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GOVERNING GAZA
Bureaucracy, Authority, and the Work of Rule, 1917-1967
By ILANA FELDMAN DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2008 Duke University Press
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8223-4240-3
Chapter One
Introduction
GOVERNMENT PRACTICE AND THE PLACE OF GAZA
Gaza has had more than its share of difficult times and crisis conditions. It is often described as, and has often seemed to be, on the verge of being ungovernable. Yet it also has had, if anything, a surfeit of government. While one can easily imagine the security concerns that mobilize certain extraordinary government measures, the everyday work of government continues even (and sometimes especially) in crisis conditions. What constitutes such everyday work is to a considerable degree shaped by the situation itself. Under certain conditions-such as those pertaining in Gaza after 1948-providing daily rations to refugees becomes part of everyday government work. Similarly, in other settings-such as the Gaza of the 1920s-public utilities such as electricity are not part of this field. The terrain explored in this book-a historical ethnography of the civil service in Gaza during the British Mandate (1917-48) and Egyptian Administration (1948-67)-is persistent conflict and ongoing tension as well as ordinary bureaucratic procedures and unremarkable office work. Consideration of this slice of Gazan history highlights the tremendous significance of such quotidian bureaucratic practices even in unstable places.
Even with all of the changes in Gaza over the course of the fifty years under consideration here (as well as before and after) and the crises that produced and accompanied them, there have been important continuities in its government. This persistence of government attests to the fundamental correctness of Max Weber's insights into the role of bureaucracy in producing stability when state regimes change. At the same time, even as bureaucratic practice can continue across regimes, it is also dramatically reshaped by changing conditions and circumstances of rule. Cognizant of this complexity, I give attention to both continuity and rupture, both stability and crisis, in bureaucratic practice. In this exploration it becomes possible to see not just how government in Gaza worked, but how its workings shed light on more general (even more "ordinary") conditions of modern rule.
In focusing on the daily work of government, this book calls attention to distinct rhythms of history, charting processes of transformation that do not always match the ruptures of Palestinian political history. My primary interest here is not the significant dates, battles, and political maneuvers in Gaza's history, but life and government in the in-between: the time and space between such dramatic events, the tenuous domain of the everyday that was never entirely lost. This attention not only sheds light on quotidian formations of place and people, but can also produce a new sense of events themselves. To understand what may be the defining date in Palestinian history-the nakba (catastrophe) of 1948-and the utter transformation of life in Gaza produced by it, for instance, we need to know more than the political facts of dispossession. We need to comprehend the multiple mechanisms through which such loss was managed-whether it be the transformation of an ethics of care, the reconfiguration of service bureaucracies, or the development of new forms of documentation. Each of these areas (and many more) is most clearly illuminated in the workings of everyday government. In focusing on bureaucratic practice, this study explores the effects of government on those caught up in its dynamic.
This book is an exploration of government in Gaza, yet what Gaza is and was has changed significantly over time. In terms of administrative classification, Gaza has been variously a region, a district, a subdistrict, and, after 1948, a strip-a unique entity. Gaza City, the administrative and commercial center of the area, is also known simply as Gaza. During the British Mandate, the Gaza district was an inseparable part of the larger entity of Palestine. During the Egyptian Administration, the Gaza Strip was decisively and painfully cut off from the rest of this territory. In the course of this book, I refer to all of these different senses of Gaza. I also explore how transformations in the shape of the place have influenced what it has meant to be Gazan, and what impact such identification was likely to have on people's lives. These transformations were at once a result of shifts in government and something to which government had to respond.
I consider a variety of service sites and practices, attending to both the specificity of particular services and the general conditions of civil service bureaucracy. The first part of the book (chapters 2, 3, and 4) examines general practices and procedures of rule, exploring the production of authority that is crucial for governing. Under conditions where government was tenuous and lacked a stable ground, it was the repetitions of filing procedures, the accumulation of documents, and the habits of civil servants that produced the conditions of possibility for authority. The second part of the book (chapters 5, 6, and 7), which looks at a variety of government services (shelter, utilities, and education among them), examines the practice of what I call tactical government-a means of governing that shifts in response to crisis, that often works without long-term planning, and that presumes little stability in governing conditions. It was through tactical government that the crises and difficulties which were endemic in Gaza during this period were managed by government. And it was this practice that contributed to the tenacity of government, despite its instabilities.
To do the research for this exploration of fifty years in Gazan government, I spent two years in Gaza (1998 and 1999) during another distinct moment in its troubled history. I conducted both ethnographic and archival research, the latter taking me also to Cairo and Jerusalem. I subsequently undertook further research in London and in the United States and also returned to Palestine in the summers of 2003, 2004, and 2005. The bulk of my ethnographic work was conducted with retired civil servants, with whom I spent time in government offices, in retirees' associations, and in their homes with their families. Archival and ethnographic research sometimes came together, as it was my reading of government documents that afforded me the opportunity to spend extended time in government offices-the Pensions Administration, Gaza City Municipality, Awqaf (pious endowments) Administration, and Housing Ministry among them. While I lived in Gaza City, my research took me throughout the Gaza Strip-to Rafah and Khan Yunis (the other main towns) and to refugee camps such as Nusseirat and Jabalya.
The amount of movement necessary to carry out my research-not only within Gaza, but between Gaza and the West Bank-serves as a reminder that I was extremely lucky in the timing of my fieldwork. I conducted the bulk of the research for this book during what turned out to be the latter part of the Oslo period. What at the time seemed to be part of a new stage in Palestinian history appears now to have been only a lull in the violence of conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. While the luster of the Oslo Accords-which had been heralded as bringing an end to conflict between Israelis and Palestinians and leading to the establishment of a Palestinian state-had worn off by 1998, replaced by growing frustration with Israeli intransigence and Palestinian National Authority (PNA) corruption, the easiness of everyday life (for someone like me, at least) had not yet been disrupted. Aided by my American passport and the Michigan license plates on my car (which I had shipped from the United States), I was able to travel freely and easily. The fact that the only way to get from here to there in Palestine was with an American car-and that with an American car there was almost no difficulty-speaks volumes about the peculiar and difficult conditions of the post-Oslo world. Cars with Palestinian license plates were not generally allowed out of Gaza, and cars with Israeli plates were not allowed in. More important, Palestinians were not allowed to travel between the West Bank and Gaza without difficult-to-obtain permits, so the two parts of the Palestinian territories were almost entirely cut off from each other. The overt violence of occupation had, for the moment, been replaced by a system of bureaucratic stricture and degradation.
In the wake of the establishment of the PNA in 1994, American, Japanese, and European aid money had flowed into the West Bank and Gaza, generating numerous improvement projects. The "de-development" of the Israeli occupation was replaced with a drive for both economic and political development (the latter a favorite of the U.S. Agency for International Development). As I talked with people about the governing work of the Mandate and Administration, projects of infrastructure development were all around. Roads were paved, water networks improved, hospitals built, parks created, and traffic lights installed. The permanent nighttime curfew imposed in Gaza by Israel was replaced by vibrant street activity after dark. At the same time, even as life was easier in these ways, the economy of Gaza suffered terribly from the Israeli closure policy, which dramatically reduced the numbers of people permitted to work inside Israel. Seizures of Palestinian land continued, and the natural resources of the area remained disproportionately available to the eight thousand Jewish settlers in Gaza. Compounding people's frustrations with Israeli actions was the deep disillusionment with the PNA-as, for example, "returnees" and political cronies got jobs over better qualified "local" candidates. As frustrated as people were, though, this was a moment when people expected something from government.
Even as troubles were in the air and people spoke frequently about the possibility of another intifada, the newly possible ordinariness of life had yet to be disrupted. The civil servants who worked in government offices where I conducted so much of my research were able to focus on the everyday work of government. These places did not form a space apart from the politics of Palestinian experience-political talk was ubiquitous in offices and everywhere else-but they did allow for "getting stuff done," that is, for keeping electricity flowing, streets clean, police patrolling, and schools operating. Not long after I completed my fieldwork, the second intifada broke out, and in the years since everyday life in Gaza has been disrupted to an almost unimaginable extent. Not only has the level of violence been extremely high, but the daily work of government has been upended, both by the demands placed on it by the increasingly difficult conditions in which people live and, more recently, by the cutting off of financial support (including the money needed to pay civil service salaries) in the wake of the Hamas victory in Palestinian elections.
Ruling Histories
While conditions during the intifada have been extreme, it is obviously not the first time Gaza has experienced trouble and disruption. Throughout its long history, Gaza has often been a battleground between empires, located at the crossroads of major incidents and historical transformations, though its inhabitants have rarely directed those events. The twentieth century was no exception. The histories in which Gaza was engulfed during the British Mandate and Egyptian Administration were also dramatic. The dramas of colonialism, anticolonial nationalism, and nation-state building have all had an impact on Gaza, though none can entirely define its government.
During the Mandate, Gaza was a district within the larger territory of Palestine. Palestine was part of the larger British colonial empire, though mandates, authorized by the international community in the form of the League of Nations and designed to end (even if in practice bringing them to an end required forms of resistance typical of other colonies), were a quite distinct form of colonialism. The mandate system was developed in the aftermath of World War I to manage German colonial holdings and the territories of the Ottoman Empire. Emerging out of negotiations over the future these areas should properly have, this system proceeded from the claim that "the well-being and development of such peoples form a sacred trust of civilization."
Mandates were commissioned by the League of Nations, which, formally at least, retained authority over them. The countries which were granted mandates were supposed to shepherd the native population to independence, providing "administrative advice until they can exist unaided." Where sovereignty actually lay, however, was never a fully settled question. In practice the mandatory powers exercised the powers normally associated with sovereignty, though they purported to be doing so on behalf of the governed territory and its "latent sovereignty."
This was, then, a colonial form that was intimately connected to the nation-state, albeit a nation-state that was more envisaged than actual. As Antony Anghie argues about the mandate system, "It did not seek merely to qualify the rights of the sovereign, but rather to create the sovereign." The language of legitimacy deployed by the mandatories (when it was deployed) was that not of a general "civilizing mission," but of "trusteeship" specifically connected to the idea of a future independent state. In the case of class A mandates, places such as Palestine which were in a "high stage of development," that future was supposed to be near. While the mandatory powers did not entirely share visions of imminent independence, the idea of a future nation-state was important to their operations. And although to the populations subject to it the mandate system may have felt very similar to other forms of colonialism, its distinct form did make a difference. Within the mandate system, Palestine was unique, in part because of the multiple and conflicting responsibilities the British had assumed there. In addition to its obligations to the native population of the country, Great Britain had taken on the task of promoting a Jewish national home. A great deal of British policy and practice over the course of the Mandate was comprised of efforts to manage, however imperfectly, its "dual obligation." Over time, it became increasingly difficult to conceive how the Mandate could succeed in the face of these conflicts. At the same time, the increasing conflict on the ground made it difficult to envision an end to the Mandate. As one of the many commissions sent to Palestine to investigate the causes of strife noted, "The Mandate cannot be fully and honourably implemented unless by some means or other the national antagonism between Arab and Jews can be composed. But it is the Mandate that created that antagonism and keeps it alive.... Real 'self-governing institutions' cannot be developed, nor can the Mandate ever terminate, without violating its obligations, general or specific." One effect of these circumstances was that despite the international authorization of the Mandate the language of legitimacy in fact provided a very poor foundation for government. Distraction and deferral, on the other hand, proved to be crucial to Mandate government.
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Excerpted from GOVERNING GAZA by ILANA FELDMAN Copyright © 2008 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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