The construction of Palestinian death as an exceptional repetition in Israel

Abstract

This article delves into a military court’s quest to determine the nature of one Palestinian death by an Israeli soldier as exceptional or banal. The court’s rejection of selective enforcement claims in Azaria’s trial for Al-Sharif’s killing allows unpacking Israeli settler society’s indifference to Palestinian deaths. As I show, the logic of open fire regulations strips these deaths of their singularity and political meaning, constructs them as an exceptional repetition, and sets them aside even when soldiers are prosecuted for killing Palestinians. Exploring whether a different epistemology could account for the singular yet repetitive nature of Palestinians’ deaths in Israel, I turn to Deleuze. His understanding of repetition as the maximality of differences and reversal of the order of trauma lead me to conclude that the state of Israel does not repeat (killing Palestinians) because it represses (the death of Palestinians). It represses because it repeats.