Why did Israeli soldiers use both restraint and brutality during the first Palestinian uprising?

In 1988, Israeli security forces engaged in a wide variety of repressive tactics aimed at putting down the Palestinian uprising in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Rather than viewing these methods solely as products of instructions handed down from on high, this article regards Israeli tactics as emerging from processes of innovation and elaboration by military personnel. Rules stipulating the legal use of lethal force placed important limits on Israeli military behavior. Within those limits, however, soldiers were free to invent new methods of repression.

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