Yael Berda

Living Emergency

Israel's Permit Regime in the Occupied West Bank

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Yael Berda is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Hebrew University and Academy Scholar for International and Area Studies at Harvard University.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 152
• Erscheinungstermin: 21. November 2017
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 203mm x 129mm x 12mm
• Gewicht: 167g
• ISBN-13: 9781503602823
• ISBN-10: 1503602826
• Artikelnr.: 48858066

Autorenporträt

Yael Berda is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Hebrew University and Academy Scholar for International and Area Studies at Harvard University.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Prologue
chapter abstract
The reader joins Issa, a Palestinian construction worker from the West Bank
who suddenly received word from his employer that his permit has been
denied by the Israeli military, on the long and convoluted journey through
the bureaucracy of the occupation, to try to recover his permit. He
encounters many obstacles: police detention, attempts to find clandestine
ways to work during closure, and mostly, long waiting times in offices and
courtyards of the bureaucracy. Following his classification as a security
threat by the secret service, he engages two lawyers in his struggle, one
of them the author, who represent him in Israel's Supreme Court in the
attempt to annul his classification as a security threat and secure his
work permit.
1Dangerous Populations
chapter abstract
This chapter provides a concise history of Israel's military rule over the
Occupied West Bank, focusing on population monitoring and control. It
outlines the development of the messy bureaucracy of the occupation and the
establishment of the permit regime by an array of agencies, technologies,
rules, and practices. Following the institutional changes brought about by
the Oslo Accords, the chapter shows that while it is administratively
inefficient, the population management system followed an effective
institutional logic to achieve two major goals. First, it makes the
Palestinian population dependent on the administrative system to construct,
maintain, and widen the scope of monitoring and control, based on a racial
separation through laws and enforcement. Second, it produces uncertainty,
disorientation, and suspicion within Palestinian society through the
prevention of mobility.
2Perpetual Emergency
chapter abstract
This chapter analyzes the shift in the role of Israel's secret service, the
Shin Bet, in the bureaucracy of the occupation, from an intelligence agency
to the central organization that designed, strategized, and made
administrative decisions regarding the population of the West Bank.
Focusing on the expanding category of Palestinians classified as security
threats that encompassed over a quarter of a million people after the
Second Intifada, the chapter explores the contradictory profiling
practices. It suggests that the permit regime became the major asset of the
Shin Bet, increasing its capabilities to recruit thousands of low-grade
informers in the West Bank.
3Labor of Uncertainty
chapter abstract
The permit regime includes the Ministries of Economy, Interior, and
Defense, which created a political economy that controlled the lives of
Palestinian Laborers and their employers. The complex array of military and
civil organizations that populated the expanding flow chart of regulations,
forms, and offices created an economy of shortage, in which there were
consistently fewer permit quotas than need by employers. This chapter
traces how this administrative shortage, the product of the negotiation
between the different fragmented institutions of the state, created the
perfect conditions for a black market of permits sold, rented, and
exchanged between employers and employees, ruled by middlemen,
intermediaries, and semiofficials who ran networks of forgeries that were
criminalized but not severely punished.
4Effective Inefficiency
chapter abstract
This chapter outlines how institutional practices of the permit regime
affected and shaped Palestinian daily life in the West Bank by
disorientation, atomization, and routinization of emergency. Administrative
flexibility and the wide discretion of clerks who actually made law during
the permit process produced a different kind of bureaucracy, where
contradictory decisions, overlapping policies, and secret information
turned freedom of movement into an unknown variable in Palestinian life
across Israel and the Occupied Territories. Attempts of international and
human rights organizations to standardize practices helped develop the
permit regime, while resistance to life in the emergency took various
forms. People found ways to obtain permits, broke pathways into Israel and
across the separation wall, and challenged the Shin Bet classifications in
the High Court.
Epilogue
chapter abstract
The reader joins the author as she recounts her first contact with the
bureaucracy of the occupation through the military courts of Judea and
Samaria. She sets up a makeshift office on Saturday mornings at a
restaurant in Area C, where Palestinians who are denied entry because they
are classified as a security threat come to prepare documents and
affidavits for their petition to the Supreme Court. She then realizes that
legal attempts to retrieve permits and remove someone's classification as a
security threat are futile. Understanding that legal representation of
Palestinians provides legitimacy to an illegal colonial bureaucracy that
constituted a security threat for both Israelis and Palestinians leads her
to leave her practice.