Ilana Feldman

Governing Gaza : bureaucracy, authority, and the work of rule, 1917-1967

Marred by political tumult and violent conflict since the early twentieth century, Gaza has been subject to a multiplicity of rulers. Still not part of a sovereign state, it would seem too exceptional to be a revealing site for a study of government. Ilana Feldman proves otherwise. She demonstrates that a focus on the Gaza Strip uncovers a great deal about how government actually works, not only in that small geographical space but more generally. Gaza’s experience shows how important bureaucracy is for the survival of government. Feldman analyzes civil service in Gaza under the British Mandate (1917–48) and the Egyptian Administration (1948–67). In the process, she sheds light on how governing authority is produced and reproduced; how government persists, even under conditions that seem untenable; and how government affects and is affected by the people and places it governs. Drawing on archival research in Gaza, Cairo, Jerusalem, and London, as well as two years of ethnographic research with retired civil servants in Gaza, Feldman identifies two distinct, and in some ways contradictory, governing practices. She illuminates mechanisms of “reiterative authority” derived from the minutiae of daily bureaucratic practice, such as the repetitions of filing procedures, the accumulation of documents, and the habits of civil servants. Looking at the provision of services, she highlights the practice of “tactical government,” a deliberately restricted mode of rule that makes limited claims about governmental capacity, shifting in response to crisis and operating without long-term planning. This practice made it possible for government to proceed without claiming legitimacy: by holding the question of legitimacy in abeyance. Feldman shows that Gaza’s governments were able to manage under, though not to control, the difficult conditions in Gaza by deploying both the regularity of everyday bureaucracy and the exceptionality of tactical practice.

Waiting for Palestine: refracted citizenship and latent sovereignty in Gaza

This article explores the dynamics of citizenship under conditions of statelessness and in territories with uncertain sovereignty. The Gaza Strip under Egyptian Administration (1948–1967) – a nearly indefinable entity that was under Egyptian authority but no ones sovereignty – offers an especially good site for this exploration. In this period, both the government and the population were invested in some notion of Palestinian citizenship, but there was no Palestinian state to codify that concept. The Palestinian loss of formal citizenship with the end of the British Mandate in 1948, and the continued absence of this legal category, has shaped Palestinian life and political identification in profound ways. Even under these conditions, though, both conceptions about, and the social practice of, citizenship have also been crucially important for Palestinian community. Conditions in Gaza under Egyptian Administration illuminate a ‘refracted citizenship’ that articulated a relationship to both a future state and an existing government. Considering both the earlier dynamics of citizenship and sovereignty under the contested circumstances of the Mandate and the details of Egyptian governing practices in Gaza, the article argues that refracted citizenship provided a mechanism for people to make claims of the existing government and offered a means for that government to better manage the place and people of Gaza. Refracted citizenship also enabled people to build new community relations within Gaza – to develop a sense of specifically Gazan community – without feeling that they were jeopardizing their claims to Palestinian citizenship.

Punctuated Humanitarianism: Palestinian Life between the Catastrophic and the Cruddy

With a more than sixty-seven-year displacement, the Palestinian refugee case is an extreme instance of a widespread phenomenon: the need for humanitarian organizations that are oriented toward emergency to respond to circumstances that are “protracted.” Humanitarian practice does change as needs on the ground change, but long-term need and displacement poses both definitional and practical challenges for this work. The broad trajectory of Palestinian refugee experience has moved from “crisis” to chronic needs—what Elizabeth Povinelli calls “cruddy” conditions. Povinelli specifically contrasts suffering that is “catastrophic, crisis-laden, and sublime” with that which is “ordinary, chronic, and cruddy.” Palestinians share experiences of poverty and immobility with others around the world who are part of what is sometimes referred to as the “precariat.” It is this sort of suffering, which often persists below the threshold of an “event,” that Povinelli terms cruddy.

OBSERVING THE EVERYDAY

This article explores the dynamics of policing in the Gaza Strip during the Egyptian administration (1948–67) to consider both the constraints on and the possibilities for civic participation. Under conditions of expansive policing that existed in Gaza – of the surveillance of everything – it was inevitable that often as not surveillance provided little or no information about either criminal or political activity; that it produced, that is, reports of nothing. Focusing attention on these seemingly useless reports, I argue that they were not simply the detritus of a broader policing regime that was uncovering criminal and political activity, but were effective in their own right. Even as reports of non-activity were of limited immediate use for police investigation, they participated in describing and shaping the contours of public life. Understanding the place of policing in Gaza requires an exploration of this feature of police work – the surveillance of regular activity, the observation of the everyday. The Gazan instance, in turn, provides an opportunity to think more broadly about the relation between policing practices and possibilities for civic action.

GOVERNMENT WITHOUT EXPERTISE? COMPETENCE, CAPACITY, AND CIVIL-SERVICE PRACTICE IN GAZA, 1917–67

The expert is a quintessential figure of modern bureaucratic rule, offering a “protean image of authority and rational knowledge.” Tracing the development of modern rule, Max Weber describes the emergence in European government of a “professional labor force, specialized in expertness through long years of preparatory training…[and] based on the division of labor” as a “gradual development of half a thousand years.” Different fields, Weber suggests, demanded experts at different moments, but in three areas—finance, war, and law—“expert officialdom in the more advanced states was definitely triumphant during the sixteenth century.” For the British civil service, the triumph of the expert has been located in “the nineteenth-century revolution in government” such that the “modern image of the expert, canonised and criticised, was well established by the 1920s.” With this consolidation of the experts place in modern rule, it has been generally agreed that, whether for good or for ill, “the expert in the civil service is here to stay.”

Reaction, Experimentation, and Refusal: Palestinian Refugees Confront the Future

ABSTRACT Displaced Palestinians are faced with an array of “enemies” and a degraded, disappointing political leadership. They are offered few road-maps for a way out of these conditions. Drawing on long-term research with Palestinian refugees across the Middle East, this essay explores how they confront the future from a depleted present. It considers two instances of future encounters, to explore different modes of confrontation: reaction, experimentation, and refusal. These modes of encounter reveal the different temporalities and geographies that are key to the experience of the future.