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The Guardian
The Guardian
Israeli minister threatens to strip NAZA filmmakers of citizenship
Written by The Guardian
Briefing from The Guardian. Original reporting stays with the outlet.
Culture Minister Miki Zohar accused Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor of “treason against the state” after NAZA won Venice’s Special Jury Prize, and said he would move to revoke their Israeli citizenship.
Sian Cain and Lorenzo Tondo’s Guardian report, first published on 13 September 2026 and updated the next day, is the English record of Culture Minister Miki Zohar’s threat to strip Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor of Israeli citizenship. The paper says the Guardian-produced film spoke to 24 military or intelligence whistleblowers, and that one source claims approval to kill 500 civilians, the film’s “NAZA” figure, to kill one Hamas member. It won the special jury prize on Saturday after what the Guardian calls a 25-minute ovation, which it describes as a festival record.
On Sunday, the Guardian reports, Zohar wrote on X that he would revoke their citizenship for treason, accusing them of seeking applause from antisemites. On Monday he said he had asked the directors general of the Population and Immigration Authority and the interior ministry to examine revocation for breach of loyalty and collaboration with the enemy, and to ask whether gathering the material assisted the enemy in wartime. He is quoted: freedom of expression is not a licence to betray the state. In a video, Benjamin Netanyahu called the applause intolerable and objected to directors portraying the IDF as war criminals. Itamar Ben-Gvir called them a disgrace and told them to leave. Eyal Zamir said military lawyers were examining legal measures against what he called blood libels. Naftali Bennett called it a horrific blood libel.
The Guardian says revocation is rare. A 2022 supreme court ruling allowed removal of nationality for a failure of loyalty such as espionage or treason, and a 2023 change covered terrorism convictions. The interior minister must request it, the justice minister must approve it, and judges must validate it. A culture minister’s post is not that sequence. The army, the paper reports, first rejected the allegations outright and said anonymous identities cannot be verified, then said they needed an evidence-based answer rather than a blanket dismissal. Anat Saragusti, of the Union of Journalists in Israel, said Hebrew media had barely shown Palestinian civilian casualties. Haaretz, quoted in the piece, called the conduct of the war a black stain, “to put it mildly.”
Agence France-Presse figures in the piece put the 7 October 2023 death toll at 1,221 on official Israeli numbers, with 251 hostages taken, and cite the Gaza health ministry for more than 73,000 deaths since, most of them civilians. A Guardian News and Media spokesperson said the attacks came from people who had not seen the film, that the testimonies are from confidential sources after more than three years of work, and that the company would defend the film. The threat is logged at https://nazafilm.org/record/timeline. Public defences are at https://nazafilm.org/record/defenders. Screenings are at https://nazafilm.org/showings and the watch page is https://nazafilm.org/watch.
This desk
Desk file · Citizenship
A minister can post. He cannot, by posting, take their passports.
The Guardian, 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.
Unofficial. We support Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor. We do not reprint the outlet and we do not invent a donation page.
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