Miki Zohar didn’t wait for a translation. Hours after “NAZA” walked away with the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival on Saturday, Israel’s culture minister was on X calling its directors traitors.
“I will act immediately to revoke the Israeli citizenship of these despicable creators for treason against the state,” he wrote.
Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor are the filmmakers in his crosshairs. Both Israeli. Both journalists. Both already Oscar winners, for 2025’s “No Other Land,” a film about settler violence in the West Bank that made Netanyahu’s government furious long before this week.
Their new film goes further. “NAZA” draws on interviews with 24 people identified as Israeli military and intelligence sources, whistleblowers describing how AI-powered targeting systems were used in Gaza. The film’s synopsis at Venice didn’t soften the claim: calculated mass killings of Palestinians, assisted by algorithms.
That’s the sentence that set Zohar off.
By Monday he’d escalated from social media outrage to actual bureaucracy, saying he’d contacted the Director General of Israel’s Population Authority and the Director General of the Ministry of Interior to examine denying citizenship to Abraham and Szor. His stated grounds: breach of trust, cooperation with the enemy, and whether the making or release of the film assisted an adversary during wartime.
He wasn’t alone. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir piled on with characteristic subtlety.
“You are a disgrace and an embarrassment to the entire people of Israel. Go away!” he posted. Then, for good measure: “I am certain that your friends, that is to say our enemies Hamas in Gaza, will welcome you with open arms.”
Here’s the problem for both ministers. Citizenship revocation in Israel is real, but it isn’t a minister’s personal weapon. The law allows it in narrow cases involving disloyalty, espionage, or terrorism, and it requires layers of government and judicial sign-off. Zohar, as culture minister, has no unilateral authority to strip anyone of anything. His own ministry doesn’t even sit in that chain.
Legal analysts have already flagged how thin his path is. Rights groups moved faster than the Interior Ministry did.
Human Rights Watch and the European Film Academy condemned the threat as an attack on free expression. Inside Israel, the criticism came from unexpected corners too. Democrats party MK Naama Lazimi pushed back publicly against the citizenship threat, and pointed out that hostility toward Abraham and Szor wasn’t confined to the right. She tied the backlash to a wider political storm already engulfing Netanyahu’s office, including allegations of Qatari influence and questions about pre-October 7 intelligence failures.
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The Israeli military has disputed the film’s central claims, questioning the reliability of anonymous sources describing the targeting systems. The Interior Ministry, the body that would actually have to act on Zohar’s request, has said nothing.
Abraham and Szor haven’t spoken publicly since the award. Venice’s own programme lists “NAZA” under a different flag entirely: the United Kingdom, with The Guardian and JW Films credited as producers. Filmed by Israelis, backed internationally, and now facing a citizenship fight in the country that made the passports in the first place.
The jury in Venice gave the film its prize for what it called urgent and courageous storytelling.
Zohar called it something else. Vile.
