Bodies, Power and Resistance in the Middle East

Experiences of Subjectification in the Occupied Palestinian Territories

Caitlin Ryan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317623670
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Freedom
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The book examines how exercises of power and processes of security exercised in the Occupied Palestinian Territories have formed Palestinian women as subjects.

To understand how women experience occupation, this book examines the various ways in which the occupation is directed at making Palestinian women into subjects of power. The work argues that the exercises of power are focused on controlling and disciplining women's bodies. The objectives are to expose how the exclusions of women's daily-lived experiences of conflict in the occupied Palestinian territories obscures how power operates, to demonstrate how the elements of Israeli security practices make women insecure, and to highlight how resistance to the occupation can be found embedded within daily life in the occupied territories. Ultimately, all of these themes can be related more broadly to how women might experience conflict and resist subjectification by exposing different ways that subjectifications result in insecurities and resistance to those insecurities. While the book is specific to women in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, the exercises of power and enactments of resistance it exposes demonstrate how important it is to take seriously the feminist argument that 'the personal is international, and the international is personal.'

This book will be of much interest to students of gender politics, critical security studies, Middle Eastern politics, sociology and IR in general.

Part I
Thinking about subjectification and resistance

Introduction

Checkpoint 300

Checkpoint 300

Two realisations about the exercise of power confront you when you stand in line waiting to cross out of the West Bank into Israel at Checkpoint 300 located between Bethlehem and Jerusalem. First, the exercise of power occurs through and upon our bodies. This is apparent in the maze of fences, turn-stiles, gates and the concrete separation barrier, all of which dictate every movement of every body passing through the checkpoint. There is an extensive system of surveillance in the checkpoint, comprising dozens of cameras and catwalks, built so soldiers can patrol above the people who are waiting to pass through the turnstiles. The entrance to each turnstile has a camera pointed at it, and the soldier watching that camera uses the locking turnstile to let one person through to the screening area at a time. It is immediately obvious that you’re being watched from all angles.

Second, and perhaps less obviously, the exercise of power actively creates subjects. Subjectification – or the process of creating subjects – occurs differently through different bodies, such that the bodies of foreign nationals, the elderly, men, women or children experience different exercises of power. In crossing through the checkpoint you are subjectified – you ‘become’ a subject of Israeli power. Despite the different subjectifications, different individuals experience (i.e. white foreign woman, young Palestinian man, little Palestinian girl), the exercises of power in the checkpoint that form you as ‘subject’ can be seen as merely one element in the apparatus of power that is the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories.¹

To understand how the apparatus of the occupation functions, it is necessary to examine the different elements that comprise it, including, but not limited to, the checkpoint system. The value of such an analysis comes from an understanding that the exercise of power occurs in an infinite number of ways. It exposes elements of power that may otherwise go unnoticed, and, in doing so, it also allows for the possibility of exploring resistance to the exercise of power. If the exercise of power is obvious in Checkpoint 300, the resistance to it is subtle, yet enduring. Palestinians who pass through Checkpoint 300 exercise resistance to their subjectification in many different ways, many of them seemingly insignificant at first glance. If we assume that the exercise of power in Checkpoint 300 (or indeed any one of the checkpoints scattered throughout the occupied Palestinian territories) are aimed at managing, controlling and subjectifying the people passing through, then resistance that challenges that power most often occurs when Palestinians find ways to maintain their humanity and dignity. Through its exercise, power subjugates, but resistance to this subjectification accompanies the exercise of power. One therefore cannot speak of power without also speaking of resistance (Foucault, 1980: 142).

I stood in line at Checkpoint 300 multiple times during the winter of 2011/2012. During this time, the situation in the West Bank was relatively calm, at least, for Palestinians, as calm as things can be when you are living under all the assorted elements of a colonial occupation. Without doubt, daily life was still confronted with disruption and delay and control and management and punishment, but there was not death in the streets at the level there had been during the intifadas. There was not death in the streets as there had been three years previously in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead. As I write this, at the end of the summer of 2014, experiences of war and death in the streets have been much more intense, largely in Gaza, but also in the West Bank. During the worst days of this most recent war, I would dread getting out of bed in the morning. I felt compelled to read the news of the latest death tolls, reports of whole families killed, or stories of children killed while they played. The intense feeling of compulsion to read the news equalled the intense desire I had to bury my head in the sand. I felt equal parts grief, anger and helplessness, and it became harder to boot up my computer and turn to this manuscript.

The experiences of war in Gaza were surely horrifying, and based on the testimonies we can access, the photos of destruction and the reports by human rights organisations, we can begin to have an idea of that horror. If we were not there, we would not be able to experience it directly, but we can build an understanding of the experience through the accounts of others. Listening to experiences of war from Gaza are essential if we want to talk about the conflict in a way that humanises the population, if we want to talk about the war in a way that makes the people of Gaza ‘grievable’ to us. Judith Butler argues that to acknowledge the lives of ‘the Other’ as grievable is central to moving towards a more emancipatory politics (Butler, 2004a, 2010). In this book, I argue that understanding how occupation and resistance in the West Bank of the occupied territories is experienced in daily life is crucial to understanding how the occupation functions, how resistance to occupation is enacted, and why it is only the end of the occupation that will lead to emancipation for all of the people of Israel/Palestine.

There have recently been some excellent cross-disciplinary analyses aimed at uncovering specific aspects of the Israeli occupation and Palestinian resistance (Abufarha, 2009; Weizman, 2007; Zureik et al., 2011). Weizman’s stunning analysis of the architecture of occupation examines how architecture has been used since the formation of the Israeli state to control Palestinians. Abufarha takes a critical ethnographic approach to examine how the occupation functions to create Palestinians who willingly blow themselves up in martyrdom operations/suicide bombing attacks.² In an edited volume entitled Surveillance and Control in Israel Palestine (Zureik et al., 2011), a range of authors investigate a wide variety of techniques used in the surveillance of Palestinians and what the impacts of these means of surveil-lance are. These examples demonstrate the logic of examining Israeli power and Palestinian resistance under a critical light, because many of the means of control and subjectification of Palestinians appear subtle but are in fact insidious. Through taking a more critical approach to aspects of the conflict, these works contribute to a much deeper understanding of how occupation and resistance function.

These three works inspire this project, but this project seeks to expand upon their approach by focusing on a particular segment of the Palestinian population that experience particular impacts of the occupation: women. The reason for doing so is clear; women and their experiences of occupation and resistance deserve elucidation because claiming that one’s analysis is ‘gender-blind’ does not safeguard one from reproducing a gender bias (Wadley, 2010) and assumptions about whose experiences matter in conflict often favour ‘men as warriors’ when gender goes missing from the analysis (Sylvester, 2012a). Gender needs to be central to thinking about the relationship between bodies, power and resistance because physical bodies are gendered, and different gendered bodies will experience power and resistance differently as a result.

This brings us to the rationale for centralising gendered ‘subjects’ and their bodies when examining how Palestinians experience and resist the occupation. I argue that doing so is beneficial because of the potential to illustrate how our physical bodies are targets of power and sites of subjectification but also sites of resistance to power. Focusing on the body as a site where the exercise of power is directed adds to existing literature that examines how bodies are controlled as a result of Israeli control of the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt) (Parsons and Salter, 2008). Bodies are crucial because it is through our bodies that we experience the world, and the Israeli occupation relies on the physical bodies of Palestinians to exercise power in occupied territories and subsequently to subjugate the Palestinian population. Sylvester argues that: ‘To study war as experience requires that human bodies come into focus as units that have war agency and are also prime targets of war violence and war enthusiasms’ (2012b: 484). Taking seriously the body and how bodies are sites and targets of war is an essential element of understanding how war is experienced. This project takes seriously these calls for a bodily focus, while maintaining that our bodies are not merely the targets of power and violence, but that they are also a means of resistance.

There are four assumptions that I start from in this book, which deserve a brief elucidation before outlining the book’s structure. First, I am starting from the claim that the occupation of the Palestinian territories is a colonial occupation. There have been various stages in the colonisation of the Palestinian people, but the dominant, enduring feature has been an expropriation and settling of Palestinian land (Abufarha, 2009; Khalili 2007b, 2012). A combination of ideology, political structure, social, political, ideological, religious and economic discourse, a settler population and the military supported the various stages of land expropriation. The colonial elements of the occupation will be described and outlined throughout Chapters 5, 6 and 7 to demonstrate how power is exercised through colonial mechanisms.

Second, ‘the subject’ is neither fixed, nor pre-existing, but is instead shaped through exercises of power. This assumption draws from Foucault’s claim that the focus of his inquiries was ‘the subject’ rather than power (1994b: 327). Part of Chapter 3 develops a theory of ‘the subject’ that will support the later analysis of subject formation in the occupied territories. I am assuming the primacy of the ‘subject’ as the focus of my inquiry by concerning myself with two questions:

1. What are the practices that form Palestinian women as subjects to the occupation? In other words, what is the dispositif ³ of occupation?
2. What are the practices through which Palestinian women enact resistance to their positions as subjected to occupation? In other words, what is the dispositif of Palestinian women’s resistance?

This leads to the third assumption: that power and resistance are irrevocably intertwined, and that both are often located in the ‘everyday’. The notion that resistance has to be centralised, organised or calculated reflects a state-centric, Western, liberal understanding of resistance. I draw from Foucault as well as James Scott to argue that resistance can in fact be much more free form. For Foucault, the possibility for resistance exists everywhere there is the exercise of power. The forms that resistances can take are as varied as the forms the exercise of power can take (Foucault, 1978). I more fully engage with Foucault’s theory of resistance in Chapter 2; but his insistence that resistances are varied and located at the sites of power is a central starting point of this project.

Foucault is not alone in thinking about resistances as plural and varied. In his book Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1990), Scott argues that ‘everyday’ resistances have more significance than they are often given credit for. He argues that the resistance tactics of the subordinate group may not seem like resistances to the dominant group, but this may be precisely the aim. ‘Spontaneity, anonymity and lack of formal organization then become the enabling modes of protest rather than a reflection of the slender political tactics of the popular classes’ (Scott, 1990: 151). The range of everyday resistances enacted by the subordinate group may not fit into state-centric notions of resistance but that does not mean that they are not engaging in resistance. He introduces the term ‘infrapolitics’ to refer to these resistances.

For a social science attuned to the relatively open politics of liberal democracies and to loud, headline-grabbing protests, demonstrations, and rebellions, the circumspect struggle waged daily by subordinate groups is, like infrared rays, beyond the visible end of the spectrum. That it should be invisible, as we have seen, is in large part by design – a tactical choice born of a prudent awareness of the balance of power.

(ibid.: 183)

Scott’s notion of infrapolitics does not explain every example of Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation, but it does support my claim that Palestinian women’s resistances in the occupied territories are varied, not always apparent as ‘resistance’ and often located within daily lived experience.

My fourth and final assumption is that by centralising the daily lived experiences of Palestinian women, I am privileging a non-existent ‘shared’ category of ‘Palestinian woman’. I acknowledge, however, the problems of doing so, particularly from my own subjectivity as a white, Western, woman, as well as from the perspective of feminism. There is a need to think critically about to what degree a feminist approach to research fits within Palestinian women’s experiences and understandings. Egyptian anthropologist Saba Mahmood engages with the question of difference between ‘Western’ feminisms and feminisms in the Islamic world. According to Mahmood (2001), problems often arise when Western researchers claim to adopt a ‘feminist’ perspective when conducting research on the subject of women in Arab or Muslim societies. The choice to associate such research with feminism can be problematic if it tends to ascribe a specific ideal of what women should strive for by Western ideas of what it means to be a liberated woman. Continued assertions of the ‘universal’ oppression of Muslim and Arab and the need for Western feminism to save them will fail to successfully explain the complexity and diversity of the experiences of Muslim and Arab women. Specific to this project, preoccupancy with the position of women within Palestinian society does not necessarily correspond to the attention Palestinian women pay to their position vis-à-vis men. As is the case with other nationalist struggles, the struggle against the Israeli occupation almost always takes precedence. As such, analyses which claim to centralise Palestinian women, as this analysis does, should give precedence to the issues women are most concerned with.

This is not to argue for condoning actions within Palestinian society that serve to subjugate, punish or subordinate women, but rather that as a Western researcher claiming a feminist approach to Palestinian women, it is important to avoid prescribing desirable indicators for women’s liberation from patriarchy. Mahmood herself makes the point that ‘in order for us to be able to judge, in a morally and politically informed way, even those practices we consider objectionable, it is important to take into consideration the desires, motivations, commitments and aspirations of the people to whom these practices are important’ (2001: 225). As such, in calling this a feminist project, I am cautious of making judgements or prescriptions for what Palestinian women should aspire to. One of the fieriest, strong-minded and politically active of the women I interviewed during field research told me that the West’s perception of Palestinian and other Oriental women as ‘incapable’ is a part of what justifies Western intervention in the Middle East. She argued that if people in the West were to critically analyse Palestinian women’s involvement in the national struggle, it would become clear that women in Palestine have a diversity of experiences, much like women in the West.

It is just as any other women in the world, there are some women smarter than others, there are better women than others, there is this woman who is smart and working and hard and active and whatever, and there are women who want to be at home. Now, if it happens in the US it’s a matter of choice, if it happens in Palestine, we’re incapable.

(‘Samaah’ interview 18, Al’Walaja, 2012)⁴

If the aim of a feminist project is to take women’s experiences seriously, then it is important that the researcher does not push their own versions of Western feminism onto women in other places, but instead listens to how women frame their own positions.

It is important to note that this study in no way claims to represent the experiences of every Palestinian woman in the West Bank, much less every Palestinian woman. As I utilise the category of ‘Palestinian women’ I acknowledge that in fact the category is neither a fundamental pre-given, nor an unproblematic assumption. Instead, I acknowledge that construction of gender interacts with the sexed body to constitute the gendered subject (Butler, 1999). My use of ‘Palestinian women’ does not imply that I frame their subject status of ‘women’ as inherent, but rather as a complex array of relationships and interactions that brings the category into being. The categorisation itself is problematic as there is no monolithic experience of the ‘Palestinian woman’ – this is apparent in the wide variety of subjectivities, experiences and reflections shared with me by my research participants. In one interview, when the participant took a phone call, the translator who was helping me that day expressed how she saw the differences in experiences of different Palestinian ‘women’ – experiences of living under occupation, of being a woman, or enacting resistance are mediated through a web of other social, religious, economic or geographical relations, all of which reconstruct the subject. It is therefore important to note that I acknowledge the problems with using the category ‘Palestinian woman’.

Outline of chapters

The book is divided into two parts. The purpose of Part I is to establish and build the theory that will be necessary to examine how subjects are ‘produced’ by the occupation and how resistance to the occupation challenges that subject formation. Part II applies this theory to eighteen elements of occupation and resistance. These eighteen elements are divided across three chapters; but what is important to point out is that there is more than one way these elements could have been divided or grouped together. Their present groupings in these three chapters is not meant to signal some inherent shared likeness, nor is it meant to signal that there is a hierarchy among elements of occupation that subjectify, or elements of resistance that defy and resist subjectification. Each of the elements is examined individually, to determine how that particular element functions to create the Palestinian subject, or to reject subjectification. As such, the sections of the chapters in Part II can in fact be read in any order or grouping the reader chooses, as their present division across these three chapters represents only a suggestion of one way they might be connected or divided.

Chapter 1: ‘Women, (in)security and violence’ engages with the existing relevant literature. The chapter begins with an overview of the critical security studies and feminist security studies literature t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• PART I Thinking about subjectification and resistance
• PART II Experiences of subjectification and resistance: power and resistance in the occupied Palestinian territories
• Conclusion: back to Checkpoint 300
• References
• Index