Effective abandonment: The neoliberal economy of violence in Israel and the Occupied Territories

Introduction

As the Arab Spring continues to unfold and authoritarian rulers in the Middle East find themselves dethroned or battling for their survival, the civil societies of the region seem to be increasingly polarized. As the tensions between Middle Eastern regimes and societies are exacerbated, the world’s attention largely turns away from Israel–Palestine. While J14, Tel Aviv’s social justice protest movement, did draw attention intermittently in the context of the region’s uproar, it is puzzling that the troubling events in the Israeli-controlled parts of the Occupied Territories have gone almost unnoticed. As the violent ‘price-tag actions’ carried out by settlers increased in terms of both frequency and gravity, ¹ Palestinians were no longer the only targets, with settlers also attacking an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) base in the Occupied Territories (Altman, 2011). Meanwhile, the Israeli state apparatus appears to be doing very little to reverse the tide of violence. This upsurge of violence has been mainly characterized by the ethno-religious logics of Israeli state practice and now intersects with neoliberal interests to police the boundary of the nation in the context of the J14 sociopolitical crisis. For instance, the price-tag actions and colonization activities of the settlers renders land in the Occupied Territories and Israel’s ‘Arab villages and neighbourhoods’ available for settlement construction, thus providing lower property rents that accord with the state’s policing imperatives and the demands of the middle-class J14 movement.

With the entry of this violence into ‘Israel proper’, we are also witnessing an intensification of practices geared towards the policing of the body politic and a reproduction of racial limits and modes of partitioning exemplified by the activities of the J14 movement. The latter is a middle-class-driven sociopolitical movement that demands economic reforms to bring down the costs of renting property in Israel, especially in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, where, as in most other capitals and large cities around the world, the cost of living has soared radically.

As I illustrate in the following explorations, these events provoke us to rethink the theoretical assumptions that have previously guided the problematization and analyses of practices of securitization in Israel and the Occupied Territories. Not only do they mark a departure from the conventional understanding of state sovereignty as the monopoly of violence popularized by Max Weber, they also partition the national space along a spectrum – running from hypersecuritized to necro-political spaces – such that violence, death and an active ‘governing by abandonment’ take on a productive role in the administration of a biopolitically disqualified population. In the context of Israeli governmentality vis-a-vis the neoliberal market, settlers in the Occupied Territories form ‘war machines’ ² that thrive on insecurity, danger and risk. They also channel state and transnational resources towards their own ends through processes of securitization of a racially and religiously defined life that ‘must live’, as violence becomes an exchangeable commodity for the realization of its own ends (Hoffman, 2011).

Framed as ‘price-tag actions’, settler violence produces new subjects/objects of violence and security in a process that also, we argue, creates the conditions of possibility for a neoliberal economy – which in turn produces further violence, abandonment and ‘deferred death’. The necropolitical character of such a neoliberal economy means that states ‘can no longer claim a monopoly on violence and on the means of coercion within their territory. Nor can they claim a monopoly on territorial boundaries’ (Mbembe, 2003: 32). As Achille Mbembe (2003: 30) illustrates, the Occupied Territories represent one of those ‘necropolitical spaces’ where life itself is organized around making men and women available for the performance of dangerous tasks and work; where ‘daily life is militarized’ and violence is no longer an affaire d’etat, but a commodity of everyday life. In line with this economy of violence characterized by war-as-policy, the aim of state and non-state security apparatuses in Israel and the Occupied Territories is not to eliminate violence and threats, but to maintain a certain level of violence and danger so as to ‘establish an equilibrium’ or ‘homeostasis’ that is economically and politically rewarding (Foucault, 2003: 246). In sum, judicial and extrajudicial violence are not pursued to bring about an end to insecurity and danger; in fact, they establish a well-managed economy of violence, where the latter becomes a source of quick profits, capital accumulation, and the elimination of people and conditions that do not optimize settler life (Foucault, 2009: 18–19).

Attentive to the new forms of neoliberal violence and their relationship to a long history of settler violence in Israel and the Occupied Territories, this article engages ongoing discussions on various aspects of the Israeli occupation that began after Israel’s ‘disengagement’ from Gaza and the resultant change in Israeli governmentality and administration of the Occupied Territories. As illustrated by Azoulay and Ophir (2009), Gordon (2008a, 2008b) and Gordon and Filc (2005), this post-‘disengagement’ phase of the occupation is marked by the fact that the governmentality increasingly relies on a unique and cost-efficient ‘logic of withheld or suspended violence’ that enables Israel to assert its domination over the Palestinian territories and their populations. Uncertainty and ‘deferred death’ are the direct result of such a logic and have become the new features of everyday Palestinian life (Puar, 2007). In a similar vein, Eyal Weizman (2007) points out how this new logic of governmentality had been made possible through new spatial, architectural and military technologies. For instance, new technologies of control such as magnetic cards, flying checkpoints, drones, differentiated spatial zones and elevated highways all fulfil the functions of reducing ‘friction’ between the various Israeli administrative and security apparatuses, the settlers and the Palestinian indigenous population, as well as detaching and differentiating the administered population from the administered space and its resources. This ‘inclusive exclusion’ of the Palestinians by the Israeli government involves planning a meticulous administration of Palestinians’ movement through the fragmentation of the Occupied Territories space, thus contributing to rising levels of uncertainty (Dayan, 2009; Handel, 2009, 2011).

Others who have worked on the political economy of the occupation have noted how it entails the promotion of the Palestinians’ economic dependence on the Israeli economy, as well as processes of systematized dispossession and ‘de-development’ that affect the social fabric of Palestinian society, and thus the politics of entities like Hamas and Fatah (Abu-Saba, 2009; Farsakh, 2002, 2009; Gordon, 2008b; Roy, 1999). Locating these processes within the context of neoliberal globalization, Gadi Algazi (2009) recently pointed out how such processes were closely linked to a colonial dispositif made up of global real-estate investors; Israeli construction companies; corrupt officials exploiting Israeli socio-economic disparities; government agencies and subsidies secured through processes of securitization; and religious practices. All of them contribute to furthering colonization, land theft and quick profit accumulation. Among the numerous outcomes of ‘de-development’ and abandonment is the establishment of mechanisms of violence and governance whereby ‘catastrophization’ and humanitarianism are the two faces of the same coin, constituting a new governmental logic through which the economy of violence in the Occupied Territories is calculated and managed (Ophir, 2010, 2011; Weizman, 2011).

Heeding the insights from these critical readings of the ‘state’ of violence in Israel and the Occupied Territories, and provoked by Achille Mbembe’s and Michel Foucault’s theoretical explorations on the dynamics of political life, this article engages and seeks to sketch the micropolitics of bio- and necropower in Israel and the Occupied Territories and the corresponding political economy of violence. Among other things, one can identify what I call the ‘settler war machine’, which is characterized by an evolving relationship between the state and settler society, through an investigation of the relationship between neoliberalism and violence in Israel and the Occupied Territories. With a specific focus on the violence that has been taking place in the wake of the so-called Arab Spring, I argue that the price-tag actions perpetrated by settlers in the Occupied Territories and Israel are the effect of a neoliberal organization of power characterized by a form of governing by non-intervention, whereby the abandonment of certain parts of society produces the desired containment of elements considered undesirable to the body politic in an increasingly economic and sustainable manner. The abandonment and containment contributes to the legitimacy of the regime in Israel and abroad. That is, this mode of governmentality reflects a desire to increasingly check resistance without having recourse to the state’s ‘monopoly on the legitimate use of violence’, or what Azoulay and Ophir (2009: 111) term ‘eruptive violence’ in contrast to ‘withheld violence’. And this withholding of violence ‘promises maximal control … at the lowest price’ (Azoulay and Ophir, 2009: 119, emphasis added).

Accordingly, then, we must ask how the politics of securitization, the politics regulating the practices of security and war, and the security dispositif in post-Arab Spring Israel–Palestine work. Are they designed to suppress violent threats, dangers and risks – as is too often normatively assumed by international relations scholarship – or are they in fact designed to organize and order them? If the latter is the case, how are we to think about the presumed opposition between non-state violence and order, especially in places where they seem to increasingly depend on each other?

Biopolitics, race and civil society in Israel–Palestine

In the context of Israel–Palestine, a process of racialization further complicates the emerging dependence of the state and the economy on non-state violence. For instance, the sexualization of young children, especially Jewish-Israeli girls, is accomplished in the form of a crusade for the health of the nation and the race. While in Jerusalem patrols work to stop ‘Arab men’ from mixing with local Jewish women, the city of Petah Tikva created a hotline that Israeli citizens can call in order to denounce Jewish women who mingle with ‘Arab men’. Once the women are identified, they are ‘treated as pathological cases and sent to a psychologist’ (Žižek, 2011). Moreover, in 2008 the city of Kiryat Gat launched a programme in its schools to teach Jewish girls about the dangers of dating local Arabs through a short film entitled Sleeping with the Enemy, which presents mixed couples as an ‘unnatural phenomenon’. One of the Rabbis of the city, Shmuel Eliyahu, informed the local newspaper that the act of ‘seducing’ a Jewish girl by an Arab should be considered ‘another form of war’. Certainly, we should consider this didactic recourse seriously, and not simply as a metaphor, for in fact the silent war theorized by Foucault (2003) is the dispersion of policing throughout civil society.

Also, the Yad L’Achim organization claims that it ‘rescues’ Jewish women from ‘hostile’ Arab villages (Žižek, 2011). In 2009, a government-backed television campaign urging Israeli Jews to report relatives outside the country who were in the process of marrying non-Jews was withdrawn after being nonetheless on air for some time (Žižek, 2011). More recently, following the government’s anxiety-driven ‘hygienic’ policies and the lynching of young Palestinians in Jerusalem, racist extremists began a campaign calling on ‘Arab men’ to keep out of popular Jerusalem hangouts and to avoid dating Jewish girls – ‘for their own good’ – through the multiplication of racist posters on the city’s walls (Matar, 2012).

Racialization takes the form of a governmentality based on the distribution of bodies in the Occupied Territories and ‘Israel proper’ through the use of the shadow of ‘Arabness’ ³ and its opposite, the Sabra (the ‘new Jew’). ⁴ Race here should be understood as a presumption or a normative dispositif whereby some forms of life, framed as populations, are said to be superior to others. This process also involves a distribution of differences through the permeation of the politics of war and securitization into various practices, ranging from the policing of intimacies to the control of water flow and access to roads and land, for instance.

When one considers how these racializing strategies involve practices in the service of a biopolitical racial endeavour, the multiple dimensions of violence and the dynamics of exchange that enable them (in this case, libidinal economies) become apparent (see Foucault, 1990: 146). That is, the politics of race and its arbitrariness are exposed when affective relationships transcend the social markers of Arabness, Jewishness, etc. As Weiss (2001, 2002), Puar (2007) and Žižek (2011) illustrate, the policing of intimacies becomes ‘embedded in control societies’ such as neoliberal/settler Israel and serves ‘as a mode of population disaggregation between those incited to life and those consigned to death’ (Puar, 2007: xxvi). The Israeli-Jewish (non-Arab) body constituting the subject of biopolitics – the ‘Chosen Body’ in Israel (see Weiss, 2001, 2002) – is thus produced, policed and ‘defended’ against the ‘putrid’ life-toward-death of the necropolitical space. ‘This sexually exceptional subject is produced against queerness, as a process intertwined with racialization, that calls into nominalization abject populations peripheral to the project of living, expendable as human waste and shunted to the spaces of deferred death’ (Puar, 2007: xxvii).

This population becomes a datum, a field of intervention and the ultimate objective of governmental strategies that have ‘security’ as a rationale of governance and ‘essential mechanism’ (Foucault, 2007: 109; see also Foucault, 2010). The Weberian notion of sovereignty is thus incomplete, for the target is no longer territory but primarily populations defined by the racially based ‘inclusive exclusion’. Under such logic, the population – which appears as a concept foreign to earlier raison d’etat – appears to be the ‘end and instrument of government rather than sovereign’s strength’, and the security of ‘society’ becomes the alibi for state intervention and modulation (Foucault, 2007: 105–106).

Neoliberal governmentality ‘recruits’ a racially defined civil society to serve its purpose (Lazzarato, 2009: 111, 116). Here, the neoliberal economy – as a ‘science’ of the ‘social environment’ – is the rationale and strategy through which the population and space are constituted as two different important political problems. Neoliberalism becomes the condition of intelligibility of biopolitics through the governance (abandonment as a form of governance) of a racially defined population.

Biopolitics, neoliberalism and security

Biopolitics is intimately related to neoliberalism (Foucault, 2010: 22n). Neoliberalism dissociates market economics from a laissez-faire rationale of government, and the market becomes the new rationale of governmentality as it constitutes the new site of veridiction (Foucault, 2010: 131). That is, it requires a form of governmentality that intervenes actively, not on the market but on the ‘social environment’, so as to foster competition among subjects (Foucault, 2010: 146). Neoliberalism introduces the couple ‘competition–inequality’. Inequality (difference) becomes a necessary condition for neoliberalism’s imperatives – mainly growth and price stabilization – to take place. In such context, the governance of conduct acts on the social environment so as to make competition possible through the reward and punishment of subjects, as well as the (re)organizing of the ‘social bonds and the conditions for social cohesion’ (Lazzarato, 2009: 111) that make up the entrepreneurial societal fabric. That is to say, it nullifies anti-competitive mechanisms by introducing difference through both the securitization of ‘life that must live’ and the active abandonment of the racially disqualified (see Foucault, 2010: 145, 160).

Neoliberal governmentality implies an active modulation policy of ‘vigilance, activity, and intervention’ rather than a steady set principle of regulation’ (Foucault, 2010: 131). This modulation policy aims at striking an ‘acceptable equilibrium’ between various normalities with a ‘vital minimum’ of intervention, preventing violence and unrest from developing into civil war or unproductive violence (Lazzarato, 2009: 128–132). The recent indictment of three settlers accused of price-tag actions points to this economic rationality, stating that

the perpetrators of the price tag actions hoped to cause agitation and disquiet in the Judea and Samaria areas … and lead to agitation … which would compel the police and security forces to divert larger resources to restore law and order in these areas. (Levinson, 2012, emphasis added)

This neoliberal governmentality is about keeping a level of investment in the governance of the social environment that is just sufficient to bring crime, danger and risk to an acceptable level, without aiming at what would be an economically and politically costly ‘total’ disciplinarization of individuals. The blockade of the Gaza Strip and the separation of the West Bank mark ‘Israel’s abandonment of any attempt to discipline Palestinians as individuals … and Israel’s indifference towards the individual inhabitants is intricately tied to and informed by the way Israel modified its use of the Palestinian economy as a form of control’ (Gordon, 2008b: 188).

This dynamic equilibrium is referred to by Israeli officials as ‘breathing space’ or as an ‘elastic zone of discretion’ (Weizman, 2011: 84, 92). Yotam Feldman and Uri Blau have revealed the existence of a document entitled ‘Red Lines’, which lists thresholds that should not be crossed by the Israeli apparatuses in charge of managing the active abandonment of the Palestinians. ⁵ For instance, the minimum amount of calories required to sustain a population of 1.5 million Gazans is set just above the UN definition of hunger, and the ‘breathing space’ is continually reassessed through the constant monitoring of Gaza’s situation. Data on the ‘social environment’ (die soziale umwelt) are put into various sets of equations, such as C = A*B, D = Z/C, and Z = X+Y–C (Weizman, 2011: 85). ⁶ Equally stunning is former Israeli general Itzhak Ben Israel’s equation utilized to predict the necessary minimum of ‘terrorists’ the Israeli military would have to assassinate in order to defeat an organization such as Hamas. This equation is Q = 1 – (q ln q + 1/q ln 1/q), where Q is the probability of collapsing the organization and q the percentage of militants killed) (Weizman, 2011: 13–14).

In post-Arab Spring Israel and the Occupied Territories, this governmental modulation takes the form of policies that are increasingly implemented in the name of security. Intervention takes the form of military and economic support for the building of settlements in various ‘zones’ ⁷ within the Occupied Territories where Israeli and Jewish bodies face greater risks and danger. Risk becomes an asset that enables the state apparatus to legitimize the channelling of resources owing to processes of securitization that aim to ‘smooth’ the problem of circulation related to the intertwining of biopolitical (making live a racially bounded ‘civil society’) and economic processes (on security and circulation, see Foucault, 2007: 47). Among the economic effects of building such settlements in these zones we can consider the stabilization of rents (danger allows money to be channelled through depoliticized securitization processes) and the provision of a pool of cheap labour that the state does not even need to govern (in terms of providing social services or active protection). ⁸

Security funds and the threat environment function to outsource violence to settlers (Gordon, 2008b: 194) while still maintaining the interests of the state. The result is an overall lower cost of security, as the large number of armed forces personnel initially required to police the Occupied Territories can be withdrawn. This is rewarding on the political level, as responsibility appears to be transferred. The state is exonerated of its obligations and the potential international and domestic political fallout from military actions, while maintaining the dynamic equilibrium of violence and presence necessary to maintain the occupied territory as a kind of buffer to the normalized state space of Israel.

Of course, the above description suggests more coordination than is present or necessary. No agreement or even explicit coordination of settler and state interests is required. Instead, the process of racialization and the fever pitch of insecurity organize this complementarity between the settlers and the state. The state and sovereignty should accordingly be conceptualized as an effect of a specific arrangement of forces. Different agencies and governmental practices are now producing sovereign effects without a top–down centralized decisionmaking process.

In fact, as Foucault (1990: 135) points out in the context of neoliberalism, the state increasingly avoids using its ‘right of rejoinder’. Of course, the dispositif of the Israeli state still has recourse to the ‘making die’ techniques of security (e.g. military operations such as Cast Lead), yet what we need to highlight is the increasing ‘letting die’ of abandoned population. Abandonment here takes the form of a possessive and affective investment in the production of death (‘let die’), and it must be understood as an active form of governmental action. The administration of a racially excluded population no longer has the multiplication of life as the main target of governmentality, but rather the management of economic and political costs.

This form of ‘soft death’ (Povinelli, 2011: 167) takes the form of a non-event. Ethical and political implications are dispersed and dissipated (Povinelli, 2011: 30) into a complex diagram of power that involves taxation; the sequestration of tax revenues; air, naval and terrestrial blockades; a network of checkpoints, permits and magnetic cards; calculation of the ‘vital minimum’ of food; settler-exclusive roads partitioning the inhabited space into administrative areas; and a proliferation of various subject positions and legalities/illegalities (Azoulay and Ophir, 2009: 135; Weizman, 2007: 30). We can thus speak of an effective abandonment related to a neoliberal governmentality and economy and forming a novel way of ‘making die’ (Povinelli, 2011: 98).

Letting the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and the Israeli-Palestinian citizens of Israel swim against the neoliberal currents of increasingly expensive basic life necessities has become the most economical and sustainable governmental technique. Made destitute through racial politics and identified as a ‘demographic problem’, or as a ‘cancer’ (Shavit, 2002), Palestinians and Israeli-Palestinians ‘find themselves in a structural space no longer valued by the market and its cultural forces’; and, for them, ‘the softer forms of letting die will do. They will be allowed to continue to persist in the seams of neoliberalism and late liberalism until they exhaust themselves’ (Povinelli, 2011: 95). For instance, a simple decision to turn off the water supply, prevent oil deliveries, stop shipments of pasta at the borders or turn a blind eye to settler violence may suffice.

This process of exclusion took place during the activities of the recent J14 movement in Tel Aviv. During one of the gatherings, an Israeli-Palestinian woman from the Ma’an workers movement, who was supposed to talk about labour issues, had been barred by the J14 organizers from delivering a speech from the stage during a demonstration (Tarachansky, 2012). Around the same time, the organizers handed the microphone to a right-wing member of the Knesset who proposed to jail human rights activists opposing the deportation of African migrant workers and their internment in work-camps (Burston, 2012). These events revealed the racial limits of politics and the biopolitical partition of society, and thus the different spaces of sovereignty and citizenship. The social environment is accordingly not divorced from the space of sovereignty, even if it often operates beyond or beneath the official policies and practices of the state. Neoliberalism relies on various strategies of governing for reordering political spaces and populations (Ong, 2006).

There is thus a process of spatial fragmentation and separation of the polity that creates different expectations of securitization within and across various spaces. This spatialization affects the various bodies inhabiting those spaces in different ways, as the protocols of securitization vary, producing different registers of ‘dividuals’ rather than the earlier disciplinary specificity of one particularly good or bad subject. The biopolitical order comes to reflect the (in)capacity of bodies to circulate across those different spaces (Selmeczi, 2009: 532), and the security apparatuses mediate and distribute bodies along the axes of space, place and race (Weizman, 2007).

For instance, in Israel and the Occupied Territories, there are different milieus depending on the level of securitization and presence of forms of (dis)qualified life inhabiting the designated spaces. Tel Aviv and other major urban centres where most of the secular, Ashkenazim elite dwell represent one end of a spectrum; in the middle are the ultra-orthodox neighbourhoods and settlements, as well as the ‘Arab towns’ of Israel proper, where police forces enter only rarely and where there has been an increase in the resonance of the settler war-machine actions (Fisher-Ilan, 2011; Rosenberg, 2011); and at the other end of the spectrum are the so-called Palestinian Authority-controlled areas, where the settler war machine has taken the space created by the active abandonment of the Israeli state dispositif and where life takes the form of a ‘being-towards-death’. The population inhabiting this necropolitical space is left to struggle against the daily restrictions of circulation that are distributed according to the occupier’s demands and needs for cheap labour, matters related to the security of settlers, or a wish simply to assert authority (see Na’aman, 2012).

In such a context, necropolitical spaces of abandonment cohabit alongside spaces designed for protecting and making life live, along with other in-between spaces that participate in a political economy of violence, risk and insecurity. All are involved in the stabilization of prices and the extraction of resources at minimum cost. Each space produces a particular type of citizen or subject with his or her own specific resources (private security firms, private and public subsidies, tax breaks, etc.) for coping with risk, ‘security threats’, violence and war (B’Tselem, 2013).

A concrete example of this process and space is the development of the illegal colony of Modi’in Illit – one of the largest and poorest Israeli settlements on the West Bank – near the Palestinian town of Bil’in. The settlement was founded not by Zionist zealots, but by private entrepreneurs such as Lev Leviev (‘one of Israel’s most powerful businessmen and an owner of Africa Israel Investments’), Shaya Boymelgreen (American real-estate investor) and Mordechai Yona (former head of the Contractors Association, who founded Heftsiba, the construction company that built the illegal settlement of Matityahu-East) (Algazi, 2009: 525). Hence, unlike in the 1970s when Gush Emunim and other settler-zealots were the main drivers behind the colonization of the Occupied Palestinian Territories, most settlements born in the late 1990s were the result of a heterogeneous assemblage that linked real-estate developers and construction companies seeking to score quick profits from land confiscations and government subsidies related to new housing (Algazi, 2009: 522).

Equally important for our discussion are the persons inhabiting these types of settlements (Modi’in Illit accounts for one-quarter of the settler population in the West Bank), which are mostly populated by poor and lower-middle-class Israeli families, young couples or large orthodox families with no other alternatives. Settlements like Modi’in Illit are indeed attractive to those citizens, as they are highly subsidized by the government and hence cater to the real social needs of a growing disenfranchised Israeli population. For instance, in the settlement of Ariel, it is possible to buy a four-bedroom house for US$200,000, while in Israel the same figure could only buy a two-bedroom apartment in one of the poorest neighbourhoods of Tel Aviv, such as Kyriat Shalom. B’Tselem (2013) recently mapped out this apparatus, stating that:

Most of the settlements in the West Bank are defined as national priority areas…. Accordingly, the settlers and other Israeli citizens working or investing in the settlements are entitled to significant financial benefits. These benefits are provided by eight government ministries: the Ministry of Construction and Housing (reduction of price of the land and generous loans for the purchase of apartments, part of which is converted to a grant); the Israel Lands Administration (significant price reductions in leasing land); the Ministry of Education (Compulsory Education Law from Age Three, the long school day, extension of the school year, incentives for teachers, and subsidized transportation to school); the ministries of industry and trade, tourism, and agriculture (grants for investors, development of infrastructure for industrial zones, indemnification for loss of income resulting from custom duties imposed by countries of the European Union); the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs (incentives for social workers); and the Ministry of Finance (reductions in income tax for individuals and companies).

The money is directed and funnelled according to a very simple logic of danger: ‘the more settlers were willing to undertake personal hardship and danger, the further they were from Israeli employment centres, the higher the government subsidy’ (Weizman, 2007: 125). Paraphrasing Foucault (2010: 144), we could say that such a governmentality achieves economic growth by according everyone a space within which he or she can take the ‘freedom’ to confront risks.

Thus, alongside their function as a means of grabbing natural resources, colonies in the Occupied Palestinian Territories mostly serve as ‘subsidized dormitories’ (Farsakh, 2009: 386), thus constituting spaces of ‘graduated sovereignty’ (Ong, 2006: 77). ⁹ Neoliberal reason ‘does not use the national territory as the overriding frame of reference for political decisions’, for it emphasizes how economic borderlessness creates multiple political spaces and techniques for differentiated governance within and outside the national territory, thus inducing graduated effects that produce graduated levels of sovereignty and citizenship (Ong, 2006: 76–77).

Taking the example of the Modi’in Illit settlement once more, we can explore how this ‘graduated sovereignty’ produces various effects for the market, prices and the neoliberal economy. Owing to its proximity to a First World economy, government subsidies and its poor ultra-orthodox population, Modi’in Illit has attracted a large number of hi-tech companies – such as Imagestore and Matrix – that want to avoid offshoring their production to India, for instance. Matrix’s website announces to clients that they will get ‘the quality, performance and professionalism of a modern, Western country, at third world prices’ (quoted in Algazi, 2009: 527). Mordechai Gutman, Matrix’s chief executive officer, explains that ‘because the religious population competing for the jobs faces relatively low living costs, Matrix is able to provide its local offshore outsourcing services to customers at prices similar to those in Far East countries’ (quoted in Algazi, 2009: 527). Matrix can do this because its wages are subsidized by the government for at least five years, and the constant proliferation of violence and security issues places at its disposal stolen land and public resources such as security forces (IDF and police personnel), as well as a docile and captive workforce mostly composed of orthodox women catering for their large families at salaries of about 30% of what a person doing the same job in Israel proper would be paid (Algazi, 2009: 528).

Effective abandonment: Necropolitical spaces and war machines

What, then, would be the role of the war machine in the diagram of power that seeks to facilitate the extraction of resources at the lowest sociopolitical and economic cost and to keep policing the body politic? What is the relationship between the security dispositif of the state and the war machines that exceed and conform to the state order? It is certainly complex and variable. But what we can say here is that the state’s security practices tend to territorialize or ‘capture’ a war machine in ways that enable the state to benefit from the war machine’s positive effects upon the economy – such as stabilization of prices or growth, extraction of natural resources, land confiscation, opportunities for quick profits – and the policing of the ‘abject’.

War machines thrive on the exploitation of natural resources – be they diamonds, minerals, water or territory – and they are connected with transnational networks that ignore territorial sovereignty. As Mbembe (2003: 31–32) points out, one of the dominant features of the neoliberal age is that the right to kill and military operations are no longer under the monopoly of the state, and military manpower can be found on the market obeying laws of supply and demand (see also Hoffman, 2011). In fact, an increasing number of militias, security firms and mercenaries are implicated in regional economies of violence without the sponsorship of a nation-state. It is my contention that groups of settlers such as the one that attacked the IDF base in 2012 can be better understood as war machines of this kind.

Events in the wake of the Arab Spring reflect an already established neoliberal trend whereby particular agencies of government have ceded a degree of control over life to private enterprises and war machines. Letting the latter fill the space of state abandonment, the agencies intervene sparingly to produce an acceptable level of security without totally eliminating threats. Since the former objective is viewed as being too costly and practically impossible, they must instead constantly adjust the policy in order to achieve the right balance between expenses and risks/danger. War machines thus play a crucial role within the security–expenses dynamic equilibrium and thrive on the presence of danger, violence and the absence of state enforcement.

For the settler war machine, war and violence become a way of participating in a neoliberal world economy. As entrepreneurs, they thrive on insecurity, danger and violence. Less restrained by frontiers and codes, the settler war machine increasingly draws funds thanks to the capital of sympathy among pro-Zionist organizations, as well as from land and water theft, real-estate developers and construction firms.

The role played by non-governmental organizations (NGOs), international organizations and United Nations (UN) agencies (such as the United Nations Relief and Works Agency) as well as local charities in this economy of violence should not be neglected. There is increasing participation by international organizations in what is the state of Israel, as those organizations have allowed Palestinians to benefit from basic life services denied them by the Israeli occupier (Weizman, 2011). However, they also have become a central piece in the diagram of power in the Occupied Territories (Azoulay and Ophir, 2009: 136). That is to say that they provide food, water and other basic needs (education, sanitary services, etc.) to the Palestinians. Not only do the latter represent a ‘demographic threat’ in the eyes of the Israeli state, but they also represent a considerable expense and high political costs. In short, the occupation and settlements are more sustainable partly thanks to the presence of the international community that takes care of the Palestinians, but also partly thanks to the role of Palestinian cheap labour and the dynamic equilibrium managed by the Israeli Civil Administration’s policy, which has almost entirely given up its caring function (Azoulay and Ophir, 2009: 113, 118). We should then add a caveat to Foucault’s theorization of biopolitics and say that neoliberalism goes beyond the latter – that is, into necropolitics.

The settler war machine is thus a thoroughly heterogeneous assemblage. The concept of the war machine is particularly useful because it makes it possible to map complex assemblages of forces and entities, state actors or otherwise, that merge and split depending on particular events, interests and spatial variables. We can thus easily imagine a young secular poor Israeli couple forced to move to a settlement for economic reasons, banding with corrupt state officials, radical settlers motivated by religion and IDF soldiers to ‘defend’ a settlement, and then disbanding and even confronting the same groups when it comes to other events or interests.

Between the end of 2011 and September 2012 especially, settler attacks of all sorts increased dramatically (UNESCO Chair on Human Rights & Democracy at An-Najah University, 2012). Among them, we can list mosque burnings (Kershner, 2011), the destruction of olive groves and other forms of economic resources (Levinson, 2010) and shooting with live ammunition on Palestinians trying to protect the latter (BBC, 2012). These actions have the effect of forcing upon the Palestinian population a new form of technology inducing ‘life-towards-death’ when and where the neoliberal active abandonment and arbitrary restrictions have yet to entail Palestinian resilience.

The state and the war machine thus benefit from their relationship with each another. Needless to say, this process is messy and unpredictable, for the war machine does not respect established boundaries and conventions. To be more precise, we could talk of a resonance between the state and the war machine, and it is not so much a question of which ‘utilizes’ or ‘uses’ which more than a reciprocal and co-dependent relationship. Here again, the concept of the war machine is central if we want to account for governmental practices. It allows us to investigate the processes by which a multiplicity of forces make up the various apparatuses that contribute to the reproduction or destabilization of a particular diagram of power in the post-Arab Spring Occupied Territories.

Nevertheless, this relationship has concrete effects for attempts to understand Israeli politics and the politics of violence and occupation. In fact, this process actually produces what we traditionally understand as ‘the state’ or ‘sovereignty’ in this case. The latter is actually what emerges from this complex set of interests, forces, discourses, relationships and struggles. In this complex economy of violence, the presence of threats and violence becomes a condition of possibility for the construction and upkeep of settlements in the West Bank as well. The settler war machine, composed of its various heterogeneous elements, thus has an incentive to incite and multiply acts of violence in this economy.

The settler war machine benefits from IDF training and equipment and military-level intelligence, as well as state subsidies and the support of private entrepreneurs looking to score quick profits. As the inquiry on the recent price-tag actions unfolds, it is clear that IDF military personnel and members of the Knesset provided strategic information to the attackers (Glickman, 2012; Robbins, 2012). The settlers adopted a ‘bring it on’ tone that Israeli commentators have described as echoing ‘civil war’, a theme not so foreign to public debates in the country but nonetheless remarkable. ¹⁰ We have here an expression of the effect of the colonization of the state by the settler war machine. Like any other war machine, the settlers eradicate differences and codes (religious/secular, mizrahim/Ashkenazim/ex-USSR Jews, poor/middle-class/rich, etc.). Capital is the only logic holding things together (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980).

Here, enmity matters little, and it is very possible that an Israeli-Jew might attack other Israeli-Jews. As the state ‘territorializes’ the war machine, the latter works from the ‘inside’, changing and producing what we understand by the ‘Israeli state’, challenging an already established rapport de forces (in this case, secular Ashkenazim domination) and causing anxieties of all sorts over the Israeli identity, which is based on the democratic and Jewish character of the state. According to the Israeli daily Ha’aretz, for instance, fear over the possibility of mutiny within the IDF looms large today (Levinson, 2009; Sherwood, 2012). ¹¹ Another concrete example of this new era is the increasing number of attacks by settlers and groups associated with them within Israel ‘proper’.

What is new, though, is how this war machine has declared war on different ways of being Jewish or Israeli. It is in fact the capacity of war machines to cross all traditional boundaries that is creating the new situation, one that many have come to call ‘war’. The tactics of the settlers, and the settlers themselves, are increasingly coming back to Israel proper, thus effecting new forms of ‘statization’ (étatisation; see Deleuze, 2004: 82).

One Israeli recounts his conversation with an ultra-orthodox yeshiva student implicated in the colonies in the Occupied Territories:

‘Clearly, there is a war here sometimes even worse than the one in Samaria,’ the yeshiva student said. . . . The war he described was another front in the struggle he knew from growing up in a settlement in the northern West Bank, or Samaria. . . . The explicit reason that his yeshiva had been established in Acre was to serve as bridgehead in that struggle just as West Bank settlements are built to bolster Jewish hold on land there . . . the conflict is coming home. The words ‘price-tag’ spray-painted in Hebrew on the wall of a burned mosque inside Israel’s 1967 borders transformed Israel’s Arab citizens into targets and tore at the all-too-delicate fabric of a shared democracy. . . . The agents of this change include veterans of the West Bank settlements seeking to establish a presence in shared Jewish-Arab cities in Israel and politicians backing a wave of legislation intended to reduce the rights of Arab citizens. . . . Now, the attitudes and methods of West Bank settlements are inevitably leaking back across a border that Israel does not even show on its maps. (Gorenberg, 2011)

Ignoring frontiers and revealing the complex border politics within the Israeli polity – producing Israel as a ‘frontier state’ – the settler war machine has thus marked a return within Israel (Fisher-Ilan, 2011). In the Arab neighbourhoods deserted by the Israeli Jews, groups of settlers coming from the Occupied Territories apply the tactics learnt outside the ‘official’ boundaries of the state. Burning mosques, attacking Israeli-Palestinian citizens and making their lives unliveable, they thrive on their Jewish status (qualified life) in order to bring state resources through processes of securitization in disenfranchised zones within Israel ‘proper’.

Conclusion: Neoliberalism, violence, space

Among the theoretical implications that can be drawn from this reflection is a new way of conceptualizing the relationship between society, the state and violence in the context of neoliberalism. Needless to say, our common understanding of sovereignty loses its theoretical foothold here, for we could say that along the spectrum of spaces of citizenship and sovereignty, the levels of violence and (in)security follow a similar pattern of spectralization. Here we are forced to abandon the clear distinction between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ and should talk of a spectrum of violence, where it becomes increasingly difficult to differentiate between war and politics. That means thinking in terms of the distribution and variable intensities of violence rather than accepting the simple debates about the absence or presence of war. No doubt, this understanding of the political is radically different from that presented by liberal institutionalists. Instead of theorizing it as ‘a project of autonomy and the achieving of agreement among a collectivity through communication and recognition’ (Mbembe, 2003: 13), we could think of institutionalization as the internalization of warlike relations, where violence (at various degrees and intensities) is less the exception than the norm (on war as an internal institution of civil order, see Foucault, 2003: 159–160). The disciplining and control of bodies and subjects is thus the effect of a particular arrangement of power that is itself the result of warlike relations in the body politic. The process of racialization described earlier as the distribution of difference through politics as war by other means thus takes on its full meaning.

In the case of Israel and the Occupied Territories, Weizman (2007: 94) points out that ‘the logic of partition of the Occupied Territories has always swung between selective presence and absence, addressing two contradictory Israeli strategies: territorial (attempting to annex as much empty land as possible); and demographic (excluding the areas heavily populated by Palestinians)’. He continues:

Governments gradually learned to benefit from the settlement chaos; indeed, they sometimes promoted or even agitated it, creating the atmosphere that allows certain crimes to take place…. Actual or claimed loss of control in the Occupied Territories thus itself became an effective government strategy. The appearance of being out of control allowed the state to achieve its ideological objectives without accepting responsibility for them. (Weizman, 2007: 94–95)

An apparent governmental loss of control in the legitimate use of violence and sovereignty may very well in fact mean the outsourcing of violence to achieve desired effects without the undesired externalities (Gordon, 2008b: 169–196). The art of not governing becomes the art of governing – that is, in this neoliberal logic, the state thrives out of its retreat. Even more importantly, such an approach also serves an economic purpose. As a matter of fact, the Israeli administrators have proven to be exceptional neoliberal administrators, managing to deny social services to a population under their control.

Therefore, in the context of post-Arab Spring Israel, we cannot understand the violence in the Occupied Territories apart from the J14 movement, its protests and claims, the policing of the Israeli body politic, and the violent incident involving settlers and an IDF base in the Occupied Territories. We can ask whether those events are not, in fact, tied together through a neoliberal logic – for the demands for lower property rents in Israel’s major urban centres and the limited scope of the organizers of the J14 movement are intimately linked to the situation of the settlers and the securitization of daily life in the Occupied Territories. As the settlers make ‘new prudential’ entrepreneurs of themselves, placing themselves at risk and in harm’s way, the price of housing in the Occupied Territories and Israel’s ‘Arab neighbourhoods’ gets considerably cheaper thanks to the militarization and the presence of danger and violence in everyday life. Could violence become a way of stabilizing prices and responding to social demands, while continuing the occupation and reducing its political and economic costs? With an eye on the relatively recent literature on the Israeli occupation and violence, this article draws on Foucault’s theorization of neoliberalism and biopolitics – along with Mbembe’s addendum to the latter, through the concept of necropolitics – to make such a case.

Mbembe’s role in this exploration is non-negligible and is, in fact, a crucial and necessary part of the puzzle I am trying to put together. To be more precise, what Mbembe helps us to do here is to get rid of Foucault’s normative understanding or dichotomous order/disorder logic of sovereignty in the context of biopolitical governmentality, and provides a means for thinking about violence in the Occupied Territories along with capitalism in different ways.

The concept of necropolitical spaces is central, for it highlights how abandonment and violence are far from being the result of ‘failed states’ or the loss of sovereignty. They are simply a totally different mode of organization for the distribution of violence, law and order. They represent neither chaos nor failure, but a neoliberal organizational type introducing difference and inequality into a global capitalist system that thrives on them. As Mbembe argues, one of the dominant features of the neoliberal age is that the right to kill and military operations are no longer under the monopoly of the state, and military manpower can be found on the market obeying laws of supply and demand (Mbembe, 2003: 31–32; see also Hoffman, 2011). An increasing number of militias, security firms and mercenaries are implicated in regional economies of violence without the sponsorship or contract of a nation-state. Recent developments in Iraq, West Africa, Afghanistan and Israel–Palestine all point in this direction.

Our thesis is consonant with Danny Hoffman’s (2011) recent work, which argued that in Liberia and Sierra Leone, space, social relationships and life itself are increasingly organized around the purpose of making young men available for the ‘dangerous work’ of the postcolonial necropolitical space. Central to our argument and for the purpose of thinking the political is the fact that enmity does not appear to be playing a central role in the ordering of violence. What makes a young mercenary shoot at another is increasingly a matter of who is paying them to do so. Here, enmity is based on existing networks of social relations and an economy based on violence and the extraction of resources such as water, land, real estate and government subsidies.

We could say that we are witnessing a new organization of space and population that blurs the enemy–friend relationship. Identities become fluid and fungible. For war becomes a way of participating in the neoliberal world economy. What holds things together in this economy of violence is no longer kinship, nationality or even race, but a capitalist axiomatic. In that sense, Palestine is far from being a failed state. It is exactly as Israel planned it to be. The types of spaces that it exemplifies are the most advanced and most radical form of the neoliberal state, which is creating spaces that are extremely productive for resource extraction, without providing any services or social policy to a population that has been relegated to the status of ‘living dead’. Thus, in this neoliberal economy, the reason of state is to let people kill each other in ways that enable the extraction of resources. And in such a context, violence becomes an occasion to invent – that is, it is having the most creative relationship to violence that will differentiate those who die from those who live.

Violence should thus be understood as productive and as a resource/technology working in conjunction with other incentives to influence the market. In other words, war and violence are technologies producing and introducing difference – different spaces of citizenship and inequalities – thus participating in processes of economic growth and/or price stabilization. Under neoliberal governmentality, necropolitical spaces trade in violence and thrive on ‘disorder’.