War Against the People could not have come at a more important time. But the reality it presents is shocking and unnerving, even to someone who’s spent their whole life working on Israel/Palestine. Halper shows us, in frightening detail, just how central war and violence have always been to Israel's strategic power and position, both vis-à-vis Palestinians and globally. This portrayal reveals the impossibility of a successful transition to peace with Palestinians, not merely because of unending settlement expansion, but because of the very foundations of Israel's broader political economy.
This is not a book to digest in one sitting. It's too hard to understand how one small country can have so many connections to so many regimes. Halper masterfully reveals how deftly Israel made itself an indispensable part of the world system. Its partnerships around the world not only ensure the state's survival, but also its prosperity through militarization, pacification, and securitization of entire polities: “Lacking bases and the weaponry of the US, it is no less extensive in range… It surpasses the US in depth, however. In addition to ingratiating itself into the military-industrial complex of the core, its presence in ‘Third World’ countries, including many Arab and Muslim ones, runs far deeper” (67).
Halper demonstrates how contemporary warfare that involves “securitization at home and abroad, counter-terrorism and militarized domestic policing,” (144) allows Israel to transform its interminable struggle against the Palestinians into an exportable commodity (140). War against the people then becomes a marketing advantage because the “failure to come to terms with the Palestinians is not presented as a failure at all, but as a successful case of pacification—or at least ‘sufficient,’ ongoing pacification” (144).
Israel has developed special expertise in the technologies of contemporary warfare and has used the Occupied Territories as the premier testing ground for such weapons. These weapons and the policies that deploy them are incredibly complex, an admixture of realpolitik and highly technical knowledge.
For over two decades Halper, an anthropologist by training, has been one of Israel's foremost activists on behalf of Palestinian rights. His extensive fieldwork on the ground convinced him that a “Matrix of Control” is the most useful model for understanding how Israel achieved and maintains its stranglehold on the Occupied Territories. But Halper always understood that the matrix extended outside Israel's borders. It was never just that Israel received billions of dollars every year in American military aid, or that it maintained often clandestine military and security relationships with assorted regimes across Latin America, Europe, Africa, and East Asia. It is that Israel's actions, policies, and its function in the larger global system were and remain a cipher for the workings of the world system writ large.
Halper zeroes in on the militarized neoliberalism, which he terms a type of “endocolonialism,” a capitalism that feeds upon itself after there are no more foreign territories to conquer and exploit. This is accomplished through the intensification of what David Harvey famously described as “accumulation by dispossession” from within as well as between countries. Halper explains this by deploying the term “neoliberal securitization,” a kind of governance that depends on the pacification of large numbers of people with whom there is little hope of creating a viable social contract.
Palestinians, then, are merely a seminal example of the “palestinianization” of a growing share of the world's population—not just formally occupied people, but marginalized and superfluous populations within countries as well. Thus the technologies that Halper describes are almost all “dual use”—capable of enforcing Israel's colonial project, or the power of capital in more developed countries. “Securing insecurity,” Halper demonstrates, is not only crucial to maintaining the matrix of control in the West Bank or Gaza, but around the world. Insecurity is instrumentalized to generate large-scale profits through pacification of “troublesome” populations.
Although the Occupation itself is not the focus of the book, the global political and security economies it treats are crucial to understanding the Occupation, and particularly why the Oslo peace process and the “New Middle East” it was supposed to herald were never going to deliver on their promises. Israel was already too embedded in a “New-Old” Middle East—a region and system defined by a century of colonialism, authoritarian rule, and intense conflict, now reinforced rather than weakened by the technologies that define neoliberal globalization.
The “war amongst the people” that Halper describes is epitomized by the intercommunal conflict between Palestinian Arabs and Jews that has defined the Zionist–Palestinian conflict for well over a century. And, as with the Occupation, absolute victory is rare. The best one can hope to achieve is “a condition” of superiority, or “sufficient victory.”
Halper's work also reveals a direct link between Israel's actions in the Occupied Territories and broader global processes in the “framing” and “lawfare” used to control and pacify local populations, whether occupied or one's own citizens (80–85). As he points, out, a major reason for Israel's advantage over other populations is precisely that it is the one major arms manufacturer in the “West” that also has a captive population on which all these technologies of securitization and control can be tested with broad impunity. Labels such as “Combat Proven,” “Tested in Gaza,” and “Approved by the IDF” on Israeli or foreign products greatly improves their marketability” (143).
Halper took a risk in delving into so much detail about the structure of the global arms and security industries, which will challenge even the experienced researcher. While one can feel lost in the forest at times, the book offers a fundamentally important and powerful argument that should become part of the arsenal of critical scholars and activists on the Occupation and on contemporary neoliberal globalization as well. This book is ultimately a must-read both for specialists and advanced students, policy-makers, journalists, and politicians.
This book does not offer specific directions for resistance against the massive system he describes. But resistance can only succeed when one has a comprehensive understanding of the system against which resistance is being waged. Halper's book offers crucial information towards that end. For those ready to act after closing the book, they could do a lot worse than joining the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, where presumably Halper's insights are being put most directly into practice.
