[layer8]

Not exactly. For one, class files are just components of a program, so more akin to .o or .so files, not executables. That set aside, they are binaries for a virtual machine, the JVM. One difference to real machines is that the bytecode doesn’t have access to untyped memory and to the hardware (not even “virtual” hardware), and some instructions have more complex semantics than you usually have in real hardware, but otherwise it’s not so much different from actual machine code. Overall it’s closer to native than to script, and therefore I wouldn’t quite say that it’s in the “middle”.