Presenter: Smadar Ben-Natan, Benaroya Postdoctoral Fellow in Israel Studies, Stroum Center for Jewish Studies and Israeli human rights lawyer.

In 1967, soon after Israel established a system of military courts in the newly Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), the “Lod Military Court” was established inside Israel. Based on extensive research in Israeli military archives, Professor Ben-Natan will show how for over 30 years, this court was used to prosecute Palestinian citizens of Israel for security offenses, while Jewish citizens were prosecuted for similar offenses in civilian courts. While this separate and unequal system compromised the rights of Palestinians as citizens, the discourse of the military court invoked their citizenship as creating a duty of allegiance that, once breached, justified enhanced punishments. Thus, Palestinian citizens have been constructed as citizen-enemies, a hybrid category between Jewish citizens and Palestinian non-citizens in the OPT. This talk argues that military prosecutions, which are mostly understood as instruments of war and foreign occupation, form part of the construction of an ambiguous and securitized citizenship within the state.