Abraham and Szor: life in Tel Aviv going on ‘is also an act of violence’

Elsa Fernández-Santos interviewed Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor for El País in Venice. The piece is dated 14 September 2026. They live in Jerusalem, and their families are from Tel Aviv, where they filmed at night. The Special Jury Prize had just been awarded. El País says the film gathers 24 military personnel on systems for killing in Gaza, some of them using artificial intelligence, and that The Guardian verified the claims and the sources’ anonymity. They won the 2025 documentary Oscar for No Other Land with Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal. The army had, the day before, denied using AI.

Asked what it is like to live in a society that denies reality, Abraham gives two answers. He says it is painful to see people lose basic moral limits, and that reactions he has read do not only fail to deny the officers’ accounts but justify them and applaud them. The second answer is the headline. Ordinary life in Tel Aviv, he says, is itself a form of violence while the military headquarters that programmed what happened in Gaza sits in the city, about 60 kilometres from systematic killing he calls a genocide. A cheerful morning radio voice, in that setting, feels violent to him. Szor says daily life is bearable because a small group of activists opposes what is happening, including by being present in the West Bank. She distinguishes that from opposition aimed only at Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.

Abraham says Shoah’s attention to detail influenced them, and that Holocaust memory is being used as a weapon. The sketches, he says, were for understanding the systems, not a copy of that film. Szor says the ending enters Gaza for viewers she names as the most in denial: Israelis, Germans and Americans. Glazer joined after a first cut. Abraham says he pushed the dialogue forward and let the city arrive more slowly, changing structure, opening and sound. They edit together. He calls her the artist. She says the work is entirely shared, and that they studied history, not film.

He says Netanyahu’s 1986 texts use the same good-against-evil frame as now. On a settlement he says two states, one state or a confederation could respect both peoples, and that the obstacle is will. The urgent fact, he says, is that Palestinians are being destroyed and expelled. Szor says Israel is losing public opinion and not the support of governments that send weapons, naming the United States and Germany. Abraham says he is worried about antisemitism, particularly for Jews outside Israel on the left. The ministerial threat that day is a separate entry at https://nazafilm.org/record/timeline. Screenings are at https://nazafilm.org/showings and the watch page is https://nazafilm.org/watch.