In case you took the last week off from reading the news, watching TV or combing through social media, you’re aware that a lot of people have suddenly come to the conclusion that artificial intelligence will soon destroy humanity if it isn’t stopped.
While I’m sure that most Israelis are also interested in the possibility that our computer/robot overlords will soon render us extinct, headlines in the Jewish state have largely focused on another controversy in which AI plays a subsidiary role.
Bolstering the ‘genocide’ lie
The 25-minute standing ovation given to a documentary film called “NAZA”—a reference to a Hebrew military acronym for nezek agavi, which means “collateral damage”—at the Venice Film Festival shined a spotlight on the new movie. It’s the work of journalists Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, two vocal Israeli members of the far-left activist class who not only oppose the security policies backed by the majority of voters, but have a history of publicizing dishonest and fabricated atrocity stories besmirching the Jewish state in film and print.
The movie was also co-produced by Britain’s The Guardian newspaper, a publication that is among Israel’s most ardent opponents.
A historical footnote to this controversy is that The Guardian was an early and crucial supporter of the Zionist cause at the time of the Balfour Declaration in 1917. Since then, as it drifted farther and farther to the left, it has switched sides. It now considers that stand to be among the worst mistakes it made in its more than 200 years of publication. In fact, it ranked its cheerleading for the Confederacy during the American Civil War as the only blunder considered more egregious than its backing for self-determination for Jews in their ancient homeland.
To buttress the blood libel that the Jewish state has committed “genocide” in Gaza, “NAZA” claims that the Israel Defense Forces used an AI technology called “Lavender” to expedite and approve airstrikes with what it claims were high expectations of civilian casualties. The film uses anonymous sources that it alleges are all Israelis involved in the program and know what they are talking about.
The accusation is apparently rooted in something true. As is well known, the Israeli military goes through a highly involved process to determine whether military actions are legal and worth the risk to both IDF personnel and Palestinian civilians before they are approved. In doing so, Israel is not committing war crimes. To the contrary, it is following both international standards and its own laws that forbid the wanton slaughter of civilians and require the military value of the operation to justify “collateral damage.”
One may debate whether such standards are stringent enough, though most criticism of the IDF’s actions ignores the context in which such strikes are ordered in the first place. Israel was fighting a war in Gaza started on Oct. 7, 2023 by a brutal enemy bent on the genocide of its citizens and the destruction of its country.
What the film doesn’t say
Indeed, as even an article in the far-left newspaper Haaretz by an author who had seen the film—something no one in Israel or the United States has yet had the opportunity to do—pointed out, much is missing in this attempt to make the genocide libel stick to the Jewish state.
As one might expect from an outlet where anti-Zionism is normative, Haaretz’s news and opinion section has been acting as a cheerleader for “NAZA.” But as much as Raviv Drucker, who works at Israel TV’s Channel 13, wanted to like “NAZA” and vouched for the honesty of its creators, he couldn’t help noting that it was completely lacking in context. Hamas’s role in maximizing the number of Palestinians killed in its war—numbers that have already been proven to be highly inaccurate—isn’t taken into account.
As Drucker noted, “At one point, Hamas’s use of civilians as human shields comes up, only to be sharply dismissed. Instead, we’re told that we [Israelis] deliberately killed suspected Hamas operatives at home with their families, at night, because it was convenient.”
Even left-wing Israelis like him, who oppose the government led by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, understand that the organization that governed Gaza from 2007 to 2023 as an Islamist terror state deliberately located its military structure and command centers in schools and hospitals. It used international aid intended to help civilians to construct a tunnel network underneath Gaza as extensive as the New York City subway system; a feat of engineering that could be considered the world’s largest bomb shelter. But no civilians were ever allowed to enter it since it was reserved for Hamas’s soldiers, commanders, and their supplies and ordnance—not to mention being where they often hid the Israelis they kidnapped on Oct. 7.
As Drucker also admitted, many of the names of the people that Hamas and its sympathizers previously claimed were innocent journalists, teachers, athletes and aid workers slain by Israel later turned up on lists of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad operatives who were killed in the war.
More to the point, he described the film as presenting the Israelis as committing terrible crimes and then casually going out to dinner in Tel Aviv, comparing themselves to Nazis and treating the killing of children as “fun.”
In other words, the point of the documentary film seems to be to depict Israelis as callous monsters.
For those who cheered “NAZA,” Oct. 7 is just a date on the calendar. For Israelis who lived through the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab assault on communities in southern Israel—when 1,200 men, women and children, Jews and non-Jews, were slaughtered and 251 others dragged into Gaza for days, months and even years—it was the reason why the war was fought. The orgy of mass murder, torture, rape, kidnapping and wanton destruction carried out that day was the trailer for what Palestinians want to do to all of Israel. The only reason why it hasn’t happened is because of the efforts of the Israeli military and its various branches, which have been on active alert since that day.
The soldiers of the IDF sent to operate in Gaza—many of them young men not long out of high school or 40-year-old reservists with children at home—were not only risking their lives by conducting operations on foot in areas and buildings to avoid indiscriminate killing of civilians; they often wound up getting ambushed, with hundreds killed and many more wounded. They were there not for the “fun” of waging war on Palestinian Arabs. Rather, they were defending their homes and families, and attempting to ensure that Hamas and its allies couldn’t repeat the atrocities of Oct. 7 again and again, as they still pledge to do.
The point is demonization
Drucker also disputes the account in the film of deliberate IDF attacks on civilians, which he believes just didn’t happen.
He says the film doesn’t bother comparing the record of the IDF in urban warfare with other modern armies. If it had been honest about it, then “NAZA” would have shown that Israel’s conduct has been exemplary when placed alongside other examples of such fighting, killing disproportionately fewer civilians than in other wars, including those fought by the U.S.-led Western alliance against ISIS in Mosul, Iraq and elsewhere. And recalling how many non-combatants were killed in the Allied bombings of Germany and Japan in World War II, such efforts to avoid civilian casualties are even more proof of the Jewish state’s devotion to legality and humane behavior under the most difficult of circumstances.
But, of course, the purpose of such a film isn’t, as Drucker notes that he would have preferred, an effort to give an honest journalistic account of a complex situation. The point of the exercise is to demonize Israelis and their army, and to delegitimize efforts to defend themselves against a genocidal Islamist foe that was widely supported by the civilians under their control who celebrated the Oct. 7 atrocities.
No matter how thoroughly the IDF debunks the charges in the film, not even the most exhaustive investigation of the issues raised by “NAZA” will have much of an impact on a global audience that is hungry for inflammatory lies about Israeli misbehavior. To those who are already convinced that the Israelis are settler-colonialists who have no right to be in their own land and “white” oppressors of Palestinian “people of color,” the truth doesn’t matter.
As seen with previous efforts that unpacked the falsehoods about exaggerated Gaza casualty figures, the bogus number of women and children killed, and the non-existent famines, few among those giving a standing ovation for films like “NAZA” will listen. The same individuals were ready to believe in The New York Times’ preposterous claims that Israelis trained dogs to rape male Palestinian prisoners don’t care if the charge is ultimately disproven. The belief in such slander is impervious to even the most rigorously documented journalism that vindicates Israel’s behavior.
Whether or not Abraham and Szor think of themselves as serving humanity by trashing their own country, as with their past attacks on Israel, they aren’t likely to convince many of their compatriots whose lived experiences of the war contradict their claims. The only impact it will have will be to further encourage other efforts to bash and isolate Israel. It will also embolden the global surge of antisemitism rooted in blood libels about Jews.
Worries about AI
That is why one detail of the filmmakers’ indictment of Israel is crucial to understanding just how dangerous such calumnies can be. While these allegations about indiscriminate killings of Palestinians will likely blend into many other false charges, the focus on AI in the midst of a worldwide panic about artificial intelligence is likely to make it stand out. Like radioactive material, it will give such smears an extended life long after the film is forgotten.
The explosion of concerns over a potential apocalypse started when Jacob Coxon, who had worked at the two largest AI companies—OpenAI and Anthropic—publicly resigned from the latter with a broadside alleging that unless the technology was reined in by public regulation, it would soon turn on its creators and wipe out the human race.
That was followed by announcements from Sam Altman and Dario Amodei, the CEOs of these companies, as well as billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, chiming in that they agreed about the need for government intervention.
Like almost everyone else who has followed this controversy, I have no idea whether they are right about the threat from AI.
I deplore the use of AI in writing. It is a practice that dumbs down author and reader. It is both a symptom and an accelerant to the trend by which humans are becoming less literate and less intelligent.
Nevertheless, I realize that AI can be very useful in doing some things, such as research or creating accurate translations from one language to another. It also helps industries of all sorts accelerate their ability to create new solutions to old problems, as well as break new ground for innovation, as Israel’s “startup nation” high-tech sector has proven.
It’s equally true that skepticism about apocalyptic predictions of doom is often more than justified. Even when the concerns are legitimate or at least arguable, advocates for causes often succumb to the temptation to exaggerate the consequences of various problems simply to motivate people to take them more seriously. The effort to instill an almost religious belief in the alleged peril to humanity from anthropogenic global warming is only one such example.
I understand why these companies might welcome regulation. It will give them cover if things go wrong (and they almost always do, to some extent) and gives them enormous leverage over Washington, which will likely mean their market advantages will be grandfathered into any effort to slow down the pace of innovation. This sort of collaboration between government and big business invariably results in corruption, not sensible policies.
But even if worries about AI are justified—and this might be an example of when doomsday predictions could be accurate—the notion that the government is going to solve the problem by creating bureaucratic regulatory structures beggars belief. It’s far more likely that it would be either ineffective or make the problem worse.
It’s also true that any halt to AI research and development that doesn’t include China would not only fail to achieve the desired results. It would make a very different doomsday scenario more likely, involving that communist tyranny gaining a decisive advantage over the free world.
Doomsday scenarios and antisemitism
But all of this is speculation. The one thing I know for sure about the fears being generated about AI is that sooner or later, they will be harnessed by those who always seek to blame the Jews for everything they think is wrong with the world.
And that’s where Abraham, Szor and their sugar daddies at The Guardian come in.
It doesn’t take much to inflame the imagination of conspiracy theorists. Still, the effort to falsely label Israel’s use of technology to help it conduct military operations as a genocidal tool is catnip for those willing to blame Israel for every problem under the sun. Podcasters like former Fox News host Tucker Carlson already believe that the Jews are responsible for every possible crime, like using sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein to blackmail politicians and even creating pornography to enfeeble American males.
It isn’t much of a leap from there to think that the Israelis are creating AI to dominate the world or wipe out humanity. It may not make sense, but antisemitic tropes and conspiracy theories don’t have to be logical. Their purpose is to convince people that the Jews are responsible for whatever it is that they fear most as part of an effort to gain financial and political power. That’s why leftists and Islamists like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, in addition to their counterparts on the far right like Carlson, seek to weaponize lies about “genocide.”
In the long run, those responsible for “NAZA” won’t help the Palestinians they supposedly care about since the net effect of their propaganda is to strengthen the ruling terrorist outfit that is oppressing them. Nor will it break Israel, even if it also bolsters the cause of those seeking to isolate and sanction the Jewish state.
But what they will likely accomplish is to create a new variant on an old antisemitic trope about Jews poisoning the wells. Whether or not the worries about AI are justified, the film will alarm the paranoid and the fearful, who are already vulnerable to conspiratorial thinking. The difficult question of how to harness a new technology will morph into what to think about a mythical plot by the Jews.
Israelis have good reason to accuse the filmmakers of concocting treasonous defamation against their own nation. The two deserve even more opprobrium for their shameless efforts to fuel the worst kind of Jew-hatred with a high-tech twist.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS. Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.
