This Article examines Israeli military lawyers’ practice of international humanitarian law (IHL) revolving around the West Bank and Gaza. Based on interviews with legal officers serving in the army between 1967–2009 and archival materials, it interrogates these lawyers’ work—the stories that they tell about law, their legal interpretations and their interactions with military decision makers. This interrogation is set in the context of broader structural, historical, and political shifts. Anchored around lawyers’ stories about law, their narration of law’s relationship with politics, and its position in relation to violence, this account sets out to contribute to discussions on lawyers’—and by extension law’s—past and present positions in states’ military affairs.

In the Gaza Strip, Israel’s military used lethal force against civilian protestors engaged in the ‘Great Return March’ of 2018. In its late May 2018 ruling, the Israeli Supreme Court held this use of force as legitimate self-defense. This article challenges Israel’s security response to these protests in an attempt to both unsettle a warfare discourse and to urge for a distinct ontological approach. The article argues that an ongoing settler-colonial project has racialised the Palestinian body as a security threat, and historicises Israel’s shoot-to-kill policy as merely one contemporary mode of dispos- sessing the native body. This includes a novel framework of armed conflict that has diminished the category of the civilian and expanded the scope of legitimate targets permitting the killing of greater numbers of Palestinians in the language of law; the article calls this legal technology the ‘shrinking civilian’.

Human shields were prominent in the 2016 military campaign seeking to recapture Mosul from the hands of ISIS militants. On October 24, 2016, Pope Francis expressed his concern over the use of over two hundred boys and men as human shields in the Iraqi city. In an election rally the following day, Donald Trump decried the enemy's use of " human shields all over the place, " while the New York Times reported that the Islamic State is driving hundreds of civilians into Mosul, using them as human shields. A few days later, the United Nations disseminated a press release, warning that ISIS militants are using " tens of thousands " as human shields, thus casting massive numbers of Iraqi civilians as weapons of war. Surely thousands of Iraqi civilians did not volunteer to become shields, and, most likely, the vast majority of them were not coerced into becoming involuntary shields. Their proximity to the fray in Mosul, a city that had become a conflict zone, was enough to brand them as weapons and to categorize them as human shields, thereby stripping them of some of the protections international humanitarian law (IHL) bestows on civilians.

In this article a confrontation on the classic Gog/Magog motive (end time battle between God and evil) is enacted between two opposite Jewish thinkers: Martin Buber and Meir Kahane. It shows how and on what conditions the biblical text can be interpreted so differently. The article also tries to shed a more general light on the chances and risks at stake in end-of-time accounts.

This article introduces the idea of informal complementarity. Where the principle of complementarity allows the International Criminal Court ('ICC') to assess the admissibility of a particular case, informal complementarity is employed by states. It exists independently (or pre-emptively) of an International Criminal Court investigation. Appeals to informal complementarity speak fluidly of individual criminal proceedings and state-level investigations or inquiries. When a state appeals to informal complementarity, it is not immediately concerned with individual criminal liability or the admissibility of a particular case. Instead, informal complementarity serves to deny the state's non-criminal responsibility. Appeals to informal complementarity constitute an emergent vocabulary. It increasingly features within the lexicon of states that engage in the use of force. It provides a novel means of asserting legitimacy. Within armed conflict, states are supplementing traditional appeals to international law and assertions of legal fidelity with claims of post-hoc legal accountability. Grounded within a study of Israel's engagements with international law during and after the 2008–09 and 2014 Gaza wars, this article demonstrates that the postwar discourse has moved from exclusive assertions of legal compliance to include pronouncements of investigative willingness. Framed around the metaphor of the proleptic show trial, four phases of legal engagement are introduced that collectively constitute both an appeal to informal complementarity and an emergent means of asserting legitimacy.

I am not the author of this. A report by the JINSA-commissioned Gaza Conflict Task Force March 2015 This report was commissioned by the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) and featured a task force of several retired American military officials—headed by General Charles Wald, former deputy commander of the United States European Command—as well as several legal and international affairs experts. http://www.jinsa.org/files/2014GazaAssessmentReport.pdf