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  • Police Encounters: Security and Surveillance in Gaza under Egyptian Rule by Ilana Feldman
  • Netta van Vliet
Ilana Feldman, Police Encounters: Security and Surveillance in Gaza under Egyptian Rule. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014. 224 pp.

An Anthropological Paradox

Although the small sliver of land called Gaza, populated by approximately 2 million people, is arguably one of the political “hot spots” most frequently in the media spotlight and increasingly a cause célèbre in humanitarian and activist politics, relatively little scholarly attention is given to Gaza and its history. Ilana Feldman’s recent monograph, Police Encounters: Security and Surveillance in Gaza under Egyptian Rule, makes significant advance in covering this largely unattended scholarly ground. Building on her earlier influential work, Governing Gaza: Bureaucracy, Authority, and the Work of Rule (1917–1967) (2008), this book offers an exceptional chronicle of policing in Gaza under Egyptian rule (1948–1967).

Feldman’s account is both historical and ethnographic. It will likely appeal to readers in many fields, including history, anthropology, cultural studies, Near Eastern studies, and political theory. Written in a captivating and engaging style, without this being at the expense of its erudition, the book should also engage a wider audience beyond academia. It may be of particular interest to those who are interested in urgent contemporary questions of state politics, refugees, the politics of security, humanitarianism, and in the complexities of the legacies of colonial rule generally, and in the Near East specifically.

Feldman brings well over a decade of research experience in and about Gaza to her analysis, and her training in anthropology and history is evident in her attentiveness to the nuance and specificity of Gaza’s context. Her investigation is based on interviews with retired police officers and other Gazans, memoirs, press accounts, and other archival sources, including records of the Egyptian Administration’s police force and of the [End Page 355] United Nations peacekeeping force that deployed to Gaza in 1957. Early on, Feldman introduces the main focus of the book:

It is an apparent paradox of Egyptian rule that security practices such as surveillance, control, and even police violence are among the most and the least positively remembered aspects of this period by Gazans…Policing was a space of both constraint and possibility, of control and action.

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It is this apparent paradox that Feldman addresses, not, as she takes care to explain, in order to offer a prescription for better policing, but rather as a diagnostic project “to better understand the dynamics and effects of policing in Gaza” (13).

In her focus on policing and security, Feldman both draws on and distinguishes her work from that of criminologist Ian Loader (2006). She departs from his investment in what he calls “deep and narrow” policing, which he prescribes over what he suggests is the less democratic practice of “shallow and wide” policing. Feldman explains that “by ‘shallow’ Loader means that recognition of police effect is limited to protecting people from ‘crime and disorder’” (12). In contrast, “deep” policing acknowledges the importance of policing for “shaping subjectivities and political belonging” (12). “Wide” policing refers to “extensive visible display of police presence and entrance of police into a broad range of situations” (12). Finally, “narrow” policing involves “‘constrained, reactive, rights-regarding agencies of minimal interference and last resort’” (12). One of Feldman’s central claims is that policing in Gaza under Egyptian rule was both deep and wide, as well as “self-consciously ambitious” in shaping membership in political and social community.

Feldman thus argues that Egyptian policing in Gaza was not only repressive, but was also a means of action for Palestinians. This action took place through the formation of relations governed predominantly by suspicion, uncertainty, and instability. Within this context, categories such as “citizen,” “refugee,” “humanity,” “native,” “criminal,” “spy,” and “informer” were unstable but central to security practices. Gazans were able to get things done by operating “from within those positions to generate leverage for change or advantage. Simply being Palestinian made people both potential threats and objects of care” (145–146). It is Feldman’s insistent examination of the ways in which Palestinians responded to being in this [End Page 356] position and...

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