Security Theology, Surveillance, and the Politics of Fear is a much-needed contribution to the scholarly body of work seeking to document the continuing impact of Israeli colonial policies on Palestinians. In this volume, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian describes the surveillance framework and daily violence to body and mind experienced by Israeli Arabs and Palestinians living in the West Bank, Gaza, and occupied East Jerusalem. Surveillance and violence are used to deprive Palestinians of full rights to property, a representative political structure, economic stability, and social self-determination. Beyond the outcomes of Israeli policy regarding Palestinians and Israeli-Arabs, she emphasizes process and, “the importance of being attentive to concept formation such as [. . .] ‘illegal’ and ‘unregistered’ and categories such as ‘non-citizens’ and ‘Arabs’” (179). In doing so, Shalhoub-Kevorkian provides an in-depth illustration of the economic, bureaucratic, and violent barriers between “deserving” humans and those categorized as “undeserving Others” in the Israeli–Palestinian context. She also offers an insightful examination as to how this binary emerged from the colonial logic of a civilizing, liberalizing state, Judeo-Christian theology, and tropes of insecurity and imminent danger.

Shalhoub-Kevorkian introduces the reader to the creation of difference, starting with the nineteenth century Zionist colonization of historic Palestine. The Zionist narrative claimed land grounded in a religious narrative, thereby determining those that were living in Palestine at the time—raising children, growing families, carrying on economic activities, and creating their own narratives of relationship to land and place—were, quite literally, dispensable. In the twentieth century, native Palestinians were subject first to the systems of Ottoman Rule and from that to the British, who, in 1947, withdrew from Mandatory Palestine, leaving the newly formed United Nations to implement partition. Shalhoub-Kevorkian does not merely recount the actions of the political elite as a sterile history lesson but instead concentrates on the development of what she conceptualizes as a system of “security theology” used by Israel to segregate, silence, and make invisible Israeli-Arabs and Palestinians. The fear of the Arab Other as an existential enemy from within and without has been incorporated into a religious narrative of a “promised land” reserved for a “chosen people.” A system has thus been created wherein religion and security have been indelibly linked. The state has co-opted security concerns and justifies enforcement of a religious narrative with no place for a co-existing Other.

Shalhoub-Kevorkian begins her argument by outlining policies erected to produce a bureaucracy conducive to violence (both physical and psychological) against Palestinians. She focuses on the recent activities of Tag Mehir, a settler vigilante group whose members carry out “Price Tag” attacks against Palestinians (as well as other targets, including, at times, Israeli security forces). These are in retaliation for actions restricting or limiting settler activities in the West Bank (chapter 2). Shalhoub-Kevorkian argues that the primacy of maintaining the Jewish character of the state among political parties in Israel, “creates a legal condition that both fails to criminalize Tag Mehir's acts and creates solidarity in the Jew's ethnic supremacy, thereby producing xenophobic ideologies and hatred of the Other” (30). She expands discussion of colonial policy from the public space to the private, outlining how Palestinians resist citizenship policies that brand their children as unwanted, feared, and dangerous (chapter 3). Based on the Citizenship Law approved in 2007, Israeli citizenship or permanent residency is barred to Palestinian spouses and children of Israeli citizens. Temporary residency of Palestinian spouses can also be stripped at any point based on national security concerns. Thus, surveillance pervades even the most intimate of relationships between Palestinians and shapes how families struggle to create a sense of home and belonging for the next generation.

The author further argues that Palestinians stand to threaten the very physical and emotional landscape of Israel through memory (chapter 4). For Palestinians, the Nakba commemorates the “catastrophe” of dispossession, trauma, and destruction associated with Israel's independence. The Nakba Law (approved in 2011) penalizes organizations receiving state funding should they support commemorating the experience of Palestinians following 1948. She continues her review of how Israel policies pose danger to Palestinian home-spaces by detailing the practice of home demolition (chapter 4). The colonial state justifies the rendering of families in the Occupied Palestinian Territories as homeless and destitute with the language of security. Families experience vulnerability as their homes are subject to destruction as a result of collective punishment, haphazard determination of illegal construction, or for security concerns.

The following two chapters of the book, chapters 5 and 6, create an even more evocative picture of life under colonial rule as the Arab Other. Shalhoub-Kevorkian presents the very stories of those struggling against red tape and barriers created in the name of security to bring new life into the world and those attempting to see their loved ones from death to a final resting peace. The author poignantly recounts the words of grieving sons and daughters and anxious parents as they describe the anguish of facing checkpoints, military violence, and dispossession as they seek medical help to birth infants or to lay the dead to rest. It is in these two chapters, in particular, that Shalhoub-Kevorkian's seamless blending of quantitative data with ethnographic descriptions shines in its ability to humanize men, women, and children facing these daily struggles.

The book is a welcome addition to exhaustive historical analyses that line bookshelves of Middle East scholars. In Israel's Occupation (2008), Neve Gordon utilizes Foucault's dimensions of power to describe how Israel maintains control over Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, including restriction of Palestinian space and movement, settlement growth, legal divisions, permit regimes, and post-Oslo normalization schemes. Shalhoub-Kevorkian likewise uses Foucault (in addition to several other postcolonial and feminist theorists) to contextualize relevant history and legal movements that impact Palestinian social, economic, political, and family lives. Her ability to balance qualitative data and ethnographic description in Security Theology, Surveillance and the Politics of Fear sets it apart from previous work and renders it a valuable academic text. Policy “lives” not only in the paper on which is it written but in the communities, homes, wombs, and graves of those whom it governs. Shalhoub-Kevorkian's inclusion of voices of those directly impacted by Israel's policies remind readers of previous works that weave discussion of policy with anthropological insight, including (among others) Nadia Taysir Dabbagh's Suicide in Palestine: Narratives of Despair (2005) and John Collin's Occupied by Memory: The Intifada Generation and the Palestinian State of Emergency (2004). Security Theology, Surveillance and the Politics of Fear also complements recent collections of oral histories of both Palestinians and Israelis living through conflict, such as Wendy Pearlman's Occupied Voices: Stories of Everyday Life from the Second Intifada (2003), Breaking the Silence's Our Harsh Logic (2012), Arthur Nelsen's Occupied Minds: A Journey Through the Israeli Psyche (2006) and In Your Eyes a Sandstorm: Ways of Being Palestinian (2011).

Shalhoub-Kevorkian delivers a volume that is accessible to readers, providing necessary depth to policy description without removing the very human element of colonial rule. The shared focus on not only the public, but the private and emotional spaces where Palestinians experience dehumanization affords the reader with an opportunity to interact with both men and women as agents of resistance and challenge, rather than as passive subjects of law. Less attention was paid, however, to explicit or implicit support for discriminatory Israeli policies from other nation-states (such as the United States) or the failure of the Oslo Accords and subsequent “peace” negotiation cycles. Additionally, the role of the Palestinian Authority and its responsibility for Israeli policy enforcement is lacking. These are certainly areas that would be valuable additions to future examinations of Shalhoub-Kevorkian's security theology framework.

Today we are witnessing a rise of violence in historic Palestine. In the United States and Europe, a disquieting trend of increasing use of securitization language is emerging. Both illustrate how quickly public and political support for segregation of those deemed worthy of safety from those categorized as hazardous and threatening materializes. This book warrants particular attention from security studies scholars. The policies and practices detailed by Shalhoub-Kevorkian stand in direct contradiction to tenants of human security as described by the United Nations and certainly thwart the notion of building a “Whole Community” of security as espoused by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Her description of legal restrictions and the words from those subject to institutionalized discrimination vividly illustrate an erosion of human rights, dehumanization, and processes through which such violence becomes legitimized and perceived as state-sponsored (whether in official policy or not). One can only hope that the work of Shalhoub-Kavorkian will serve as a warning of the damage that is done by the violent rhetoric of politicians and consequences that will ultimately be written on the faces, bodies, and lives of fellow human beings.