"Defensive" Measures along Palestine's Main Roads

Colonel Amit's early 1988 experiences in the southern West Bank exemplify tactics of road "defense." Then a colonel in the paratroop reserves, Amit was sent in January 1988 to join Intifada-repression efforts near

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Hebron.^[29] One evening, Amit recalled, he was ordered to patrol the Jerusalem-Hebron thoroughfare, a major transportation artery, and stop stone throwers from approaching the road across a boulder-strewn field. Colonel Amit said his first plan was to speak to village leaders in the adjacent Palestinian village.^[30] "I told them, ‘If your people leave the road alone, we'll stay out of your village.’" In the early hours of the morning, however, several dozen Palestinian protestors tried to cross toward the main road, passing through the Israeli troops. Colonel Amit resolved the road "would be the last line of defense. I wouldn't let them get to the road.… Blocking the road would be worse than anything else. If they had succeeding in blocking the main artery between Hebron and Jerusalem, then what? … This would be the last spot. If they broke us there, then the army itself and the entire system would be broken."

Having determined the urgency of his task, Colonel Amit decided to use a small-caliber rifle to defend the road.^[31] At first, he said, he fired warning shots in the air, but then took aim at the protestors themselves. "So you say [to yourself], come on, stop, stop, and they keep on coming." And Colonel Amit continued to fire his rifle. In less than an hour, Amit said he killed four Palestinians and wounded seventeen, including some gravely injured by shots to the spine. Amit said he aimed at the legs, but hit the upper body when the Palestinians suddenly turned or dropped for cover. Today, Colonel Amit sees his preoccupation with defending the road as strange but says it made sense at the time.

Although Amit's experience was similar in form to the border patrol's shoot-to-kill policies in an earlier era, it differed in crucial ways. First, his goal was to defend Jewish traffic through the Palestinian enclave, rather than to secure Israel's international borders. Second, Colonel Amit used a .22 rifle to minimize casualties. Third, he allegedly tried to wound, rather than kill, the stone throwers. As in the beating case described above, Amit's actions combine a mixture of police-style restraint with cold-blooded brutality. He killed four persons and wounded seventeen, even though their crimes hardly merited the punishment. At the same time, however, he could have killed many more. Had Colonel Amit been stationed in another institutional setting—Lebanon, for example—he might have shot to kill without a moment's hesitation, given the prevalence of different norms. As he noted, "You're talking about people's rights [in the West Bank and Gaza]. But on the Jordanian or Lebanese border," soldiers shoot to kill without question. "What about those persons' rights?" Institutional setting was key, and Palestine was a ghetto, not a frontier. Colonel Amit's mixture of restraint and savagery

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was produced by Palestine's ghetto setting, where non-Jews were oppressed but also partially protected.