In the wake of Operation Cast Lead (28 Dec. 2008 – 18 Jan. 2009) numerous IDF soldiers testified to the indiscriminate killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Days later, Israeli newspaper Haaretz published pictures of T-shirts created and worn by IDF soldiers, depicting figures seen through the crosshairs of a gun: a young Palestinian “militant” with the slogan “the smaller, the harder”; a pregnant niqab-clad Palestinian woman whose caption reads “one shot, two kills”; the image of a Palestinian mother mourning her dead child on a condom wrapper with the slogan “Better use Durex”. Using the T-shirt images, news articles, interviews with soldiers, and literature on Zionist ethnonationalism, I locate the content, production and circulation of these images within the Zionist nationalist discourse of demographic management. This nationalist narrative predicates the continuation of the Jewish state on the increased reproduction of Jewish bodies and attempts to morally justify the confinement, disciplining, and killing of Palestinians by positing them as terrorist bodies posing a threat to this demographic balance. Informed by a Hegelian framework of recognition and subjectivity and Achille Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics, which uses as its starting point Hegel’s notion of becoming a subject in the fact of death, I argue that these images are sites upon which the Israeli soldier is created as a moral subject through recognition of the Palestinian as a terrorist subject and the annihilation of this enemy Other. This destruction is posited as a moral imperative, creating subjects through the dialects of recognition and granting the soldier the right to ensure the primacy of Jewishness. This desire for the death of the Other can be further understood within the context of what Mbembe terms necropower, or the management by the sovereign of life and death through the creation of death-worlds, imposing conditions on the targeted population, thus limiting the possibilities for life and creating them as the ‘living dead.’ Given that the exercise of the right to kill is, for Mbembe, the utmost expression of sovereignty, I suggest that the T-shirt images produced and circulated by soldiers create a space in which the fantasy of state-sanctioned killing as a practice of demographic management can be expressed unconditionally. Furthermore, I argue that these T-shirts are not anomalies, but demonstrate the extent to which Zionist nationalist ideology and military culture are inextricably tied to life, and are reproduced, embedded in, and normalized by social artifacts.