The biopolitics of declassing Palestinian professional women in a settler-colonial context

Introduction

The colonial logic of elimination (Veracini, 2010) and exclusion of indigenous Palestinians through settler colonialism have been studied from various points of view in several disciplines, including citizenship (Abdo, 2011), space (Yiftachel, 2009), history (Jamal, 2011) and others. In this article, I argue that the biopolitics of declassing Palestinian professional women, as part of the logic of eliminating the native, is mediated by colonial violence intended to secure settler class sovereignty in the labor market. The term declassing refers to Palestinian women’s class subordination, i.e., disregarding their presence and/or value in the labor market.

The research population consists of a group of middle-class women from the southern Naqab, who account for no more than 4.1% (Ghara, 2015: 73) of Bedouin ¹ society yet represent its greatest financial, educational and cultural capital.

Colonization of the Palestinian economy has been examined extensively with regard to strategies that impede work access and deny economic rights through land exploitation, geographical separation, ghettoization of economic enclaves and displacement (see Turner and Shweiki, 2014). By contrast, my study aims at unpacking the logic of elimination through the racialized, everyday lived experience of middle-class women in Bedouin society who succeeded in entering the hegemonic Jewish workplace. I argue that the settlers’ elimination mechanisms target not only weakened segments of the population, but also its economically strong sections.

By decolonizing the corpus of knowledge on women and employment, this study offers an innovative approach that has not been addressed previously in the relevant literature. First, most research on racialization of the political economy of Palestinians in Israel examined the topic from a macro standpoint, analyzing power relations between the state and the Palestinian minority and their effect on the Palestinian political economy (Abu-Bader and Gottlieb, 2009; Abu-Rabia-Queder, 2017; Lewin-Epstein and Semyonov, 1994). Second, studies assessing the marginality of Palestinian women in the labor market mostly adopted a statistical approach (stipulating percentages of employed and unemployed women) and a perspective that links the political-colonial structure with cultural factors that deny women equal access (Herzog, 2004; Khattab, 2002; Yonai and Kraus, 2010).

This article argues that despite the obstacles addressed in the literature (such as a shortage of employment opportunities, the lack of public transportation to and from Palestinian villages and ongoing racism in the Jewish labor market that largely close the gates to Palestinian women and thereby lead to high unemployment rates − 80% among Bedouin women; see Abu-Bader and Gottlieb, 2009), a minority group of professional middle-class women succeeded in entering the hegemonic labor market. It is there, however, that they face sophisticated erasure tactics, paralleling various manifestations of the direct politics of fear that discipline the body, will and mind, as well as indirect opposition reflected in the reinforcement of patriarchal power against women.

This article contributes to the field of bodily class stratification/subordination, that is not carried out primarily by economic (Scott, 2002) or symbolic (Anthias, 2001) means, but rather through everyday embodied practices involving violent mechanisms. I begin by unpacking the mechanisms of the ‘logic of elimination’ of women in settler contexts along two principal theoretical axes: Settler colonialism and its mechanisms of violence, control and biopolitics, on the one hand, and understanding the politics of declassing in settler-colonial contexts, on the other.

Settler colonialism, violence, control and biopolitics

Settler colonialism has been defined as a structure (Veracini, 2010) serving as a basis for analyzing race and gender subordination (Glenn, 2015). In this article, I add class subordination to the formula. The settler’s primary goal is to establish sovereignty and property rights over lands and territory through the logic of ‘eliminating’ the natives, an objective achieved through biopolitics aimed at administration and regulation of the population – as individuals and collectives – including practices of correction, exclusion, normalization, disciplining, selection and elimination (Lemke, 2011: 5). In his work, Foucault (1980) refers to three meanings of biopower: Rearticulation of sovereign power, which has a central role in the rise of modern racism and the production of liberal forms of social regulation and individual self-governance. Settlers use various direct and indirect forms of violence, such as forced displacement of indigenous people from their lands, masked by ideologies such as modernization, militarized genocide, cultural erasure through biological or cultural assimilation, containment through segregation and separation in the public space (Glenn, 2015) and body politics.

Glenn (2015) refers to settler colonialism as a project producing a racialized and gendered national identity that normalized male whiteness; in the Palestinian case, it normalizes Jewish sovereignty. This supremacy is achieved by various violent forms of ‘denial and disavowal of the history of violent dispossession of the indigenous’ (Veracini, 2010: 14), as well as by structuring a naturalized image of the indigenous person as an uncivilized ‘other’ who does not belong to the national boundaries of the nation, unlike the white full citizen.

In this regard, women’s bodies are used to discipline the native either directly or indirectly, by manipulating patriarchal control (Stoler, 1997). Patriarchal order may be exploited, for example, through legitimizing sexual violence and not interfering in cases of violence against native women. The colonial perception is that women’s bodies are polluted and thus sexually violable and ‘rapable’ (Smith, 2003: 73). ‘Dirty’ bodies are perceived as a security, economic and social threat, as ‘ “biologized” internal enemies (Stoler, 1997: 59). Moreover, women’s bodies are used as a tool for colonial intervention: particularly through the rhetoric of saving native women from native men, legitimizing colonial control in land and space (Abu-Lughod, 2013). In addition, colonial imperialism strengthens patriarchy among the natives and thus perceives itself as more egalitarian – and consequently more normative – than native society. Patriarchal white men’s need to control white women is legitimized by the patriarchal control of native women (Smith, 2003).

In the economic realm, settler colonialism is characterized by its capacity to control the ‘population economy as a marker of a substantive type of sovereignty’ (Veracini, 2010: 12). This sovereignty is driven by body politics that regulate political life, organize the community and maintain local control. Sovereignty is practiced not only at the formal levels of state institutions, but also has alternative forms effected through informal mechanisms, such as controlling the indigenous economy, subordinating its metropole and disavowing the indigenous subject (Veracini, 2010: 72).

One such concealed violent form of power is manifested in symbolic violence. Bourdieu (1989) claims that non-recognition is central to the maintenance of symbolic violence. Long-term domination will succeed if it is esteemed as non-recognition of a kind of fundamental arbitrariness. Such non-recognition allows for legitimation of domination and its internalization by the dominated, thereby rendering it ‘natural’. Its effectiveness is inherent in its embodiment in bodies and habitus, as revealed in physical signs such as the dominated’s discomfort, contrasting sharply with the dominator’s sense of confidence and wellbeing. Domination is thus based on obedience to the existing order and its assimilation in the bodies of the dominated, leading to a feeling of low self-esteem and even to self-denial reflected in emotions such as anxiety, guilt or even desire.

Symbolic violence is not experienced palpably, but is achieved in a soft, less overt manner, through contact, awareness and emotion. Accordingly, research on the lived experiences of Bedouin women would contribute significantly to exposure of the relevant means of control applied to them and the methods used to legitimize these means.

The politics of declassing in a settler-colonial context

The literature detailed below points to various class systems that the colonizer institutes within the colonized society, based on level of education, family or clan affiliations or socioeconomic aspects. Another class system level imposed and practiced by the colonizer is to dehumanize and demote the colonized, deeming them unworthy of freedom, rights and so on.

Class stratification is mediated by racialized ideologies and practices, along with an institutionalized policy that usually structures an inferior economic position for disadvantaged minority groups. Dominant groups generally succeed in legitimizing their own culture and mores as superior to those of lower classes by exercising ‘symbolic violence’; they ‘impose a specific meaning as legitimate while concealing the power relations that are the basis of its force. They use their legitimate culture to mark cultural distance and proximity, to monopolize privileges, and to exclude and recruit new occupants to high status positions – translating symbolic distinction into closure’ (Lamont and Molnár, 2002: 172–173).

Initial contact between economics and colonial conquest is mediated by the mechanisms of settler colonialism (McEwan, 2009) that wants not only to control the other but also to eliminate it in concealed ways. History shows that class formation is a product of settler colonialism (Good, 1976). The colonizer’s need to advance industrial and economic superiority through control of land and labor was satisfied by the cheap labor provided by largely unskilled indigenous workers in urban localities. As economic colonial capitalism proceeded, a change in social structure took place under settler colonialism.

One way that colonialists define class boundaries is the manipulation of middle-class positioning during the colonial period. An educated and nationally conscious middle class played an important role during the colonial period. Its political mobility threatened the colonial ruling authorities, that in turn instituted a variety of measures to suppress it. In South Africa, for example (West, 2002), even though the colonial state kept the indigenous as hewers of wood and drawers of water, the middle class flourished thanks to the missionary education that colonialism provided as part of its acculturation policies. African nationals took advantage of this opportunity to escape working life. At the same time, their skills and knowledge were essential within the colonial capitalist system that ran the mission schools, in which they worked as clerks, merchants and bookkeepers. As this group of educated persons represented a threat to the colonial state, particularly on its expansion after the First World War, the state responded in developing industrial education to check expansion of an intellectual elite and to mold an underdeveloped indigenous society. The middle class, however, refused to be subordinated by colonial realities. As intellectuals with national awareness, they continued to struggle for African rights and thus continued to pose a threat to the white conqueror.

Consequently, the colonialist was always interested in neutralizing the revolutionaries from among the ‘skilled and experienced leaders in modern organization, and to narrow the composition of the movement to poor peasants, unskilled workers and unemployed’ (Good, 1976: 613). Accordingly, the rulers realized that alliances should be forged with the traditional leaders, intensifying their traditional tribal leadership to preserve control of the indigenous middle class, thereby practicing ‘containerization of a subject people’ (Mamdani, 1996: 51).

In the colonial history of Mandatory Palestine, repression of the middle class entailed various strategies to neutralize the common class interest of residents. One of the best-known such strategies applies the divide and rule principle by creating a client state and politics of notables. The ruler forges a kind of alliance with the upper class in exchange for extra goods, employment privileges and political rights, forming a colonial glass ceiling (Watenpaugh, 2006: 2013). In response to the 1917 Balfour Declaration, the Arab intelligentsia and the ruling groups in Mandatory Palestine – who then comprised an elite of landowners, merchants, senior officials, professional groups and religious aristocrats – began to organize national protest committees. The political mobility of the Palestinian middle class threatened the colonial authorities, who responded by adopting various repressive means, as Rosenfeld explains:

By declassing Arabs, by ‘officially’ making them different, ‘superficial and Levantine,’ … the state attempt[s] to justify ends, mainly land expropriation, that are specially directed against Arabs. (Rosenfeld, 1978: 401)

Additionally, colonial rule in Mandatory Palestine broadened class disparities among different groups and religious sectors, especially when the urban minority controlled the rural provinces, by reaching out to local leaders and according them additional rights so that they could control the rural population and exact funds from them (in 1920, most Palestinians, about 75%, were rural soil tillers; Rosenfeld, 1978). These disparities gave rise to friction and competition for jobs and employment among religious groups, families and clans, as well as within the dominant group (educated Muslims and Christians), leading to the disintegration of class solidarity aiming to decline the national Palestinian interest. Economic dependence on settlers thus increased, intensifying rural migration to urban regions. By the 1940s, the emerging proletarian wage-earners’ class had developed into a flourishing middle class employed in commerce and administration. The thriving urban intelligentsia played an important role in the Palestinian national movement and in its political and cultural institutions until it was uprooted by the 1948 war and Nakba (Arabic: catastrophe) (Mana’a, 1999). The weakened rural group that remained within the boundaries of Israel lacked political and economic power. The Palestinian bourgeois and the burgeoning Arab cities were cast to the margins and doomed to destruction (Mana’a, 1999). This strategy was intensified by the Zionist Movement, that achieved Jewish control of state economic resources by conquering land, labor and the market (Mana’a, 1999: 301) through a series of discriminatory laws and political programs and national organizations such as the Jewish National Fund – a Zionist body established in 1901 to control land – and the General Federation of Hebrew Labor (Histadrut), established in 1920 as a trade union to promote Jewish labor. At the Twelfth World Zionist Congress in 1921, the Zionist Movement coined the expression ‘Zionist ownership’ of land, achieved by replacing the existing Palestinian population with a Jewish one. Agricultural settlement was a very important objective for Zionist policy because it was perceived as the most efficient tool in establishing a territorial base for Jewish society and reinforcing the Jews’ emotional and cultural ties with the land (Nadan, 2006: 87). This policy endangered the Palestinian labor market, as 70% of Palestinians were farmers for whom the land was a source of livelihood, identity and status. As a result of massive land acquisitions, the disparity between the Jewish and Palestinian economies increased, the rift between the two populations widened and when the World Zionist Organization (WZO) launched a campaign to impose Jewish labor in Jewish cities, Palestinian work migration to major urban centers declined, unemployment among Arabs increased and Palestinian agriculture was affected adversely, leading to an increase in capitalistic production (commercial agriculture and industry) in the Jewish labor market, while its Palestinian counterpart remained non-capitalistic and primarily agrarian (Asad, 1976).

As the Palestinian middle class stagnated, the Jewish one flourished thanks to Israeli and American government assistance, becoming the dominant factor in all branches of government. The resulting ruling group thus derived its economic power and resources from land and property belonging to Palestinians uprooted from their homeland, transforming them into means of promoting the Jewish middle class and private sector (Rosenfeld, 1978).

This policy is still in effect today: The lack of investment in development of Palestinian localities and the dearth of economic opportunities for Palestinians preclude emergence of the human capital required for class mobility, thus perpetuating economic dependence on the Jewish sector (Khatttab, 2002).

Another means of preserving the rights of the hegemonic collective is the delineation of physical and symbolic boundaries in the relevant space (Jamal, 2011). One such manifestation is the isolation of Palestinian localities from Jewish ones through institution of a racist separation mechanism along spatial and temporal axes, constituting part of a spatial Judaization policy that gave rise to ghetto citizenship within a creeping apartheid system (Yiftachel, 2009: 56), in which economic ghettos of poverty are characterized by a backward, undeveloped and unprofitable economy that cannot compete in the hegemonic labor market (Khattab, 2002). Most Palestinian localities in Israel are distant from industrial centers; consequently, anyone who does succeed in finding employment in the Jewish sector usually works at blue-collar occupations and earns discriminatory wages, even if his or her training is equivalent to that of their Jewish colleague. Abdo (2011: 40) calls such conditions racialized inclusion. While the Jewish national economy is based on manufacturing, industry and development, a third of Palestinian families are dependent on the Jewish labor market and work therein, another third rely on the local Palestinian market that is undeveloped and unprofitable and the remaining third on stipends from the Israel National Insurance Institute because of unemployment, disability, retirement or old age (Khalidi, 2008: 4). Among the Palestinian-Bedouin, these rates are even higher, with 66% overrepresentation in unskilled industry and service occupations and very high rates of women’s unemployment (80%) and poverty (80%) (Abu-Bader and Gottlieb, 2009).

The intersectional location of Palestinian middle-class women in Israel, as women and as professionals who enter the Jewish labor market with cultural and professional capital equal to that of their Jewish colleagues, as well as class identity (see Abu-Rabia-Queder, 2017) that embraces critical awareness, indeed threatens colonial power relations. As professional Palestinian women are ‘legal persons and living beings’ (Foucault, 2008: 82), one ought to inquire how such subjects are to be governed.

Methodology

Findings

The findings presented below reveal the direct and indirect disciplinary means by which the hegemonic players within the Israeli labor market racialize middle-class women as part of the colonial logic of elimination.

Discussion

The biopolitics of declassing Palestinian women as part of the logic of eliminating the native is mediated by colonial violence to secure settler’s class sovereignty and Palestinian women’s transparency. Such violence is embodied in the settlers’ governing apparatus, that seeks to construct and preserve inequality by ruling others, thereby demanding, in Fanon’s words, ‘that they serve your interests to the exclusion of their own, [which] can only be achieved through application of violence’ (Fanon, 1963: 29–30). In the case at hand, we find two strategies through which the settlers discipline the native: Directly (through the body, senses and desires) and indirectly (by imposing and strengthening patriarchal control).

Direct disciplinary mechanisms aim at displacing and replacing the native, thus indigenizing settlers and settler space (Wolfe, 2012). According to the narratives, this strategy imposes tangible exclusion and elimination through the sensations and emotions of apprehension and fear that silence women’s wishes and desires. Disciplining emotions, thoughts and the body is a means of excluding the symbolic and social body of ‘internal danger’ (Lemke, 2011: 249) from colonial space. Silencing wishes and disciplining thoughts by engendering a sense of not belonging are inherent in the structuring of feelings of elimination and exclusion, as embodied and normalized among natives, establishing their exclusive inferiority in a space ostensibly not their own. Such structuring is substantive in securing the settler’s sovereignty in that space.

Among women participating in this study, inferiority is embodied through senses and emotions signifying fear of the settler. These become indicators of inferiority through the sensory layer of the body, that helps the settler portray the native person as trapped and confined, whereas the settler, by contrast, is free and maintains control. Such disciplining intensifies the settler’s power through fear that courses through the body. The Palestinian’s body thus becomes anxious, with an uncertain and unstable presence in the designated space, whereas the presence of the settler’s body is secure and legitimate, arousing existential apprehension among the natives. This phenomenon, that I call sensory disciplining, eliminates the sense of belonging and suppresses existential human wishes and desires, thus perpetuating the colonial order and hierarchy between settler and native. Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2016: 1) refers to it as the ‘occupation of senses’ and includes it among the more violent forms of colonial dispossession that address the ‘sensory technologies that manage bodies, language, sight, time and space’.

Colonial violence is perpetrated by conquest of the senses in colonial space that disciplines the language/body/senses of professional women and determines what may be said and what may not, the legitimate and prevailing language of colonial space, the opinions deemed legitimate therein and who may express them. Such disciplining maintains the settler’s privilege and superiority. Using embodied means of disciplining, colonial institutions produce an ‘injured racialized subject’ (Jafri, 2013), who wants to belong to the colonial space but knows it will never be possible. This structuring of an unfulfillable desire leads the native to feel that Israeli public space will never be theirs and that they will never be part of it. Non-recognition of the ‘other’ and the sense of not belonging are thus embodied in the feeling of undesirability in colonial space.

Jafri (2013) maintains that racialized subjects persist in desiring to belong even after becoming aware that the realization of their wishes is necessarily constrained by processes of perpetual social, political and cultural misrecognition, wherein desire and recognition mark the tenuous relationship that racialized peoples maintain with settler colonialism: ‘It is perhaps due to this lack of embodied recognition that settler desire is so significant to sustaining colonial power’ (Jafri, 2013: 77). The feeling that one will never belong renders the loss of self legitimate.

Fanon (1963) reminds us that the settler’s existence is affirmed once the colonized conclude that they are of lesser value than the colonizers. In this respect, the settlers keep the colonized obedient, exacerbating their sense of inferiority.

The feelings and thoughts that participants express – a sense of shock, not belonging, apprehension about speaking one’s own language, concern about staff responses, others ignoring their position as professionals, taking offense, fear of what Jewish colleagues expect, the amazement expressed by Jewish colleagues and clients regarding the image of Bedouin professional women – all attest to the importance of the body in racializing and disciplining the native. By positioning the native body as an illegitimate outsider, King (2013: 23) makes links between the slave’s black body and settler colonialism by stating that ‘Black women’s bodies are materially and symbolically essential to the space-making practices of settler colonialism.’ To the settler, the figure of the native female functions as a metonym for unending increase and production of land/bodies that impedes settler expansion and is consequently perceived as a surplus body that should be eliminated.

From an Israeli colonial perception, the Palestinian woman’s body is perceived as a threat that must be destroyed but also controlled. By colonizing Palestinian women’s bodies, Israel thus colonizes the entire Palestinian population (Wadi, 2012). These perceptions leave their imprint on the colonized body, as Kassem (2011) demonstrates by presenting narratives of Palestinian women from the first generation of the Nakba. Palestinian women consider invasion into their land as a metonym for penetrating the female body. When land is occupied, female bodies are in danger, as they become a target for violent colonial intrusion. This act strengthens the role of the male as a patriarchal protector: Women lose their agency and are perceived only as victims who need the protection of men.

Although colonial discourse on Palestinian women’s bodies refers mostly to destroying them before they enter its space, the case at hand involves legitimate and legal subjects in the form of a bourgeois body that did enter hegemonic space and consequently must be removed in sophisticated ways. Following Bourdieu’s ‘class body’ hierarchy (for analysis, see Mason, 2013), in which bodies of women and non-white persons are dehumanized and uncontrolled – unlike controlled and cultured white bourgeois bodies – I claim that the controlled and civilized bodies of Palestinian women who enter the hegemonic workplace are threatening the hierarchies of these latter class bodies. The presence of classed, bourgeois bodies of Palestinian professional women is not wanted in shared public space because it threatens the growth and sovereignty of the bourgeois body that rules hegemonic space.

Mason claims that there was less emphasis on individual efforts and more on the evolutionary advancement of the group/race as a whole (2013: 694). In other words, confirming the presence of a classed bourgeois group of indigenous Palestinians reflects the class group’s development potential and not only that of the individual, thereby posing the risk that the hostile body will proliferate. Biopower is thus manipulated by settler colonialism in sophisticated and concealed ways, producing the specific modes of violence that naturalize its power (Morgensen, 2011: 54).