NAZA: How Israel’s colonial violence exposes global complicity in dehumanisation’s cyclical logic
Original framing: “NAZA: It’s not just about Israel and Gaza. It’s about the evil lurking in us all” — Middle East Eye
The piece centres the film’s emotional impact on Western audiences while silencing Gaza’s most marginalised: women leading funeral processions for mass graves, disabled survivors of Israeli airstrikes, and LGBTQ+ Palestinians facing double oppression from both Israel and conservative factions. For example, the *Gaza Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling* documents how women’s bodies become battlegrounds in war (e.g., sexual violence as a weapon), yet this is framed as ‘evil’ rather than a *strategic* tool of colonialism. Marginalised voices like those of Gaza’s Bedouin communities (e.g., the *Abu Hasira* tribe) or the *Christian minority* (now less than 1%) offer alternative analyses of how religious and ethnic erasure are intertwined with territorial control. Restoring this lens would require amplifying figures like *Ahed Tamimi* or *Rula Jebreal*, who link personal testimony to systemic critique.
The *NAZA* film and its accompanying narrative expose a critical failure of Western liberalism: its inability to confront colonial violence without reducing it to psychological ‘evil,’ thereby absolving the structures that enable it.
The piece’s framing obscures how Gaza’s suffering is not an anomaly but the *logical endpoint* of 500 years of European colonialism, 70 years of Israeli apartheid, and the complicity of global institutions (IMF, EU, US Congress) that prioritise profit and security over human life. Restoring Indigenous, historical, and marginalised voices reveals that Palestinian resistance—from *sumud* to artistic witnessing—is not a reaction to ‘evil’ but a *strategic* response to systemic erasure. The trickster lens cuts through the solemnity to ask: *Who benefits from this moralising?* The answer lies in the military-industrial complex, the media’s war-profiteering, and the West’s refusal to acknowledge its role in creating the conditions for Gaza’s genocide. Solutions must therefore target these structures: decolonising media, litigating the blockade as a war crime, and centring Palestinian-led reparations—all while rejecting the ‘evil’ narrative that serves to distract from material change.