News · film ·
Ynet
Variety
Ynet: who are the makers of NAZA, the film shaking Israel?
Written by Ynet
Briefing from Ynet. Original reporting stays with the outlet.
A Hebrew profile of Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham after the Venice win, covering the citizenship threat and their insistence on showing the film in Israel.
Ynet’s Hebrew profile asks who Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham are. It says she has preferred to stay off stage, and that the pair won an Oscar with No Other Land before NAZA. Ynet calls NAZA a Guardian production, filmed on Tel Aviv rooftops, with 24 men and women it identifies as Unit 8200 soldiers. The directors, in this account, call the policy intentional and say it uses artificial intelligence. After the prize Abraham said politicians and journalists were attacking a film they had not seen. Ynet’s applause figure is almost 25 minutes.
The profile’s sharpest institutional point is about money and the law. Zohar, it reports, accused the directors of treason and said he would act at once to revoke their citizenship. Ynet says there is no legal precedent it can point to for revoking citizenship over a statement or a film, and that revocation has been a rare step tied to terrorism or a serious security threat, not to expression. It also says NAZA is a British production and did not receive money from the culture ministry, a film fund, a broadcaster, or any other Israeli source. Zohar, in the same account, tied the row to a reform meant to stop public money paying for work he said harmed soldiers. Ynet’s point is that this film did not take that money.
On No Other Land, Ynet says Szor directed with Abraham, Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal, shot the film, and helped edit about 2,000 hours from Masafer Yatta. It won in Berlin, then the documentary Oscar. She told El País, at 32, that she studied history rather than film. The article text says Abraham, born in Be’er Sheva, was released from intelligence after two weeks. A caption on the same page says two months. Screen Daily reported a week and said the film does not state it. This desk does not choose among those figures.
Ynet says Abraham founded Across the Wall in 2019 with the journalist Ahmed Alnaouq, to publish Palestinian stories in Hebrew. The site drew more than a million visitors in 2021 and stopped in November 2023 after the army bombed Alnaouq’s home. At the Oscars on 3 March 2025 he said Gaza’s destruction must end, the hostages must be released, and any settlement has to come without supremacy. Szor told the Associated Press, as this profile reports, that seeing people draw the system is different from reading an investigation. The IDF spokesperson’s statement in the piece calls the promo false and invites the directors to show the army the full film. Public screenings are at https://nazafilm.org/showings, the watch page is https://nazafilm.org/watch, and the timeline is https://nazafilm.org/record/timeline.
This desk
Desk file · Citizenship
A minister can post. He cannot, by posting, take their passports.
Ynet, 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.
Keep reading
More in film
More briefings as you scroll. Each card names the writer and links to the original outlet.
End of the clip-file.