Naza, or On the Political Uses of Shock Treatment

Whether or not a human being can have experiences depends, in the last instance, on how he forgets.

(Th. W. Adorno, letter to Benjamin, 29 February 1940)

Naza is a film with documentary pretensions.¹ It falls into two parts, which are not announced as such and do not work in the same way. The first sets out the Israeli army’s rules of engagement and war strategy in Gaza, without undue emphasis, through the testimony of soldiers, most of them apparently from Unit 8200. The viewer learns about Israeli military rationality, about possible reasons for the very high civilian death toll, and about how the strategy relates to the fight against Hamas. The soldiers’ statements go unchallenged: no IDF official is asked to respond to the allegations.² Even so, this part of the film moves beyond fantasies about the IDF and its murderous conduct in Gaza. It offers explanations, some of them technical (the use of AI in the search for targets). The viewer is thus in a position to discuss this strategy, or even to dispute that it exists, and to debate the means employed and the context of these decisions. It also becomes possible to condemn the strategy for reasons that can be stated openly.

The second part works quite differently. Hamas disappears, both as an actor in the war and as its cause. The Nakba takes the place of cause and context. Strategy, tactics and means are no longer discussed. Individual stories of horror follow one another on screen, each chosen for being singularly unbearable. Then a soldier is brought to confess that he believes he has contributed to a genocide, and to compare himself to the Nazi murderers. His posture and voice suggest such distress that one inevitably thinks of post-traumatic stress disorder; but since the faces and voices of all the interviewees have been digitally altered beyond recognition, there is no knowing whether these bodily signs are really his own. A reworking of the iconography of the poster for Lanzmann’s Shoah then echoes this subjective assessment. Finally, images of children’s bodies under the rubble of Gaza close the film’s last sequence of images, and the film ends on a sentence with nothing to date it: ‘Israel continues to kill Palestinian civilians’.

Between the two parts, the mode of critique changes. The first sets out a military rationality that is open to criticism, and its merit is to give a voice to soldiers who can describe that rationality from the inside. The second tries to engage the viewer affectively by shocking him. Presumably the hope is that the shock will provoke opposition to the acts described and to those responsible for them. The film also tries to steer how that reaction is interpreted: the Nakba as context and cause, genocide, Nazism, the poster of the Shoah retrospective, and the claim that Israel continues to kill Palestinians, as if this were its essence and raison d’être.

These two modes of critique are not complementary. They cannot even be added together. A viewer who is thinking through Israel’s strategy in this war feels assaulted by so brutal an appeal to his affects, which seeks to dictate what he should think. The film is built on a continuity error (faux raccord): the second mode of critique, which works through shock and the shocking, undoes the reflective distance that the first had made possible. The question the film raises concerns, in truth, the critical strategy of a whole section of the Israeli left in its just struggle alongside Palestinian civilians. It comes down to whether shocking is a useful modality of critique, given the situation of the Israeli society the film addresses, a society which its directors hope ‘will see it and have some response to it’.³

The address of critique

If Naza means to address this society, and hopes for a response other than rejection or denial,⁴ its device has to rest on a diagnosis of that society. There is no universal formula for critique. A critical statement is always calibrated to the norms of those it addresses, and to their moral and psychic possibilities. It is right, but doubtless utterly futile, to address the Taliban by showing them that their treatment of women violates human rights at their most basic. No sensible critique can ignore the social, political and psychic conditions in which it is voiced, on pain of forfeiting all efficacy. That, at least, is the conclusion of a hundred and fifty years of reflection on critique, a reflection that begins with Marx, runs through classical and then pragmatic sociology, and remains at the heart of what is called Critical Theory.

There is no universal formula for critique. A critical statement is always calibrated to the norms of those it addresses, and to their moral and psychic possibilities.

The argument fits in a few words. A critique that is not immanent, one that does not draw on the norms and possibilities of conduct of the society it addresses, merely sets an abstract moral ‘ought’ against existing reality. Short of appealing to natural law or metaphysics, it cannot give rational grounds for the norms it invokes. Every critique therefore faces a twofold question of address. On what norm does it rest, and which social actors carry that norm? What critical device would allow it to be heard by the bearers of this normativity, so as to orient their practices towards greater justice?

The directors of Naza do have an answer to this twofold question, and what is at issue here is its pertinence. Their answer rests, first, on a diagnosis of the moral and psychic possibilities of the society they come from and address: Israeli society is unable to hear or see the suffering it inflicts on the Palestinians. It is fixated on its security, and on its security alone, so much so that what is done in its name a few dozen kilometres from its cities never reaches it. (Night-time scenes inside Tel Aviv homes, where people go about their everyday business of cooking, eating, watching television and going to bed, are meant to illustrate this self-centred indifference, somewhat insistently and at length.) By making the film in order to change this state of affairs, the directors implicitly assume that the internal normativity of Israeli society forbids causing suffering to innocent civilians. It is more than likely that they are right on this point. They then observe that, despite this shared norm, the society cannot look Palestinian suffering in the face or recognise it as such. The film’s critical device thus sets itself the task of cutting into this blindness, which it takes to be wilful and carefully cultivated.

The directors thus start from a diagnosis of denial: Israeli society denies a reality of which it is nevertheless objectively a part. This has consequences for the means that critique, in their view, must use if it is to be heard. If ordinary critical speech fails to reach its addressee, even when it rests on common norms that this society shares, then critique has to be formulated so as to pierce whatever blocks its way. This reasoning assumes that the obstacle to listening is of a kind that the force of shock can knock down. In assuming this, the film relies on a second diagnosis, which concerns no longer the normative and moral make-up of the society but its psyche. On this view, the society defends itself against every piece of information about Palestinian suffering, and only shock, or even exaggeration, can bring about the collapse of this defence mechanism against a reality it does not want to see.

The collapse of the shelter

Since this form of critique makes a claim about the Israeli psyche, it is worth considering what constitutes anyone’s psyche, a society’s included: its biography, what it has lived through.⁵ The biography of Israeli society consists of repeated and continuous experiences of attack, threat and hostility, passed down the generations. It is not reducible to 7 October, whose magnitude need not be recalled here. Israel has lived in danger since 1948, and Israeli society organised itself long ago to live with it.

What all the wars and terrorist attacks had left intact until 2023 was a certainty: that in spite of this situation, and in a sense against it, Israel was a sovereign shelter. It was the place where, whatever happened, the annihilation of the people was impossible, because Israeli society was free to act to prevent it. Israeli society shared this conviction with much of the Jewish world, whose support for Israel went as much to the shelter as to Jewish sovereignty. The conviction was constitutive of how the society coped, day to day, with the hostility around it.

On 7 October it collapsed, in Israel and in the diaspora alike. What broke that day was not a line of defence. It was the certainty of being able to guarantee one’s own security, that is, of being able to hold, by one’s own means, the boundary between a protected inside and a hostile outside, the boundary that gave life in Israel its very meaning. This is the society on which the directors of Naza expect their ‘shock’ to work.

Benjamin’s wager

The idea that shock can be a means of critique is not the invention of Naza’s directors. It has a history in reflection on the modalities of critique, going back to Walter Benjamin: to his work on Baudelaire and to the figure of the gambler in The Arcades Project. Benjamin, too, starts from a diagnosis, in his case of the state of consciousness of the members of modern capitalist societies. In his view this consciousness is in a permanent state of shock, kept up by modern life, which assails the subject from early childhood with violent stimuli: ‘What the Lunapark achieves with its Dodgem cars and other amusements of the same kind is nothing but a foretaste of the drill to which the unskilled worker is subjected in the factory […] The passers-by in the crowd behave as if, adapted to the automatons around them, they could express themselves only automatically. Their behaviour is a reaction to shocks.’⁶ Benjamin calls this behaviour, peculiar to the modern subject and induced by its social and cultural reality, a ‘reflex’ mechanism, comparable to the one ‘which the machine sets in motion in the worker’.

For Benjamin, modern life, the life of the big city, the factory and the crowd, reaches the subject as a series of unconnected jolts. To survive, individual consciousness turns itself into an agency of defence. It parries whatever reaches it, processes it instantly and gets rid of it by sending it straight back to the outside it came from, like the reflective strips on our outdoor gear. Nothing that strikes it penetrates it or settles in it. Reacting in this way, the individual knows only moments lived through; what he no longer does is have experiences. What is lived passes without becoming past. It is consumed on the spot and leaves no trace that could later be taken up again, narrated, worked through. A consciousness reduced to this defensive function is reduced to reflexes. It meets every jolt with the same gesture of rejection, and that gesture teaches it nothing, either about itself or about the world. In this ‘reflex’ behaviour, induced by modern life, Benjamin sees that life in its barest outline: time and space reduced to a series of jerks out of which nothing is built.

A consciousness reduced to this defensive function is reduced to reflexes. It meets every jolt with the same gesture of rejection, and that gesture teaches it nothing, either about itself or about the world.

From this observation Benjamin draws a wager. If consciousness has become a defence mechanism that deals with reality by rejecting it, no critique of reality based on shared norms can reach it any longer. Nor can such a consciousness construct those norms, since that would require a continuous experience of reality, an experience that would let it grasp reality’s rules. The only thing that can then arrest it, and halt its ‘reflex’ behaviour, comes from what it cannot parry: a shock powerful enough to destroy its defences. In other words, catastrophe. In the collapse of defence brought about by catastrophe, the subject might perceive reality as it is, and understand that it ought not to be.

This is the wager that the second part of Naza takes up, perhaps unknowingly. If Israelis do not see Gaza, it is because a powerful defence mechanism is at work, and it has to be brought down by ‘shocking’.

A breakdown that has already happened

Benjamin, however, had based his wager on psychoanalytic theory. In his writing, ‘defence mechanism’ was not a metaphor, whereas the directors of Naza seem to ascribe ideological motives to Israeli defensiveness. Freud distinguishes between fear, anxiety and fright in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the great text in which he recast psychoanalytic theory in the wake of his work on the traumas of the 1914–18 war. Anxiety is a state of expecting danger and of preparing for it, where danger means, for every subject, an experience of unpleasure (which may be physical, ranging from hunger to death and including any injury to physical or psychic integrity). Fright occurs when the danger arrives and one is not prepared for it. Freud adds a decisive point: anxiety protects against fright. Trauma occurs where preparedness for anxiety is lacking, in both senses of the term. On the one hand, a shock strikes where there was no anxiety; this is the trauma that occurs when an environment one trusted turns into an aggressor. On the other, preparedness is not solid enough, and the shock breaks through the barrier.

Within his conception of modern capitalist reality as a series of jolts, Benjamin draws an obvious consequence from this. Such a reality produces a consciousness that is permanently prepared, and this very preparedness prevents shocks from becoming experiences, because consciousness parries them. Hence the circle he describes: the more reality consists of shocks, the more anxious consciousness becomes, that is, the more prepared to take a blow; and the less it is affected by the blows, which it no longer even registers but casts out of itself.

It follows, for Benjamin, that in a reality of this kind, which produces subjects who are ‘on guard’, a shock can take effect in only two cases. The first is when the consciousness that receives it is not in a state of preparedness for anxiety. Either it is in a space protected enough for it to lower its guard, or it has the singular capacity that Benjamin attributed to Baudelaire: the capacity to gather up shocks rather than forestall them, and to make them the material of his oeuvre. The second case is when the shock breaks through the guard. But then the shock is final. It shatters what constitutes the ego (its defences, which in this particular case amount to its entire way of integrating reality) and makes it break down.

Benjamin finds the model for this second kind of efficacy of shock in the figure of the gambler. The gambler deliberately exposes himself to an environment made of ‘blows’ and pushes ‘reflex’ behaviour to its paroxysm, reacting reflexively, and without being able to stop, to every turn of the game. What he is really seeking is his own breakdown: the moment when he will no longer have the resources, financial ones in this case, to keep playing. Benjamin hopes that reality as it is will be revealed in this breakdown of the subject. Once broken down, the subject no longer has the means to protect himself against what comes from that reality, and at last looks at the world with the scales fallen from his eyes.

What broke on October 7 was not a line of defence. It was the certainty of being able to guarantee one’s own security, that is, of being able to hold, by one’s own means, the boundary between a protected inside and a hostile outside, the boundary that gave life in Israel its very meaning.

Benjamin makes this wager against psychoanalysis and against the knowledge it draws from clinical practice. Psychoanalysis credits the subject’s breakdown with no emancipatory virtue, not even a merely salutary one. Winnicott worked more directly than anyone on the defences of the traumatised subject, the subject who parries reality under the sway of an immense anxiety, an anxiety that has inhabited him since the shocks he suffered in the past. He also worked on what happens when those defences are broken. And he showed that ‘reflex’ behaviour is itself already a reaction to a breakdown that took place in the subject’s past. The anxiety behind the rejection of reality stems from a breakdown that has already been experienced: ‘It is a fear of the original agony which caused the defence organization which the patient displays as an illness syndrome.’⁷

There is no easy or immediate way out of this pathological state. Bringing down the defence mechanisms through a second breakdown merely reproduces the state of disintegration that made them necessary in the first place. Winnicott is very clear about such cases: ‘[T]he patient must go on looking for the past detail which is not yet experienced. This search takes the form of a looking for this detail in the future. Unless the therapist can work successfully on the basis that this detail is already a fact, the patient must go on fearing to find what is being compulsively looked for in the future.’⁸ What the subject seeks in the future has already happened, and that is precisely why he fears it. The only way out lies in what Winnicott calls the establishment of a ‘transitional space’: a place safe enough for the first breakdown to be lived through and integrated as experience. Otherwise the subject will spend his life anxious in the face of reality, constantly suspecting it of wanting to make him break down, and rejecting it for that reason.

A raised guard

Naza follows Benjamin’s critical model, with its faith in the salutary effects of breakdown, and bets on shock. In doing so, it makes plain its complete lack of interest in Israeli society. That society is made up of generations of traumatised people⁹ (Shoah survivors, refugees from persecution in the Arab world, successive wars, terrorist attacks), and the directors of Naza very likely number among them. It was already on the defensive towards Palestinian reality, which by its sheer complexity is a source of unpleasure for Israelis. But before 7 October that reality was not rejected. It was the object of political conflict within Israel. One could try to look away from it, but it had its place in the country’s political life, and not only as a security issue, even though security became the dominant frame under successive Netanyahu governments. If Palestinian reality could be seen and heard, it was because Israel, experienced as a safe and sovereign place from which to face the outside world, kept it from being perceived as a possible cause of breakdown.

Israeli society has indeed, over its history, translated its traumas into experiences. The Eichmann trial was one instance of this collective work; Israeli art is certainly another. From Hatufim to Fauda by way of BeTipul, the television series industry has given Western audiences access to this work of remembering and integration. But 7 October destroyed the safe place from which the traumatic and threatening side of external reality could be dealt with.

It may be said in passing that the greatness of the latest season of Fauda, whatever criticisms its caricatures of France may deserve, lies in starting exactly there, with the destruction of the refuge. It shows without varnish what this does to the Israeli psyche, including that of characters we thought unshakeable, like Doron. It follows their attempts to regain a capacity for action without the support of the shelter known as the ‘security system’. And finally it shows the failure of personal revenge, and the reintegration of all the Israeli survivors of this epic into a society bound by solidarity, a society now able to make 7 October an event of the past, one that can be dealt with.

Naza ignores this dimension of 7 October. It treats it as one more war trauma, ultimately normal for a country like Israel. The film mentions it at the start, but only as a cause of the calls for revenge heard in the first months after the event, and as the reason why Israelis are insensitive to Palestinian victims. It frames it in a logic of virility: ‘we’ll show you who’s strongest’. At no point does the film acknowledge what 7 October meant for the Israelis’ certainty of having a place from which they could safely face the outside world.

The film does not meet a dozing consciousness waiting to be woken (as the night-time scenes in Tel Aviv would have us believe), but a raised guard that parries it, because the place where what it shows could be dealt with has not yet been rebuilt.

In short, the directors do not see that the breakdown has already happened, that the defence mechanisms against reality are its consequence, and that no shock, however violent, will produce anything but further disintegration and the building of still stronger defences. And since Naza has not managed to be that shock, a work of art lacking the power of a real event like 7 October, Israeli society has undergone no breakdown, whether disintegrating or, still less, salutary. The only result is the rejection of Naza, and of what it tells us about the situation of the Palestinians, together with a rallying around the Israeli security system that plays straight into Netanyahu’s hands in an election season.

The film does not meet a dozing consciousness waiting to be woken (as the night-time scenes in Tel Aviv would have us believe), but a raised guard that parries it, because the place where what it shows could be dealt with has not yet been rebuilt. What it achieves in Israel, and will probably achieve in the diaspora too, is what analytic theory regards as the only response of a subject who has undergone a breakdown: reflex rejection. All the more so in the diaspora, where the shock of the shelter’s collapse has been compounded by the violence of antisemitism since 7 October, which now seems to be accepted as a normal feature of our societies. This rejection is not an opposing opinion, which might open a debate, but non-reception. The film will leave no trace in such a subject except panic. What has been seen and heard will count not as an experience of reality, still less as an experience one is party to, or even responsible for, but as an assault.

The film will therefore speak only to those for whom the shocking is a matter not of shock but of the already-known. These are people already convinced that Israel is committing genocide, who can fit each horrific fragment of the film into a ready-made narrative where it immediately finds its place. For them, what Naza recounts does not shock. Its testimonies illustrate what they already knew, and when they applaud the film for twenty-five minutes, they are really applauding themselves and the lucidity they believe they embody. The paradox is complete: the aesthetics of shock takes effect only where the shocking does not shock. In Israel, and in the diaspora, it reinforces the very rejection of the reality in Gaza that it claims to fight.

Two ways of forgetting

What could free a society from the perpetual presence of the event that wounded it is for that event to be remembered, that is, taken up again, narrated, traversed. Freud was categorical on this point, and Adorno follows him in his famous letter to Benjamin on the theory of shock. He objects to Benjamin that there are two ways of forgetting. Epic forgetting, the forgetting that narrative performs, drops what is inessential so that the essential can be retained and passed on. ‘Reflex’ forgetting, the forgetting performed by the parry, sets everything aside because it retains nothing. The first forms experience; the second prevents it.

There is nothing epic about Naza. By choosing shock over narrative, the film has chosen, for its Israeli audience, reflex forgetting over the chance to begin a work of remembering that includes what has been done in Gaza. As noted above, Fauda, which does not speak of Gaza, does far more useful work here. By using fiction to set 7 October and its traumatic effects within an epic narrative, its fifth season helps to make the event memorable and strips it of its quality of agony. It can legitimately hope to help rebuild the shelter of sovereignty, the only place from which the suffering of the Palestinians can at last be looked in the face.

What the film produces

It remains to note what the film actually produces. On the Israeli side, shields go up, as was to be expected. The second part ensures that the content of the first will not be received. On the European side, the film confirms an existing prejudice, supplying it with testimony from those whom this opinion had in any case already classed as executioners, or better still as Nazis. And in this roundabout way it strengthens, in Israel, the camp whose entire politics rests on a single statement, confirmed by every new wave of European indignation: the whole world is against us, we are threatened on all sides.

Let us draw the conclusion. What the directors of Naza lacked was neither courage nor radicalism. What they failed to do was take seriously the state of breakdown caused by 7 October, and the fact that defence mechanisms against reality protect a subject in real distress, a subject that may be a society. Lowering these mechanisms is not something the traumatised can decide, and no one can impose it on them. It can be obtained only in what Winnicott called transitional space, which a work of art can indeed produce, since it gives the subject access to the protected space of aesthetic experience. In a sense, this is what the first part of Naza had begun to do. The second destroyed it, and with it the discussion the film claimed to open.

What holds for Naza holds for a whole section of the Israeli left. In its despair at not being heard, it tries to shock, and succeeds only in provoking such hostility that it turns to the Western public, which for its part already knows that Israel is guilty. It thereby lends legitimacy to antisemitic attitudes in the West, which certainly do nothing to strengthen the sense of security of diaspora Jews. Yet that sense of security is the only thing that would allow them, too, to look Israeli-Palestinian reality in the face.

Critique of this kind wants too much, too fast. It belongs not to the emancipatory critique that Benjamin and Adorno tried to build in and for their own time, but to the violence of a reality that imposes itself on individuals in the form of blows. That is the reality it claims to want to shatter, when in fact it is just one more repetition of it.

1. On the obvious limits of these pretensions, see Michelle Goldberg’s review of the film in the
   New York Times, 19 September 2026: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/18/opinion/israel-naza-movie-documentary.html ↩︎
2. The IDF did publish a response to the film’s allegations on 2 October 2026. It stresses the very particular position of the interviewees, which may account for the way they apprehend things (
   aperception):
   https://cdn-media.web-view.net/i/ww3xwccasc/________________________16.pdf ↩︎
3. 
   https://www.screendaily.com/features/israeli-directors-yuval-abraham-and-rachel-szor-on-their-new-documentary-naza/5220266.article
   . ↩︎
4. 
   Ibid.: ‘[But] now, when it is in Hebrew and on camera, and people are speaking about it in Tel Aviv, then it might be hopefully a bit harder for the Israelis to ignore it.’ ↩︎
5. 
   For a book that writes the biography of a society in this way, see Norbert Elias,
   The Germans: Power Struggles and the Development of Habitus in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, trans. Eric Dunning and Stephen Mennell, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996. ↩︎
6. 
   Walter Benjamin, ‘Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire’, in id.,
   Gesammelte Schriften, vol. I.2, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, p. 632; our translation.
   Ibid. ↩︎
7. 
   D. W. Winnicott, ‘Fear of Breakdown’, International Review of Psycho-Analysis, 1 (1974), pp. 103–107, here p. 104. ↩︎
8. 
   Ibid., p. 105. ↩︎
9. 
   On this subject, José Brunner’s Brutale Nachbarn. Wie Emotionen den Nahostkonflikt antreiben – und entschärfen können, Berlin: Propyläen Verlag, 2025, is well worth reading. It has the inestimable merit of also telling the story of the traumas experienced by the Palestinians. ↩︎