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Reviewed by:
  • Israel’s Occupation
  • Uriel Ben-Eliezer (bio)
Israel’s Occupation, by Neve Gordon. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008. 344 pages. $55 cloth; $21.95 paper.

In 1967, during the Six-Day War, Israel conquered the West Bank of the Jordan River as well as East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Desert, and the Golan Heights. Sinai was returned to Egypt following the 1979 Camp David Treaty, while the other territories still stand at the center of disagreement and conflicts that turn from time to time into violence and war. The occupation, which at first was presented by the Israeli leadership as a “deposit for genuine peace,” was gradually normalized, partly by the Israeli government, and partly by a massive enterprise of Jewish settlers who were motivated either by economic reasons or by a religious belief that the territories are part of Israel’s ancestral land. Surprisingly, even though numerous works have been written on the nature of Israel’s occupation and its various aspects, not many authors have attempted to grasp its overall nature, to decode its comprehensive logic, the way it was legitimized, and the resistance it created. [End Page 331]

Gordon’s book represents such an attempt. Theoretically, he uses Michel Foucault’s three modes of power: disciplinary, bio-, and sovereign, and the shifting emphasis from the one to the other, as a means to explain the changing nature of the occupation along the years. According to Gordon, during the occupation’s first 20 years, Israel mainly used disciplinary and bio-power. Disciplinary power was meant to create regimentation on a daily basis and to form homogeneity of attitude among the occupied. It worked on the level of the individual. Bio-power, which worked at the level of the collectivity, deployed an array of institutions that coordinated and regulated various activities such as medical care, welfare services, economic regulations, etc.

In the last 20 years, however, Israel’s mode of control has changed, becoming more remote and arbitrary. Gordon calls this kind of power sovereign. It includes the draconian imposition of a legal system by the state through the employment of its means of control (police, army) on the population as an entirety, with no interference in its ordinary life, and without any attempt to differentiate those who actively object to the occupation and those who passively live with it, for lack of any other option. All in all, Gordon’s main thesis is that the internal contradictions between and excessive use of Israel’s forms of control led to a change in Israel’s modes of power and created the Palestinian resistance to it.

Gordon divides the genealogy of the occupation — both Israel’s means of control and the Palestinian resistance — into five periods: the military government (1967–1980), civil administration (1981–1987), the first Intifada (1989–1993), the Oslo years (1994–2000), and the second Intifada (from October 2000 on).

For those who are interested in various modes of power and the ways they are being used by an occupier, and for those who are interested in particular in the ways Israel normalized its military occupation over the years, Gordon’s book is indispensable. It gives ample demonstrations concerning the role of the Israeli legal system and its Supreme Court in legalizing and legitimizing the occupation; the methods of surveillance used by the Israeli General Security Service (Shabak), which include a vast use of collaborators; the deep censorship in the first years of the occupation on journals and curriculum; the way the Israelis supported forms of identification that helped split Palestinian society; the various methods, both “legal” and “non legal,” of seizing Palestinian lands (e.g., declaring a parcel of land to be absentee property, or confiscating land for the so-called public interest, which later became a settlement interest; the construction of bypass (“apartheid”) roads; the ways the settlers served as part of Israel’s system of control; and the various means used by the Israelis in order to suppress the two Intifadas and Palestinian nationhood.

Among the interesting parts of the book are those in which Gordon demonstrates the discrepancy that was created, right after 1967, between the Israeli...

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