NAZA, the Acronym That Means 'Collateral Damage'

An Israeli documentary takes its name from a Hebrew acronym: NAZA, short for nezek agavi — "collateral damage." As NPR describes it, the term refers to the number of civilian casualties the Israeli military deems acceptable.

That phrase is the film's organizing idea. NAZA is shot on Tel Aviv rooftops, where Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham conducted one-on-one interviews with Israeli soldiers and intelligence personnel, and it is made by Israeli filmmakers.

The word choice is doing a lot of work. An acronym turns a moral threshold into something sayable in a briefing — a number that can be entered into a column rather than argued about. Bureaucratic language of this kind rarely hides the question it encodes; it files it somewhere the question is harder to reopen.