Reflections on the experience of watching NAZA

“We don’t have to go if you don’t want to.”

“I know. I want to go. Do you want to go?”

“I want to go.”

My husband and I are egging each other on to watch NAZA at the Barbican. We are not looking forward to it, but it’s something we have to do.

We know the format already. Israeli soldiers sit atop Tel Aviv buildings and give testimonies to war crimes.

We know the content already. We are subscribers to +972 Magazine and read the Guardian. I have read the reports by Breaking the Silence and Btzelem. We watch the news. We know what the Israeli government says publicly, brazenly, about itself, its actions, its intentions.

We know the route already. Two trains and a short walk. We do it so often we joke about deja vu.

On the way, we talk about who we might see there. People we knew from Jewish youth movements. People active in Progressive Judaism today. Jewish socialists. Jews involved in Palestine solidarity. “The same crowd as a fundraiser,” we joke. We are reassuring each other. We won’t be alone.

Upon arrival, we soon realise we have not accurately guessed the audience. We don’t recognise anyone. Nobody else is wearing kippah or visibly Jewish. There are one or two keffiyehs, but worn in the stylish way of London artists, not the practical way of Palestinian farmers.

London artists. That’s the crowd. The kinds of people who come to any interesting film the Barbican puts on. Culture vultures and curious spectators. We could just as easily be at an art house.

They bring in their glasses of red wine and boxes of popcorn.

We are watching war crimes testimonials.

I think about when I first knew what a war crime was. I didn’t have the vocabulary, then. When, as an infant, I first saw numbers tattooed on Jews’ arms. When, at primary school, child refugees arrived from Kosovo. When, at secondary school, I protested against invading Afghanistan and Iraq.

I think about when I first knew that Israel had committed a war crime. When, while I was at university, they released white phosphorus on Gaza.

A generation of my family were killed in a genocide. I wonder how many people in this room understand what that feels like. I wonder if any of them know what it means to carry genocide in your family history; in your internal narrative; in your DNA. It is more than mass murder. It is the systematic effort to erase everyone who looks like you, thinks like you, prays like you, talks like you, is anything in any way like you.

Despite my best efforts to build Jewish community based on pride and joy, genocide is an inescapable part of my story; and so of my experience of the world.

We will remember the burden of being an almost-destroyed people. I read these words annually in the Progressive Jewish liturgy.

It carries a great weight. To keep the way of life alive that the Nazis almost destroyed. To refuse to be conquered. To uphold the highest moral ideals to which our ancestors strived, so that not only Jews will keep on living, but Judaism will too.

I hear the click and fizz of people opening their drinks.

I wonder if any of them have ever before considered how easy it is to follow orders. How easy it is to do banal things that unalterably change history for hundreds of thousands of people. Or even to do something unspeakable that changes history for just one person.

How easy it is to watch war crimes with popcorn.

Each of the war crimes testimonials from the soldiers reinforces the others. They tell the same story, again and again, from different angles. The use of AI to decide which buildings to collapse. The number of civilian deaths permitted in every military strike. The orders to shoot anyone who walked beyond the perimeter or tried to cut cues to get food. Each is an individual confession to a war crime; and each paints a picture of something more sinister, more planned, more awful.

There is a reason this film is banned in Israel and the documentary-makers have gone into hiding. There is a reason Netanyahu does not want people to see this.

The soldiers are younger than us, by maybe 10 or 15 years. They are educated, middle-class, urban. They are like us. I suspect plenty of them carry the same genetic memory of genocide that I do, albeit a generation or two more removed.

Never again was the clarion cry. Never again would this happen to us. Never again would this happen to anyone.

I wonder if any of the other people in this room have considered that their people might also commit atrocities. That the propensity to carry out mass murder is not based on your religion, or your race, or your nationality. Most of them will call themselves British. I wonder how often they consider how many unspeakable acts have been carried out by people carrying that nationality, that flag, that passport. I wonder if they have ever really reckoned with how much cruelty human beings can inflict, and how much they can have inflicted on them.

We tell ourselves we have done the right things. Fundraised. Protested. Joined protective presence. Talked to our MPs.

In truth, we have been morally lucky. None of us really know what we are capable of resisting until we are instructed to commit war crimes and know the price if we do not.

After the Holocaust, taught Rabbi Albert Friedlander, we can never again teach a theology that we could not also justify to a million murdered Jewish children.

And now we have to justify Judaism to the thousands dead of Gaza.

And now we have to keep the Jewish story and way of life alive so that the Nazis did not destroy us entirely. And now we have to live with the memories of all those Palestinians.

And it isn’t over. There are no guarantees which peoples, if any, will survive to see the 22nd Century. There are almost certainly more massacres to come. We can say with some surety that some will involve Jews, and some will involve Palestinians. The Israelis are still bombing Gaza now.

The lights go up. The credits roll. We are back among the London artists at the Barbican. People exit around us. We remain seated. People file out. They walk past us and climb over us. We are the last there, attached to our chairs. The last of the credits arrive.

I nudge my husband and point to the screen. Someone I know from the Jewish left helped make the film. My husband knows his sister from youth movements.

We walk home in near silence.

“I don’t think there’s much to say,” my husband says. “What did we expect?”