Description
Book SynopsisIn 1991, the Israeli government introduced emergency legislation canceling the general exit permit that allowed Palestinians to enter Israel. The directive, effective for one year, has been reissued annually ever since, turning the Occupied Territories into a closed military zone. Today, Israel's permit regime for Palestinians is one of the world's most extreme and complex apparatuses for population management. Yael Berda worked as a human rights lawyer in Jerusalem and represented more than two hundred Palestinian clients trying to obtain labor permits to enter Israel from the West Bank. With Living Emergency, she brings readers inside the permit regime, offering a first-hand account of how the Israeli secret service, government, and military civil administration control the Palestinian population.
Through interviews with Palestinian laborers and their families, conversations with Israeli clerks and officials, and research into the archives and correspondence of governmental organizations, Berda reconstructs the institutional framework of the labyrinthine permit regime, illuminating both its overarching principles and its administrative practices. In an age where terrorism, crime, and immigration are perceived as intertwined security threats, she reveals how the Israeli example informs global homeland security and border control practices, creating a living emergency for targeted populations worldwide.
Trade Review"Yael Berda's pointed and precise study plunges readers into an ugly and dark reality. A lawyer and ethnographer, she knows the jurisprudence of the Israeli 'permit regime' and sees the damages and despair it inflicts.
Living Emergency tracks a form of infliction that operates on minute and life altering scales." -- Ann Stoler * The New School, and author of
Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times *
"The next time someone tells you that Israel's occupation of the West Bank is benign—or designed only to provide Israel security—hand them Yael Berda's
Living Emergency." -- Peter Beinart * author of
The Crisis of Zionism *
"
Living Emergency is a deeply humane study of the permit regime in the West Bank. The neocolonial resonances of this malign system of control, and the technologies and institutional logics it bares for us, are fast being replicated in other places around the world, and in ways that are too loud for any reader to ignore." -- Sanjay Kak * filmmaker and editor of
Until My Freedom Has Come: The New Intifada in Kashmir *
"
Living Emergency is a groundbreaking analysis of the bureaucracy of occupation. And in Yael Berda, this intricate and obfuscated bureaucracy has met its match: Her meticulous research and brilliant insights call on us all to acknowledge the ways in which the contemporary rule of officials has developed across the globe." -- Eyal Weizman * University of London, author of
Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability *
"In
Living Emergency, Jewish Israeli lawyer Yael Berda leverages her years of experience representing Palestinian laborers by using detailed personal anecdotes, administrative documents, and extensive historical research to construct a thorough picture of how the Israeli government manages and restricts the movement of Palestinians in the West Bank." -- Zander Guzy-Sprague *
Middle East Journal *
"
Living Emergency argues convincingly that the permit regime functions in ways that exceed the security logics it is meant to uphold, operating instead as a powerful mechanism of population management and deepening Israeli control and surveillance of everyday life in Palestine." -- Michelle D. Weitzel *
Journal of Palestine Studies *
"
Living Emergency is impressive in how it makes accessible and legible the way that the Occupation works in practice. It manages to lift the veil off the regime and enables us to peer into its institutional brain." -- Hilla Daya *
Israel Studies Review *
"Berda's [
Living Emergency] and Erakat's [
Justice for Some] are essential reads, not just for those who wish to understand the central place of law in both Palestinian liberation and Israel's expansionist policies. They also offer instructive perspectives for anyone who wants to think more profoundly about the law's entanglement with sovereignty, violence, liberation, and politics." -- Elif M. Babül *
Political and Legal Anthropology Review *
Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsPrologue 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.
