Egypt came to govern Gaza as a result of a war, a failed effort to maintain Arab Palestine. Throughout the twenty years of its administration (1948–1967), Egyptian policing of Gaza concerned itself not only with crime and politics, but also with control of social and moral order. Through surveillance, interrogation, and a network of local informants, the police extended their reach across the public domain and into private life, seeing Palestinians as both security threats and vulnerable subjects who needed protection. Security practices produced suspicion and safety simultaneously.
Police Encounters explores the paradox of Egyptian rule. Drawing on a rich and detailed archive of daily police records, the book describes an extensive security apparatus guided by intersecting concerns about national interest, social propriety, and everyday illegality. In pursuit of security, Egyptian policing established a relatively safe society, but also one that blocked independent political activity. The repressive aspects of the security society that developed in Gaza under Egyptian rule are beyond dispute. But repression does not tell the entire story about its impact on Gaza. Policing also provided opportunities for people to make claims of government, influence their neighbors, and protect their families.
Egypt came to govern Gaza as a result of a war, a failed effort to maintain Arab Palestine. Throughout the twenty years of its administration (1948–1967), Egyptian policing of Gaza concerned itself not only with crime and politics, but also with control of social and moral order. Through surveillance, interrogation, and a network of local informants, the police extended their reach across the public domain and into private life, seeing Palestinians as both security threats and vulnerable subjects who needed protection. Security practices produced suspicion and safety simultaneously.
Police Encounters explores the paradox of Egyptian rule. Drawing on a rich and detailed archive of daily police records, the book describes an extensive security apparatus guided by intersecting concerns about national interest, social propriety, and everyday illegality. In pursuit of security, Egyptian policing established a relatively safe society, but also one that blocked independent political activity. The repressive aspects of the security society that developed in Gaza under Egyptian rule are beyond dispute. But repression does not tell the entire story about its impact on Gaza. Policing also provided opportunities for people to make claims of government, influence their neighbors, and protect their families.
Police Encounters: Security and Surveillance in Gaza under Egyptian Rule
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Overview
Egypt came to govern Gaza as a result of a war, a failed effort to maintain Arab Palestine. Throughout the twenty years of its administration (1948–1967), Egyptian policing of Gaza concerned itself not only with crime and politics, but also with control of social and moral order. Through surveillance, interrogation, and a network of local informants, the police extended their reach across the public domain and into private life, seeing Palestinians as both security threats and vulnerable subjects who needed protection. Security practices produced suspicion and safety simultaneously.
Police Encounters explores the paradox of Egyptian rule. Drawing on a rich and detailed archive of daily police records, the book describes an extensive security apparatus guided by intersecting concerns about national interest, social propriety, and everyday illegality. In pursuit of security, Egyptian policing established a relatively safe society, but also one that blocked independent political activity. The repressive aspects of the security society that developed in Gaza under Egyptian rule are beyond dispute. But repression does not tell the entire story about its impact on Gaza. Policing also provided opportunities for people to make claims of government, influence their neighbors, and protect their families.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804795371 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/13/2015 |
| Series: | Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| File size: | 10 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Police Encounters
Security and Surveillance in Gaza under Egyptian Rule
By Ilana Feldman
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-9537-1
CHAPTER 1
Cultivating Suspicion and Participation
NOT LONG AFTER EGYPTIAN AUTHORITIES acquired formal control of Gaza, Egyptian military and administrative officers met in Khan Yunis with a group of mukhtars (village leaders). The purpose of this meeting, held in October 1949, was to enlist the cooperation of the mukhtars in controlling the population, particularly in keeping people from crossing the armistice line that marked the boundary between the new Gaza Strip and the new State of Israel. In his opening statement, Egyptian army officer Abdullah Sharqawi laid out the situation as a simple quid pro quo: "The Egyptian army," he said,
came to Palestine specifically to help the people of Palestine and to defend against their enemies. In this effort it sacrificed money and men, and it is still ready to sacrifice whatever is asked of it. This is from our side, but from your side we ask that you help us to fulfill our mission with honor and security. The Egyptian army intends to respect that to which it has agreed, in regards armistice conditions.
The armistice agreement between Egypt and Israel was signed on February 24, 1949. It brought an end to active hostilities, defined the provisional boundaries of the Gaza Strip, and identified Egypt as the responsible authority in that territory. According to the agreement, Palestinians were supposed to remain at a distance from the armistice line: the territory abutting the border was defined as a no-man's-land. But, suggesting that the Egyptian army was willing to be flexible and to take risks on behalf of the Palestinian people, if it received their full cooperation, Sharqawi indicated the following: "If we violate the letter of this condition and allow people to cross [into the no-man's-land] to the armistice line itself, in order to help them earn a livelihood, then we expect from the people that they will appreciate this sympathy from us and will not cross the armistice line under any circumstances. And the line is known to you also."
This meeting was an early instance in the process of establishing the expansive and wide police presence that the Egyptian Administration deemed necessary in Gaza. This broad presence required the cultivation of significant public participation in policing. It 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 in order to make it possible for them to be everywhere depended on ensuring that this suspicion was widely shared. The work of cultivating both participation and suspicion involved coercion and consent, the threat of force and the promise of support. These efforts to establish the conditions for policing not only show the complexity of police power and the population's response to it; they illuminate the multiplicity of attributes ascribed to both police and public. The people were identified as at once a source of threat and an object of protection. The police appeared as both part of the local community and apart from it. Trust among all these parties was tenuous, but mutual reliance was nonetheless necessary.
The demand for significant public participation in policing work was one prong of the Egyptian security strategy. The consolidation of a professional police force was another. Building up the force and its structure took time, and the first personnel were often people who had served in the Palestine Police during the British Mandate. They brought their training and prior experience to the job. Like police everywhere, they regularly confronted questions about their proper relationship with the public. Learning to create a degree of professional distance, even as one works to cultivate trust, is a central part of most police training. The experience of the Mandate had confirmed that these questions were particularly acute, and sometimes unsolvable, in circumstances of conflict where the police were also party to the struggle. During the Egyptian Administration "conflict" lay across the new border, but there were numerous tensions within Gaza that sometimes presented themselves as clashes of loyalty for police personnel.
The Gaza Strip was a brand-new space, in a difficult condition and with an unknown future. Its boundaries were a product of war. Its population was the result of the massive displacement of Palestinians. The approximately 250,000 refugees nearly overwhelmed the 80,000 natives of the area. Refugees lived everywhere: about half of the displaced in the eight refugee camps established throughout the Strip and the remainder in its towns and villages. Whether the refugees would ever be able to return home or whether the dispossessed natives would ever gain access to their property was unknown (and seemed increasingly unlikely as time went on). Quaker aid workers who arrived in Gaza in the midst of the emerging refugee crisis recorded the suffering and the demands of the displaced. In a typical statement, a refugee from Lydda insisted: "I want to return to my lands, my house and my friends.... This is a very bad life. All we ask is to be home and safe." The Quakers also described the ways refugee needs could create security challenges in the camps. Refugees were sometimes injured in the crush of people around ration distribution; agitated crowds demanding improvements in their conditions sometimes surrounded aid workers. The desire of refugees to return home, and their need for the food and goods they had left behind, led many to undertake the very dangerous journey across the armistice line. These facts were fundamental in shaping police practice and police relations. Such crossings in violation of the armistice agreement no doubt prompted the Khan Yunis meeting.
Refugees were the new majority in Gaza, but the area's native population also suffered the losses of 1948. The vast majority were dispossessed of property, which lay in territory thereafter occupied by Israel. Their homes, towns, and remaining agricultural land were crowded with displaced people from other parts of Palestine. They found themselves in the position of at the same time offering hospitality and assistance to refugees—people who were sometimes their relatives and friends with claims of kin and community—and being in need themselves. In his memoirs, Abu Iyad (one of the founders of Fatah) describes a common scenario. His family came to Gaza from Jaffa and took shelter with an uncle "of humble circumstances" where his family of seven crammed into a small room. Both hoping to return and lacking funds to move elsewhere, they stayed this way for two years, "until my uncle told my father that he was unfortunately unable to keep us any longer." Stories I heard from people in Gaza about the early days after the nakba make clear that even as hospitality was widespread and genuine, so too were hostility and worry about the long-term impact of the influx of refugees on Gazan lives. Sorrow about the past and worry about the future were defining experiences for everyone in Gaza.
Sharqawi's demand for participation in policing was made in a language of certainty—"the line is known to you"—that in some sense belied Gaza's unstable reality. But this language also was a key way in which the new condition of place and people was established. The call for participation named a set of relations, obligations, and subject positions, and in so doing (and backed by the threat of coercive power) helped produce and stabilize them. In his statement to the mukhtars, Sharqawi stressed, "If the people cross the armistice line, they put themselves in danger from one side and put the Egyptian side in a position of noncompliance with the armistice conditions from another. I do not think that you [the mukhtars] will accept this because such a phenomenon would place the Egyptian army and the administration in a position of not controlling affairs in their lands." He placed direct responsibility for compliance on the mukhtars: "I consider you responsible for making the people understand what is required of them to respect the armistice conditions and not cross the armistice line under any circumstances. It is your obligation to guarantee the implementation of this condition by informing us about each violator of these regulations immediately, so that he can be given the strongest punishment."
He then went on to explain the system of daily border patrols being set up in agreement with Israeli forces (the patrols would include personnel from the Palestinian police), and he further told the mukhtars that they were responsible for passing this information along to the population and for telling them not to shoot at these patrols, whether Egyptian or Israeli. Underscoring this point, Sharqawi stated, "From now on each mukhtar will be considered responsible for any incident that occurs in his area and is required to present the perpetrator or he will be taken himself." According to the record of the meeting, immediately following this threat he restated the call for participation in more positive terms: "I await, from each individual in the area where the Egyptian army is now, sincere cooperation so that the Egyptian army can devote itself fully to its primary mission: to protect you until your problem is solved in a manner that is to your benefit and which returns to you your rights." Sharqawi's language gestures to the multiple means of addressing Gazans: as citizens, as population, and as security threats. It invokes the language of rights and duties that is the purview of citizens. It uses the language of protection, which is often a frame for managing population. And most clearly, it emphasizes the possibility that Gazans could pose a threat to Egypt and the stability of its rule, positing Palestinians as security problems who need to be controlled.
Conditions of Suspicion
The Egyptian entry into Gaza was marked by a rhetoric and practice of mutual support and a climate of suspicion and recrimination. This condition was experienced both within the new population, as refugees and natives worked out their relationship to each other, and between Gazans and their new Egyptian governors. Circulating suspicions about threats to stability, to the nation, and to moral community both created the need for expansive policing and were mobilized to generate participation in this work. Suspicion underlay procedures for control of the border, the management of politics and behavior inside Gaza, and the prevention of crime. Police officers had to acquire a professional suspicion of the criminal, the traitor, and the dissident, and to learn proper techniques for utilizing their suspicions in interrogation and interdiction. Gazans were encouraged to turn generalized fear and uncertainty into grounds for joining in the police project through informing, self-policing, and control of others in their community.
Suspicion is a regular feature of security practices. Not only does it promote an expansion of police presence; in many circumstances it provides a mechanism for targeting and controlling particular persons and populations, very often defined in racial terms. In France it is equally persons of North African descent who are targeted. In Israel Palestinians are the most frequent sources of suspicion. As Juliana Ochs describes, suspicion is presented to the Jewish Israeli public as a security technique that they can adopt to protect themselves and their nation. The identification of categories of concern often goes along with a discourse of moral or social panic that justifies this attention. Stuart Hall famously linked fear of mugging in England to moral panics that were driven more by media coverage than by any increase in crime rates. Teresa Caldeira shows how the "talk of crime" in Brazil organizes the physical and social landscape (e.g., "don't go there," "fear those people") and obscures analysis of the underlying causes of violence. By focusing on crimes as isolated actions, but also identifying particular groups of people as prone to criminality, crime talk is a depoliticizing language with significant political effect. In each of these instances, the category production that is key to suspicion operates as a mechanism of exclusion: identifying certain groups as threats to community and other groups as members of that threatened community.
In Gaza suspicion operated slightly differently. Certainly the elaboration of categories of persons was important in this space. And, yes, people expressed fears through category differences, but those differences were not generally racialized. Many of the relevant category differences in Gaza were ultimately connected to the condition of statelessness: citizenship and its absence, dispossession and its consequences, displacement and its effects. Gaza was not alone in having displacement at the center of so much of its experience. In the years after both World War I and World War II, statelessness was a global problem. Hannah Arendt described a Europe ever more starkly divided between privileged citizens and utterly disenfranchised stateless people, the latter treated as "the scum of the earth." In Gaza, in contrast, the population distinctions were never so sharp. The loss of Palestine in 1948 meant that all Gazans were technically stateless. And, especially in the later years of the administration, Egyptian commitment to the at least rhetorical defense of Palestine meant that all Gazans were governed to some degree as Palestinian citizens. Neither "statelessness" nor "citizenship" was a stable category in post-1948 Gaza, and both were sources of security problems and central to structuring relations within the population and between Palestinians and Egyptian administrators. Ultimately, suspicion was attached to every category of person, circulating across these differences to identify "the people" as the dominant collectivity of concern for the police.
Simply being Palestinian made people a source of possible threat, so no behavior choice could render people free from surveillance and suspicion. At the same time, being Palestinian also made people objects of compassionate care, and therefore subject to the government's gaze through another, though not unrelated, lens. The fact that everyone in Gaza was a subject of concern (as both potential threat and object of protection) did not mean that police viewed all their activities in the same way. But it did mean that no activity was outside police jurisdiction. It should also be remembered that being in the police force did not ensure that one was beyond suspicion.
Membership in a political party, active political organizing, and even political talk were matters of special concern to the police. And involvement in any of these activities could make an individual a specific target for control. Staying away from active politics did not, though, ensure that police gaze would not come your way. Applying for a job as a teacher, establishing a social club, and traveling abroad were all activities that generated investigation and report. One's comportment, dress, and social interactions might all be noted by police observers. The intertwining of social uncertainty and state security concerns was a key feature of security talk and practice in Gaza. So in some sense, security talk in Gaza worked in a different direction than the crime talk Caldeira has described in Brazil. Rather than depoliticizing, the discourse of concern in Gaza expanded the range of actions, behaviors, and events that could be understood as political threats. This expansion, in turn, supported a project of widespread participation in policing.
Border Control, Political Containment, and the Palestinian Threat
The very circumstances that led to the Egyptian presence in Gaza were a source of suspicion. Although both Egyptians and Palestinians highlighted Egyptian efforts to defend Palestine in the 1948 war, this positive rhetoric did not entirely define the dynamics in Gaza. Gazans, upon learning more details of Egypt's largely failed war effort—such as the stories about the defective weapons with which the army fought—developed a certain amount of skepticism about Egyptian involvement. And in the early days of the administration, Egyptians were quite distrustful of the Palestinians in Gaza. Egyptians accused Gazans of spying. Gazans remembering these accusations generally attributed them to a desire to deflect responsibility for Egyptian failures in the war: "One always looks for a scapegoat. So, they said 'the Palestinians cheated us. The Palestinians were conspiring with the Jews against us.' When the Egyptian army was routed, they started to say that the Palestinians were collaborators with the Jews. They blamed us for their defeat."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Police Encounters by Ilana Feldman. Copyright © 2015 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents and AbstractsIntroduction: Security Society in Gaza chapter abstractThis 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 abstractThis 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 abstractThis 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 abstractThis 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 abstractIt 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 abstractThis 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 abstractThis 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.