zondag 27 september 2026

NAZA film-makers address threats at documentary’s New York City premiere

 


Rachel Szor (left) and Yuval Abraham on stage at the NAZA premiere in New York City on Saturday. Photograph: Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for FLC

NAZA film-makers address threats at documentary’s New York City premiere

Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor defend findings on Israel’s killing of Palestinians amid threats from Israeli officials

The film-makers behind NAZA, the award-winning documentary on Israel’s systemic mass killing of Palestinians in Gaza, defended their findings at the film’s North American premiere in New York on Saturday, amid protests in Israel and escalating threats from Israeli officials to strip them of their citizenship.

The critically acclaimed film, directed by Oscar-winning film-makers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor and produced by the Guardian, features the testimony of 24 anonymized Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers involved in the surveillance and remote killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, who describe the AI-powered systems used to select their targets. The project takes its name from an acronym used euphemistically by Israeli intelligence to indicate how many civilians it expects to die in an airstrike, which are often conducted at night in private homes, killing many family members, including children, at once.

“Our country is doing so much to hide these systems,” Szor told the audience at the New York film festival in a Q&A that followed the film’s premiere. “It’s not a world that is open even to the Israeli public.”

“These crimes that you saw are ongoing,” Abraham said. “They’re ongoing because it’s what our country is doing, and because of what your country is supporting and funding.”

NAZA - official trailer

The 80-minute documentary, filmed in secret on rooftops in Tel Aviv, builds on reporting published from 2023 to 2025 in the Guardian; +972 Magazine, an Israeli-Palestinian publication; and Hebrew-language outlet Local Call. It held its world premiere earlier this month at the Venice film festival, where it received a 25-minute standing ovation – a festival record – and went on to win the special jury prize.

The film has been met with fierce derision from Israeli officials as well as threats to the film-makers, amid a tense election season largely focused on Benjamin Netanyahu’s ongoing campaign in Gaza, which has killed more than 73,000 Palestinians to date and has been declared a genocide by numerous international agencies, including the United Nations.

A couple dozen protesters gathered outside the film’s premiere at the Lincoln Center on Saturday afternoon, brandishing Israeli flags and signs calling for viewers to “learn the facts” of the 7 October 2023 attacks by Hamas on Israeli civilians. At least one truck with LED screens accusing NAZA of being “propaganda dressed up as a documentary” circled the theater.

NAZA’s New York City premiere came just a day after the Israeli prime minister offered an aggressive defense of Israel’s use of deadly force in Gaza just across Central Park to the UN general assembly. As hundreds of protesters gathered outside and dozens of diplomats inside walked out in solidarity with Palestinians, Netanyahu called Israel’s war in Gaza the “opposite of genocide” and denounced Israel’s critics. Netanyahu had previously said he would seek new laws to strip citizenship from people who “smear” Israeli soldiers in response to NAZA.

“So, to all those spreading these lies about my country and about our brave soldiers, whether they sit in this hall or in the office of the antisemitic mayor of New York, I say this: shame on you!” he said Thursday.

On Friday, Netanyahu reiterated his plan to advance legislation revoking the citizenship of Abraham and Szor, two of the four film-makers behind No Other Land, an unstinting look at the Israeli-occupied West Bank, which won the Oscar for best documentary in 2025. In an interview with the conservative Israeli outlet Makor Rishon, he likened NAZA to “launching dozens of ballistic missiles” at Israel.

Abraham addressed the missile comment directly in the post-screening Q&A, referring to such a characterization as “the criminalization of journalism and of this kind of work”.

He also defended the film’s use of anonymous sources as necessary to expose systems of mass killing hidden by the Israeli state. “Throughout the history of investigative journalism, very often granting confidentiality to sources is a means to pursue the truth,” he said. “This film could not have been made any other way and because the crimes are ongoing, we felt that it was important to make it.”

Along with Netanyahu, Israel’s culture minister, Miki Zohar, has called for the film-makers’ citizenship to be revoked, and accused them of “treason against the state”. The IDF’s chief of staff, Eyal Zamir, said the military would “not allow IDF soldiers to be made targets through lies and blood libels” and would use “every tool at our disposal” against the film.

Rightwing activists have gone even further, calling for violence against the pair. Earlier this month, dozens of agitators surrounded Szor’s parents’ home in central Israel, with one protester calling for the “death penalty for traitors”.

More than 1,500 Israeli film professionals, 43 Israeli human rights organizations and the directors of major international festivals have defended Abraham and Szor, as have numerous international press freedom organizations. The film is currently set for release next month in cinemas in 55 countries, before a digital global release, for free, on the Guardian’s website in November, as part of the organization’s commitment to the dissemination of independent journalism.

But the US premiere Saturday held particular resonance, given the country’s annual $3.8bn in military assistance to Israel – a connection the film-makers noted to the New York City crowd.

“These soldiers are talking about what has been done with the taxpayer money of the people sitting here,” said Abraham.

He also responded to the protesters outside the theater invoking the attacks of October 7. “It’s in the film and it’s completely unjustified,” he said of the massacre, which killed 1,200 Israelis, most of them civilians. “But it also cannot justify what you’ve seen in the film. It doesn’t justify the slaughter of so many civilians in Gaza.”

“I don’t want to live in a world where rightful empathy to Israeli victims is weaponized by leaders like Netanyahu – cynical people who promise nothing other than perpetual occupation and war,” he added. “It’s weaponized to mean a lack of empathy to Palestinians, to mean this continuous killing and murder of people. I don’t think we should want to live in such a world. I think we should all refuse to play this zero-sum game.”

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/sep/27/naza-film-new-york-city-premiere

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donderdag 24 september 2026

The west is in freefall – and the worst part is that we were warned, but chose not to listen

 





The west is in freefall – and the worst part is that we were warned, but chose not to listen


Owen Jones

Endless pursuit of wealth and power by western leaders led us here. What strikes me most is how many saw what was coming

T

he symptoms of decline are everywhere you look. On Sunday, Germany’s far right won another state election, taking nearly 40% of the vote in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. France is preparing a €54bn fiscal squeeze, which could turn the screw still further on a foundering so-called European social model. At the UN general assembly, Donald Trump once again threatened to “annihilate” Iran, even as the fourth failed western war on a Muslim nation this century has added more than $100bn to Americans’ fuel bills.

There is little dispute over the symptoms. The great fight of our age is over the diagnosis, and the right has been winning it for years. Its story is simple and, as the latest German state election underlines, effective: the west is dying because of migrants, Muslims, trans people, “woke” and the “deep state”. So when I told friends I was writing a book called The Fall of the West: How They Really Lost It, they worried I had shape-shifted into Liz Truss, who, after being outlasted in office by a lettuce, produced Ten Years to Save the West.

My diagnosis is rather different. The west is in decline because after the cold war, its elites declared a victory from which they have never recovered. They proclaimed an economic model that channelled wealth upwards as the inevitable future, while treating an apparently invincible military as free to reshape the Muslim world. Both convictions were terribly convenient for those who benefited from them. The result has been catastrophic: an economy that no longer delivers sustained improvements in living standards or public services, and western military interventions humiliated in Kabul, Baghdad, Tripoli and now the strait of Hormuz.

Abroad, the west’s claims of moral superiority have been incinerated, not least by Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza. At home, the disillusionment and despair spawned by these overlapping disasters have fuelled the rise of the far right, threatening democracy itself.

What struck me while researching the book was how often people had seen what was coming – and how little difference their warnings had made.

In the spring of 1994, one of the most senior political officers at the US embassy in Moscow sent Washington a long dissenting cable. Its argument was stark enough to make its author an outcast within the foreign-policy establishment.

Wayne Merry is nobody’s idea of a radical. He grew up in a wheat-country settlement in Oklahoma called – no joke – Kremlin, and admired the then Russian president, Boris Yeltsin. But he had spent two years witnessing “shock therapy” – the overnight conversion of a planned economy into a casino – being imposed on the wreckage of the Soviet economy by Washington, Harvard economists and the IMF. He had taken to stuffing his pockets with cash for old women begging in the streets, “because,” he told me simply, “they were starving”.

Russia was ruled by westernisers, but Merry’s cable warned that “democratic forces in Russia are in serious trouble” and that “there is no reason to believe the Russian economy is capable of rapid market reform”. If the US chose “the role of economic missionary rather than true partner”, he predicted, it would strengthen extremists and revive an “adversarial relationship between Russia and the west”.

As Merry told me: “We’re gutting working-class living standards, and then expecting people to vote for us.” Washington’s answer was to make him persona non grata. The cable remained classified for three decades, quietly released only at the end of 2024. By then, one study estimated there had been 12.2 million excess deaths in Russia during the transition. Meanwhile the strongman who rose from the wreckage was nearly three years into his murderous full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Ukrainian firefighters searching the rubble for civilians after a Russian airstrike on a residential building in Oleksandrivka, Donetsk. Photograph: Diego Herrera Carcedo/Anadolu/Getty Images

The men who ignored Merry were not coy about their assumptions. Russia had to move towards “our way of doing things,” said Strobe Talbott, President Bill Clinton’s main Russia adviser. If that sounded like “an obnoxious confirmation of our doctrine of exceptionalism”, his answer was simple: “Well, tough. That’s us; that’s the US. We are exceptional.”

This was the basic structural problem of the post-cold war order. It has never gone away. However strong the evidence behind a warning, when it collided with the interests of western power, the warning gave way.

I spent two years travelling from Baghdad to Pittsburgh, and Nairobi to Ramallah, for the book, and Merry’s experience turned out to be less the exception than the rule. In a 2005 interview, the US envoy Edmund McWilliams said he had warned in 1988 that Washington’s Afghan policy was “going very, very badly”, as US weaponry flowed to Islamist fundamentalists. But the overriding objective was defeating the Soviet Union. McWilliams said he was frozen out, smeared as mentally ill, alcoholic and gay, and reassigned. CIA analysts themselves had warned in 1987 that a victorious Islamist regime might inherit a “mountain of weapons” and use them to arm or train Islamist guerrillas elsewhere. The weapons kept flowing.

The same triumphalism took hold at home. Western economies were not starved of wealth: they were increasingly organised to extract it rather than invest it. As the economist Mariana Mazzucato told me, 80% of British finance now flows back into finance, insurance and real estate. Western economies became increasingly good at rewarding ownership, but increasingly bad at building the productive foundations on which prosperity depends.

In early 2007, an executive director of the World Bank told his friend, the economist Ha-Joon Chang, that a huge crisis was coming. His evidence was his cleaner, who he suspected was undocumented: she had a $300,000 mortgage. Stagnant wages had been papered over with cheap credit – “let them eat credit,” as one economist summed up the model – and the paper was about to tear. When it did, the crash should have finished off this failed economic model. Instead, ordinary people were forced to pay to save it, through shredded social provision.

Where this chaotic fall could lead is frightening. Israel’s genocide has normalised limitless depravity. Trumpism has repurposed the rhetoric and institutions of the “war on terror”, now used to target domestic dissent. Authoritarianism and barbarism are entirely plausible futures.

There is another possibility: the left makes a different case. That it was the endless, unchecked pursuit of wealth and power by western elites, at home and abroad, that brought us here, and that the task is to rebuild what Margaret Thatcher sought to destroy – society – by investing the wealth we collectively produce. Or, as the man who wrote that buried cable put it to me: stop gutting people’s living standards and then expecting them to vote for you.





  • Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist. His latest book, The Fall of the West: How They Really Lost It, is published on 1 October.



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My comments :


The early warning from USA whistle blower Wayne Merry (the then highest political officer in the USA embassy in Moscow) in 1994, in a cable (for thirty years burried - on purpose that is - behind the doors of the national archive b y his superiors) to Washington, on the highly destructive (read demolishing) efffects - both on the hyper fragile ecnomy as on the (still in its very early stages of developement) democracy in the then only just begun post-Sowjet era - from (conform a kind of shock doctrine, instantly directed by the western powers right from above) instantly, almost violently introducing western style economics on Russia under Yeltsin, you can find in PDF, behind the following link



My question for Owen Jones is : Has he never been in touch with the content of that other PDF - see for link under this aleneas) wherein the message from world renowned scholar on international relations, John Mearsheimer, did explain in depth in an essay, exactly how the geopolitical inter-communicative mechanisms between superpowers are operating.

So has he never come to understand, that - however monstrous the Putin regime rightfully has to be called - it has been the west, that provoked the invasion of Russia into Ukrain and that this invasion could have easily been avoided by the western powers to be of that time, had they only been open for the aforementioned mechanisms and signals.
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woensdag 23 september 2026

‘Remigratie’

 


In Den Haag

‘Remigratie’

– verschenen in nr. 39
Leeslijst
Lidewij de Vos (Forum voor Democratie) en Thierry Baudet (Forum voor Democratie) op de tweede dag van de Algemene Politieke Beschouwingen© ANP / Remko de Waal
De term ‘remigratie’ duikt steeds vaker op in het Nederlandse debat. Dat is onterecht én zorgwekkend. In essentie is het een administratieve beleidsterm die verwijst naar vrijwillige terugkeer van migranten naar hun land van herkomst. Maar in extreem-rechtse kringen fungeert het als een eufemisme voor de grootschalige uitzetting van mensen met een migratieachtergrond.
De afgelopen tien jaar heeft de pan-Europese Identitaire Beweging – een netwerk van extreem-rechtse activisten – actief geprobeerd deze term te verspreiden en te normaliseren. Hun centrale zorg is de vermeende ‘islamisering van Europa’ en het idee dat migratie de Europese beschaving ondermijnt. Hun ultieme angst: ‘omvolking’, een racistische complottheorie die stelt dat Europese elites immigratie doelbewust inzetten om de ‘inheemse’ (lees: witte) bevolking te vervangen.
Omdat openlijk racistische taal maatschappelijk minder wordt geaccepteerd, bedienen deze bewegingen zich van eufemismen. ‘Ras’ wordt ‘cultuur’, ‘boreaal’ staat voor ‘witte Europeanen’ en ‘deportatie’ verandert in ‘remigratie’. Het zijn ideologische herverpakkingen van oude extreem-rechtse denkbeelden. In wezen hebben we het bij ‘remigratie’ dus over een vorm van etnische zuivering – niet door fysiek geweld, maar via bureaucratische middelen en politieke druk. Door het te framen als een sociale dienst (‘we helpen mensen terug naar huis’) en als een legitiem beleidsinstrument, wordt morele weerstand ondermijnd.
In Duitsland kreeg de term brede aandacht nadat het onderzoeksplatform Correctiv onthulde dat er in november 2023 een geheime bijeenkomst had plaatsvonden, georganiseerd onder anderen door AfD-leden. Hoofdgast was de Oostenrijkse Martin Sellner, een bekend kopstuk van de Identitaire Beweging. Tijdens die bijeenkomst presenteerde hij zijn ‘masterplan remigratie’: de uitzetting van miljoenen mensen met een migratieachtergrond, onder wie asielzoekers, mensen met een verblijfsvergunning, en zelfs Duitse staatsburgers die ‘onvoldoende geïntegreerd’ zouden zijn.
Sellner promoot ‘remigratie’ al jaren. In mei organiseerde hij een ‘Remigration Summit’ in Milaan. Vanuit Nederland waren Eva Vlaardingerbroek (voormalig FvD-lid en zelfverklaarde ‘schildmaagd’ van extreem-rechts) en Freek Jansen (FvD) als sprekers te gast. Op X verkondigde Sellner vooraf dat het vooral zaak is het woord ‘remigratie’ zo vaak mogelijk te herhalen, zodat het publiek eraan went. Die strategie werpt vruchten af. Mede dankzij Trump wint ‘remigratie’ terrein op sociale media. Ook bij protesten duikt de term vaker op. Tijdens de ‘Unite the Kingdom’-demonstratie tegen het immigratiebeleid van de Britse regering in Londen sprak Vlaardingerbroek onlangs voor een menigte, gekleed in een shirt met de tekst ‘Generation Remigration’. Haar boodschap was glashelder: ‘Ze eisen het offer van onze kinderen op het altaar van massamigratie. (…) Dit is de verkrachting, vervanging en moord op ons volk. Remigratie is mogelijk, en het is aan ons om het te realiseren.’
Ook in Nederland sijpelt de term gestaag het politieke discours binnen. In aanloop naar de verkiezingen van 2025 prijkt het woord in de programma’s van alle vier partijen op de uiterst rechtse flank van het politieke spectrum: PVV, FvD, BVNL en JA21 (dat zich overigens graag presenteert als een ‘gematigd’ alternatief voor haar rechtse concurrenten). Ook bij de BBB komt de term voor in het verkiezingsprogramma. De regeringsdeelname met de PVV heeft duidelijk haar sporen nagelaten.
FvD is het meest uitgesproken: in het verkiezingsprogramma komt ‘remigratie’ zeventien keer voor. In de inleiding: ‘We willen stoppen met massale immigratie en remigratie tot stand brengen zodat ons volk ook in de komende honderden jaren kan blijven bestaan.’ Daarna volgen voorstellen als een naturalisatiestop, royale steun voor remigratie naar landen van herkomst en een GreenCard-systeem voor ‘economisch waardevolle’ migranten.
Ook buiten de parlementaire politiek wordt de term actief gepusht. Zo verkondigde Wierd Duk onlangs in een talkshow dat hij graag als eerste het debat over ‘remigratie’ in de mainstream wil brengen, omdat ‘onze westerse democratieën bezwijken onder de immigratie’.
In Duitsland werd het AfD begin 2024 door de binnenlandse veiligheidsdienst officieel aangemerkt als gesichert rechtsextremistisch, onder meer vanwege haar expliciete pleidooi voor ‘remigratie’. In Nederland spreekt de kersverse FvD-lijsttrekker Lidewij de Vos intussen openlijk over datzelfde thema in de Tweede Kamer, zonder dat er een wenkbrauw wordt opgetrokken. Sterker nog: een Kamermeerderheid stemt vervolgens in met haar voorstel om antifa in Nederland als terroristische organisatie te bestempelen.
Het klakkeloos overnemen van termen als ‘remigratie’ is allesbehalve onschuldig. Het past in het draaiboek van uiterst rechts om denkbeelden stapsgewijs salonfähig te maken. Dat versterkt het zelfvertrouwen van de beweging – wat zich vertaalt in electorale winst en meer zichtbaarheid op straat. Wie extreem-rechtse taal normaliseert, werkt mee aan een ideologie die haaks staat op fundamentele mensenrechten en democratische waarden.
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