I had no idea how it would work out, or whether my brother would indeed receive the documents promised by Israel’s Military Prosecution. Already living in France, I sent him to the Kyria Base in Tel Aviv to collect the materials. Once outside, he called: “They gave me a ring binder with many documents.”

“Were you asked to sign anything? Are there limitations on using these documents?” I inquired.

“No,” he replied. “I just said my name. They directed me to an office where the binder waited, handed it over, and I left.”

In other words, he returned with unrestricted documentation without any formal attestation requirements. That’s how four years of correspondence, countless phone calls, and transfers between military units concluded—with the simple handover of documents that committees had painstakingly reviewed for declassification. The anticlimax was palpable.

When I recounted this to a historian friend recently, he laughed. “There’s nothing remarkable about your story. That’s how archives work—always messy, rarely following clear rules, even when official protocols exist.”

Fair enough. As someone trained in Philosophy and Cultural Studies rather than History or Law, I found myself on unfamiliar methodological terrain when I began this project in 2015.

I started my archival investigation with collegial guidance, quickly discovering that their well-intentioned advice poorly reflected the complex reality of data collection. Moreover, my research parameters, when intersecting with Israel’s institutional framework—particularly its mandatory military conscription—revealed an intricate network of gatekeepers controlling access to critical documentation in ways that theoretical understandings failed to anticipate. The rule seemed to be procedural arbitrariness. How can else we explain I was denied access to court documents only to later discover they had been published entirely in Ziv Bohrer’s book?

Trials of Repudiated Violence

My research examines how states legitimize and explain the illegality of their agents’ actions, illuminating how the sovereign right to employ lethal force is renegotiated. I analyze cases where Israel prosecutes its security apparatus—military personnel, Border Police officers (both conscripted soldiers and professional officers), and conventional “Blue” police officers—for offenses committed against Palestinians during official duties. This analytical framework, which I conceptualize as “Trials of Repudiated Violence,” emerges from understanding sovereignty as a political entity that can deploy violence legally, and whose violence is fundamentally structured around enmity relations (Madar 2021). A notable example is the 2016 case of soldier Elor Azaria, who was convicted of manslaughter for shooting Abdel Fattah al-Sharif while al-Sharif lay wounded on the ground.

The etymology of “repudiate” elucidates these state responses. From 13th-century Latin origins (denoting dismissal of wives) to later indicating rejection of previously accepted obligations (Ernout and Meillet 2001), repudiation consistently signifies withdrawal from prior commitments. In divorce law, it implies unilateral rejection; in contractual contexts, it means renouncing agreements. Unlike mere rejection, repudiation involves retreating from established commitments—uprooting oneself from positions previously maintained. In state violence contexts, repudiation manifests when authorities prosecute agents previously authorized to use force. This prosecution constitutes a performative public disavowal that distances the state from actions it had implicitly sanctioned. The Azaria case exemplifies this ambivalence—beginning with military condemnation of his shooting al-Sharif while wounded, then evolving into softer criticism from politicians including then-Prime Minister Netanyahu, amid significant public protests against the prosecution itself.

Between Institutional Protocols and Conscripted Intermediaries

My research necessitated navigating both martial and civil jurisdictions. While civil court decisions theoretically resided in legal repositories, military proceedings were ostensibly housed in either the Defense Establishment Archive or military prosecution offices.

Initial institutional engagement revealed most cases weren’t centrally archived. For the majority, I was directed to submit formal requests to military prosecution authorities—a seemingly straightforward administrative procedure for accessing predominantly public trials that can, from a narrow legal perspective, be cited as evidence of institutional accountability.

The unanticipated reality involved communicating with conscripted personnel, typically 18-20 years old male and female soldiers, with minimal understanding of academic research protocols or archival requests. What appeared procedurally straightforward metamorphosed into a protracted process requiring persistent follow-up communications. Each interaction necessitated recontextualizing my request to military personnel who would vaguely indicate it was “under review.” Even after establishing electronic communication channels, no clear timeline materialized, and the frequent rotation of personnel—due to reassignment or completion of mandatory service—required repeatedly reinitiating the process as if no prior communication had occurred.

I had never previously considered the professional implications of mandatory military conscription. Without personal military experience, I hadn’t conceptualized this institution as one whose administrative functions were performed by extremely young individuals often exhibiting pronounced disinterest in their assigned responsibilities. Nevertheless, this constituted the operational reality of a process initially presented as simple but which ultimately extended over four years of persistent engagement.

Open-Legal Access

The disparity between theoretical accessibility and practical implementation reveals the paradoxical nature of legal transparency frameworks. While civil proceedings were nominally available through institutional repositories, accessing military records required navigating bureaucratic structures staffed by temporary personnel with minimal investment in facilitating scholarly inquiry. This reality demonstrates how conventional juridical taxonomies fail to capture the experiential dimension of accessing justice systems. This is especially true in trials of repudiated violence, where charges often erase the violent event itself. My research focused on physical violence, yet due to agents’ legal capacity to use force, charges frequently obscured the underlying violence—for example, “inappropriate behavior” masking actual violence inflicted on victims.

Traditional legal taxonomy typically conceptualizes law as static, overlooking the disconnect between formal codification and practical implementation—what Lavit (2020) terms the gap between “law-on-the-books” and “law-in-action.” The positivist approach neglects critical social and political dimensions, particularly those relegated to systemic margins. As Campbell (1999) and Dagan (2008) argue, such taxonomies often represent a world that neither acknowledges nor accepts the socio-legal paradigm shift.

My experience exemplifies how institutional configurations—specifically mandatory conscription resulting in unmotivated gatekeepers—create formidable barriers despite theoretical commitments to accessibility. This mismatch between institutional organization and critical inquiry reveals how access barriers function not just as practical impediments but as epistemological gatekeeping. As Hutchinson and Cohen (1990) suggest, the legal system resists being reconstructed through alternative analytical frameworks that might challenge its legitimizing narratives.

When researchers impose non-legal taxonomies upon legal materials—as with my “repudiated violence” framework—we confront not just administrative resistance but epistemological boundaries that structure cases by offense type rather than by power dynamics.

Conclusion - beyond questions of classified materials

When we dare to step outside the law’s authoritative framework and repurpose its categories to serve our analytical needs, we fundamentally transform the question of access. No longer is it merely about classified versus declassified materials. Instead, we confront a more nuanced reality where access depends on whether institutional repositories can accommodate our alternative conceptualizations.

My experience with “repudiated violence” demonstrates this tension. By centering physical violence rather than legal categorization, I created a framework that challenged conventional legal taxonomy. Yet this approach immediately revealed the limitations of existing archives and databases, which remain organized according to the law’s internal logic. For socio-legal scholars, this suggests a strategic imperative: we must develop methods that acknowledge these institutional constraints. When we insist on using legal categories “as they suit us” rather than as they were intended, we create productive friction that illuminates power structures embedded within seemingly neutral systems of knowledge organization. The question becomes not whether materials are accessible in principle, but whether our conceptual innovations can penetrate institutional practices designed to reproduce legal authority.

References

Bohrer, Ziv. 2020. The Defense of Justification Due to Obeying an Illegal Order: Existing and Proper Law in the Israeli Legal System. Tel Aviv: Ma’arachot. [in Hebrew]

Campbell, David. 1999. “Classification and the Crisis of the Common Law.” Journal of Law and Society 26(3):369-377.

Dagan, Hanoch. 2008. “Legal Realism and the Taxonomy of Private Law.” Pp. 147-166 in Structure and Justification in Private Law: Essays for Peter Birks, edited by Charles Rickett and Ross Grantham. Oxford: Hart Publishing.

Ernout, A., & Meillet, A. (2001). Repndium. In Dictionnaire Étymologique de la Langue Latine (4e ed.). Klincksieck.

Hutchinson, Allan, and David Cohen. 1990. “Of Persons and Property: The Politics of Legal Taxonomy.” Dalhousie Law Journal 13:20-54.

Lavitt, Joseph. 2020. “Leaving Contemporary Legal Taxonomy.” Denver Law Review 90(1):213-268.

Madar, Revital. 2021. “Repudiated Violence and Sovereign Power: The Case of Israel.” PhD Dissertation, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Madar, Revital. 2023. “The Construction of Palestinian Death as an Exceptional Repetition in Israel.” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power (September 20). https://doi.org/10.1080/1070289X.2023.2259218.