Law wars: experimental data on the impact of legal labels on wartime event beliefs

On June 1, 2018, Razan Al-Najjar, a twenty-one-year-old Palestinian paramedic, was killed by Israeli fire during demonstrations along the Israel-Gaza border. Her death triggered intense debates about whether Israeli soldiers intentionally targeted her, in violation of international law. Despite the many fact-finding efforts, the facts are not settled, the legal debates linger, and meaningful accountability seems further away than ever. This episode highlights the growing focus of wartime investigations on legal truth. Furthermore, it suggests that, in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, framing facts in legal terms triggers backlash, anger, and denial. In other words, using legal terminology to frame public perception of wartime events is ineffective for dispute resolution. This Article explores this general claim employing interdisciplinary theories and methods using the 2018 Gaza border demonstrations as an illustrative example. It then tests these hypotheses with a 2017 survey experiment fielded in Israel with a representative sample of 2,000 Jewish-Israeli citizens. This experimental data provides systematic evidence of the effect legal labels have on people’s beliefs about contested wartime actions committed by their fellow nationals. The findings demonstrate that discussing events using common legal labels, such as “war crimes,” significantly decreases Jewish-Israelis’ willingness to believe information about Palestinian casualties and fails to stimulate feelings of empathy toward the victims. Jewish-Israelis tend to reject facts described using war crimes terminology and are more likely to feel anger and resentment than guilt or shame. These findings contribute to the broader debate about the role played by international law during armed conflicts, suggesting that, rather than serving as an educational and informative tool, it is cynically perceived as a political tool.