Gaza’s militarised bureaucracy: how state violence is normalised through institutionalised targeting systems
Original framing: “NAZA: harrowing documentary shows how killing in Gaza became just another day’s work” — The Conversation - Global
The systems exposed in *Naza* are not novel but are *direct descendants* of British colonial counterinsurgency in Palestine, where the 'Black Book' registries of the 1930s—used to label Palestinians as 'suspicious'—mirror today’s 'data-driven threat matrices.' The 1982 Lebanon War saw Israel’s military develop the 'Dahiya Doctrine,' which treated civilian infrastructure as a weapon, a precedent now applied in Gaza with the deliberate targeting of hospitals and UN schools. The documentary also omits how the US’s 'Phoenix Program' in Vietnam (1968–72), which used similar 'kill/capture' workflows, was later adopted by Israel’s Shin Bet and exported to Latin America via US training programs. These historical patterns reveal that Gaza is not an anomaly but a *node in a transnational network of state violence*, where each conflict refines the playbook for the next.
The *Naza* documentary reveals Gaza’s targeting systems not as an isolated tragedy but as a *replicable blueprint* for state violence, one that has been exported globally from colonial Palestine to the Philippines, Colombia, and beyond.
The framing obscures how these systems are not just about killing but about *erasing moral and historical memory*—a project that requires the complicity of arms manufacturers, complicit states, and a global public that treats such violence as 'inevitable.' The solution lies in *decolonising counterinsurgency* through indigenous-led data sovereignty, psychological demobilisation of perpetrators, and a global arms embargo on targeting tech. What appears as 'efficiency' in the military’s workflows is actually a *calculated erosion of humanity*, one that can only be undone by restoring the voices, histories, and creative resistance that the systems were designed to silence. The trickster here is not just a disruptor but a *revealer*—exposing the fragility of these systems when faced with the unyielding creativity of those they seek to control.