Courting Conflict: The Israeli Military Court System in the West Bank and Gaza. By Lisa Hajjar. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Pp. 312. $24.95 paper.

Abstract

Courting Conflict: The Israeli Military Court System in the West Bank and Gaza. By Lisa Hajjar. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Pp. 312. $24.95 paper. Reviewed by Vanessa Barker, Florida State University After 38 years of military occupation, Israel has recently withdrawn from Gaza and the West Bank. Readers seeking to understand the historic proportions of this move, especially as it is enmeshed in the legacy of Israeli control over Palestine, will be interested in Hajjar's first-rate ethnography, Courting Conflict: The Israel Military Court System in the West Bank and Gaza. Operating within a complex legal framework, Israel's military court system, Hajjar argues, functions as a highly repressive form of governance even as it remains shrouded in the principles of formal rational law. The military court system, Hajjar explains, has governed the everyday lives of Palestinians in the occupied territories since 1967. That is to say, the military court system not only prosecutes cases of security violations and armed resistance, but it regulates how Palestinians live their lives in the occupied territories. By applying various military orders, the court regulates how Palestinians actually move through the territories (e.g., curfews, checkpoints, permits), how they can or cannot display signs of Palestinian nationalism, how they can or cannot protest the occupation, and how they make a living, marry, and go to school, among other more mundane activities (p. 186). Pushing her point further, Hajjar argues that the military courts along with other legal institutions in the occupied territories have created what Foucault characterized as a society. Governed by intensive surveillance, discipline, and practices of domination, Hajjar argues that Palestinians have become imprisoned in their own homeland (p. 186). Hajjar's application of Foucault is problematic. Foucault analyzed how modern democracies created carceral societies based on insidious forms of surveillance, normalization, and discipline. But they did so in ways deemed legitimate by citizens who actively participated in their own subjugation. In the case of the Israel/Palestine conflict, the court system has created a real prison inside Palestine, a conquered land. By doing so, the Israeli military courts have indeed created a carceral society but one deemed illegitimate by most if not all Palestinians. Perhaps the strongest part of the book, Hajjar's ethnography vividly captures the intensity and banality of social control. She details the tedium of the court as well as the brutal practices of torture. In part because of her own background (American with Syrian heritage), Hajjar gained a high degree of access to key actors in the military courts. During her two years of fieldwork in Ramallah, Hebron, Nablus, Jenin, Tulkaram, and Gaza (1991-1993), she was a participant-observer in daily court proceedings and interviewed 150 people, including judges, prosecutors, translators, defense attorneys, and defendants, most forthcoming in their discussions of the court, its meaning, and its role in the Israel/Palestine conflict (pp. …