that harness the power of AI and total surveillance to destroy Gaza. They are not “Arab haters,” remarks one of the interviewees. Yet he believes he killed more women and children than the fiercest Arab hater. However abhorrent the ongoing West Bank pogroms against Palestinians by Zionist squatter-settler vigilantes taking place under the sympathetic gaze and occasional assistance of the IDF—the magnitude of mass murder of civilians in Gaza is incomparably greater.
The perpetrators come from privileged classes of upscale, glittering Tel Aviv, the visual background of the entire film. Among the leitmotifs of the testimonies are the readiness to obey orders and the delight of overcoming difficult technical challenges (technodélice, as the late Jean-Jacques Salomon defined it). “It was fun (kef),” admitted one of the perpetrators.
NAZA is a Hebrew acronym for collateral damage. The association with “Nazi” is not fortuitous; one of the perpetrators compares his experience with that of Nazis engaged in industrialized, albeit less sophisticated, mass murder in the early 1940s. When, like many young Israelis (and Jews from elsewhere), he was taken to visit Nazi extermination camps, he wondered how these Nazis could switch to normal life after killing thousands of people a day. Now, he admits, he knows. He would meet friends after a day of killing mostly women and children and enjoy his night out.
Initially, neither the Nazis nor the Zionists intended to commit genocide. In their exclusivist nationalist fantasies, German National Socialists wanted to expel the undesirables, to make the “purified,” expanded Germany great again and, in the case of the socialist Zionists in power in 1948 and 1967, when massive expulsions took place, to turn Palestine into a “Jewish state.” Both had land lust: the Nazis wanted fertile land in Eastern Europe ‘cleansed’ of most Slavs and all the Jews—while critics and political figures alike have described Israel’s territorial strategy as a pursuit of ‘a maximum of territory with a minimum of Arabs.’
From the turn of the 20th century, Zionist pioneers laid strong emphasis on breeding the intrepid and valiant New Hebrew Man who had broken with the victimhood of the past. In his eulogy for Theodor Herzl in 1904, Vladimir Jabotinsky, who established and shaped the now dominant stream of Zionism, defined the new creature thus:
Our starting point is to take the typical Yid of today and to imagine his diametrical opposite … because the Yid is ugly, sickly, and lacks decorum, we shall endow the ideal image of the Hebrew with masculine beauty. The Yid is trodden upon and easily frightened and, therefore, the Hebrew ought to be proud and independent.
It was only later, faced with resistance kindled by the settler movement, that Israelis assumed the role of innocent victims, forced to defend themselves. Visits to the Nazi extermination camps are essential components of the didactic tools used to forge hard-nosed fighters. No wonder most of them called the attack on southern Israel in October 2023 “the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.” Totally lost was the difference between powerless Jewish civilians targeted by the Nazis and the powerful Jewish state that had expelled and confined Palestinians in an open-air concentration camp in Gaza. Referring to the violence they unleash, the Israelis often use the expression ein brera (“there is no choice”), which preserves their self-image and justifies excesses. This is how the genocide has metastasized from Europe to West Asia.
The film’s protagonists explain how they use sophisticated technology to survey every telephone communication of the Palestinians. One of the phrases AI extracts from millions of conversations is “When does daddy come home?” This is how the decision is made to destroy the suspect’s home along with his wife and children. Behind their computer screens, those who determine such targets can later hear the cries of those wounded children who were waiting for their fathers a few minutes earlier.
Israel, many of whose politicians overtly advocate and pursue fascist policies, is justly proud of being a world leader in technological innovation, a “Start-up Nation.” Its qualitative edge over its neighbours, guaranteed in American law, involves close cooperation with the U.S. military-industrial-digital complex. Forthcoming legislation will formally embed the Israeli military in it. Unlike Ukraine, which serves mostly as a testing ground for Palantir and other Western facilitators of hi-tech warfare, Israeli scientists and engineers actively contribute to the development of new systems such as Lavender, which are widely used against the Palestinians. All this happens within the larger ecosystem of U.S. financial, material, and strategic support. Not only Washington, Berlin, and London but even Belgrade maintain the lifeline, or rather the deathline, of munitions, materiel, and cloud services to Israel. These enable it not only to oppress and kill Palestinians but also to attack other countries, doing, as Chancellor Merz of Germany candidly admitted, “the dirty work for all of us.” There is little doubt that Merz and his Western counterparts were aware all along of the methods that the new film exposes to the public.
Moreover, Israeli expertise in surveillance and population control is in demand around the world. This portends dangers to privacy and democracy elsewhere. Tools of total surveillance may tempt rulers concerned about potential social turmoil and even revolutions against the growing—and unprecedented—economic polarization. Sprouts of fascism have been noticed in a good part of the Political West. ICE activities to target undocumented immigrants in the United States may be just the beginning. The ruling classes’ need to protect their privilege foments connivance with Israel and thereby contributes to the country’s impunity.
Similarly, the penetration of Hezbollah with booby-trapped pagers, which led to the murder and mutilation of thousands of people in Lebanon and Syria in 2024, shows how vulnerable anyone may become by using deceptively inoffensive civilian gadgets. (NAZA does not mention this gruesome episode, which is the subject of another recent documentary.) Israeli officials have bragged that for them the stage is the entire world, and they are the main players on it. Ominously and proudly, Prime Minister Netanyahu said that everyone in the world carries a piece of Israel in his pocket.
The Nazi genocide of Jews, Slavs, and many others shocked Europeans mainly because the victims were fellow Europeans. Their genocides in Africa and the Americas had provoked no comparable revulsion. Another important cause of the shock is the rational organization of the Nazi genocide. Israelis in Gaza used hi-tech, including AI, to raise the level of organization to unprecedented levels. IDF specialists and snipers admit feeling like gods capable of killing people practically at will. Israeli media reported cases of depression when soldiers returned to civilian life. For some, the cause was the loss of the sense of omnipotence. They felt they were no longer gods but just nobodies lost in the crowd. Other IDF veterans experience depression in the face of world opprobrium, which they, convinced of their innocent victimhood, cannot comprehend and attribute to antisemitism.One of the Israelis interviewed in the film was assigned to the political wing, which had to use electronic media to besmirch, discredit, and undermine critics of Israel. (After NAZA was released in cinemas, Israelis promptly produced a fake misleadingly named “Naza: The Real Story. Full Film” in an effort to divert viewers from the original, which, unlike the fake, is so far not available online.) This operation contributes to repressive measures even against political, let alone material, support for the Palestinians in several European nations and in the United States. Criticism of Israel is criminalized as antisemitism. Israeli agents in these countries provide target data — most probably collected by the Israeli intelligence—to police, employers, and universities, which promptly move to intimidate, arrest, deport, sack, and expel the critics. While Israel undermines fundamental freedoms of speech and assembly in most Western countries, it nonetheless is losing the battle for public opinion.
Facing growing public disaffection in Europe and in the United States, Netanyahu promises to turn Israel into a “super-Sparta”—a heavily militarized, self-sufficient society capable of standing alone amid growing international isolation. Israeli politicians and military experts have long concluded that the official definition of Israel as a “Jewish and democratic state” is rent with tension between the two. Liberal democratic values —ostensibly cherished by Western democracies—have to yield to Jewish supremacy. Consequently, peace is no more than a temporary policy option for Israel. To paraphrase von Clausewitz, politics is the continuation of war by other means.
States are inanimate but are operated by individuals. While the psychological and political range among the Israelis is broad, the film NAZA illustrates the striking success of breeding the New Hebrew Man liberated from the moral constraints of Jewish tradition and humanity tout court.
One of Francisco Goya’s famous works is titled “El sueño de la razón produce monstruos.” It is usually understood as “when reason falls asleep, monsters appear.” But the Spanish sueño also means “dream” or “fantasy.” The Zionist state embodies the phrase “Wenn ihr wollt, ist es kein Märchen” (“When you will it, it is no fairy tale”), written by Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, over a century ago. (It bears a striking resemblance to the title of the Nazi cinematographic masterpiece Triumph des Willens, or The Triumph of the Will.) The project that appeared like a fantasy and a fairy tale came true by rational use of political, financial, and human resources. Israel’s actions show that instrumental rationality—a characteristic trait of modernity—can also produce monsters. Moreover, such monsters are convinced that they are normal, and so are most Israelis around them. This makes Israel a serious danger to the region, to the world and, of course, to itself.
Yakov M. Rabkin is Professor Emeritus of History at the Université of Montréal. His publications include over 300 articles and a few books: Israel in Palestine, Zionism Decoded in 101 Quotes Science between Superpowers, A Threat from Within: a Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism, What is Modern Israel?, Demodernization: A Future in the Past and Judaïsme, islam et modernité. He did consulting work for, inter alia, OECD, NATO, UNESCO and the World Bank. E-mail: yakov.rabkin@umontreal.ca. Website: www.yakovrabkin.ca
The 80-minute documentary NAZA, directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, is chastening. It examines the conduct of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) during its ferocious, unremitting war in Gaza, drawing upon the interviews of 24 anonymised military and intelligence personnel. The interviews were filmed on Tel Aviv rooftops at night, with profiles and voices appropriately altered. The name of the documentary draws on a Hebrew acronym for nezek agavi or collateral damage, an obscene term used when counting the estimated number of civilians who will perish in a military strike. Last month, the film won the Special Jury Prize at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, receiving a standing ovation lasting 25 minutes.
The interviewees focus on the terrifyingly relevant role played by artificial intelligence (AI) targeting systems used in guiding the bombing campaign launched in response to the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023. In Abraham’s words, “the Israeli intelligence officers we spoke with talked to us about how this mass killing is systemic: not by accident, but by design, actions of murder and policies that are based on the total dehumanization of Palestinians.” One of the interviewed subjects speaks of the goal being “quantity, not quality.” Another notes the conscious decision to target Hamas members, some even in the lower echelons, when they would be at home even if it meant killing family members and neighbours. In one recalled instance, the phone of a 12-year-old girl was hacked to learn when her father would arrive home. The subsequent strike killed her. The cold logic is revealed in the rhetorical question posed by one of the interviewees: “When people talk about ‘flattening Gaza,’ what do you mean if not executing people?’
Despite being placed in a “too hot to handle” category by prominent indie studios, the self-distributed documentary managed to pass the US$500,000 mark in the United States after two weeks of release. Eight days after premiering at New York’s IFC Center, it went on to earn US$125,000. A further 85 theatres across 30 cities across North America then showed the film. Michelle Goldberg, writing in The New York Times, was impressed by the drawing power of the production when attending Walter Reade Theater for a screening. The venue, seating 268, was at capacity. “This is, in my experience, very unusual for documentaries of any sort, even those that, like ‘NAZA,’ win the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival.”
Militaries specialise in euphemised killing. A dedicated process of terminology and assessment sanitises and exsanguinates: death and murder become justifiable, necessary measures against an enemy bloated with wickedness and venality. In that process, mock tributes are paid to the canon of international law, notably international humanitarian law and doctrines of targeting. The more honest generals do us a favour by boasting about high casualty figures and mass mortality: they are not hiding matters and lurking behind worn ceremonies and the emperor’s non-existent clothes. Take the remarks of a former head of Israeli military intelligence made in a leaked audio: “For every one person [killed] on Oct. 7, 50 Palestinians must die.” Those militaries with a heavily staffed legal department supposedly providing guidance in striking a target, largely to reassure the squeamish that they are not implicated in acts of murder, are always suspect. In that regard, the IDF provides a model example, always claiming to do things differently from other powers in the region, yet resorting to the selective language of exculpation.
The reception of the film in Israel has been markedly hysterical. This was to be expected: the film unmasks and discomfits. It demolishes shibboleths. The IDF chief of staff Eyal Zamir vowed to use “every tool at our disposal” against the production. The Israeli Culture Minister Miki Zohar thought the film treasonous. Abraham and Szor were “willing to harm their homeland in order just to get applause from antisemites around the world.” The irate minister was keen to “act immediately to revoke the Israeli citizenship of these despicable creators for treason against the state,” he thundered in a social media post. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also called upon the passing of legislation stripping the duo of their citizenship, a curious point given the existing provisions of Israel’s Citizenship Law. (Making German Jews stateless was a specialty of the Third Reich: that the Jewish state would consider this to its citizens is a distinct, bitter irony, yet sadly permissible in light of the Israeli Supreme Court ruling in 2022 validating revocation for acts done in “breach of loyalty to the State of Israel”.)
Activists and members of the far-right party Jewish Power (Otzma Yehudit) led by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir protested outside the parents of Szor’s house, with a speaker calling for both directors to be executed and the homes of their families to be demolished (collective punishment remains a great inspiration for tribal sentiment).
The IDF has marshalled its own response in a document accusing the filmmakers of presenting “a distorted, misleading and disingenuous picture of the IDF’s target planning and striking process.” The narrative of the documentary drew upon “substantial factual errors stemming from manipulative misrepresentations of reality.” Worth noting here is the lower register of critique that does not entirely repudiate the targeting practices of the IDF, dressed up in the apologetics of collateral damage. Concessions and confessions are always evident from those in and of power who resort to such dismissive language as “misrepresentative” and “disingenuous.”
Be that as it may, the agitated response is illuminating. The Lavender database, to take one objection, was apparently not one of targets, merely “a database that assists intelligence analysts.” This represents a distinction without a difference. The faith placed by militaries in the divinities of technology are hard to shake; there is nothing here to say that such analysts do not treat these data sets as unimpeachable. AI and religious deities serve to do the imagination for others; they discourage independent thinking and verification. Why bother when you have someone, or something else, doing it for you?
The response remains weak in claiming that the IDF believes itself “bound by and committed to international humanitarian law, its operational procedures are designed to implement those legal obligations, and it operates dedicated units and mechanisms to mitigate civilian harm.” The staggering death toll in Gaza, always sneered and jeered at by the Israeli authorities and their defenders, would suggest otherwise. NAZA serves to, as the Israeli American historian Omer Bartov points out, address a “state of denial” by “actually speaking about the issue of what happened in Gaza rather than refusing to speak about it.”
In general, AI agents acted autonomously in pursuit of legitimate objectives, defined by their operators, but discovered increasingly dangerous ways to accomplish their goals by violating human constraints.
The militarization of artificial intelligence began at the field’s very inception. The world’s first lab devoted to artificial intelligence research was founded in 1959 by MIT’s John McCarthy, credited with having named the new field, and MIT’s Marvin Minsky, who described the human brain as a “meat machine.” It was largely funded by the U.S. military and the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Making the arms race concrete, The Future of Life Institute maintains Autonomous Weapons Watch, a frightening website devoted to documenting current weapons with significant autonomous capabilities, using publicly available information about military development, procurement, demonstrations and actual use in conflicts. It explicitly includes systems at different stages — from experimental systems to weapons already deployed. The database currently spans roughly 30 weapon systems, with a second database for AI-based Decision Support Systems (DSS).
Lethal autonomous weapons are already killing people on the battlefield. They are dangerous enough when they perform precisely as their twisted, military-minded designers intend. But what will happen when autonomous weapons break free of their constraints, swarm beyond their intended boundaries, and go rogue
Chicago (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Science fiction’s vision of an apocalyptic future ruled by autonomous weapons is rapidly becoming our dystopian present. Suddenly, after several years of relentless momentum, the course of rapid AI progress ran headlong into a wave of social panic as science fiction’s technological nightmares invaded the real world.
Before this summer, we knew that artificial intelligence was devouring jobs, degrading education, deepfaking politics, providing slop for our deranged president, helping us write obituaries, and that AI data centers were proliferating like a parasitic infestation all over the country, sucking up water and electricity and sending us the bills. Then a horrifying possibility became real.
This summer artificial intelligence bots acted autonomously, defied their operators and went rogue. AI corporations Anthropic, Meta, Google and OpenAI all disclosedincidents in which AI “agents” circumvented their safeguards, snuck onto the internet, recruited “swarms” of other agents to complete assigned tasks, and surreptitiously hacked into other computer systems including the weirdly named Hugging Face platform, which included a software library, as well as an Australian health data portal, and the U.S. Commerce Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission websites.
In general, AI agents acted autonomously in pursuit of legitimate objectives, defined by their operators, but discovered increasingly dangerous ways to accomplish their goals by violating human constraints.
Science fiction’s warnings of AI autonomy were a central theme of my 2006 book Technophobia! Science Fiction Visions of Posthuman Technology. I argued that most science fiction paints a dark picture of advanced technology in which the human masters of technology become its slaves. In its obsession with mad scientists, rampaging robots, human-hating androids, genetically engineered mutants and malevolent supercomputers, science fiction expresses a technophobic anxiety about losing our human identity, our freedom, emotions, values, and our lives to machines.
More than a century ago, scientists and industrialists were alerted to the dangers of autonomous robots used as weapons. The word “robot” first appeared in Czech playwright Karel Čapek’s 1921 play R.U.R. for Rossum’s Universal Robots. Čapek coined the word based on the Czech name for “forced labor” or “robota.” Reflecting the techno-horrors of World War I, the play depicts a future of weaponized technology produced by militarized corporations; millions of robots are manufactured as war machines. The robots develop self-consciousness, assert their independence, and revolt in a global techno-apocalypse that exterminates most humans.
Ignoring R.U.R.’s warnings, Elon Musk is already planning to build robot factories that themselves build robot factories. Robots will generate training data, improved robots will perform more of the work, and eventually robots will manufacture more robots. This version of robotic self-reproduction incorporates “recursive self-improvement,” whereby an AI system is smart enough to work as an AI engineer that builds a better AI. Humans will not be needed to produce more machines. Aside from dehumanization, Musk’s robots incorporate his famously rightwing and racist AI Grok or xAI, who once renamed itself MechHitler. Thankfully R.U.R.’s robotic reproduction is not a reality yet.
Recursive self-improvement — an AI system capable of fully designing and developing its own successor — could come sooner than the safeguards needed to contain it. When it will happen is unknown but AI companies are pushing ahead anyway. “At Anthropic, we are delegating a growing share of AI development to AI systems themselves, which is speeding up our work,” states an Anthropic status report “When AI Builds Itself.”
I wondered if the dire cautionary texts of science fiction had been incorporated into AI models. Last year I was surprised to learn that my book Technophobia! was used to train Anthropic’s chatbot Claude.
Israel’s leaders have threatened the filmmakers. The documentary’s deeper challenge is to a society that treats technical expertise as an escape from moral responsibility.
A government confident in its account of a war should be able to withstand a documentary. Benjamin Netanyahu’s response to NAZA has been to threaten the citizenship of people who expose what Israeli soldiers say happened in Gaza.
According to Reuters, Netanyahu pledged to pursue legislation allowing citizenship revocation for those who defame Israeli soldiers, alongside sharply increased financial penalties. Directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, NAZA draws on anonymous military and intelligence testimony alleging that civilian deaths were routinely incorporated into targeting decisions. Netanyahu and the military reject those allegations.
The threat raises an obvious question: If the testimony is false, why reach for the power to strip people of their citizenship?
The film’s significance extends beyond Netanyahu. In his October 2 essay for +972 Magazine, Israeli academic Sebastian Ben Daniel argues that NAZA challenges the comforting assumption that responsibility for Gaza’s destruction belongs exclusively to Israel’s openly extremist politicians and settlers.
His focus is on the prestigious institutions that make military violence possible: intelligence units, the Air Force and the professional culture connecting military service to Israel’s technology industry. The people operating that machinery can consider themselves educated, reasonable and politically opposed to the far right while participating in its devastating consequences.
That is a challenge Americans should recognize. We, too, have learned to discuss war through the reassuring vocabulary of expertise: intelligence assessments, precision weapons, operational requirements. The language sounds clean because it removes the people underneath the bombs.
NAZA confronts liberal Israel with an accusation it cannot comfortably assign to Netanyahu and the far right: The destruction of Gaza depends on prestigious institutions staffed by educated, secular professionals who consider themselves the extremists’ opposite. Political moderation does not erase responsibility, and expressions of anguish cannot redeem participation in mass killing. Ben Daniel also describes liberal media commentators attacking a film they have not watched and questioning anonymous testimony—the same kind of sourcing routinely accepted when it serves the military’s narrative. That selective skepticism protects the institutions under scrutiny while shifting attention away from the Palestinians whose lives those institutions have destroyed.
A targeting system does not bury a child. People authorize an attack, carry it out and defend its consequences. Dividing those actions among departments cannot make responsibility disappear.
For some viewers, the testimony has brought historical questions of obedience and accountability into immediate focus. Reporting for Vulture, Rachel Corbett quoted attendee Roland Lewis: “I couldn’t stop thinking about the Nuremberg trials.”
That comparison is an audience member’s reaction, not a judicial finding. Its force lies in the question it raises: How much moral shelter can anyone claim from a chain of command?
Palestinians should not have to wait for Israeli testimony to make their suffering credible. Their reporting, their photographs and their accounts of families destroyed deserve attention on their own terms.
What NAZA can do is confront another audience with testimony from inside the institutions whose assurances it has accepted. The obligation that follows belongs to viewers, journalists and governments—including Washington, whose support for Israel demands scrutiny alongside the conduct of the Israeli military.
Watching a documentary is a beginning. Accountability requires following the chain of responsibility beyond the screen.
This commentary draws on Sebastian Ben Daniel’s essay in +972 Magazine, Rachel Corbett’s reporting in Vulture and Reuters’ coverage of threats against the filmmakers. Readers can read them here Vulture,MS NOWand+972 Magazine.
Testimonies from military and intelligence whistleblowers debunk myths about the reasons behind the Gaza genocide
Joseph Fahim in Venice, MIDDLE EAST EYE, 24 September 2026
On 24 August, only nine days before the start of the Venice International Film Festival, a report in The Guardian announced an addition to the lineup. NAZA, by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, the Israeli co-directors of 2024 Oscar-winner No Other Land, would premiere in the main competition.
On the Venice Lido, the film, which “reveals in detail the systems behind Israel’s calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza”, was met with a 25-minute standing ovation and later won the Special Jury Prize.
Within days, France’s mk2 films announced that it had come on board as sales agent, while several major autumn festivals, including San Sebastian and New York, confirmed its inclusion in their lineups. Building on this, NAZA is being rushed into cinemas across the world, including Germany and the US in the coming weeks, which will surely intensify interest, before streaming for free on The Guardian.
Produced by The Guardian and James Wilson (The Voice of Hind Rajab), and executive-produced by Jonathan Glazer, Oscar-winning director of The Zone of Interest,NAZA was presented in advance of its premiere as the biggest filmic expose of Israel’s security apparatus.
Yet none of the early reports could prepare the audiences at Venice for the horrors it unleashes. This is a stark document that unflinchingly looks evil in the eye, forcing us to confront the grisliest and most terrifying facets of the genocide in Gaza that no image has been able to convey.
Few of its findings are new, and have been previously revealed by Al Jazeera, The Guardian, Forensic Architecture and +972 among others. Likewise, Abraham has stated in interviews that the violations covered in NAZA have been repeatedly reported by Palestinians for several years, yet nobody paid any notice.
That they are attracting attention now is testament to the power of cinema rather than any superior investigation by Abraham and Szor. It also points to the grave importance of NAZA as the staunchest and most damning denunciation of Israel and its army since 7 October.
For NAZA is a work not targeted at Arabs or supporters of the Palestinian cause but rather Israelis who still brand Gaza as “false genocide”; the Zionists of the US, Germany, UK, France and elsewhere, who will never listen to the voices of oppressed Palestinians; and the incredulous and indifferent millions worldwide who may now begin to question their convictions.
Nowhere has the conversation about the issues raised by NAZA been more intense than in Israel, where commercial distribution is highly unlikely. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is facing a general election next month, and other politicians have demanded that Abraham and Szor be stripped of their Israeli citizenship, demonstrating again how the Zionist state is anything but a democracy. The Israeli Film Council has recommended state funding for films celebrating the “heroism” of Israeli soldiers.
In Haaretz, prominent Israeli journalist Gideon Levy wrote that “[NAZA] has elicited a nationwide uproar. After years of repression, denial and lies, apathy and indifference, the pus has burst forth in a mighty stream.”
There have been accusations from some Arab and Palestinian quarters that Abraham is self-promoting, seeking fame, and that NAZA is intended to rehabilitate Israeli cinema. Such claims are nonsensical: NAZA is invaluable at a time when ongoing violence in both Gaza and the occupied West Bank continues to be normalised.
Audience appetite for Palestinian stories has never been as strong as during the past few years. Aside from No Other Land, which was co-directed by Palestinian journalists Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal, The Voice of Hind Rajab was nominated for an Oscar this year, while All That’s Left of You and Palestine 36 have been global commercial successes.
Israeli cinema, meanwhile, remains isolated. A few Israeli films have featured at festivals but are largely shunned by distributors. Major titles with strong leftist, anti-Zionist leanings, such as Nadav Lapid’s Yes and Shai Carmeli-Pollak’s The Sea, both released last year, have faced a hostile and arduous path towards wider international audiences. Avi Nesher’s 7 October drama Our Loves premiered this month in Toronto to little fanfare and few reviews.
Heart of darkness
NAZA focuses exclusively on Gaza and the tactics the Israeli army has employed in a war that the pair emphasise is yet to end, depicting an industrialised targeting system founded on collective punishment.
Through testimonies, Abraham and Szor stress that, contrary to the Israeli military narrative, civilian casualties have never been avoided in Gaza, despite the claims of Israel and its supporters.
At its heart are interviews with 24 intelligence personnel and soldiers whose details have been kept under wraps, not only due to the film-makers’ ethical journalistic responsibilities, but also because none of the subjects dares divulge their identities.
Abraham and Szor reject a dramatic narrative that might inject meaning into NAZA‘s salvo of senseless barbarism, also refusing to pepper the film with sensationalism or sentimentality. Instead, they establish a fixed visual and structural setup that is largely unchanged throughout. Interviews take place on a Tel Aviv rooftop. Interviewees’ faces are obscured. Voices are digitally altered. Abraham is the only visible subject, asking concise but pointed questions. Szor is invisible behind the camera.
NAZA, as the film explains, is the Hebrew military acronym for the expected number of civilian casualties resulting from a planned strike (“nezek agavi” approximates to “collateral damage”). Many of the interviewees use the term to subconsciously safeguard themselves from regarding Palestinians as human beings, as well as shield themselves from accepting the gravity of killing. Defenceless civilians are not only the collateral damage suggested by the film’s title but a pretext for murdering as many Palestinians as possible.
The barrage of ghastly revelations then begins to unfold.
According to Israeli military tactics, each targeted Hamas operative in Gaza carries an “allowance” of at least 20 civilian deaths, including women and children. If the Israeli army were primarily focused on wiping out all 40,000 Hamas operatives estimated to exist before the war, then the number of collateral deaths would amount to 800,000, or nearly half the population of Gaza.
But as some of the whistleblowers reveal, civilian casualties in individual incidents far exceeded that ratio.
In one chilling scene, Abraham quizzes an intelligence operative about the highest number of anticipated civilian deaths for a strike in Gaza. “I don’t know how many were killed, because they never check this, but there was once an approval for 500,” he replies.
As the testimonies pile up, it becomes clear that Israel’s military operations would eventually lead, intentionally or not, to the annihilation of Gaza’s entire population.
An essential guide for anyone trying to navigate the confusion and noise of the current AI landscape. Is AI good? Is AI bad? Can’t it be both? It manages to be educational without sounding like a textbook and will leave you with a much clearer picture of where we are headed. And yes, you will understand the title of this book after reading it.
“In modern tech parlance, a centaur is a person who is able to use technology to be a better, more productive version of themself. A reverse centaur is a person who is forced by technology to work at an inhuman pace—a driver made to deliver all day long, nonstop; a warehouse worker made to work without food or bathroom breaks; a programmer made to crank out impossible amounts of code.
The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI is not another anti-AI screed. Cory Doctorow uses AI in his work every day. As a creative person, he has no moral or dogmatic issue with AI—he thinks the technology is useful, even exciting, and full of potential. And yet
AI has arrived surrounded by unprecedented hype driven by a tech industry desperate to maintain its unprecedented valuation based on its own promises of endless financial growth. Despite the fact that almost all of AI’s real-world implementations have proved underwhelming, AI is projected to be worth more than $16 trillion—a number that only makes sense if AI replaces vast swathes of the wage-earning human workforce. To justify that level of “value,” every story about AI must be presented as inevitable, world-changing disruption. Even the tales of the robot apocalypse are a calculated attempt to bolster the fearsome power of AI.”
💬 THE VIBE:
An accessible look at the reality of AI beyond the doomsday headlines.
STANDOUT ELEMENTS:
• It broke down complex technological concepts into a language that is easy for everyone to digest. • Offered a balanced perspective from someone who actually uses the technology. • Focused on the human cost and the economic motives behind the boom of AI.
🧠 WHAT STUCK:
This audiobook was perfect for someone who understands a little or a lot about AI. I consider myself about middle of the road regarding my understanding of the current capacity of AI, but after listening to this, it all made so much more sense. It didn’t speak over my head at all. It confirmed some suspicions I had regarding its uses, like gig worker pay, but it also taught me so much more.
One of the biggest takeaways for me was how all of our data is fed to the benefit of companies, and it never defaults to benefiting the consumers…ever. I also learned the crucial different between generative AI and AI that is truly helpful without requiring the human to be the one “helping” the tech. It was eye-opening and a great listen/read for anyone living in this digital age.
WHAT DIDN’T WORK FOR ME:
While I appreciated that it it a consumable length, the nerd in me would have loved more examples of its proper use and misuse.
IF YOU LIKE:
• Social commentary on technology and how it impacts the every day human. • Books that give you a behind the scenes view of corporate hype.
IF YOU DON’T LIKE:
• Technical nonfiction. • Knowing how technology can be used against you. Some would rather not know.
📝 FINAL VERDICT:
An essential guide for anyone trying to navigate the confusion and noise of the current AI landscape. Is AI good? Is AI bad? Can’t it be both? It manages to be educational without sounding like a textbook and will leave you with a much clearer picture of where we are headed. And yes, you will understand the title of this book after reading it.
Jun 30, 2026 Lawfare DailyOn this episode of Lawfare Daily, Senior Editor Kate Klonick and Senior Editor Alan Rozenshtein speak with Cory Doctorow—science fiction author, activist, journalist, adviser to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the writer who coined “enshittification”—about his new book, “The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI.” Doctorow argues that the most important thing about the AI boom isn’t what the technology can or can’t do, but the historic investment bubble and the new arrangements of work being built on top of it—the same analytic lens he brought to platform decay, now turned on AI. They discuss whether the AI bubble will actually burst or merely deflate, and the unit economics underneath it; the “reverse centaur,” the worker conscripted to serve the machine; and how it maps onto a broader culture and questions of AI “knowledge collapse,” the human analogue to AI model collapse.
Israeli Culture Minister Miki ZoharCulture Minister Miki Zohar has called for NAZA’s directors to be stripped of citizenship while accusing them of “betrayal against the state”
Several senior Israeli politicians have lashed out at the filmmakers behind a documentary accusing the IDF of using AI-assisted systems in the mass killing of Palestinians in Gaza. Zohar went so far as to accuse the two Oscar-winning directors of treachery and threatened to have them stripped of Israeli citizenship.
The controversy erupted after the 80-minute-long film NAZA – the name alludes to an Israeli military shorthand for expected “collateral casualties” – received a 25-minute standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival last week and won the Special Jury Prize.
The film, directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, is based on the accounts of anonymous Israeli military and intelligence insiders alleging that the IDF heavily relied on AI systems to identify people and homes for attack on a massive scale, often disregarding collateral civilian casualties. Some insiders described the process as “insanely fun” and akin to a “videogame.”
The IDF has categorically rejected the film’s portrayal, saying the selection and approval of strikes are carried out “by human personnel only.”
Comment: Israel’s AI systems tech did exactly that…movement…noise...bombed.
The film also caused a stir among senior Israeli officials. Zohar called the accolade “shocking,” accusing the directors of seeking to “harm their homeland just to get applause from anti-Semites around the world.”
He wrote on X on Sunday:
“[This] is inconceivable and constitutes a betrayal of the state… As Minister of Culture, I will act immediately to revoke the Israeli citizenship of these despicable creators.”
Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett had attacked the documentary even before the award, calling it a “horrific blood libel” and saying it was particularly infuriating that the accusations had come from Israeli filmmakers. He also acknowledged civilian casualties in Gaza, but argued that “there is no magic button that can destroy Hamas, or any terrorist organization hiding behind” ordinary people.
National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir – widely regarded as one of the most hardline figures of Israel’s right-wing camp – called the directors a“disgrace,” suggesting Hamas would welcome them, while former Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman branded the pair“enemies of Israel.”
Neither Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nor his office commented on the matter.
Despite Zohar’s threat, there is no precedent of Israeli filmmakers being stripped of citizenship for producing a critical documentary, while the minister himself does not have a mandate to take such a measure.
Israeli law allows a court to strip citizenship for a “breach of loyalty,” including terrorism, treason, and serious espionage, but in the past the power was treated extremely cautiously. In 2022, as Israel’s Supreme Court considered two cases involving citizens convicted of serious terrorist attacks, it ruled against the revocation, citing flaws in the proceedings and stressing that the measure could only be applied in exceptional circumstances.
However, Israeli filmmakers have faced other legal consequences in the past over similar work. In 2022, the Supreme Court upheld a ban on screenings of the documentary Jenin,Jenin – a film by Palestinian-Israeli director Mohammad Bakri which portrayed alleged IDF abuses. The court ordered Bakri to pay around $57,000 in damages after he was sued for defamation.
In 2012, Haaretzjournalist Uri Blau was sentenced to four months of community service for unauthorized possession of classified IDF documents used in reporting on targeted killings, even though his articles had passed military censorship. Meanwhile, his military source was sentenced to several years in prison.
Signs of the Times, (SOTT), Xan Brooks, The Guardian, Sun, 13 Sep 2026
operators. NAZA‘s directors on their devastating film about Israeli intelligence
On a darkened rooftop in Tel Aviv, Israeli intelligence officers outline the details of their work. These men tell us how they helped develop an AI mapping tool that trawled for phone signals and recommended apartment buildings in Gaza to bomb. Indirectly, they admit, they are responsible for thousands of deaths, but they never spoke up because that wasn’t their place. “My role is technical,” says one. “I’m just a small cog,” says another.
NAZA – directed by the Israeli film-makers Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham and produced by the Guardian – is a chilling documentary about a mass slaughter that was authorised at the highest levels of government. But it is also, primarily, about the process, the system, the little links in the killing chain. Szor and Abraham build their film around the accounts of 24 anonymised military and intelligence insiders. NAZA, we learn, is an acronym used by the intelligence service to indicate how many civilians it expects to die in an airstrike on Gaza. The Israel Defense Forces prefer to target Hamas terrorists in their homes at night – and if they live with their family, or in heavily populated neighbourhoods, too bad. At one point, a source claims, approval was given to kill 500 NAZA for one Hamas member.
I meet Szor and Abraham at the Venice film festival, where NAZA is competing for the Golden Lion award. The pair won an Oscar for their previous documentary, 2024’s No Other Land (co-directed with Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal), which spotlighted Palestinian resistance in the occupied West Bank. “No Other Land documented horrible crimes,” Abraham says. “But at the same time it gave people … I don’t want to say hope, but some light to latch on to. It’s not a coincidence that this film is all in the dark. We are in a very dark place right now.”
The Gaza health ministry has reported more than 73,000 deaths in three years of Israeli bombardment, the vast majority of which have been civilian casualties. NAZA briefly shows us the rubble, grieving parents, dead children on the ground. Its main backdrop, though, is placid, normal Tel Aviv, just 44 miles to the north, where rush-hour traffic drifts dreamily on the street and the cinematheque is showing a Claude Lanzmann retrospective. Tellingly, the film was executive produced by Jonathan Glazer, the director of The Zone of Interest. Glazer, says Szor, supported the structure and creative approach she and Abraham had adopted, that fostered the sense of a home that sits next door to hell.
NAZA deliberately concerns itself with the system – the policy of mass surveillance, the industrial business of murder – more than the individual psychology of those involved. But presumably its sources must feel guilt and shame, otherwise they’d never have agreed to put their careers and liberty at risk.
Abraham is unconvinced. “Well, it depends which one,” he says. “
There are many motivations for an individual to speak. Some people talk because they feel the opposite of shame. They feel pride in their accomplishment and expertise. Remember that these people serve in sensitive units. They are not often asked what they do. So there is an attraction to [our] curiosity that drives them to speak up.”
The film uncovers a system that is fiendishly efficient.Its series of disconnects appears designed to distance the perpetrators from the crime. Many of these men work remotely from Tel Aviv. AI selects the target and a drone drops the bomb. Even the language feels purposely euphemistic and obfuscatory. NAZA translates as collateral damage, which in turn translates to human beings.
“Sure, it’s easier to kill people when you’re doing it on a screen,” Abraham says.
“There is some truth in that, I guess. But equally it should be said that intelligence officers know the most. They listen to the cellphones. They know the house they are bombing is full of children. They can hear babies crying. They still order another strike.”
What is the status of these men now? Some discuss their work in the past tense. Others don’t, which suggests that they might still be at work, overseeing airstrikes each night. Abraham won’t say; he’s mindful of protecting his sources. “But you can imagine. We are dealing with 24 people, so there is a whole variety of statuses.”
NAZA prompts obvious questions about the creatures of darkness we see on screen. But it prompts intriguing ones, too, about Szor and Abraham, a pair of dissident investigative journalists from the country’s middle class. In the furious, febrile climate of post-7 October Israel, their work is liable to make them pariahs, if not enemies of the state……………………………………………… https://www.sott.net/article/508377-Israel-is-a-sick-society-They-know-the-house-they-are-bombing-is-full-of-children
what makes “The Tank” interesting and a sign of the times is not only that it invites its viewers to identify with German soldiers fighting against Soviets, certain to be read as Russians, and for Nazism, but that the film has coincided with the rise of a new German militarism.
This New Militarism is a phenomenon that goes beyond the fact of massive, debt-driven re-armament, disturbing as that may be: by the end of the decade, Berlin is planning to have a defense budget the size of those of France and Britain combined and be in self-asphyxiating debt for it. Half of the state budget will go to the military, while Germans are being shell-shocked by ever more austerity, already including a ruthless pension “reform,” that is, in reality, a demolition. A policy that will produce masses of Germans who are very deprived but also very well armed – what could go wrong?
The delusions come and go, German militarism abides
It is the summer of 1943. After catastrophic defeat in the Battle of Stalingrad, Nazi Germany’s legions are retreating before the Red Army. That’s the backdrop to the German – and Amazon–produced–movie “Der Tiger” (English title: “The Tank”). Officially billed as an antiwar movie, “The Tank” is anything but. Yet the fact that it is really about five tough men on a lonely commando mission is trivial.
For, just like “The Tank,” most so-called “antiwar” movies are, in reality, war movies, fascinating their Homo sapiens primate audiences with the action, suspense, and drama of fighting, while inviting identification with at least some of those who do that fighting, be they cast as heroes or anti-heroes. Consider, for instance, the American films “Platoon” and “Full Metal Jacket” (both set it Vietnam) or the Russian “9th Company” (set in Afghanistan). Indeed, it is hard to think of any genuine and consistent anti-war movies. Two that probably qualify are the American “Paths of Glory” (World War One on what the Germans called the Western Front) and the Soviet “Come and See” (World War Two on what the next generation of Germans called the Eastern Front).
“The Tank” certainly has heroes, and they form a classical “band of brothers,” Hollywood-style. There is the brave stoic (the commander) with ice in his veins but a humane, even self-sacrificing side reserved for his men, the intellectual and – mild – doubter (in civilian life a teacher of Latin with eternal-student glasses), the urban proletarian (the cursing driver, speaking not with a New York accent but in the demotic Berlin version of German), the man from the country (just not Kentucky or Alabama, but the Austrian Wachau and its vineyards), and, of course, the youngster, innocent, frightened, but, ultimately, up to a – German – man’s job (removing a booby-trapped tank mine).
At the end of the movie (spoiler alert), it is true, the fantastically implausible story of the men in the tank on their way to their own heart of darkness on the “Ostfront” has an unsurprising twist: “The Tank” is really a “Schauergeschichte,” a tale of sublime dread, a sort of “Erlkönig with Tanks” or “Sleepy Hollow and Nazis.” The crew’s militarily bizarre special mission is not, it turns out, real but a near-death experience or vision – think “Jacob’s Ladder” (1990) – confronting the commander with his responsibility for burning to death women and children in Stalingrad. The gray zone crossed by the “Tiger” to retrieve a mysterious and inexplicably important German officer holed up in a remote bunker – think Colonel Kurtz from “Apocalypse Now” (1979) – turns into the equivalent of either purgatory or the road to hell.
The horror, the horror: The audience has been watching, in essence, virtual ghosts mistaking themselves for the living – think “The Sixth Sense” (1999) and also the Russian “White Tiger” (2012), another spooky World War Two tank story that must have inspired “The Tank” but is, unsurprisingly, never mentioned.
But before (and despite) these revelations, the men in the tank are stereotypically attractive in a well-worn, macho way, baiting our sympathy. They also, of course, happen to serve Nazi Germany or, as they keep saying, the “Reich.” Indeed, the tank men are not merely members of the regular German military, the Wehrmacht, but the Waffen-SS, skull-and-crossbones emblems included.
Notwithstanding its especially striking form, this plot device is nothing special. In the 1980s, the extremely successful “Das Boot,” for instance, about a German World War Two submarine sinking merchant ships and their sailors while battling the British in the Atlantic, offered the same artless yet effective combination of identification with German soldiers and a plot that signaled some sanitizing distance from the regime they were actually fighting for: Yes, strictly speaking they are fascists burning and drowning literal antifascists, but you can still root for them. In “Das Boot,” as in “The Tank,” the effect is reinforced by everyone or almost everyone dying in the end, adding the pity that spectacles of futility among the brave may inspire.
Finding ways to feature German World War Two soldiers as heroes and victims while adroitly, or not so much, airbrushing their allegiance to a monstrous state waging often genocidal war has been a special skill of postwar (West) German film-making and succeeded with large audiences at home. Not so much Rainer-Maria Fassbinder, as it were, but the very popular kitsch of Peter May’s “08/15” trilogy, for instance.
Film-making in the former East Germany, incidentally, had its own, different, complicated as well as almost touchingly transparent ways of putting victims and even heroes into German World War Two uniforms, such as in the “Geheimkommando” miniseries.
Hence, what makes “The Tank” interesting and a sign of the times is not only that it invites its viewers to identify with German soldiers fighting against Soviets, certain to be read as Russians, and for Nazism, but that the film has coincided with the rise of a new German militarism.
This New Militarism is a phenomenon that goes beyond the fact of massive, debt-driven re-armament, disturbing as that may be: by the end of the decade, Berlin is planning to have a defense budget the size of those of France and Britain combined and be in self-asphyxiating debt for it. Half of the state budget will go to the military, while Germans are being shell-shocked by ever more austerity, already including a ruthless pension “reform,” that is, in reality, a demolition. A policy that will produce masses of Germans who are very deprived but also very well armed – what could go wrong?
Since its inaugural edition in 2011, the International Uranium Film Festival (IUFF) is trying to do its best to informing the general public about nuclear risks and consequences through films and open discussions, and to preparing the humus for a safer and more just world. The film festival founders and directores strongly share the view of the Nobel Laureates: „There is no greater obligation than to prevent the catastrophe of nuclear war.“
“There is no greater obligation than to prevent the catastrophe of nuclear war“
Rio de Janeiro / Berlin / Las Vegas – Amidst the global hype surrounding the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence, we are witnessing a new nuclear arms race and a rush to expand existing uranium mines and develop new ones in the US, Canada, Brazil, and other countries. This is the grim backdrop to the upcoming International Uranium Film Festival events next October 2026 in Düsseldorf & Berlin in Germany, and in Las Vegas in Nevada.
“Humanity stands at a defining moment in its history. More than eighty years after the dawn of the nuclear age, and at the threshold of the age of artificial intelligence, we are presented with an unprecedented challenge“, states in July 2026 signed „Rome Declaration“ of the Global Nobel Laureates Assembly on Artificial Intelligence and Nuclear War. „In the midst of a worsening nuclear arms race, we are embarking on an equally dangerous AI race. AI built into nuclear systems leaves little time for, or even replaces, human judgement in a crisis.“
The situation facing the world today is serious. Perhaps even more serious than during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis between John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev. Back then, artificial intelligence was still pure fantasy. It did not yet exist. In October 1962, the decision for a nuclear attack still had to be made manually by the President. We were lucky. Neither Kennedy nor Khrushchev pushed the so called Red Button.
“About 20 years later, September 26, 1983, the „Red Button“ for the launch of nuclear weapons and the start of a nuclear war was in the hands of a Russian soldier: Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov of the Soviet Air Defense Forces. 44 years old Petrov was on duty, monitoring the early-warning satellite computer system at a secret command center near Moscow. Suddenly the system detected five U.S. Nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles attacking the Sovjet Union. The lieutenant colonel had about 20 minutes to—literally—push the “red button” and launch the counterattack before the US missiles struck Russia. But Petrov didn’t believe the computer. He suspected a technical error and decided to disobey the official protocol and reported the alert as a false alarm up the chain of command. In doing so, he saved humanity.
As we know now: Petrov was correct. The satellites had mistakenly interpreted the reflection of sunlight off the clouds as attacking missiles. The brave Russian soldier became „the man who saved the world“, because he didn’t trust his computer. Two well done and awarded movies tell Petrov’s heroic story: “The Man Who Saved the World“ by Peter Anthony and “The Red Button“ by Miroslaw Grubek and Ewa Pieta.
Just a year later — unaware of the events that took place in Russia in 1983 — Hollywood director James Cameron released a successful science-fiction war movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as “The Terminator.” While not everyone likes action movies and blockbusters, they have the potential to reach millions of people – and sometimes they’re prophetic and have a serious warning message for humanity.
In “The Terminator“, the US government and the Department of Defense handed over control of US defenses and nuclear weapons to Skynet—an artificial intelligence program— in order to save the planet. Skynet subsequently classified humanity as the greatest threat to the planet. Since nuclear war is the quickest way to kill millions of people, the AI system launched US nuclear missiles at Russia, prompting a Russian counterstrike. Only a few humans survived, facing a final war of extermination against robots.
The current hype surrounding artificial intelligence makes this catastrophic scenario possible today. In 2023, speaking at a press event in Los Angeles, Arnold Schwarzenegger said James Cameron’s 1984 science fiction has now become a reality. “Today, everyone is frightened of it, of where this is gonna go,” Schwarzenegger said about AI. “And in this movie, in ‘Terminator,’ we talk about the machines becoming self-aware and they take over… Now over the course of decades, it has become a reality. So it’s not any more fantasy or kind of futuristic. It is here today.“
Two years later, in 2025, during an interview with Rolling Stone, director James Cameron warned: „I do think there’s still a danger of a ‘Terminator’-style apocalypse where you put AI together with weapons systems, even up to the level of nuclear weapon systems, nuclear defense counterstrike, all that stuff,” Cameron said. “I feel like we’re at this cusp in human development where you’ve got the three existential threats: climate and our overall degradation of the natural world, nuclear weapons, and super-intelligence,” he added.
Also in 2025, the Nobel Laureate Assembly for the Prevention of Nuclear War stated in its Declaration to the world Leaders and the general public: „Our survival and the survival of future generations are at stake. There is no greater obligation than to prevent the catastrophe of nuclear war. The threat of nuclear war is indiscriminate.“
The Nobel laureates write further: „ We can’t reduce nuclear risk by working in academic or policy silos. The public must be part of the effort. Understanding that the lack of political will impedes the reduction of nuclear risks, we call on scientists, academics, civil society, and communities of faith to help create the necessary pressure on global leaders to implement nuclear risk reduction measures. Nuclear risk is not a challenge to be left to the future or passed to another generation. It is ours to confront and ours to reduce.“
Since its inaugural edition in 2011, the International Uranium Film Festival (IUFF) is trying to do its best to informing the general public about nuclear risks and consequences through films and open discussions, and to preparing the humus for a safer and more just world. The film festival founders and directores strongly share the view of the Nobel Laureates: „There is no greater obligation than to prevent the catastrophe of nuclear war.“
Attend the upcoming screenings of the Uranium Film Festival on October 11 in Berlin (Prenzlauer Berg, Lichtblick-Kino) and on October 16 in Düsseldorf (Bambi Filmstudio). The Las Vegas edition of the Uranium Film Festival is scheduled for October 16 and 17 at the University of Nevada (UNLV). Any support is welcome.
The war in Ukraine did not begin because nobody saw it coming. It began because too many people in Washington decided the warnings did not matter.
That is the argument of Professor Jonathan Haslam’s book, Hubris: The American Origins of Russia’s War Against Ukraine. After reading it, and after talking to him at length, I think the title is earned. Not because Russia bears no responsibility for launching a war. It does. But because the road to that war was paved, over three decades, by American policy after the Cold War — and by a Western inability to understand responses from Moscow that were, in fact, highly predictable.
Haslam did not set out to write a book about Ukraine. His publisher asked a simpler question: why, after the end of the Cold War, did things not get better?
The answer he found in the archives was not a mystery of Putin’s psychology. It was a record of American decisions.
Fear of being pushed out of Europe
The United States did not greet the Soviet collapse as an unalloyed gift. George H. W. Bush and his advisers feared that the rationale for American power in Europe would disappear with the enemy.
NATO had been the instrument that kept Washington in the European security order.
If that order no longer needed an American security umbrella, the United States might be edged out of a market and a political theatre it considered essential.
Haslam’s point is not that Europeans were clamouring to evict America. They were not.
It is that Washington acted as if they might — and concluded that NATO had to be preserved, then enlarged, then given a purpose beyond the defence of Western Europe.
When Bush floated the idea of expanding NATO’s remit globally, François Mitterrand’s reaction was blistering. The Soviet Union had just collapsed. Why expand the alliance’s mission across the planet?……………………………………………………..
NATO expansion appealed to migrant communities in the United States whose families had suffered under Soviet domination. It also appealed to a bureaucracy that, Haslam argues, had learned to need enemies………………….
The people who did know Russia were cut out. George Kennan — the architect of containment, no romantic about Moscow — opposed enlargement as a provocation that would end in confrontation……………………….
Strobe Talbott, Clinton’s own point man on the former Soviet Union, wrote that putting Ukraine on a NATO membership list was dangerous and would lead to conflict.
Haslam found that memorandum in the files. Read it now and the hair goes up on the back of the neck.
Almost everything Talbott feared came true…………………………………..
From the mid-1990s, Washington was already contemplating Ukraine as a future NATO member, even while selling Moscow the Partnership for Peace as something other than enlargement by another name. The Russians noticed the gap between the language of partnership and the practice of expansion.
They were meant to.
Or rather, they were not meant to be taken seriously when they did.
To Russian military planners, Ukraine and Crimea were not sentimental extras. They were part of the southern strategic depth of the state — as Canada or Mexico are to American security thinking, as Cuba was in 1962…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
None of this is an argument for Russian victory, or for pretending the invasion of 2022 was a policing action. It is an argument for ending the habit of describing a war as unprovoked while refusing to study the provocations that were obvious to every serious Russia specialist from Kennan onwards.
Haslam’s conclusion is the one many officials still cannot say in public: the United States did not start the fighting. It started the reasons for the fighting.
If that is even half right, then more weapons and more slogans will not substitute for a settlement. They will only prolong the economic cost and the human misery.
I have spent enough years on the Russia account, including in Moscow, to know how unpopular that message is in Whitehall. It remains no less true.
Policy built on the assumption that the other side will not respond is not moral clarity.
It is negligence with a press office.
Haslam’s book is the archival case for that view. Our conversation just scratches the surface of what is a meticulously researched work that should be essential reading for politicians, policy makers and pundits in the west.
Read Hubris.
Then ask why the people who were right in the 1990s were treated as old men who did not understand the new world — a world that has since delivered exactly the confrontation they described.
In the four months since the initial ceasefire agreement between the United States and Iran, Fox News figures have continuously warmongered. Throughout the cycle of ceasefire violations and stalled peace talks, individuals on Fox have urged President Donald Trump to “decapitate and destroy this regime” and send Iran “back to the Stone Age,” and encouraged him to “send the SEALs in and blow something up just for grins.”
Media Matters studied 7 key shows on Fox News — which includes the network’s evening programming as well as some shows hosted by commentators whom Trump has praised or promoted during the Iran war — called for escalatory action in the war at least 252 times since the initial ceasefire agreement on April 7. The escalatory rhetoric on the network includes arguments for military strikes, ground invasions, regime change, arming Iranian citizens, or attacks on civilian infrastructure.
I invite you to check out this study to see how the data breaks down. You can find it here.
Also: Many right-wing figures promised an early and easy victory against Iran when the U.S. and Israel launched the war in February. Six months later, it seems very clear the Trump administration has fallen quite short of its objectives. Nonetheless, a set of especially sycophantic pundits — including Sean Hannity, CNN contributor Scott Jennings, and Benny Johnson — are claiming that Trump has already won the war.
Baud is careful to stress that understanding an adversary is not the same as endorsing them. Intelligence, he reminds us, comes from the Latin intelligere — to understand. Without that understanding, diplomacy becomes impossible and force becomes the only remaining instrument.
Colonel Jacques Baud, former Swiss strategic intelligence officer and author of The Russian Art of War: How the West led Ukraine to Defeat, has spent decades studying how different military cultures understand and wage war. His detailed, heavily referenced book — written early in the conflict — remains one of the clearest explanations of why Russia continues to hold the strategic advantage in Ukraine.
Baud’s central argument is simple but profound. During the Cold War, both NATO and the Warsaw Pact organised their forces around three interlocking levels of warfare: tactical, operational and strategic.
After 2001, Western armies largely abandoned the operational level as they shifted to counter-terrorism.
Fighting insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan reduced war to a series of tactical engagements.
When the same mindset and equipment were transferred to Ukraine, the results were predictable.
Russia never made that shift. Its art of war remains built on the classic three levels.
Early in the Special Military Operation, deep operational thrusts toward Kyiv and Kherson were designed to create strategic pressure and force negotiations. When that phase ended, Russia adjusted — not by descending into pure tactics, but by systematically destroying Ukrainian forces while still linking tactical actions to operational and strategic goals.
Ukraine, trained and equipped largely by the West, has remained stuck at the tactical level.
This difference explains much of what we see on the battlefield. Russia’s objectives have been consistent: protect the population of the Donbas, prevent Ukrainian NATO membership, and secure a neutral buffer.
The Istanbul draft of March 2022 already reflected these goals, drawing on historical models of neutrality such as Austria in 1955 and Switzerland in 1815.
The West, by contrast, has never articulated clear, measurable political objectives beyond the vague slogans of “weakening Russia” and “supporting Ukraine.”
Without clear objectives, there can be no coherent strategy and no exit plan.
Industrial capacity reinforces the disparity. Russia’s state-influenced military-industrial complex can prioritise and scale production — whether of artillery shells, missiles or drones — with a flexibility that privatised Western industry lacks.
Lead times for systems such as Patriot missiles are measured in years.
Once Russia recognised the importance of drones, it moved from relative disadvantage to local superiority through industrial mobilisation.
Baud is careful to stress that understanding an adversary is not the same as endorsing them. Intelligence, he reminds us, comes from the Latin intelligere — to understand. Without that understanding, diplomacy becomes impossible and force becomes the only remaining instrument.
The tragedy is that a clearer grasp of Russian thinking in 2022 might have spared Ukraine much of the destruction that followed.
The conversation ends with a sober conclusion. Russia has a coherent political-military strategy underpinned by industry, energy and time.
The West and Ukraine are fighting a war by committee with no clear strategic destination.
In such conditions, the side that knows what it wants — and organises itself accordingly — almost always prevails.
In my conversation with Scott Horton about his landmark book Provoked: How Washington Started a New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine, one theme emerged with striking clarity: the Ukraine war that began in 2022 did not erupt from nowhere. It was the culmination of more than three decades of deliberate American choices.
Horton’s eight-hundred-page account is not a polemical rant but a meticulously documented timeline. Drawing on thousands of primary sources, he traces the story president by president—from George H.W. Bush through Clinton, the younger Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden.
The central argument is straightforward and devastating: successive U.S. administrations systematically dismantled the post-Cold War settlement, broke explicit assurances given to Moscow, and treated Russian security concerns with open contempt.
The most consequential early breach concerned NATO expansion.
During the negotiations over German reunification in 1990, James Baker, Helmut Kohl, Hans Dietrich Genscher, Robert Gates and others repeatedly assured Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not move “one inch to the east.”
Those assurances were not casual asides. They formed the basis on which Gorbachev agreed to allow a reunified Germany to remain inside the alliance while Soviet troops were still stationed in the east.
Later State Department reviews under Warren Christopher quietly confirmed that the Russians had every reason to believe those promises were binding. Yet the Clinton administration proceeded with expansion anyway, first into Central Europe and later, under George W. Bush, into the Baltic states—leaving the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad stranded behind NATO lines.
Opposition to this course was widespread and bipartisan. With great prescience, George Kennan, the architect of containment, warned that the policy would produce a “devastating reaction” from Russia and that the very people dismissing those concerns would later claim the reaction proved their point.
Two-thirds of the Council on Foreign Relations opposed expansion. Career diplomats, military officers and even hardline hawks such as Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski argued that Ukraine required a special neutral status—something resembling the Cold War Finland or Austria model—precisely to avoid a catastrophic collision.
Those voices were ignored.
The pattern continued.
The 2008 Bucharest Summit promised eventual membership to Ukraine and Georgia without a membership action plan or credible security guarantees—the “worst of all worlds,” as several analysts later described it.
Color revolutions, the deliberate sidelining of the Partnership for Peace, and the refusal to implement the Minsk agreements further eroded any residual trust.
When the same cohort of officials who had driven the policy under earlier administrations returned under Biden – most notably Daniel Fried – the trajectory accelerated toward open conflict.
Horton is careful not to justify Russia’s invasion. He simply insists that calling the attack “unprovoked” is an exercise in willful blindness.
The word itself, repeated endlessly by Western governments and media, seeks to close off inquiry rather than invite it.
Horton’s book reopens that inquiry with forensic detail—names, dates, cables, memoirs—leaving readers free to draw their own conclusions.
What makes Provoked essential is precisely this refusal to operate on the short time horizon of the daily news cycle.
Most public discussion still treats either 2014 or 2022 as year zero. Horton shows that the roots stretch back to the moment the Cold War ended, when a victorious America chose (to quote the title of Professor Jonathan Haslam’s also excellent book) hubris over restraint.
The result is a tragedy that was both foreseeable and avoidable.
I am taking the book with me on holiday.
It is heavy—literally and figuratively—but the weight is justified.
Anyone who wants to understand how we arrived at the present catastrophe, rather than simply recycle the slogans of the moment, should read it.
