The Power of Inclusive Exclusion: Anatomy of Israeli Rule in the Occupied Palestinian Territories – Edited by Adi Ophir, Michal Givoni, and Sari Hanafi

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I The Power of Inclusive Exclusion, editors Adi Ophir,Michal Givoni, and Sari Hanafi have set about to bring together the latest research on Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.The editors seek to distance themselves from the larger perspective of history and the “conflicting positions”of the Jewish and Palestinian national movements and focus on the nature of the occupation as a “sui generis [i.e, of its own kind] regime or political system.” This book is about the present, so the authors suggest, and the “genealogies of the technologies of power.” Those who have focused on the past or future are not only guilty of having a “pragmatic problem solving set of mind” but are full of “blindness to the current state of affairs.” Without completely betraying their own political views from the outset, their introduction seems to want to situate this study in a unique category.The articles do not presuppose to examine the occupation as a “legal fetish . . . ; they are careful not to frame the occupation as a particular form of something known already . . . colonialism apartheid,” but they forsake the idea that it is a “unique and incomparable phenomenon.” The researchers are not as interested in what exactly has happened historically, but rather in “the deployment of the occupying forces and on the strategies that they promote.” The authors portray themselves as having written their studies “in an atmosphere that is generally hostile to the kind of political questions and theoretical perspective it strives to open.” They further claim that despite efforts on their part to include Palestinian colleagues, “Israel’s restrictions on movement, access to Jerusalem has been extremely difficult for Palestinian scholars,” and therefore most of them could not participate, resulting in a “partial and inevitably biased portrait of the occupation.” These two assertions deserve challenging. The work in question, as the editors mention several times, was due to the “generous support of the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute”and was supported by numerous organizations and individuals that make up a “who’s who” list of human rights groups and left or peace camp activists in Israel. Most of the contributors are faculty at Israel’s universities and some have received