Judges, Soldiers, and Executioners: How Punishment (de)Legitimizes Violence

Abstract This article explores the complex and often contradictory ways in which framings of violence as punishment or as war can serve to legitimize or de-legitimize lethal violence. It analyzes how in different contexts, the attributes of modern state punishment – sanctions targeting individual wrongdoers, following a bureaucratic process – can make lethal violence appear acceptable or objectionable; and argues that treating war and punishment, battlefield killing and executions, soldiers and executioners, as binary sets can help us analyze how each pole of the set is constructed in relation to the other. The Article, grounded mainly in the Israeli case, begins by examining different iterations of the punishing-fighting binary: first looking at cases where punishing is portrayed as legitimate violence and fighting as illegitimate, and then at the reverse. The third section expands on both by examining the soldier-hangman binary in Israeli cultural imagination and political culture. The final two sections identify and analyze two forms of synthesizing war and punishment: the first examines punitive assassinations (“targeted killings” in the Israeli parlance), the second attempt to conceptualize at least part of the Israeli violence in Gaza as punitive revenge while anchoring it in the colonial concept of the “punitive expedition.”