DW Arabic: Israeli criticism and a threat to strip NAZA’s makers of citizenship

Desk file · Citizenship

A minister can post. He cannot, by posting, take their passports.

Deutsche Welle, Sep 14, 2026 — one clip in this file. The note was written for the file, not from the headline.

On 14 September 2026 Israel’s culture minister, Miki Zohar, wrote that the Venice prize was horrifying, called the work of Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor treason, and said he would act immediately to revoke their citizenship. The Guardian, Al Jazeera, the Jerusalem Post, and DW all logged that post. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir added “disgrace” and told them to leave. Those sentences are public. They are still not a court file.

Citizenship in Israel is not a culture-portfolio switch. JTA and The Hindu both spell the gate: Interior, then further government and judicial steps, and a narrow statutory idea of breach of loyalty. Zohar can write to the Population Authority. He cannot, from X, cancel two passports. This desk prints that limit every time a clip repeats “stripped.” The threat is real. The completed act is not.

On 16 September Reuters recorded Benjamin Netanyahu promising two bills and naming NAZA: one to take citizenship from people who “defame” soldiers abroad, one to multiply statutory defamation damages by twenty. Deadline printed his “hit them in their pockets and also in their citizenship.” CPJ called that a move from rhetoric to a legal weapon. When JTA wrote on 18 September the bills were still bills. President Isaac Herzog, on Channel 12 in that same piece, said revocation was “completely irrelevant” and had “no chance.” He still called the film a shame. The presidency refused the nuclear option. It did not defend the right to show the work.

Former prime minister Naftali Bennett’s “cowardly blood libel,” as Deadline has it, belongs in this file as climate, not as a finding. A former head of government repeating a blood-libel charge is pressure on two journalists, not a review of 24 interviews. We do not treat it as a verdict on the footage.

This unofficial desk’s position is one sentence: Abraham and Szor made a documentary; a film is not a treason docket; watch it. We will not invent a donation page while someone is shouting “revoke.” If a later statute actually passes, we will date that. Until then, “citizenship stripped” in a headline is a minister’s wish, not the Population Authority’s stamp.

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