The success of the goal — “to penetrate the walls of justification and silence in Israeli society,” as director Abraham put it — will play out when voters decide whether to return Netanyahu to office.

Abraham made clear that his purpose in bringing the film to New York as well as to release it theatrically across America beginning Oct. 9 was to change the political scene.

“For us, [it’s] the main motivation,” he said from the Alice Tully Hall stage after the premiere Saturday night. “It’s not a coincidence the last line of text in the film is that these crimes are ongoing not just because our country is doing it but because your country is supporting and funding it,” he told the Manhattan audience as Szor and moderator-NYFF programming chief Dennis Lim looked on.

A small but intense pro-Israel protest outside the theater and the rapt interest inside it literalized the divide and suggested its intractability.

That the movie lands in a U.S. midterm season when American aid to Israel has animated Congressional races makes it a foreign-language documentary injecting itself directly into the electoral politics.

Problem: The film asked to be taken on its own journalistic terms.

Centering on anonymized Hebrew-language interviews with two dozen IDF vets of the war, Naza lays out in specific detail the various ways the Israeli army has prosecuted that war.

The movie is both less than the controversy that surrounds it (AI surveillance and selection of targets will not shock anyone who follows the latest in technological warfare) while also lobbing a more explosive and enraging grenade than even some coverage suggests (descriptions of acceptable and unquestioned human collateral damage, the “Naza” of the title, and an admission from a soldier that he feels like a Nazi, to name two), though the inclusion of such moments will enrage opposing camps for different reasons.

One of the charged choices Abraham and Szor make is to intersperse, between the rooftop confessions, drone shots of Israelis watching TV in their well-appointed high-rise apartments below — a juxtaposition that further galvanize critics of Israel who see rampant privilege undergirding its actions while angering supporters of Israel who will see in this a cheap trick sensationalizing the routine goings-on of country at war.

Abraham, who along with Szor directed the 2025 West Bank-themed Oscar winner No Other Land, built the film on his text-based reporting for The Guardian, Local Call and +972.

He can be seen on the rooftops of Tel Aviv engaging his interview subjects, often coaxing info out of and sometimes challenging them. (“And you didn’t feel any remorse about this?” is the kind of thing he might say.)

Like many advocacy journalists, his goal is to provoke grassroots American action, a theme he emphasized to the liberal NYFF audience.

Szor also was eager to say that the film was aimed at the left in Israel. “When you walk in Tel Aviv you feel all these crimes are happening and no one is speaking about it,” she said. “Tel Aviv is a liberal place; a lot of people consider themselves leftist. But they don’t talk about it or they try to justify it.”

The center-left media in Israel has been receptive to the film’s message if at times also skeptical.

The right has as a rule been far less interested; culture minister Miki Zohar, says he wants to revoke the citizenship of Abraham and Szor.

“Netanyahu compared this film to a barrage of ballistic missiles. And you know what happens to people who shoot missiles — they kill them,” Abraham said at the screening.

For all their sharpness against the right, the filmmakers did not entirely negate the claims of those standing outside the theater. “You’ve probably seen the protesters out there with the video of Oct 7 on the trucks,” Abraham brought up from the stage. “It’s important for me to say that [Oct. 7] is completely unjustified. But that doesn’t justify what you see in the film, the slaughter of so many civilians, the massacres at food sites.”

He added, “I don’t want to live in a world where rightful empathy of Israeli victims is weaponized to mean a lack of empathy to Palestinians and used by Bibi to justify the occupation and crimes in Gaza. … I don’t think we want to live in such a world. I think we should all refuse to play this zero-sum game,” he said.

Such comments has also earned Abraham criticism from the left for centering Israelis in his work — a sign that even liberal Israelis can’t win with the global left.

The audience, at least, welcomed what Abraham and Szor had to say.

“I think we all knew this would be an important screening,” Lim said, winding down, as he cited U.S. aid to Israel and military actions in Iran. “Thank you for inviting us,” Abraham replied. “The U.S. military support is one of the reasons we thought it was so important to see.”