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Self-Proclaimed Human Rights Heroes: The Professional Project of Israeli Military Judges

This article explores the cooptation of human rights discourse by looking into how Israeli military judges in the Occupied Palestinian Territories use human rights as professional capital. Previous research into human rights arguments legitimizing the Israeli occupation remained confined to a unitary image of the state. Here, I dissect the separate professional project of military judges. Optimizing a self-congratulatory argument, judges portray themselves as human rights heroes of Palestinians. But while independent judicial activism would criticize human rights violations by the state, military judges use human rights as synonymous with legal professionalism, while avoiding criticism and sidestepping human rights’ challenge to state power. Using a multimethod approach including analysis of judicial decisions, academic articles by military judges, and in-depth interviews, I argue that between 2000 and 2010, Israeli military judges were responding to a professional legitimacy crisis by what I call mimetic convergence. Relying on new institutionalism and postcolonial theory, mimetic convergence produces belonging and mobility for a professional subgroup that experiences alienation in the “colony” through convergence with the specific characteristics of the legal community of the “metropole.” Mimicking the state instead of criticizing it permits the two projects— promoting military judges professionally and legitimizing the state’s colonial occupation—to coalesce.