The Israeli confession here seems less assured of its moral direction, incapable of exulting as the Ben-Gvirs do after they shoot, and equally incapable of the crying that the classic Israeli non-apology once offered. Today, these are confessions that speak of an addiction, and of a realization, among some of the anonymized figures we hear, that their addiction to mediated forms of killing, and their decision to “cleanse,” “clear,” “kill,” “snipe,” “maim,” and “destroy,” might be unhealthy.
Throughout the conversation that Abraham brings to the fore, there is a craving for the power to decide a family’s fate and a sense of catharsis in the work they have done. A sense of addiction is made apparent by the words of one confessor, who speaks of all the hormones at play in completing a mission and moving on to the next. One building down, another to go. These men experienced this sense of power mostly behind screens, sitting in offices and watching the destruction they wrought upon the whole of Gaza.
This is the inversion of the old genre that Israeli culture produced. Shooting and crying offered the Israeli subject advance forgiveness, as long as the Israeli could cry for the crimes that “Arabs” made them do. NAZA’s confessors claim little in this specific form. What comes out in their confessions is a dependency, the ordinary brush with the drug of the divine, and then its withdrawal when the service ends and the machine releases the “engineer” or the intelligence officer back to the cafés of bustling Tel Aviv. If there is mourning, it is for this loss of power.
