What My Research Taught Me About Gaza’s Violence
By James Ron
In 1999, I watched columns of Kosovar refugees fleeing the Serbian military across the Albanian border, and thought of the Israeli-Arab war of 1947–48, and the subsequent flood of Palestinians fleeing the violence.
Those 750,000 Palestinians would never return, and their exile — and those of their descendants — has fueled the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ever since. Many refugees did not want to resettle, and the surrounding Arab states — except for Jordan - never gave them the legal opportunity to do so.
I grew up in Israel, served as a soldier in the 1980s, and then worked for Human Rights Watch in the West Bank and Gaza, just as I did at the Kosovo border.
Beginning in the mid-1990s, and especially after the Kosovo events, I wondered, Could Israel once again commit violence against Palestinians on a scale resembling Serbia’s actions in Bosnia and Kosovo?
That question drove years of research and eventually became the backbone of my 2003 book, Frontiers and Ghettos: State Violence in Serbia and Israel.
The Power of Place
One of the book’s central insights was simple: violence is shaped by geography.
In Serbia, I saw how the same paramilitaries behaved differently depending on where they were. In the Sandžak region inside Serbia, harassment and intimidation were common, but mass killings were rare. Just across the border in Bosnia, however, the same groups unleashed horrors.
In one particularly revealing incident, the paramilitaries took over an entire Sandzak town near the Bosnian border and threatened to expel its Muslim residents, who were Serbian citizens. The Serbian government quickly cracked down on the paramilitary takeover, even while it encouraged similar behavior just a few miles away in Bosnia.
Why the difference? Because the Sandžak was inside Serbia’s recognized borders — a zone of “law and order” where Belgrade had formal responsibility. Bosnia, by contrast, had suddenly become a sovereign, internationally recognized territory. As such, Serbia treated it as a lawless frontier, somewhere “over there,” beyond its formal zone of legal responsibility. Violence that would have been constrained at home was permitted — even encouraged — across the border.
Israel’s Own Divided Map
For decades, the West Bank and Gaza were under direct Israeli military occupation, formally regulated by the Geneva Conventions (Israel never accepted the international designation of those areas as “militarily occupied territories,” but did commit itself to implementing the Geneva Conventions’ humanitarian provisions. Legally, it termed those areas “administered territories” subject to military law).
Lebanon’s “security zone,” however, which Israel controlled from 1985 to 2000, was different. Israel never officially considered that area its legal responsibility, and so, in Israeli eyes, it became a “frontier.”
As a young Israeli paratrooper in the late 1980s, I saw this distinction firsthand. Things were done to Lebanese civilians that would not have been tolerated in the West Bank. The rules were different. The law was applied unevenly. Geography mattered.
Gaza as Frontier
After Israel’s 2005 withdrawal, Gaza was no longer seen, in Israeli eyes, as a territory for which it had legal responsibility. Instead, Israel began to treat it as a bona fide frontier, and an area it could operate in militarily, but over which it had no direct authority.
As a result, when Hamas launched its horrific attack in October 2023, Israel responded with frontier-style vengeance.
The results have been catastrophic. Tens of thousands dead, millions displaced, entire neighborhoods destroyed. What I once described as a possibility in the abstract has become reality in front of our eyes.
Why This Matters
This isn’t just academic hair-splitting. The distinction between ghettos (subordinate territories under control) and frontiers (lands beyond formal responsibility) helps explain why Gaza has been subjected to such disproportionate force, while the West Bank — despite all the violence there — has not been destroyed in the same way.
It also carries a sobering warning: if the West Bank were ever to “break free” in the way Gaza did, Israel might treat it the same way. What many imagine as a path to peace could, under certain political conditions, become an opening for even greater violence.
Looking back, I realize how much of my work has circled this theme: the way law and geography shape violence, and how societies use legality not just to restrain brutality but also to justify it.
In Serbia, Bosnia was the frontier. For Israel, Lebanon has always had frontier-like characteristics, and so has Gaza, both before the 1967 occupation and after Israel’s 2005 withdrawal. These patterns echo each other across continents. And they remind us that the structures of power, territory, formal bureaucracy, and law often matter more than rhetoric about restraint or morality.
Conclusion
Two decades ago, my book asked whether Israel might one day commit frontier-style violence against Palestinians. Today, the answer is tragically clear. The lesson is not that history repeats itself mechanically, but that we must pay attention to the geography of violence and how states define their zones of responsibility. When a place is reclassified as a frontier, terrible things can follow.
About the Author
James Ron is an author and social scientist. He taught sociology and political science for 22 years, was a journalist with the Associated Press, and has consulted for Human Rights Watch, CARE, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the Swiss government. He is now writing a memoir, Azimuth, which reflects on his transition from soldiering to human rights documentation.
His books include Frontiers and Ghettos: State Violence in Serbia and Israel (University of California Press) and Taking Root: Human Rights and Public Opinion in the Global South (Oxford University Press). He now writes at jamesron.org and jamesron.net. You can access his scholarly articles via ResearchGate and Google Scholar.
