SAVAGE RESTRAINT IN PALESTINE

Israel's 1988 ethnic policing efforts sparked outrage among human rights activists and critics.^[14] In response, Israel's defenders noted the multitude of regulations, norms, and orders restraining their military's resort to deadly force in the West Bank and Gaza.^[15] In effect, these rules were the nuts and bolts of Palestine's institutional (ghetto) setting, which combined Jewish national domination with a heavy dose of legalism and police-style principles. The resulting repertoire of violence was one of savage restraint; harsh and painful, but limited.

Israeli repertoires of violence in Palestine were constrained through four key institutional mechanisms. First, the army circulated detailed rules of engagement governing the use of lethal force, and while these were classified, they seemed to generally comply with accepted police procedures.^[16] Second, the army's bureau of Internal Affairs investigated allegations of military wrongdoing, providing a bare minimum of accountability

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for Israeli field troops.^[17] Third, all coercive actions were authorized by military orders and emergency regulations aimed, in theory, at preserving law and order while protecting Jew and Arab alike.^[18] Finally, Israel's Supreme Court, parliament, journalists, and international human rights monitors regularly scrutinized military action. Israel's critics said these constraints were largely meaningless, arguing they were used chiefly to legitimize acts of Israeli repression. Israel was systematically beating Palestinian protestors, torturing prisoners, using lethal gunfire, imposing draconian curfews, denying freedom of movement, and imposing myriad petty harassments on oppressed Palestinians.

At first glance, these two positions seem irreconcilable. For Israel's defenders, the state was using legitimate policing methods in a restrained and relatively regulated manner, restoring law and order to an unruly environment. For its critics, Israeli forces were running amuck, disregarding legal constraints while viciously oppressing Palestinians. Both defenders and critics examined the same Israeli practices, but emerged with vastly different interpretations.

Upon closer examination, however, it becomes clear that Israel's methods included both restraint and brutality. As Israel's defenders tacitly noted, the security forces' suppression of the Palestinian Intifada was "restrained" in that it did not include ethnic cleansing or wholesale destruction, methods used years earlier when Palestine was differently configured. Yet Israel's methods were also "savage," as any casual observer could discern in the field. The following account illustrates this dual policy of savage restraint. According to witnesses interviewed by al-Haq, a respected Palestinian human rights group, Israeli troops in early 1988 grabbed a seventeen-year-old Palestinian whom they suspected of throwing stones, and began

dragging the young man along on his back, kicking him over his entire body, stamping on his abdomen and genitals, punching him with their fists, and pounding him with wooden truncheons. The boy's head, face and neck were entirely covered with blood, and his nose was obviously broken. He had deep, bleeding gashes on his forearms. The Israeli soldiers pulled him upward and as the boy began to stand, one soldier kicked him twice in the genitals. As the boy doubled over in pain, another soldier kicked him under the chin and the boy fell backward. As he sat on the ground, three soldiers delivered several punches to his face and neck.… One Israeli soldier held the boy's arm outward and struck it repeatedly with a wooden truncheon. They then handcuffed him to the door, and one soldier took the boy's head in his two hands and bashed his head as hard as he could repeatedly against the door … [which was] covered with the boy's blood.^[19]

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This mixture of restraint (the soldiers did not kill the boy) and savagery (the soldiers tortured the boy) is understandable when we realize that ethnic policing methods were produced by the ghetto's regulatory mechanisms. Israel's concern for the appearance of law and order, its Internal Affairs investigations, its legal framework, and the presence of external monitors were all components of the West Bank and Gaza's ghetto-like setting. Each rule, norm, and regulatory device imposed limits beyond which Israeli violence could not go, but simultaneously generated incentives for new forms of "appropriate" violence. The cumulative result was Israel's 1988 policy of ethnic policing, as I illustrate below. As noted in the Preface, my analysis is based on some one hundred interviews with Palestinians for two book-length Human Rights Watch reports, as well as forty-five interviews with Israeli veterans. Some of these informants are quoted in the text below. ^[20]