The “Outing” of Lethality: Using “Lethality” to Legitimize Military Violence in Israel

ABSTRACT Since the early 2000s, military violence has been legitimized using consumer marketing practices, particularly microtargeting. This responsive strategy invites various audiences to interpret military violence and thereby become its legitimation agents. The lethality concept recently adopted by the IDF has been central to such a strategy. Communicated in a deliberately vague manner, lethality served as an effective mechanism for legitimizing violence by allowing competing and dynamic interpretations, aligned with the values and interests of different social groups. The present study examined this mechanism by analyzing readers’ comments on lethality-related news articles, and found it to be highly effective in achieving legitimacy by marking the concept’s ethical boundaries and the sectorial interests bound up with it. Following this dialogue with the public, the military chose to highlight the relation between lethality and the relative security calm and economic prosperity achieved in Israel, marketing the IDF as the “largest startup in the country.” This responsive strategy, however, compromises the democratic process by shifting the choice of strategic concepts from elected representatives onto a direct dialogue between the military and its favored legitimation agents. It also erodes the military’s apolitical status and has a heavy ethical, operational and moral price.