Abstract
How do security states maintain control over their citizens and subjects? What are the mechanisms through which control is consolidated? How do people come to participate in their own policing? Ilana Feldman’s Police Encounters: Security and Surveillance in Gaza under Egyptian Rule offers key insights into these questions. Feldman provides a window into how security regimes work in practice through a detailed account of the policing regime in Gaza under Egyptian rule.
Police Encounters is a rich historical ethnography of the security dynamics in the Egyptian-administered Gaza Strip from 1948 to 1967. Drawing on a mix of archival sources, including police records of the Egyptian Administration and United Nations peacekeeping forces, as well as interviews with Gaza residents and retired police officers, press accounts, and memoirs, Feldman captures the complexity of police power and responses among the population to it in a way that moves conversations about police and policing in important directions.
Policing is most often situated in what Louis Althusser (1971) calls the “repressive state apparatus”, which operates primarily through violence, repression, and coercion. Feldman demonstrates how Egyptian policing in Gaza, while certainly repressive and violent, was also more than that. Going beyond a coercive framework, Feldman foregrounds the productive effects of police practice to explore how security dynamics shaped how Gazans were governed but also how they acted in the world. Feldman utilizes the category of “security society”—an analytic derived from Foucault’s theorization of security as a distinct mode of power concerned with circulation and population and Partha Chatterjee’s (2004) consideration of the “politics of the governed”—to capture the distinct modes of governance and means of acting politically that defined relations in Gaza. As lucidly detailed throughout the book, Gazans were governed by security but also acted politically through the form in part “mobilizing these policing techniques to other ends” (p. 17).
Feldman also makes an important qualification to Foucault’s (2007) now well-rehearsed theorization of the “society of security”. For Foucault, the “emergence of security as the dominant governing framework is a story of liberalism”, wherein the concept of laissez-faire, or “letting things happen” plays a predominant role (pp. 13–14). Feldman’s move here is an important one. Shifting the lens away from Europe (and North America) she asks: “[w]hat does a security relation to population look like if it does not proceed within the frame of ‘letting things happen’?” (p. 14). Egyptian authorities viewed the Palestinian population in Gaza in toto as inherently suspect—uncertainty and suspicion, rather than differentiated risk, defined governing relations in Gaza. Given that Egyptian authorities viewed all Gazans as potentially suspect (and simultaneously as objects of care), the regime exercised an expanded police presence throughout the population. This expanded police presence produced a state of chronic apprehension and uncertainty among the population as Gazans could be never entirely sure where and when this expanded police presence would be found. Yet importantly Feldman does not afford a totalizing power to the Egyptian policing regime. Even as Gazans lived in a state of chronic apprehension and fear, they often mobilized security techniques to other ends, most often by “changing the threat calculation”—that is “to make not responding to a popular demand riskier than doing so” (p. 15).
It is here where Feldman’s book opens up critical space for thinking about politics and policing, especially in the context of security regimes designed for control and containment. Feldman’s rich and grounded account of the policing dynamics in Gaza reveals how political life persists despite constraints imposed on “explicit” politics. Politics in Gaza, she demonstrates, were often realized through the very infrastructures and practices Egyptian police deployed to control the population. The widespread surveillance of daily life and mundane activities, such as “everyday talk”, for instance, provided Egyptian intelligence with detailed knowledge of the population. The very existence of this knowledge, at times, compelled the authorities to act. In one such instance, police surveillance of talk “on people’s tongues” (ala alsinat al-nass) created government awareness about widespread public discontent regarding a severe shortage of small change (fakka). To offset an impending social and political crisis, Egyptian authorities opted to intervene and introduce more fakka into circulation. The widespread surveillance of everyday talk on the part of Egyptian police had the effect of “lending that talk a power it might not have had otherwise”—it produced a civic effect in the absence of a clearly petitioned demand or act of protest (p. 71). In detailing these mundane encounters between Gazans and the Egyptian security regime, and between Gazans themselves, Feldman demonstrates how action and effect can occur in the context of heavy-handed security states, not through overt oppositional politics, but instead through the mechanisms of control designed to produce fear and uncertainty (p. 72).
At the same time, Police Encounters tells a more complicated story than simply how populations living in security states enact politics, even if subtle or unintended. Gazans were incorporated into the policing project through multiple means: some sought to secure personal advantage through informing; others invited police intervention into their communities based on a determination that other threats such as crime, moral transgression, or national betrayal were greater than police interference; and finally other Gazans believed in the policing project itself (p. 148). The cultivation of public participation in policing work was a central strategy of the Egyptian regime. At times, however, the population’s participation in policing was less overt and not entirely under police control (p. 148). The policing of propriety by Egyptian police, Feldman shows, served as a technique for “promoting expansive entry into people’s lives” (p. 17). The Egyptian policing reports that Feldman reviews indicate the policing of propriety was a matter of public interest and served as a key area in which the police sought to elicit public participation in its work. The morality claims inherent in concerns about propriety, Feldman argues, “made this a ripe terrain for articulation of both the idea of the people and the anxieties about threats to this whole,” and accordingly, motivated collective surveillance and social policing (p. 59). Yet at the same time, we are confronted with the question: what exists outside of security if Gazans are both governed by and act through the security form? Does this not risk affording security a totalizing power that Feldman herself would likely contest? Even in the case of Gaza during the postwar period, or today under Hamas rule and Israeli control—or in the context of other police states such as Egypt under the Sisi regime, does there not always exist something outside, beyond, or entirely non-conversant with the security form? Affording greater attention to these questions would have only strengthened an already rich account of the ways in which life under precarious conditions is experienced, governed, negotiated, and transformed.
Police Encounters is a timely and instructive read, especially as debates surrounding aggressive policing practices in racialized communities across the United States and the widespread surveillance of everyday life by the National Security Agency are gaining momentum. As states—both totalitarian and liberal-democratic—intensify their techniques of policing and surveillance, Feldman’s insights prove instructive. As she reminds us, “control, invited and imposed, exercised by security systems does not have to be the end of the story” (p. 149). By focusing on the effects of police practice, Police Encounters demonstrates that techniques of security and surveillance do not necessarily preclude the enactment of politics—“repressive policing can sometimes enable forms of political action” (p. 12). Likewise, we should ask, as Feldman does, how and in what ways might “seemingly democratic practices like community policing [function] to constrain popular politics?” (p. 12). Crucially, Feldman opens up avenues for thinking about possibilities for political action and civic effect in heavily policed and constrained circumstances across the authoritarian–liberal-democratic divide (p. 149).
Feldman’s account of the intricacies and often contradictory effects of police power in Gaza reveals how populations living in police states enact politics and negotiate the fraught conditions, but never totalizing systems of power, within which they live—a lesson that proves instructive in the case of Israel/Palestine and well beyond. Indeed, as Feldman contends, the “lives of Gazans under Egyptian rule and our lives today, in whatever country we live, are shaped in this nexus of possibility and constraint (p. 150). Future scholarship on policing and police power could only benefit by taking seriously the entangled, fraught, and ever-contested security relations that shape, undo, and re-create the world in which we live.