American Culture Medicalizes War Guilt, Disarming Art That Could Threaten Elites as NAZA Threatens Israel
Source: Alex McCarron. "Israel Fears NAZA. Why Don’t Our Films Scare Anyone?." October 20, 2026. jacobin.com
The Gist
The author says Israel is terrified of NAZA because it forces people to face war guilt honestly. American films and news, by contrast, treat soldiers' guilt as a mental illness to be treated with medicine, which keeps us from asking what our military actually did. That's why American art no longer scares the powerful.
Conclusion
American filmmakers and media have lost the power to threaten elites because US culture, unlike the makers of NAZA, treats veterans' war guilt as a medical symptom (PTSD) rather than a serious moral and political crisis, thereby obscuring America's own war crimes.
Premises
- Israel's government has responded to NAZA with unusually intense hostility (citizenship revocation threats, prosecution threats, death threats, Netanyahu comparing it to missiles), which indicates the film strikes a real political nerve.
- NAZA has this power because it takes its subjects' moral crisis seriously and confronts war guilt head-on, rather than presenting it as apolitical personal trauma as earlier Israeli 'shoot and cry' films did.
- American media, exemplified by the 2024 New York Times article on Task Force 9, treats veterans' guilt as a psychological or neurological illness and sidelines the questions of what the soldiers were firing at and why.
- The US has itself committed serious war crimes in the war on terror (indiscriminate bombardment in Raqqa, the destruction of Fallujah, support for sectarian death squads in Iraq, torture and rendition) that are left unreckoned.
- The PTSD diagnosis and the medical-pharmaceutical-insurance framework treat guilt as a disease to be cured, which depoliticizes it and contributes to a broader American mental and historical oblivion.
- Corporate media consolidation and economic pressures further weaken American media's ability to confront the country's own history.
Assumptions
- The intensity of a state's repressive reaction to a film is a reliable indicator of the film's political power and truthfulness.
- Veterans' guilt is at least partly a legitimate moral response to real wrongdoing rather than merely a pathological symptom.
- Medicalizing guilt and recognizing it as moral/political are mutually exclusive framings, or at least the former crowds out the latter in practice.
- A single NYT article and a few examples are representative of American media and culture in general.
- American media's failure is primarily due to structural ideology and medicalization rather than the absence of willing filmmakers or audiences.
- The US war on terror conduct is sufficiently comparable to Israel's conduct in Gaza to justify the parallel.