Surveillance and Control in Israel/Palestine

Elia Zureik, David Lyon, Yasmeen Abu-Laban

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136930966
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

Surveillance is always a means to an end, whether that end is influence, management or entitlement. This book examines the several layers of surveillance that control the Palestinian population in Israel and the Occupied Territories, showing how they operate, how well they work, how they are augmented, and how in the end their chief purpose is population control.

Showing how what might be regarded as exceptional elsewhere is here regarded as the norm, the book looks not only at the political economy of surveillance and its technological and military dimensions, but also at the ordinary ways that Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories are affected in their everyday lives. Written in a clear and accessible style by experts in the field, this book will have large appeal for academic faculty as well as graduate and senior undergraduate students in sociology, political science, international relations, surveillance studies and Middle East studies.

Part I
Introduction

1
Colonialism, surveillance, and population control

Israel/Palestine

Elia Zureik

The whole desolate West Bank scene is punctuated with garrison-like settlements on hilltops. If you’re looking for a primer on colonialism, this is not a bad place to start.

(Cohen 2009)

At a time when the governments of industrialized nations and spokespersons of leading international organizations sing the praises of globalization, it may seem intellectually quaint – if not entirely out of place – to resuscitate a discussion of colonialism. Yet, as far back as the seventeenth century, colonialism has left an enduring mark on modern nation states, particularly those of the post-colonial variety. In discussing the “colonial present” in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine, geographer Derek Gregory notes that “while they may be displaced, distorted, and (most often) denied, the capacities that inhere within the colonial past are routinely reaffirmed and reactivated in the colonial present” (Gregory 2007: 7). It is not only the territorial and economic dimensions of colonialism that left their mark; as the late Edward Said noted (1994; 1978), so did Orientalism’s colonial culture and its instruments of power.

Specifically for our purpose, colonialism played a leading role in the development and adoption of surveillance and control technologies that are essential tools of governance to this day. Equally relevant is the relationship between colonialism and what Michel Foucault calls biopolitics or population management. The purpose of this chapter is to situate discussions about surveillance in Israel/Palestine in the context of the colonial experience as it relates to the control of territory and population management. The chapter will further clarify the connections between what appear to be two separate intellectual pursuits: surveillance studies, on the one hand, and a study of a regional ethno-national conflict that is the product of colonialism, on the other. To accomplish this, the chapter will take the reader into a discussion of colonialism and its applicability to Israel/Palestine, the centrality of surveillance in the study of colonialism, the ontology of surveillance, case studies of surveillance in Israel/Palestine which draw upon the contributions to this volume, resistance to surveillance, and concluding remarks.

Zionism and colonialism

The contours of colonialism

Colonialism exhibits different forms and structures. For example, it can involve the actual occupation and permanent settlement of a country or territory, such as in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and the Americas. In most cases a mother country provides protection and sponsorship. These large-scale projects of settler colonialism involved the displacement and at times extermination of the indigenous population, whose status was reduced from a majority to a minority – if not in numbers, at least in terms of power relations. But colonialism can also involve occupying the territory militarily without necessarily settling the country. India under British rule is a prime example. In some cases, colonialism represents a hybrid of military occupation and settlement. The French in Algeria provided an example until the French were forced out after a bloody war. Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories since 1967 is a hybrid of military occupation, settler colonialism, expulsion, and displacement of the indigenous population. Zionist colonization patterns of Palestine starting in the late nineteenth century and continuing throughout the first half of the twentieth, first under Turkish and later British rule, have their origins in European colonialism, even though no mother country and metropolis to speak of existed. At the outset, military occupation was not involved, although there was collusion with and eventual external sponsorship of Zionist colonization, notably by Britain. In the words of Forman and Kedar, “Thus, at the onset of British rule, official documents attested to an Imperial policy of Jewish colonization, facilitating immigration, land acquisition, settlement, development, and elements of sovereignty. In addition to perceived mutual interests, the British–Zionist relationship was based on a discourse of development and modernization” (Forman and Kedar 2003: 497).

Within the colonialism model, it is possible further to identify internal colonialism, which refers to the exploitation by a dominant settler group (and its descendants) of indigenous people who are co-residents of a geopolitical entity in a post-colonial state, as for example in South Africa, Northern Ireland (Hechter 1975), and Palestine. In his contribution to this volume, David Lyon discusses at length the applicability of the internal colonialism model to Israel/Palestine. He argues that internal colonialism distinguishes between citizen and subject. Israel’s control of the West Bank constitutes a form of internal colonialism, since its Palestinian residents are subjects who are territorially controlled by Israel but lack citizenship rights. I have argued elsewhere that Palestinian citizens in Israel are also internally colonized by a political regime that curtails their access to resources (mainly land, but also jobs) and the exercise of full citizenship rights (Peled 2007; Ophir and Azoulay 2005; Zureik 1979). Finally, there is neocolonialism, which involves the use of socio-economic and military power to influence the policies and internal economies of weaker (mainly post-colonial) states without physically and militarily occupying them. Critics point out that present-day rhetoric surrounding globalization conceals a new form of neocolonialism that has become widespread since the latter part of the twentieth century.

Because discussions of colonialism tend to stress its common characteristics regardless of where it takes place, there is a danger of overlooking specific features that are geographically and historically contingent. For example, Israeli colonization of the West Bank for over forty years has gradually evolved to differentiate it from other familiar forms of classical colonialism. As argued by Ariel Handel in this volume, colonization of the West Bank is less a matter of managing the population through a Foucauldian framework of biopolitics, and more a matter of controlling the resources (land, water, and airspace) while neglecting the population. Such a position, which rests on separation between the colonizer and colonized, is also espoused by Neve Gordon:

For many years, I maintain, the occupation operated according to the colonization principle, by which I mean the attempt to administer the lives of the people and normalize the colonization, while exploiting the territory’s resources (in this case land, water, and labour). Over time, a series of structural contradictions undermined the principle and gave way in the mid-1990s to another guiding principle, namely, the separation principle. By separation [italics in original] I mean the abandonment of efforts to administer the lives of the colonized population (except for the people living in the seam zones or going through the checkpoints), while insisting on the continued exploitation of nonhuman resources (land and water). The lack of interest in or indifference to the lives of the colonized population that is characteristic of the separation principle accounts for the recent surge in lethal violence.

(Gordon 2008a: xix)

It is important to make the point that this separation and neglect, if indeed it is a neglect, should not be associated with any benign policy of live and let live. I will show in this chapter, as others have written in this volume (Denes; Bowman), that the ultimate objective of the Zionist project is to control and stifle Palestinian life from attaining any sense of normalcy. The situation is akin to adopting necropolitics in managing the Palestinian population (Wolfe 2006).

Until recently, mainstream social science was unanimous in describing Israel as a pioneering, settler-immigrant society that is democratic and has little in common with European settler-colonial ventures. While my intention is not to deal in detail with the debate over whether Israel is or is not a colonial society, it is important for this discussion to shed light on why I (and an increasing number of other writers) think Israel’s original settlement policies dating back to the early part of the twentieth century exhibit features that are consonant with those of European-inspired colonial regimes (see Massad 2006). As Glenn Bowman demonstrates in this volume, the ideational manifestation in the shape of Herzlian settler Zionism and its association with European colonialism continue to shape the nature of Israeli policies and treatment of the Palestinians in historical Palestine.

Breaching the consensus

Several writers have breached the once-dominant consensus about the nature of Israel as advanced by Israeli and Western social scientists by situating its formation in the context of colonization and the ensuing conflict with the indigenous Palestinian population. Executing this intellectual reconstruction has not been easy. It was once considered “slanderous,” as sociologist Uri Ram (1993) remarked, to associate Zionism in scholarly discourse with colonialism. Or, as expressed more forcefully by historian Ilan Pappe, who personally and professionally suffered as a result of his critical perspective on Zionism, “any reference to Zionism as colonialism is tantamount in the Israeli political discourse to treason and self-hatred” (Pappe 2003: 81).

A key figure in this critical school, one who is associated with the label “post-Zionism,” is sociologist Gershon Shafir. In the introduction to his book Land, Labour and the Origins of the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914, he remarked: “I came to the conclusion that, during most of its history, Israeli society is best understood not through the existing inward-looking interpretations but rather in terms of the broader context of Israeli–Palestinian relations” (Shafir 1989: xi). This relationship is to be understood by considering the “appropriateness of the model of European colonization for the Israeli case [which] is due to some structural similarities” (Shafir 1989: 10). Shafir further remarks: “At the outset, Zionism was a variety of Eastern European nationalism, that is, an ethnic movement in search of a state. But at the end of the journey it may be seen more fruitfully as a late instance of European overseas expansion, which had been taking place from the sixteenth through the early twentieth centuries” (Shafir 1989: 8).

For Shafir, though, the crux of initial Zionist colonization of Palestine revolved around the issue of land and labour, and how to implement colonization without exploiting native labour. Neither of these issues – either of land or population – was resolved without ethnic separation, exploitation, and outright dispossession. Eventually the issue of demography came to occupy a central place in Zionist public discourse, and this continues to this day; it was principally manifested in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948 by Zionist forces and in preventing the Palestinian refugees from returning to their homes. As Jewish immigration to Palestine increased and voluntary land sales to the settlers remained minuscule, it became clear after 1948 that without confiscation and seizure of land, supported by an ideology that justifies these policies and inde...

Table of contents

• Routledge Studies in Middle Eastern Politics
• Contents
• Illustrations
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I Introduction
• Part II Theories of surveillance in conflict zones
• Part III Civilian surveillance
• Part IV Political economy and globalization of surveillance
• Part V Citizenship criteria and state construction
• Part VI Surveillance, racialization, and uncertainty
• Part VII Territory and population management in conflict zones
• Part VIII Social ordering, biopolitics, and profiling
• Index