Police Encounters: Security and Surveillance in Gaza under Egyptian Rule by Ilana Feldman (review)

Abstract

Ilana Feldman, Police Encounters: Security and Surveillance in under Egyptian Rule. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014. 224 pp.An Anthropological ParadoxAlthough the small sliver of land called Gaza, populated approximately 2 million people, is arguably one of the political hot spots most frequently in the media spotlight and increasingly a cause celebre in humanitarian and activist politics, relatively little scholarly attention is given and its history. Ilana Feldman's recent monograph, Police Encounters: Security and Surveillance in under Egyptian Rule, makes significant advance in covering this largely unattended scholarly ground. Building on her earlier influential work, Governing Gaza: Bureaucracy, Authority, and the Work of Rule (1917-1967) (2008), this book offers an exceptional chronicle of policing in under Egyptian rule (1948-1967).Feldman's account is both historical and ethnographic. It will likely appeal readers in many fields, including history, anthropology, cultural studies, Near Eastern studies, and political theory. Written in a captivating and engaging style, without this being at the expense of its erudition, the book should also engage a wider audience beyond academia. It may be of particular interest those who are interested in urgent contemporary questions of state politics, refugees, the politics of security, humanitarianism, and in the complexities of the legacies of colonial rule generally, and in the Near East specifically.Feldman brings well over a decade of research experience in and about her analysis, and her training in anthropology and history is evident in her attentiveness the nuance and specificity of Gaza's context. Her investigation is based on interviews with retired police officers and other Gazans, memoirs, press accounts, and other archival sources, including records of the Egyptian Administration's police force and of the United Nations peacekeeping force that deployed in 1957. Early on, Feldman introduces the main focus of the book:It is an apparent paradox of Egyptian rule that security practices such as surveillance, control, and even police violence are among the most and the least positively remembered aspects of this period Gazans...Policing was a space of both constraint and possibility, of control and action. (3)It is this apparent paradox that Feldman addresses, not, as she takes care explain, in order offer a prescription for better policing, but rather as a diagnostic project to better understand the dynamics and effects of policing in Gaza (13).In her focus on policing and security, Feldman both draws on and distinguishes her work from that of criminologist Ian Loader (2006). She departs from his investment in what he calls and policing, which he prescribes over what he suggests is the less democratic practice of shallow and wide policing. Feldman explains that by 'shallow' Loader means that recognition of police effect is limited protecting people from 'crime and disorder' (12). In contrast, policing acknowledges the importance of policing for subjectivities and political belonging (12). Wide policing refers extensive visible display of police presence and entrance of police into a broad range of situations (12). Finally, narrow policing involves 'constrained, reactive, rights-regarding agencies of minimal interference and last resort' (12). one of Feldman's central claims is that policing in under Egyptian rule was both deep and wide, as well as self-consciously ambitious in shaping membership in political and social community.Feldman thus argues that Egyptian policing in was not only repressive, but was also a means of action for Palestinians. This action took place through the formation of relations governed predominantly suspicion, uncertainty, and instability. Within this context, categories such as citizen, refugee, humanity, native, criminal, spy, and informer were unstable but central security practices. …