The Establishment’s Fight against Wrongful Use of Force by Israeli Police Officers during the State’s First Decade

Abstract

The use of unlawful force by British Mandate police was embedded into the Jewish consciousness as a symbol for the entire regime’s inherent faults. In contrast, the desired image of the Israeli police force was shaped as the complete opposite: A police force whose actions are justified, enacts law and order, and applies force with restraint. Thus, as opposed to the Mandate’s model of colonial policing founded on oppressive military components, the Israeli police, upon its inception, espoused – in theory, at least – the metropolitan model, based on the public’s consent to its actions.

In practice, however, this was not enough to uproot the phenomenon entirely: since the Israeli police’s very first years, members of the Knesset, government and media have voiced their complaints about an unlawful use of force by police officers.

Although it is difficult to gauge the true scope of the problem, the state had worked to fight it due to both its practical and symbolic severity. This study will focus on the measures taken by the police, Knesset and government – sometimes with the influence of public and media discussions and sometimes without it – to eradicate it, on three levels: educational – through training courses for new police officers that included laws, regulations and content defining proper use of force; legal – which involved disciplinary and criminal action against policemen who used unlawful force; and structural – which comprised of inquiry committees that examined the use of force by the police and its officers systemically. 

The failure of these efforts is often explained on a universal level using Brodeur’s stance, that the use of force is tantamount to fighting fire with fire: fighting an inherently wrong action by employing an equally wrong means of doing so. Our research will focus on the limited success of these efforts using a local analysis that focuses on Israeli police and society during the state’s first decade: on the micro level, we will examine the characteristics of police officers, while the macro level will follow the broad political and social contexts of that time, which led to a reproduction of mandatory-military practices even within a police force that raised the banner of civic policing.