Frames of law: targeting advice and operational law in the Israeli military

Abstract

In this paper I draw on interviews conducted with former Israeli military lawyers about their role in lethal targeting operations. I argue that military lawyers and the practice of operational law help to legitimize and extend violence in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. To make the case I focus on Israel's ‘targeted killing policy’ (2000–present) and on the involvement of military lawyers in the planning and execution stages of targeting operations. I offer two contributions to the literature on war and law; first, I extend Derek Gregory's analysis of the ‘kill chain’ by arguing that targeting is increasingly made possible by a ‘technolegal’ process. Second, I add nuance to Eyal Weizman's account of how law extends violence in what he calls the ‘humanitarian present’. I argue that we must attend not only to international humanitarian law and different scales of law but to the simultaneously plural and overlapping legal regimes that govern late modern war. I conclude with a reflection on Judith Butler's Frames of War to think through the ways in which ‘frames of law’ have come to structure our apprehension of targeting and war today.