Savage restraint: Israel, Palestine and the dialectics of legal repression

In 1988, Israeli security forces engaged in a wide variety of repressive tactics aimed at putting down the Palestinian uprising in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Rather than viewing these methods solely as products of instructions handed down from on high, this article regards Israeli tactics as emerging from processes of innova-tion and elaboration by military personnel. Rules stipulating the legal use of lethal force placed important limits on Israeli military behavior. Within those limits, however, soldiers were free to invent new methods of repression. The article draws on 50 open-ended interviews with Israeli military veterans. In January 1988, 21-year old Eyal Masad stood watching with a cluster of Israeli soldiers as one of their number clubbed a Palestinian lying on the floor of Nablus military headquar-ters.1 The assault was not an attempt to extract information, but was rather an impromptu punishment session for earlier stone throwing against Israeli troops. After a few moments, the trooper took a break, permitting a medical corpsman to verify the victim was not gravely injured. The medic knelt down, ran his hands over the Palestinian's body and then, according to Masad, "stood up and kicked the Arab, saying 'he's fine, there's nothing to cry about.' " The beating continued for several more minutes. The assault was illegal under military regulations, but Masad, a second lieutenant in th