The Word That Splits in Two: What a Documentary's Title Tells Us About the Language of War

Two Rivers of Light.

There is a small, technical acronym at the center of one of this month's most explosive cultural controversies, and it deserves more attention than the controversy itself.

The word is "NAZA" — Israeli military shorthand for anticipated civilian casualties, the number of non-combatant deaths a commander is prepared to accept before authorizing a strike. It is also now the title of an 80-minute documentary by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, the Israeli-Palestinian directing team behind the Oscar-winning No Other Land, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival on September 12, 2026, to roughly twenty-five minutes of applause and the festival's Special Jury Prize. Built from the testimony of two dozen Israeli military and intelligence personnel, the film examines how that acronym gets used in practice.

Within days, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was calling the film "shocking" and accusing it of branding Israeli soldiers as war criminals. By September 16, he had announced support for legislation that would strip the filmmakers — both Israeli citizens — of their citizenship and impose twentyfold defamation damages, declaring that "their place is not with us."

Set that story down for a moment and look only at the word that started it. An acronym is a small act of linguistic engineering. It takes something that, spoken plainly, would stop a room — "how many children are we willing to kill to get this target" — and compresses it into three letters that can be said in a briefing without anyone's voice catching. This is not unique to one army or one war. Every military bureaucracy in the modern era has built its own vocabulary for the same purpose: "collateral damage," "pacification," "enhanced interrogation," "friendly fire," "neutralization." George Orwell diagnosed the mechanism eighty years ago, in an essay written after his own experience of war propaganda: political language, he wrote, exists "to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable," and it does this less through outright falsehood than through euphemism, question-begging, and "sheer cloudy vagueness." An institution that must kill in order to function will, given time, develop a second vocabulary for describing what it does — one for the internal briefing, one for the outward-facing statement — and the gap between those two vocabularies is where an old wisdom tradition's warning about the tongue becomes strikingly literal. A single institutional mouth, speaking two incompatible languages depending on the audience, is not a modern invention. It is one of the oldest patterns human beings have found for living with what we do.

That is layer one, and it applies before anyone takes a side on the war itself.

Layer two is the response to the film, and it deserves the same scrutiny. Whatever one makes of the accuracy or fairness of NAZA's specific claims — and that is genuinely contested, with the Israeli government and many veterans' organizations disputing the film's framing as selective and inflammatory, while press-freedom and human-rights groups treat it as credible whistleblower testimony consistent with prior reporting — the proposed remedy is worth examining on its own terms, independent of who is right about the underlying facts. A government that wishes to be seen as a free and open democracy, and that regularly points to that openness as a point of pride and a point of contrast with its adversaries, is here proposing to punish two of its own citizens for speech by revoking the very citizenship that speech depends on. That is not a minor inconsistency. It is close to the purest form of the old warning: praising liberty from one side of the mouth while moving to dissolve it from the other, aimed at exactly the citizens whose exercise of that liberty proved inconvenient. Historically, citizenship-stripping as a punishment for dissent is not an Israeli invention or a uniquely Middle Eastern one — it has been reached for by regimes across the ideological spectrum, from Weimar-era Germany's denaturalization of exiled critics to Cold War–era loyalty purges in both Soviet and Western states, precisely because it is one of the few punishments that a government does not need a criminal conviction to justify. Its historical company should give any government pause before treating it as a proportionate response to an unflattering film.

But an evenhanded reading cannot stop there either — and this is where the piece has to turn inward on itself, because the temptation to let outrage flow only one direction is not confined to governments. Ask the same question of the international response. Do the commentators celebrating NAZA as an act of courageous truth-telling apply the same enthusiasm to whistleblowers and documentarians exposing military conduct in conflicts where the geopolitical sympathies run the other way — Russian deserters testifying about Ukraine, Chinese dissidents documenting Xinjiang, Gulf-state critics of the war in Yemen? Some do, consistently and at real personal cost. Many do not. A press-freedom principle invoked selectively, applauded when it embarrasses an adversary and ignored when it would embarrass an ally, is its own version of the forked tongue — blessing free expression when convenient, indifferent to its suppression when it is not. The Venice festival itself, which organizers this year called its "most political" edition ever, and the parallel protests at the Toronto festival over Gaza-related films, suggest an entire cultural moment straining against exactly this inconsistency: everyone believes in truth-telling, until the truth in question is inconvenient to their own coalition.

None of this requires — or permits — a verdict on the war in Gaza itself, which remains one of the most bitterly and legitimately contested moral and political questions of this decade, with serious people holding sharply different views about causation, proportionality, and culpability that this piece has no business adjudicating. What can be said without taking that side is narrower and, in some ways, more demanding: that institutional language built to obscure human cost, government retaliation built to punish disclosure, and public outrage built to apply only where it is comfortable are three versions of the same underlying failure, and none of them are the property of one nation, one army, or one political camp. The ancient insight was never really about manners. It was about the impossibility of a single source producing two contradictory streams without something being false in at least one of them — and the corollary, which the same tradition supplies, that recognizing this in ourselves is far harder than recognizing it in an adversary.

A concrete way to sit with this, rather than simply agree with it:

First, the next time a news report on any conflict uses an institutional or technical term — "collateral," "neutralized," "cleared," "processed" — pause and translate it back into plain language before forming a judgment. This is a small discipline, but it is the direct antidote to euphemism's actual function, which is to let judgment happen before translation does.

Second, before sharing outrage at a public figure's hypocrisy, apply the same test to a public figure or institution on your own side of whatever divide you occupy. If the standard cannot survive that test, it was never a standard — it was a weapon.

Third, support the principle of protection for dissenting speech — through a press-freedom organization, a subscription to independent journalism, or simply a willingness to defend a critic you disagree with — independent of whether it currently benefits people you like. A right that only protects your allies is not a right; it is a temporary privilege, and the moment the wind shifts, it protects no one.

The tongue that blesses and curses from the same source was never only a warning about individual gossip. It is, apparently, also a fair description of how nations, institutions, and audiences alike learn to speak — and the discomfort of recognizing that is, if the older wisdom is right, the beginning rather than the end of the work.