Self-Proclaimed Human Rights Heroes: The Counter-Narrative of Israeli Military Judges Ever since the first Intifada in 1987, Palestinian and Israeli human rights lawyers and NGOs mobilized human rights claims against the Israeli military occupation. The Israeli military courts in particular were discredited for holding summary trials and violating fair trial rights. This paper examines the ways in which Israeli judges in the West Bank military courts responded to these challenges and others, as part of the larger phenomenon of cooptation of the human rights discourse and strategies. Using a multimethod approach to analyze military courts’ judicial decisions, academic articles by military judges, and in-depth interviews with Israeli legal professionals, this paper shows how military judges proclaim themselves to be promoting, rather than violating, the rights of Palestinian defendants, portraying themselves as human rights champions. I also demonstrate how this strategy is useful at enhancing their professional prestige. Taking the approach of the disaggregated and reaggregated state, I dissect two different yet complementary projects: a professional project of military judges seeking professional prestige, and a state project of legitimizing Israel’s control over the Palestinian Territories. Analyzing the interplay between them, I show how they are potentially contradictory, and yet ultimately mutually reinforcing. Military judges contribute to the state legitimating project by responding to human rights criticism and coopting the human rights discourse, while they also employ human rights as a professional strategy within the Israeli legal community. When human rights are used as a discourse synonymous to legal professionalism, their use does not challenge oppressive state power but rather reinforces it. Focusing on a neglected professional group of military judges, I explore the ambivalence and tensions between liberal and progressive ideas of the Israeli legal profession during the 1990s and illiberal state policies maintaining difference and hierarchy.