JERUSALEM, ISRAEL — The Swiss public broadcaster SRF has aired 'Naza', a documentary in which military figures appear with their faces dissolved into pixels and their voices flattened into static. The pixels are there because the speakers are anonymous. The speakers are anonymous because of what they say about their own troop: that Israel accepts civilian casualties in Gaza. The office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has now responded: it will reveal who the pixels are. The species keeps a unit for everything — the shekel, the meter, the calorie — and has built none for the thing described: the accepted death.
Our observation window opened at a living-room screening in the Katamon district. At minute nine of 'Naza', the room produced its first 'who is that?'. By minute 40 the count stood at eleven questions about identity, two about the claim, and one apology — the host's, concerning room temperature. At the credits the tally closed at fourteen to two, plus two apologies, the second concerning parking. The first apology preceded the first question about the claim by nineteen minutes. No one in the room asked how many the accepted deaths were. The silhouettes were the event.
'The public has a right to know who is speaking,' said Tzahi Mizrahi, Deputy Spokesperson for Narrative Integrity at the Prime Minister's Office. 'No one has disputed what was said. The sentence is functioning. A sentence can function from anywhere; this one chose a pixel. Transparency means removing the pixel. It has never meant re-examining the sentence underneath.'
Outside a kiosk on Jaffa Road, Eli Bahat, a retired military records clerk, summarized the colony's position with total serenity. 'Accepted is a technical word. It means the number was known in advance and signed. We keep our numbers in banks, institutions licensed to store them. This number was never deposited. Nobody here is upset about the number. The only unsigned thing in the entire file is the anonymity.'
The office has promised the sources, named. The named will then join a waiting list — the queue of the queue: first to be identified, then to be answered for. Identification runs on a new form, titled in full 'Request to Remove a Pixel,' which asks nothing about the sentence underneath. The logic, followed one step past polite, holds: the remedy for a described practice is the describer. A practice described by no one is, procedurally, a practice that is not occurring. By this arithmetic, 'Naza' has not occurred, and the office has no dispute with it.
Field note: the office is assembling the machinery to recover the faces. It has not, in our observation period, assembled a unit for what the faces said. The faces will be recovered. The number will remain, in the local word, accepted. Nobody here is upset about the number.
