The Missing Policing

Abstract

The Israeli army’s policing since 1967 has raised public awareness of the suffering of the Palestinian population, thereby implicating it as a key player in the Israeli political debate. This article discusses how policing has been presented in the leading military journals Ma’arakhot and Bein HaKtavim from 1967 to 2018. It argues that this coverage has served to mitigate the controversy by avoiding the explicit term ‘policing’ and replacing it with euphemisms that construct it differently in three distinct periods. In particular, since early in the twenty-first century, these journals have suggested alternative terms, which provide policing with hybrid military connotations that respond to pressure from both nationalist and liberal groups. New terms such as ‘the war between the wars’ promote broad public acceptance of the intractable nature of the conflict and legitimize the need to use violence.