The Bag With Holes: What We Refuse to Watch Before We Judge
There is a particular kind of vertigo in watching powerful people condemn a film they admit they haven't seen. In the days after NAZA — a documentary alleging that Israel's military uses AI-assisted targeting in Gaza in ways that predictably kill large numbers of civilians — received the longest standing ovation in Venice Film Festival history and then a Special Jury Prize, Israel's culture minister called for its Israeli-Jewish directors to be stripped of their citizenship, the prime minister called it incitement, and the military's chief of staff ordered prosecutors to hunt down the soldiers who had spoken to the filmmakers. A government spokesperson dismissed it as bait for "awards from overseas from Israel haters." None of them, by their own account, had watched it.
That detail is worth sitting with longer than the news cycle allowed it, because it is not really a story about one film, one country, or one war. It is a story about what happens when the cost of looking honestly at something becomes higher than the cost of denouncing it unseen — and that is a far older problem than Venice, or Gaza, or 2026.
An old diagnosis for a familiar evasion
Long before modern media cycles existed, a community that had just returned from exile faced a version of this same choice. They had a shared, difficult project waiting — the rebuilding of something sacred and communal — and instead they spent years finishing their own comfortable houses first, telling themselves, reasonably enough, that the timing simply wasn't right yet. The ancient wisdom-and-prophetic literature that records this doesn't waste time psychoanalyzing them. It simply says: consider your ways. Look honestly at what you've actually been doing, not at the story you've been telling yourself about why you've been doing it.
And then it makes an economic observation that still lands: their private industry, pursued instead of the harder shared work, produced nothing durable. Wages went into "a bag with holes." Effort was real. Output was real. But none of it held, because it had been redirected away from the thing that actually needed doing and toward the thing that felt safer to do instead.
That is the diagnosis worth applying here — not to one side of the Gaza war, but to the reflex on every side of this story to avoid the harder, slower work of actually examining evidence before rendering a verdict.
The failure that's easy to see
Start with the obvious one, because it's the one making headlines. Condemning a documentary without watching it is not an aberration of institutional behavior; it is institutional behavior operating exactly as it's designed to when the underlying material is threatening. It is cheaper, faster, and politically safer to attack the messenger's motives — "bait for Israel haters" — than to sit with testimony from twenty-four of your own military's former insiders and ask whether any of it is true. Declaring the film illegitimate before viewing it is the modern, bureaucratic equivalent of finishing the paneled house instead of laying the foundation: it produces the appearance of decisive action while carefully avoiding the one action — actual scrutiny — that might cost something.
This is not unique to Israeli officials, and it would be intellectually dishonest to pretend otherwise. It is the same reflex international audiences perform in reverse when they share a festival ovation as proof of a settled verdict on a three-year war they have not examined in comparable depth. A quarter-hour of applause at a premiere is an aesthetic and emotional event. It is not evidence. Treating it as evidence is its own bag with holes.
The failure that's harder to see
Here is where the inversion matters, because the tempting move — and it is tempting, because the film's subject is so serious and its reception so dramatic — is to treat NAZA itself as beyond scrutiny simply because the people attacking it are behaving so badly. That would be a mistake, and a lazy one.
A documentary built on twenty-four anonymous soldiers' testimony, produced for a festival circuit that structurally rewards the most damning possible framing of a live conflict, deserves the same "consider your ways" standard applied to its critics. Anonymity protects sources from real danger, and that danger is not in dispute — Israel's military has ordered a manhunt for the leakers, which tells you something about the personal risk involved in speaking. But anonymity also makes independent verification of specific claims difficult by design, and award juries are not intelligence auditors; a standing ovation measures how a room felt in a dark theater, not what withstands cross-examination. Israel's military, for its part, does not deny using AI to assist target identification; it maintains a human approves each strike — a claim that itself deserves scrutiny, not automatic acceptance, but that a fair-minded viewer has to weigh rather than skip past.
None of this excuses the response from Israeli officials. Refusing to watch the film is not a counter-argument to it; it is an admission that the argument might hold up if examined. But the ethical work here isn't choosing a side and defending it harder. It's noticing that both the unseen condemnation and the unexamined celebration are the same evasion wearing different clothes — comfortable houses built by people who'd rather not look too closely at the foundation.
What actually needs rebuilding
The genuinely difficult, unglamorous work in this story isn't taking a position on NAZA. It's the slower project underneath it: building — nationally, individually, in newsrooms and living rooms — an actual practice of examining costly evidence before rendering verdicts, on every side of every contested account of this war, and of every war. That practice doesn't photograph well. It doesn't produce a viral clip. It is, in the truest sense, unglamorous foundation-laying, and it is exactly the kind of project a community under pressure is most tempted to defer indefinitely in favor of something that feels more immediately satisfying — moral certainty, tribal solidarity, a clean verdict.
The human cost sitting beneath all of this is not abstract and should not be flattened by the meta-conversation about how we argue about it. Roughly 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage in the attack that began this war in October 2023; the Gaza Health Ministry's toll, which Israel's own military has publicly treated as broadly credible, has climbed past 73,000 even during a ceasefire that is supposed to be holding. Those numbers are not a debate to be won by whichever side produces the more compelling documentary or the more forceful denunciation. They are the actual foundation everyone keeps building comfortable houses around instead of confronting directly.
A concrete ask
So here is the practical version of "consider your ways," offered without pretending it resolves the underlying conflict, because it doesn't, and anyone who tells you a film festival prize or a government's outrage settles a war is selling something. Before you repeat a verdict on NAZA, or on any single contested account of this or any war, do three specific things: find and read or watch at least one primary source from each side of the dispute — not a summary of a summary, the actual testimony or the actual official statement; wait until the film is actually available to the public before treating festival buzz as documentary proof; and notice, honestly, whether your instinct to accept or reject a claim changed the moment you learned which side benefited from it. If it did, that's the bag with holes. The wages of instant certainty rarely survive contact with the evidence.
Support outlets and institutions that require multi-source corroboration before amplifying a single account of civilian harm on either side of this or any conflict — and withhold your applause, in either direction, until you've actually looked.
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