Ilana Feldman

Police Encounters

Security and Surveillance in Gaza Under Egyptian Rule

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Ilana Feldman is Associate Professor of Anthropology, History, and International Affairs at The George Washington University. She is the author of Governing Gaza: Bureaucracy, Authority, and the Work of Rule, 1917¿1967 (2008).

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 224
• Erscheinungstermin: 13. Mai 2015
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 223mm x 144mm x 20mm
• Gewicht: 368g
• ISBN-13: 9780804793957
• ISBN-10: 0804793956
• Artikelnr.: 41749798

Autorenporträt

Ilana Feldman is Associate Professor of Anthropology, History, and International Affairs at The George Washington University. She is the author of Governing Gaza: Bureaucracy, Authority, and the Work of Rule, 1917-1967 (2008).

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Introduction: Security Society in Gaza
chapter abstract
This chapter describes the political, social, and security conditions in
the Gaza Strip during the period of Egyptian rule and in the aftermath of
the displacement and dispossession of much of the Palestinian population.
It introduces and explains the "security society" that developed as the
Egyptian Administration deployed an expansive policing apparatus. Security
society was a field of both governance and action. The police used
surveillance, suspicion, and informing to control politics, propriety, and
illegality. And people sometimes worked with these same techniques to try
to influence government policy and other people's behavior. Policing shaped
relations among people and between people and their governors. The chapter
also describes the rich, detailed, and unique archival record that is the
source for this study.
1Cultivating suspicion and participation
chapter abstract
This chapter explores how the Egyptian Administration established its
expansive police presence in Gaza. It describes the articulation of a
project of participation, where Palestinians were called upon, a request
backed by coercive threat, to assist in this policing both by informing
about others' behavior and by governing themselves. Policing also required,
and equally was required by, a condition of suspicion. That is, police
needed to be everywhere because they viewed everybody with suspicion, and
their ability to engage the public sufficiently to let them be everywhere
required making sure that this suspicion was widely shared. The chapter
describes the police forces and practices that the Administration developed
to support its security agenda.
2Uses of surveillance and informing
chapter abstract
This chapter explores the signal importance of surveillance and informing
in the policing of Gaza. No space or moment was deemed beyond the interest
of the police. Given this expansiveness, it was inevitable that often as
not surveillance provided little or no information about either criminal or
political activity. Widespread surveillance was an important technique for
controlling behavior. The chapter also explores the often unanticipated
ways that techniques designed for control also created avenues for people
to influence government policy and practice. Not only could generating
suspicion about other people be a means of getting things done for oneself,
the government's concerns about the population and the threat it could pose
made it responsive to some of the desires that circulated among that
population.
3Reputation, investigation, and criminal interdiction
chapter abstract
This chapter describes the work of criminal interdiction, focusing on
smuggling, petty crime, "honor" crimes, and police corruption. The work of
crime control illuminates with particular clarity how the details of police
practice brought police and public into close relation. And in this,
reputation, of people and of police, was central. Reputation was mentioned
in nearly every investigation of an individual, whether that person was
targeted as a suspect or a witness to a crime or the report was part of the
general surveillance system. People's reputations could make them suspects,
make them vulnerable to crime, and sometimes protect them.
4Managing protest and public life
chapter abstract
It was not only Egyptian authorities who made demands of Gazans;
Palestinians also made claims of the Administration. The Administration was
faced with the challenge of how both respond to and to contain these
demands. That is, with how to create outlets for Palestinian public and
political expression without losing control of the political field. In all
of these struggles the language of citizenship was important, even in the
absence of an independent to confer legal citizenship. This chapter
explores three key arenas where the struggle over public life and political
action occurred in Gaza: the circulation of ideas, the opportunity for
protest, and the possibility of organized armed resistance to Israel.
5Peacekeeping and international community
chapter abstract
This chapter explores the UN peacekeeping force, UNEF, that was deployed to
Gaza after the brief 1956 occupation of the Strip by Israel. Tensions
existed among UNEF soldiers, Gazan locals, and Egyptian officials, but
UNEF's basic mission - to keep the peace - was accomplished successfully
for ten years. The UNEF experience shows that security society in Gaza was
not produced only in negotiations between Palestinians and Egyptians, but
that this space was always connected to an international and a regional
field whose actors mattered at the local level. In interventions like
peacekeeping, lofty ideas about "international community" are worked out in
small-scale and frequently messy interactions among people.
Conclusion: The policing imperative
chapter abstract
This chapter revisits the overarching arguments of the book and describes
the police experience in Gaza after the Egyptian Administration. The
extensive security apparatus developed to police the Gaza Strip during the
Egyptian Administration was guided by intersecting concerns about national
interest, social propriety, and everyday illegality. In pursuit of security
in each of these areas the police extended their reach across the public
domain and into many aspects of private life. Gaza's security society was
centrally shaped by the specificities arising from the 1948 nakba
[catastrophe]. Gaza's experience shows that techniques of security and
surveillance also provide means for pursuing other politics. The control,
invited and imposed, exercised by security systems does not have to be the
end of the story.