Preceding the introduction, a diary entry by Mahmoud Darwish partly captures, with the poet's characteristic mixture of satire and solemnity, what lies ahead in the chapters of Security Theology, Surveillance and the Politics of Fear. The entry, titled “The Law of Fear,” constructs an imaginary conversation where a killer, confronted by the ghost of the murdered, tells a mob: “Do not blame me: I am afraid, I killed because I was scared, and I will kill because I am scared.” As the mob comes to accept the act of killing as a legitimate right to self-defense and the resulting trauma as that which is caused by the deceased to the killer, a foreigner intervenes and wonders: “But what is the reason for killing a baby?” The mob replies: “Because one day this baby will grow up and then we will fear him.” The foreigner continues, “But why kill the mother?” The mob settles the matter responding in unison, “Because she will raise a memory. . . Fear and not justice is the foundation for authority.”
Death and leniency for killing, anxiety and fear, birth and child sacrifice, femicide and the repression of memory, power and injustice, these are some of the themes at the core of this unsettling book on the politics of life and death in Palestine. Like Darwish, Shalhoub-Kevorkian's work bespeaks the moral ethos of settler colonialism, the disposability of native life, and the settler refusal to come to terms with reality: a universe where the native can only exist as criminal and threat to the settler polity. While the book deals with these questions it also pays close attention to the symbolic and material ways the native Other is racialized, surveilled, dehumanized, and erased. Furthermore, it explores the settler fixation with and violence against women's bodies and the ways they are positioned by the Israeli state as a reproductive apparatus that threatens the success of the settler colonial project. And, most significantly, how these forms of structural violence are experienced and contested by women who are, as the author puts it, “always already silenced” (p. 158). In so doing the author expands on her previous work on the multilayered and systematic forms of political and sexual violence affecting Palestinian women caught between patriarchal and state forms of violence.
Through a well-crafted political ethnography, Shalhoub-Kevorkian opens up an intimate space for Palestinian women's voices to vividly illustrate the effects and affect of racist, gendered, and genocidal forms of violence. She paints a picture that moves from how settler bureaucracies lead to and shape traumatic experiences of housing demolition and erasure, to the anxieties and fear caused by the colonial surveillance and the invasion of bodies and otherwise mundane acts of native births, honoring and burying the dead, and keeping families together. In connecting structures of power with the invisible and quotidian lives of native peoples, the book contributes to defamiliarizing the familiar behind idle statistics and beyond the spectacular violence of colonialism. These embodied experiences, where the personal is profoundly political, convey disturbing yet compelling accounts of everyday oppression in Palestine and give visceral texture to the book's distinct empirical cases—most of which revolve around the city of Jerusalem.
The glue that holds together the empirical cases, women's testimonies, and reflections around these, is a framework premised on the notion of security theology: a quasireligious Zionist ideology shaped by the genocidal logic of settler colonialism and settlers’ understandings of the self in terms of the “return to the land” as “the chosen people.” As such, security theology de facto criminalizes the native Other and necessarily calls for and translates into the production of racialized and violent forms of surveillance and fear. It is unclear in the book, however, whether this conception of security, surveillance, and fear—which is at times reified by the author as an excessive and totalizing force—is specific to Palestine or extends to other settler contexts where similar claims and practices are deployed.
The book begins with an examination of the actions by the Israeli group known as Tag Mehir (Price Tag), to show how state-sanctioned rhetoric and visual forms of violence—such as degrading graffiti reading “Death to the Arabs” or “Jesus, son of a whore” spray-painted on private homes and religious buildings—serve to demarcate the gentile spaces of the colonized and to instill in the native a sense of constant anxiety and scrutiny with very real psychosocial and material consequences. In the second chapter, the author uses the recent Israeli Citizenship Law—which prohibits Palestinian spouses or children of Israeli citizens and residents from receiving permanent residency status in Israel or Israeli citizenship—as an example of how the state enlists the law to codify settler anxieties about native presence as national security and demographic threat. The law, defined here as a juridical-political extension of the colonial regime, produces Palestinian family members as illegal and denies their very presence in their own home(land). The threat of native deportation from settler-designated areas generates a permanent state of uncertainty underwritten by the state intrusion upon the private and intimate affairs of the colonized—from choosing a life partner to unifying one's family under one roof. As put by Maysoon, a thirty-year-old woman from Jerusalem, “I live in Jerusalem like a thief, a refugee in my home, living in my home like a criminal” (p. 65).
The law is a core strategy of Israel's ethnic cleansing project. Between 2005 and 2011, a total of 7,260 Palestinians had their residency in East Jerusalem revoked. Shalhoub-Kevorkian's third chapter illustrates how the native's home becomes a central target of settler violence, a “hunted space.” The home is understood as a place of memories, a site that plays a crucial role in producing identities, localities, social relations, cultures, and the nation, while also being the scale of preservation of psychological and social life and the prevention of social death. As such, the attack on the homespace, through house demolitions and/or the repression of its memory, constitutes an assault on a core space of political resistance for the nation. In this book “home” is shown to be a key part of the infrastructure that disrupts settler imaginative geographies and demographic schemes of native erasure.
The book closes with an original exploration of how settler forms of fear and surveillance operate through the inscription of power over death and birth. Through documenting settler court decisions that endorse the desecration of cemeteries, the denial of burial permits and public rituals of death or the sneaking of Palestinian dead bodies through checkpoints for burial, Shalhoub-Kevorkian problematizes “who has the right to die and in what manner” (p. 117). Moving from the dead to the new born, and from the graveyard to the womb, the author then maps the ways settler domination is knitted into the everyday life of Palestinian mothers. More specifically, how pregnancy and the act of birthing become sites of dispossession where settler anxieties of native population growth meet the reproductive and psychological stress of colonized women bodies, which refuse the colonial logic of erasure. Death and birth are thus considered intimate and political sites of colonial governance that make visible the necropolitical and biopolitical nature of settler sovereignty.
Security Theology, Surveillance and the Politics of Fear builds on the author's long time experience with, activism among, and scholarship on women and children in Palestine and thereby makes a significant contribution to the critical project of articulating relations between colonial structures of power and the texture of everyday life. A project premised on a conception of Zionism that shifts from land-based perspectives, dominant in both settler colonial and Palestine studies, to forge an approach that is inclusive of both territorial dispossession and the invasion, displacement, and erasure of bodies. To deepen this project, however, it seems essential to consider how, on the one hand, this analysis can be linked with a broader political economy to create a framework cognizant of the entangled relationship between land, bodies, and capital. This book is a critical first step towards rethinking the relationship between forms of racially inscribed dispossession and capitalist modes of accumulation while remaining attentive to the structures of feelings and politics of suffering it elaborates. It opens the question of what role these everyday, embodied experiences have in our political imagination and how they can ignite new ideas about social transformation, decolonization, and liberation.
This is a great book that ultimately reminds us of the importance of engaged ethnographic fieldwork. Shalhoub-Kevorkian takes seriously the voices and experiences of native peoples and women. Her work addresses and demonstrates the need for more critical analyses of Palestine and Palestinians grounded in an evolving field of settler colonial studies.
