Mors Principium Est or

Power and Its Structures in Israel Palestine

Anonymous

Spring 2016

Abstract

This paper will analyze the complex networks that form the relationships of sovereignty, power and terrorism at play in the Israel­Palestine conflict through lenses of power theory, primarily Mbembe’s necropower, Foucault’s biopower, and Agamben’s state of ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ siege and state of exception. I begin with an close historical analysis of the pre­Israeli ​ ​ ​ Jewish terrorist groups that resisted British occupation in Palestine. From here were moved into a discussion of the modern tactics of terror of the Israeli state, including some of the massacres that have occurred directly under Israeli auspices Following that, in attempting to diagnose the relationships of power at play in the Israeli state,I undergo a detailed analysis of the role played by the Palestinian Authority in abetting Israel’s terror tactics and reinforcing the Jewish state’s sovereignty over the people and the land. Finally, I conclude with an analysis of Hamas’ role in the conflict, and how their deployment of suicide attacks challenges the sovereignty of Israel.

Contents

1. Power: pg. 1.

2. Zionism and Terror: States of Siege and Exception: pg. 3.

3. The (lack of) Palestinian Authority: pg. 20.

4. Hamas: Familiarity and Terror­as­Counter: pg. 25.

5. Bibliography: pg. 37.

6. Notes on Images: pg. 39.

Power

Achille Mbembe argues that “The most accomplished form of necropower is the contemporary colonial occupation of Palestine.”1 In part as a response to Foucault’s theories of biopower and biopolitics as articulated in The History of Sexuality, Mbembe ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ posits his theory of necropower and necropolitics, or “contemporary forms of ​ ​ ​ ​ subjugation of life to the power of death.”2 Necropower constitutes the notion that the relative power and authority ­ sovereignty ­ of a state or state­like organ is rooted solely in its ability to delegate who must live and who must die. The sovereign consolidates their rights to transgress moral and natural bounds; to kill. The Israeli state attempts to reserve this sovereign right in its colonial project in Palestine. Through the directed and pointed deployment of mechanisms of terror the colonial project of the Israeli state “is a concatenation of multiple powers: disciplinary, biopolitical and necropolitical… the combination of the three allocates to the colonial power an absolute domination over the inhabitants of the occupied territory.”3 Thus, I hold the position that the Israeli project in

Palestine is a project of colonial domination that employs the dual mechanisms of the state of siege and state of exception in an attempt to ensure the complete subjugation of its occupied arab population. However, due to various sociopolitical factors, Israel has been unable to fully implement its policies of terror, and counter­Israeli

1Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 27. ​ ​ 2Ibid. 39. 3Ibid. 30.

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organizations such as Hamas have in recent times been able to consolidate a degree of sovereignty that stands to challenge Israel’s necropolitical right to rule.

In conducting this exploration of the Arab­Israeli conflict in Palestine through necropolitical and biopolitical lenses, I will explore three major state and subnational organizations operating in Palestine. In analysing these three organizations I will explore themes and mechanisms of death, the control and domination of life, the representation of bodies, and the performance of terror. The first of these political bodies is the Israeli state itself. I will trace the mechanisms of Israeli terror historically, from the direct terrorist actions of proto­IDF armed groups like the Irgun to softer forms ​ ​ of terror with direct lineages originating in apartheid South African townships, European colonial plantations and the tactics of mechanized death perfected under the Nazi regime in Germany. Following a discussion of Israel will come an examination of the failed project of the Palestinian Authority, which for reasons that include extensive

Israeli oversight, high level corruption and the complete denial of democratic political will was unable to consolidate or manifest sovereignty over its population. I will relate the process of the formation of the Palestinian Authority and its subsequent impotence at the hands of Israel to processes of sexualization and othering that occur as mechanisms of terror visited upon the Palestinian people; particularly dealing with images and the processes of the equation of the Palestinian Arab body with failed masculinity, effeminacy, deviant homosexuality and monstrosity. These are processes that are born out of the Orientalist tradition of the West and were reinforced in the wake of the September 11th terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centers in New York. From

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this point I will shift focus to discussion of the radical Islamist organization Hamas. I will explore how Hamas’ operations in the West Bank and Gaza, particularly suicide bombings carried out by the organization’s semi­autonomous armed wings, can alter and transform the geographies (both imagined and real) of sovereignty in contemporary

Palestine.

Zionism and Terror: States of Siege and Exception

The project of the establishment of the Israeli colonial state in Palestine was conceived of and came to fruition at the turn of the 19th century. Masterminded by the

father of modern secular

Zionism Theodor Herzl

under the rallying cry of

“land without a people for a

people without a land”,

waves of Jewish settlers

known as Aliyahs began

arriving in the Ottoman

territory of Palestine as early

as 1882 as the first steps in

the hope of eventually constituting a Jewish state therein. Following the conclusion of the First World War and the subsequent collapse of the Ottoman Empire, of which Palestine was a province,

3

Britain and France embarked on a colonial administration of the middle east crystallized by two agreements known as Sykes­Picot and the Balfour Declaration. These agreements in tandem established the British occupation of Palestine, then termed

Mandatory Palestine, and promised the securing of a national home for the Jewish people in that land.

Zionism was a unique product of a European philosophical, political, scientific and artistic movement known as The Enlightenment. Enshrining values of progress, modernity, secularism and democratization of the tools and benefits of state

sovereignty,

normative historical

evaluations of the

Enlightenment might

suggest that “the

ultimate expression of

sovereignty is the

production of general

norms by a body (the demos) made up of free and equal men and women. These men and women are posited as full subjects capable of self­understanding, self­consciousness, and self­representation…”4 Enlightenment­era political theory might then suggest of politics a twofold view that it is “a project of autonomy and the achieving of agreement among a

4Ibid. 13.

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collectivity through communication and recognition.”5 Given that Zionism was a product of this era of thought in Europe, the question then arises of how closely the Jewish state project adhered to these values. The answer to this question is simple; very poorly.

If one seeks a potential refutation or counterexample to normative accounts of state formation and democracy in the Enlightenment and post­colonial era one need not look further than Israel in Palestine. Even a cursory examination of Israeli policies of terror, warfare, and the solicitation of death reveals a deep affirmation of a significantly more Mbembean conception of sovereignty. Even before the state of Israel had been formally declared, violent terrorist action had become deeply rooted in the colonial national struggle. One example that beautifully illustrates this is the King David Hotel

Bombing, which occurred in

1956. Perpetrated by the proto­IDF underground terrorist organization known as Irgun, the bombing of the headquarters of the

British mandatory administration in Jerusalem resulted in the death of nearly 91 people and injury of another 46. This is not the only death­making act perpetrated by proto­Israeli Jewish militias prior to the formal declaration of Israeli statehood. The Deir

Yassin Massacre, again perpetrated by the Irgun during what Palestinians call the

Nakba (the Catastrophe), or the great loss and life and land of Palestinian Arabs ​

5Ibid. 13.

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immediately following the close of British Administration in palestine, resulted in the murder of 107 Palestinians. This death count included no small percentage of women, children and elderly Arabs, many of which were discarded in a violated state and left to rot in the streets after the fighting had concluded. Unfortunately, the King David Hotel

Bombing and the Deir Yassin Massacre are hardly exceptions to the general status quo of expulsion, warfare and destruction that mark the early formative years of the Israeli state. Writing about occupied Palestinian territories, Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir offer that “Israel’s first census in the Territories showed 667,200 Palestinians living in the

West Bank (71,300 of them in East Jerusalem) and 389,000 in the Gaza Strip in late

1967. About one­tenth of the West Bank residents [67,000] and nearly three­quarters

[292,000] of the Gaza Strip residents were refugees from areas of mandatory Palestine occupied by Jewish forces in 1948­49. The entire population, except for those

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inhabitants of regions freshly annexed to Jerusalem, had now become subjects deprived of any kind of civil status.”6 Israel’s official declaration of statehood in 1948 had little impact save for the retooling of the methods of terrorization and brutality that it had relied upon in its genesis.

To point solely to acts of terror perpetrated by the Irgun and affiliated organizations as definitive examples of Israeli state or proto­state terrorism is unfortunately a disgrace to the much more complex legacy of terror forged by the state of Israel. In the early days of Israel’s official occupation of a usurped Palestine, tactics of terror and necropower that were forged in the pre­1948 struggle to oust the British would be reshaped and refitted so that instead of ousting and exiling, terror would now be employed to control and dominate. These swirling and intersecting networks of state terror ­ the regulation of all aspects of life vis­a­vis the permit regime, home demolitions, absurd securitization, border tightening ­ are constructed by Neve Gordan as

“Infrastructures of control”, or “the basic mechanisms by and through which the inhabitants [Palestinians] were managed”7. These infrastructures involve the utter domination and terrorization of all aspects of Palestinian civil, legal and administrative life ­ and death. In the following paragraphs I will examine how Israel maintains in its occupied territories a state of siege by which “entire populations are the target of the ​ ​ sovereign”. This constant state of siege can be construed as the sum total of all the apparatuses of control by which Israel maintains dominance in the occupied territories. I

6Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophi, The One­State Condition (Stanford, CA: Stanford ​ ​ University Press, 2013), 2. 7Neve Gordan, Israel’s Occupation (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, ​ ​ 2008), 24.

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will attempt to characterize this dominance by examining Israel’s various modalities of control, namely the permit regime, mass surveillance networks and the reservation of the right to kill.

The Israeli permit regime in Palestine is a subtle terrorism. It does not conjure images of death, shattered homes or broken landscapes. Rather this terror is a psychological one. The permit regime is a terror that encumbers the Palestinian population with anxiety, paranoia, disenfranchisement, doubt, uncertainty and instability.

This regime, instituted shortly after the conclusion of the conflict that followed the Israeli declaration of statehood, is a hellish network of licenses, permits, registrations and documentation that embed every facet of Palestinian life in a labyrinthine bureaucracy of denial and revocation. Neve Gordan writes that “The permit regime managed to transform the most basic rights ­ ranging from the right to livelihood, shelter, and health to the right to freedom of movement, speech, and association­ into privileges that could be taken away at any moment without the revocation being considered a violation.”8

One is called to consider the impact of living in a situation where the foreign military power under whose occupation you live might “permit people to pick flowers” or would require that all “forms of transportation for the transfer of goods [would need] a license, including donkey carts. Farmers needed permits to obtain and operate tractors, and permits were required for grazing livestock in certain areas.“9 Imposing this micromanagement of life on Palestinians attempting to eke out a life in a landscape already ravaged by occupation constitutes terror.

8Ibid. 34. 9Ibid. 35.

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In recent times, this permit regime has taken on an insidious and even heavier

Orwellian tone with the advent of magnetic identification cards. According to the ACT

Palestine Forum, “To obtain a permit,

Palestinian civilians are obliged first

to issue [provide] an Identity Card

(ID) after the age of 16.”10 Beginning

in the early 2000’s, Israel began

issuing magnetic identification cards

that were linked to a central

database, a catalog of every

Palestinian living in the West Bank and Gaza. Applying for such an identification card required “that Palestinian civilians have their hands electronically scanned when applying for the card.”11 Now a Palestinian’s ability to obtain a permit to farm, to plant, to drive, to teach, to transport and to exist was directly tied to an electronic database intrinsically linked to the ultramodern security apparatus of the Israeli occupation.

Israel maintains a monolithic network of surveillance technologies to ensure the complete domination of its subjects in the West Bank and Gaza. Gordon writes that

“almost all forms of control depend for their successful operation on the collection and analysis of data pertaining to the population, it is not surprising that within months of the occupation almost every aspect of Palestinian life was surveyed, examined, and

10“The ‘Permit Regime’ and Israeli Attacks on Palestinian Freedom of Worship,” ACT Palestine Forum Advocacy Paper, (2013): 3. ​ 11“Special Report: New Procedures for Obtaining Israeli­Issued Magnetic Identity Cards,” Palestine Monitoring Group, (30 September 2005): 1. ​ ​

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registered.”12 Israel employs any and all available surveillance technologies in its occupied territories, including but certainly not limited to constant aerial surveillance through unmanned drones, wiretapping, data monitoring, and tracking of individual movements through magnetic ID card use at checkpoints. Also collated are vast numbers of purchase and usage statistics, exemplified by instances such as when:

“The Bank of Israel's Research Department documented, for instance, a series of social indicators, such as the number of households with electricity, private kitchens, toilets, bathrooms, and the number of people per room. It monitored furniture and household maintenance, keeping track of the per­household percentage of gas­cookers, electric refrigerators, television sets, telephones, sewing machines, and private cars.”13

This hyper­monitoring of data is not just a passive operation, however. Collection of data on such massive scales requires an intensive dedication of time and resources, and must serves a vital function to maintaining Israel’s state of siege. Just as Gordon argues that this surveillance, hand­in­hand with the permit regime, contributes and builds upon Israel’s infrastructure or control, so to does surveillance form an integral facet of the regime of terror.

The individual psychological impact of constant mass surveillance is no small matter. In the late 18th century, philosopher Jeremy Bentham articulated his theory of the Panopticon. Classically employed as a specific form of prison architecture that ​ ​ facilitated complacency and constant self­policing, the panopticon typically took the form of a central tower occupied by prison guards surrounded by a circle of cell blocks.

These cells could be seen into at all times by the guards in the tower, however it was

12Neve Gordan, Israel’s Occupation (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, ​ ​ 2008), 40. 13Ibid. 41.

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impossible for every cell to be watched at once. Theoretically, this would instill in the prisoner a state of constant fear of surveillance, leading the prisoner to police their own actions lest they be observed ­ and punished ­ at any moment. This is largely the effect, with some admittedly large modifications to the system, that modern mass surveillance in Palestine serves. In regards to the social effects of mass surveillance, research by Marcus Jacob and Marcel Tyrell into Soviet East Germany suggests that:

“a one standard deviation increase in Stasi [The Ministry for State Security] ​ ​ informer density is associated with a 0.6 percentage point decrease in electoral turnout, a 10% decrease in organizational involvement, and a 50% reduction in the number of organs donated across the districts in East Germany. We furthermore find robust evidence that surveillance intensity has a strong negative effect via social capital on current economic performance, and may explain approximately 7% of the East­West differential in income per capita and 26% of the unemployment gap.”14

These data suggest that the more a population is knowingly surveilled, the poorer it performs in economic and social engagement. There is little doubt that this is an extant

14Marcus Jacob and Marcel Tyrell, “The Legacy of Surveillance: An Explanation for Social Capital Erosion and the Persistent Economic Disparity between East and West Germany” Social Science Research Network (2010): 1. ​ ​

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goal of the Israeli security regime, and proves that the terror of mass surveillance is a major cornerstone of Israel’s state of siege.

The last head on the hydra of Israel’s apparatuses of siege that I will examine will be the reservation of the right to kill. By the right to kill, I refer to what Foucault terms le ​ droit de glaive, or the right of the sword. That is the right reserved by sovereign powers ​ to kill their subjects on naught but whim. My analysis of how Israel enjoys this right will focus on what was at the time of this writing a recent event. On 24 March, 2016, footage was released by the human rights group B’Tselem that showed an IDF soldier executing a wounded Palestinian man who was lying prone on the ground. According to the

B’tselem website:

Palestinians Ramzi al­Qasrawi and ‘Abd al­Fatah a­Sharif were shot after stabbing a soldier in Tel Rumeida, Hebron. The soldier sustained medium­level injuries. While al­Qasrawi died on the spot, a­Sharif was injured and fell to the ground. In video footage captured by Hebron resident ‘Imad Abu Shamsiyeh, who sent it to B’Tselem, he is seen lying on the road injured, with none of the soldiers or medics present giving him first aid or paying him any attention at all. At a certain point, a soldier is seen aiming his weapon at a­Sharif and shooting him in the head from close range, killing him.15

While chilling in its high­definition clarity, this video and the event itself hardly constitute an irregularity. Extrajudicial executions of Palestinians have been a constant fact of

Israel’s occupation and persecution of Palestinians, with B’Tselem providing the statistic that in 2015 alone 116 Palestinians were the victims of Israeli executions in the West

Bank.16 The occupying regime in Palestine reserves its right to kill at will and without

15“Video: Soldier executes Palestinian lying injured on ground after the latter stabbed a soldier in Hebron,” B’Tselem, 24 March 2016. ​ ​ 16“Palestinians killed by Israeli security forces in the West Bank, after operation Cast Lead,” B’Tselem, accessed April 29 2016. ​ ​

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repercussion. To this end, the label of terrorist is applied broadly and with abandon.

However, envision a situation wherein a wounded body lies prostrate on the ground, moaning and twisting in agony. Around this body are medical personnel and soldiers who refuse to acknowledge or assist this wounded body. This goes on for some minutes until finally, casually, a soldier strolls up, shoulders his rifle and fires a round through the head of the unarmed and wounded individual. This individual is then labelled a terrorist by the soldiers who stood around and were complicit in his execution. Imagine the fear and helplessness that body experienced writhing there on the ground. Who are the true terrorists?

This vignette of the execution in Hebron provides but one small example of the daily horror visited upon the occupied Palestinians by the state of Israel. Consider also events such as the Sabra and Shatila massacre of 1982, the massacre that took place in Beirut, Lebanon during Israel’s invasion of that country. The Shatila refugee camp consisted almost entirely of Palestinian refugees that fled Israel in 1948, and the massacre therein resulted in the deaths of an estimated 3,500 civilians.17 The massacre was perpetrated by an Israeli­allied Lebanese Christian militia and was facilitated in every way by the occupying Israeli Defence Forces. The militia was allowed entrance into the refugee camp by IDF soldiers on the night of 16 December, and the massacre continued unabated and unhindered by the IDF for the following two days. According to

Noam Chomsky in an interview with Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman, “The soldiers

[the IDF] watched as they illuminated it. They helped them enter. They watched for

17Amira Howeidy, "Remembering Sabra & Shatila: The death of their world," Ahram Online,16 September 2012. ​

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several days while they [the Phalangists] murdered, not 45 people, but somewhere—Israel claims 800, other analyses go up to several thousand.”18 Here again, Israel maintains the solitary right to determine when Palestinians die. They kill and they facilitate the killing of defenseless bodies for no reason other than control. This is the most effective and poignant expression of Israel’s sovereignty over their subject

Palestinian populations. Through permits, surveillance and killing, Israel ensures that the Palestinian population is locked in a perpetual state of siege, wherein everyone is tracked, everything is regulated, anyone could be targeted, and everyone can be killed.

Alongside the state of siege, Israel operates through the manufacture and maintenance of a permanent state of exception. In its consistent rhetoric of exceptionalism, or the notion that the Israeli state constitutes a special case ­ the sole democracy and force for good in the Middle East, the sole haven of the Jewish people, the sole beacon of the West in a sea of Oriental barbarians ­ Israel backs itself into a corner. That is to say that “one of the paradoxes of the Israeli case is that the more fervently it presses its exemplary status, the more evident becomes its anomalous condition as a permanent state of exception.”19 Operating under Giorgio Agamben’s definition, the concept of the state of exception holds that a state:

...may take all necessary measures "when the institutions of the Republic, the independence of the Nation, the integrity of its territory, or the execution of its

18Noam Chomsky, Rashid Khaladi and Ellen Siegel in conversation with Amy Goodman, “Noam Chomsky: Sabra & Shatila Massacre That Forced Sharon's Ouster Recalls Worst of Jewish Pogroms,“ Democracy Now, January 13, 2014. ​ ​ 19David Lloyd, “Settler Colonialism and the State of Exception: The Example of Palestine/Israel”, Settler Colonial Studies, 2:1, 63.

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international commitments are seriously and immediately threatened and the regular functioning of the constitutional public powers is interrupted."20

That is to say that by declaring or operating under a state of exception, a given State may claim legitimate right to operate outside of the bounds of its constitution or binding legal order. An integral component of the state of exception is the relatively new (at least in the case of Israel­Palestine, considering the youth of the state itself) concept of an existential threat. Often employed as casus belli for war, an existential threat is any ​ ​ force or actor which,

according to the State,

constitutes a threat to

the very existence of the

State. Israel employs

this concept extensively.

So extensively, in fact,

that one finds current prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu tweeting in regards to the 2015 Iran Nuclear Deal that “We are strongly opposed to the agreement being formulated between the world powers and Iran that could endanger Israel’s very existence.”21 Regardless of whether or not powering homes and factories constitutes the danger of utter annihilation for a nation 1000 miles distant, the deployment of the existential threat remains a crucial

20Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, ​ ​ 2005), 11. 21Benjamin Netanyahu, "We are strongly opposed to the agreement being formulated between the world powers and Iran that could endanger Israel’s very existence," (01 Mar 2015, 14:00 UTC), Tweet.

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component for the suspension of the rule of law. We can begin to unpack the concept of the state of exception by exploring how settler colonial states derive their sovereignty.

Where Mbembe and Foucault argue that it is the management of death and life respectively from which sovereignty is derived, David Lloyd maintains a Weberian perspective when he articulates that:

… one can equally think of virtually any nation in relation to another without denying either’s sovereignty. Except in the case of Palestine. The nation, which may have an ideal or cultural existence even without a state, achieves sovereignty only once it exists in the Weberian sense as a state that maintains the monopoly of legitimate violence within its given territory.22

That is to say that in many normative frameworks of state power, sovereignty and statehood is tied directly to that state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of force. This is a concept derived from political theorist Max Weber, who in a 1918 lecture defines a state as a “human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.”23 In the international eye, Israel is the sole entity in Palestine that is entitled to legitimate use of force. When thinking of a states in relation to each other, the relative sovereignty of these states is not necessarily considered. It is assumed that states, by their very nature of statehood, have a legitimate right to sovereignty. However, Lloyd argues that the Palestinian case is exceptional in that its statehood or sovereignty, is often assumed despite the fact that it claims no right to the legitimate use of force. In fact, it is entirely unable to claim this right due to Israel’s consistent policies of the denial and negation of Palestine and

22David Lloyd, “Settler Colonialism and the State of Exception: The Example of Palestine/Israel”, Settler Colonial Studies, 2:1, 60. 23Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation”, 1918, 1.

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Palestinian existence. In this regard, consider former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir’s statement that:

There were no such thing as Palestinians. When was there an independent Palestinian people with a Palestinian state? It was either southern Syria before the First World War, and then it was a Palestine including Jordan. It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.24

Accordingly, this is the way by which Israel performs Mbembe’s politics of death in its most poignant form; through the systematic negation of the existence of the

Palestinian body. Lloyd argues that:

it is also impossible to think of Palestine without thinking simultaneously of that which negates it; it is impossible to think of Palestine without thinking in relation to that which covers it, displaces it, namely, Israel and Zionism. Whenever one thinks of Palestine, one is thus faced immediately with the paradox of the ‘present absentee’, of the one whose identity is shadowed by a non­identity, in the peculiar after­life or afterglow of the disappeared.25

The zionist negation of the Palestinian body has its roots in the very foundational phrase of the zionist project, Herzl's characterization of Palestine as “a land without a people for a people without a land.” Any serious observer of the early zionist project would not have to look particularly hard to find a refutation of this phrase. However, the fact of the native Palestinian population is irrelevant when considering the intent of this particular phrase. This phrase would lay the seeds in the zionist project of a categorical denial of

Palestinian existence, at once applying a dynamic of otherness and nothingness to the

24As quoted in Sunday Times (15 June 1969), also in The Washington Post (16 ​ ​ ​ ​ June 1969) 25David Lloyd, “Settler Colonialism and the State of Exception: The Example of Palestine/Israel”, Settler Colonial Studies, 2:1, 61

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Palestinian people. Continuing his discussion of the negation of palestinian existence,

Lloyd writes that:

“This peculiar condition of being absent even when all too present, or of presence manifest in absence, of being outside even when all too much inside, however metaphysical it may appear, is one that both follows the spatial logic of ethnic cleansing and occupation as material phenomena and conforms to the logical space of the exception, that space where the constitutive force of law or state is manifested in its suspension.”26

Mbembe’s necropower, the sovereign’s management of death, signifies both a literal ability to kill and the ability to condemn a body socially, criminally and effectively to a non­existence, a death­by­proxy. This proxy death, a form of banishment and exile from the spaces of life not entirely unlike that endured by the Jewish people throughout history, is condemnation to the status of homo sacer. Homo Sacer (latin for the sacred or ​ ​ ​ ​ accursed man) was a roman status that indicated an individual was banished from all realms of life and could be freely killed, but could not be sacrificed or participate in any religious rituals. Effectively, the roman Homo Sacer was a non­person condemned to ​ ​ state of unliving and undeath, caught in an apolitical limbo. Giorgio Agamben takes up this concept in his Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, where he explores ​ ​ concepts of sovereignty and sacredness, inclusion and exclusion from society and the concept of bare life. Regarding the role of the sacred in the construction of the homo ​ sacer, he writes that: ​ If our hypothesis is correct, sacredness is instead the originary form of the inclusion of bare life in the juridical order, and the syntagm homo sacer something like the originary “political” relation, which is to say, bare life insofar as it operates in an inclusive exclusion as the referent of the sovereign decision.27

26Ibid. 61. 27Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, California, ​ ​ Stanford University Press (1995), 54.

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In this excerpt, Agamben is articulating a comparison between the concept of sacredness in a religious context ­ that which is above the mundane, negates the profane and constitutes the most primal form of religiosity ­ and the concept of bare life in a political context; bare life is to politics as sacredness is to religion. Agamben articulates bare life as the process by which:

in which human life is politicized only through an abandonment to an unconditional power of death. The sovereign tie is more originary than the tie of the positive rule or the tie of the social pact, but the sovereign tie is in truth only an untying. And what this untying implies and produces – bare life, which dwells in the no­man’s­land between the home and the city – is, from the point of view of sovereignty, the originary political element.28

This is exactly the no­man’s land occupied by the Palestinians. The product of

Israel’s consistent denial and exclusion of the Palestinian is the severance of

Agamben’s “sovereign tie”, resulting in existential exile. The Homo Palaestino is barred ​ ​ from statehood, from citizenship, from legal and civil agency. He exists in a negated

unlife permitted by the eternal Israeli state of exception. He is besieged, terrorized and

othered. The Palestinian is dominated. Mbembe writes in Necropolitics that ​ ​ “As a consequence, colonial violence and occupation are profoundly underwritten by the sacred terror of truth and exclusivity (mass expulsions, resettlement of “stateless” people in refugee camps, settlement of new colonies). Lying beneath the terror of the sacred is the constant excavation of missing bones; the permanent remembrance of a torn body hewn in a thousand pieces and never self­same; the limits, or better, the impossibility of representing for oneself an “original crime,” an unspeakable death: the terror of the Holocaust.”29

These “unspeakable deaths”, once occurring in the desolate death camps of World War

II, now occur in the seething refugee camps, ghettos and spaces of bare life collectively

28Ibid. 56. 29Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 27. ​ ​

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called Palestine. To the Israeli state, these deaths are truly unspeakable and in fact are actively concealed. I move now into a discussion of Israeli tactics of masking and justifying their actions in Palestine.

Normative pro­Israeli arguments, in an attempt to shift blame and accord agency to this besieged and subjugated Palestinian population, often point to the existence of the Palestinian Authority as definitive proof of Palestinian autonomy. These narratives are pernicious and copious, such as one found in the Jewish Virtual Library, a project of the American­Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, where it is posited that “Within less than two years, by building up official institutions of power, the PA managed to bring to bear policy­making capabilities and enforce order in a society that had never enjoyed self­government.”30 However, in the following paragraphs I will argue that rather than existing as an effective and autonomous democratic government, the Palestinian authority is naught but an inefficient, corrupt and impotent shell that is ultimately beholden to an Israeli military colonial apparatus.

The (lack of) Palestinian Authority

It has become evident in the two decades following the signing of Oslo II that the

Palestinian Authority has systematically failed to serve the Palestinian people as both an interim transitional authority on the path to statehood, and as a de facto Palestinian state. Widespread corruption, a strong effort to retain authoritarian systems of government and systematic resistance to the creation of a rule of law society, and the

30“The Palestinian Authority: History and Overview,” Jewish Virtual Library, ​ ​ accessed April 29, 2016.

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oppression of liberalizing elements from within the Authority and among NGOs

(non­governmental organizations) have all contributed to this fundamental failure to best serve the interests of the Palestinian people in the West Bank and Gaza.

Accusations of corruption leveled at Arab governments are not an uncommon theme in Middle East politics, and the Palestinian Authority is no exception. In fact, even the

Palestinian parliamentary committee, operating under the jurisdiction of the

Authority and Yasser Arafat, itself issued a report in May of 1997 detailing government misuse of public funds, both donations and taxes, human rights abuses, patronage and general corruption. The socialist analyst and Fatah correspondent Ilan Halevi considers that:

For the most part, the report is an accountancy inventory of rash spending by the public administration. From a detailed listing of expenditures undertaken by the various ministries, it appears that more than $300 million (nearly a third of the PA’s total yearly budget) could have been saved, and was therefore “wasted.” This was the section that itemized the apparently exorbitant sums spent on furnishing the ministries; one budgetary item alone involved the purchase of some 7,000 cellular phones.31

However, misuse of public funds is only a small fraction of the corruption that riddles the

Palestinian authority. Indeed, even this report from the parliamentary committee was subject to censorship and editing by the PA. Halevi concludes that “that the report had

31Ilan Halevi, “Self­Government, Democracy, and Mismanagement under the Palestinian Authority,” Journal of Palestine Studies 27, no. 3 (1998): 37. ​ ​

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been expurgated or censored was but a step, and the door to the wildest speculations was thrown wide open: What was the PA hiding?”32 Even disregarding the admitted financial mismanagement of the PA, one cannot ignore the severe lack of structural integrity and administrative oversight, rampant patronage and extralegal considerations that permeate all sectors of the Authority.

Severe structural flaws deeply inhibit transparent liberal democratic reform from within the Palestinian Authority and preserve structures of oppression in Palestinian society. A vastly unchecked and powerful executive branch, impotent legislative branch and powerless court structure ensure that the Palestinian Authority is unable to properly serve its constituents. Under Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas (after an interim period following Arafat’s death in 2004) the executive branch enjoyed unchecked control over the Authority’s court and law making organs, with Israeli Political Science PhDs

Hillel Frisch and Menachem Hofnung in 2007 stressing that:

...the relationship between the executive and the LC [Palestinian Legislative Council] was in no way symmetrical. Most of the LC members were elected on the Fatah party ticket (51 of 88 council members). Arafat, like many other leaders of national independence movements, was not accustomed to the trappings of a democratic system in which criticism is a legitimate tool of political discourse. There was evidence that Arafat did not refrain from dramatic gestures that personally delegitimize council members who dared to criticize the behavior of the PA or Arafat himself. At times, he showed no reservations about directly threatening council members into silence. Arafat also utilized cooptation as a method of silencing criticism, by offering the most prominent members of the opposition seats in the Palestinian cabinet.

Not only is the executive branch deeply entrenched in controlling the legislature, but the court system too is abused by the top levels of government to silence dissidents and

32Ibid.: 37.

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factionalists. The Palestinian Authority, under Israeli guidance, holds military tribunals on the whim of regional governorates to prosecute political opposition. Frisch and

Hofnung describe:

the use of special courts (also known as State Security Courts under Israeli rule) that held abbreviated trials by allowing for different rules of evidence than were inadmissible in ordinary courts...These courts greatly differed from their regular counterparts, with their foremost function being the preservation of public order rather than maintaining justice and resolving disputes.33

Another important function of these courts is the systematic upholding, often under

Hamas pressure, of social structures such as “the hamula (extended family) [through ​ ​ which familial clans and patriarchs can exert pressure on PA administrators], the concept of ‘ird (family honor), and the prevalence of customary law...”34 These ​ ​ structures, both from within the PA vis­à­vis the courts and from without in the form of social and religious pressure, act to dissuade, suppress and beleaguer progressive

NGOs and community organizations that seek to liberalize and democratize the PA, seek women’s liberation, reform education and more.

One of the most visible facets of the Palestinian Authority’s active suppression of social liberalization is manifest in the role of the feminist movement in Palestine and of the state of women in Palestinian society. The role of women in Palestinian society has seen very little improvement in the decades following Oslo II, a trend that is indicative of a general lack of social progress in the territories controlled by the Palestinian Authority

(and indeed even a regression in the status of women in areas under Hamas control).

33Ibid.: 336. 34Ibid.: 340.

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Social anthropologist Nahla Abdo describes this phenomenon in her 1999 report on women in the Occupied Territories:

Thus, while the PA has developed as a governing body resembling the formal bureaucracy of a nation state, in fact it remains economically, politically, and geographically dependent on Israel. The absence of sovereignty and geographical cohesion results in the absence of an independent, functioning civil society.35

This functioning civil society is one that would allow structures such as the court system to enable and nourish democratizing, liberalizing and progressive social movements that would help to enhance the position of women in Palestinian society.

Now that the corruption of the Palestinian Authority and its failure as a government for the Occupied Territories has been made clear, it becomes necessary to examine what needs to be the case for things to be otherwise. In 2011, the revolutions in Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, Egypt, and Syria, once and for all refuted the notion of “Arab exceptionalism” that holds that Arab dictatorships and authoritarian regimes are immune to democratization movements. Though it is true that the revolution in Syria collapsed into a brutal and ongoing civil war, and the Muslim Brotherhood quickly co­opted the

Egyptian revolution, it is nonetheless true that the authoritarian regimes of Hosni

Mubarak, Muammar Gaddafi, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, Ali Abdullah Saleh and Bashar al­Assad were either completely toppled or severely impacted in 2011. Following this line of reasoning, a hopeful Adam Shatz reflects that “What was clear to me during the three weeks I spent recently in the West Bank is that the Arab revolutions have emboldened them [Palestinians] to ask for more, both from Israel and from themselves,

35Nahla Abdo “Gender and Politics under the Palestinian Authority,” Journal of ​ Palestine Studies 28, no. 2 (1999): 39. ​

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even if that means preparing for a much longer struggle.”36 Shatz will later go on to argue that, if nothing else, the Arab Spring has laid the groundwork for the healing of what he refers to as “the Division” in the Occupied Territories; the split between Fatah and Hamas.

Considering the relative sovereignty claimed by Israel in Palestine and the abject failure of the Palestinian Authority to constitute any sort of consistent governing power due to deeply entrenched systems of patronage, corruption and dogged obedience to an Israeli master, Hamas now becomes an essential component in our exploration of the politics of life and death in Palestine. After its victory in popular elections in 2006 and the following takeover of the Gaza Strip, Hamas officially entered the governing game in the Occupied Territories. Hamas is the Palestinian branch of the Egyptian

Muslim Brotherhood, and for many decades has had a growing presence in the

Occupied Territories. Hamas is well known internationally as the group responsible for coordinating many of the martyrdom operations against Israel (in conjunction with the

Al­Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade) and for the maintenance of its armed wing, the Qassam

Brigades.

Hamas: Familiarity and Terror­as­Counter

As far back as 1994 and certainly earlier, elements of Hamas have made clear their intention to either overthrow, or at least stand ready to replace the Palestinian

Authority should it fail in its obligation to democratically represent the Palestinian people

36Adam Shatz, “Is Palestine Next?” London Review of Books 33, no. 14 (2011): ​ ​ 1.

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and resist Israel’s occupation. In an interview by Graham Usher from that same year,

Sunni cleric and Hamas member Bassam Jarrar articulates the point that:

The Islamic movement’s [Hamas’] position is quite clear: it wants a national dialogue between all national and Islamic forces based on democratic reform of the PLO [the Palestine Liberation Organization; what would become the PA following the Oslo peace process] and its decision making structures. If, however, the PLO disintegrates because of the catastrophic political decisions its leadership has made ­ specifically, its acceptance of Oslo ­ then this is due to those decisions… if it does disintegrate, this does not mean that there is a political vacuum. The Islamic movement is there because it exists independently of the PLO, and is an integral part of Palestinian political culture.37

In other words, Hamas and the Islamic movement are ready and willing to fill any political void left by the Palestinian Authority, and have already done so in Gaza.

However, Hamas’ attempts at governance are accompanied by another method of establishing sovereignty and control over life and death that directly pushes back against Israel’s tactics of terror, siege and exception. Hamas utilizes the suicide bomber. On the subject of martyrdom, Mbembe writes that:

The “suicide bomber” wears no ordinary soldier’s uniform and displays no weapon. The candidate for martyrdom chases his or her targets; the enemy is a prey for whom a trap is set. Significant in this respect is the location of the ​ ambush laid: the bus stop, the café, the discotheque, the marketplace, the checkpoint, the road—in sum, the spaces of everyday life.38

If we are operating under a model of power that takes into account the ability to exercise the right to both negate and cultivate life as the most legitimate manifestations of sovereignty, how then do we begin to investigate a non­state pseudo­governmental

37Graham Usher and Bassam Jarrar, “The Islamist Movement and the Palestinian Authority,” Middle East Report, no. 189 (1995): 29. ​ ​ 38Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 36. ​ ​

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actor that utilizes methods of terror and mass killing in order to resist the local sovereign?

To initially address this question I will open with a historical analysis of the circumstances of Hamas’ rise to power in Palestine. To quote from Graham Usher’s

“Hamas Risen”, on:

January 27, 2006, Fatah activists and Palestinian security personnel converged on the Palestinian Authority's parliament building in Gaza City. Within minutes, cars were torched, tires set aflame and stones thrown at election banners displaying the visages of victorious Hamas candidates. The cry was for vengeance, particularly against a leadership that had just presided over Palestine's premier nationalist movement's worst political defeat in its 47­year history.39

The Hamas Government’s rise to control in Gaza is the product of democratic election that occurred in January of 2006. Pitted against the Palestinian Authority’s political wing

Fatah, Hamas pulled a total victory in the Palestinian legislative elections. However, the immediate aftermath of the election got chaotic quickly. Immediately following the election, the Middle East Quartet (United States, Russia, United Nations and European

Union) demanded of the new Hamas government that:

all members of a future Palestinian government must be committed to nonviolence, recognition of Israel, and acceptance of previous agreements and obligations, including the Roadmap. We urge both parties to respect their existing agreements, including on movement and access.40

Unsurprisingly, considering the stated goals and principles of Hamas as an organization that I will discuss momentarily, Hamas rejected this agreement. Upon the rejection,

Israel and the United Nations embarked on a round of sanctions against the Palestinian

39Graham Usher, “Hamas Risen,“ Middle East Report, No. 238, (2006): 2. ​ ​ 40“Quartet Statement,” London, 30 January (2006).

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National Authority and all Palestinian territories. International aid to Palestinians was suspended. According to Jeremy M. Sharp’s report to the United States Congress, the

United States had been investing some $2.3 million on bolstering Fatah’s image in the

Palestinian legislative election.41 Israel’s response to the Hamas victory, the most damaging of all, was the total suspension of the dispensation of Palestinian tax revenue to the Palestinian Authority. The blockade of the Gaza strip was tightened and Quartet country aid was permanently suspended. These sanctions were largely pulled back from the West Bank in the summer of 2007, but not Gaza. Following the victory in the elections, and the failure to answer international calls to form a unity government,

Hamas embarked on a hostile coup d’etat of the entire Gaza area. Beverly

Milton­Edwards writes that:

In June 2007, after more than a decade of Fatah­dominated rule in the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas consolidated its election victory of 18 months earlier by routing Fatah security forces loyal to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Fatah 'strongman' Mohammed Dahlan. In a matter of days Gaza fell to Hamas forces and hundreds of Fatah functionaries fled their homes for the relative security of the West Bank city of Ramallah, where Fatah remained dominant.42

Without Israeli military interference, Hamas was able establish complete control over former Fatah areas and fully depose the Palestinian Authority in the area.

Considering Hamas’ political control over gaza, which does not necessarily equate to sovereignty in our schema, our need to dissect both the stated goals and

41Jeremy M. Sharp, “CRS Report for Congress,” (2 February 2006). 42Beverley Milton­Edwards, “The Ascendance of Political Islam: Hamas and Consolidation in the Gaza Strip,” Third World Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 8 (2008): 1585. ​ ​

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ideology of Hamas in tandem with their tactics and methods of retaining and maintaining control in Gaza, all while grappling with the looming threat of a sovereign Israel.

Founded in 1987, Hamas is a Sunni Islamist organization closely affiliated with the Egyptian Islamist organization known as the Muslim Brotherhood. Hamas is comprised of a tripartite organizational structure which includes the executive Majis ​ al­Shura or General Consultative Council, the Dawah, which provides and manages all ​ ​ ​ social services, infrastructure and civil management, and the Izz ad­Din al­Qassam ​ Brigades, which are its armed forces. This noted however, the al­Qassam Brigades do ​ not always operate under the jurisdiction of Hamas and have been known to act independently. Hamas’ ideology has three critical components.

The Hamas Covenant, drafted in 1988, contains thirty six articles outlining and clarifying Hamas’ political, ideological and religious standpoints. Distilled, there are three primary components of this charter than frequently and consistently reappear and repeat themselves and broadly encapsulate the appeal of Hamas; Palestinian

Nationalism and and Anti­Israelism, Islamic Nationalism, and Islamism. Perhaps the most appealing aspect of Hamas for its support base is its assumption of the mantle of

Palestinian nationalism from the defunct and decrepit shoulders of the Palestinian

Authority, which has done naught but work against the Palestinian national cause since its inception. Iyad Barghouti, a professor of sociology at al­Najah University in Nablus, describes the appeal of Hamas as

Hamas now is the main competitor of the PLO. This is not because the Palestinian people are more willing to turn to religion per se, but because the

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current situation in the occupied territories has led more and more people to see Hamas as a "nationalist" alternative.43

In describing the popularity of Hamas, Barghouti continues on to describe the process by which:

In Gaza, Hamas worked hard to accommodate people's social needs in terms of services and economic support. That doesn't necessarily translate into a widely shared vision of social relations as Hamas would define them. The same is true politically. People might not agree with Hamas' broader vision for the future, but they do support Hamas' position on the occupation, including military attacks.44

Hamas successfully utilized a soft social infiltration of a broken and beaten Palestine to build the groundswell necessary to seize control of Gaza and gain noticeable influence in the Fatah­dominated West Bank. Rising from the ashes of the failed Palestinian

Authority in Gaza, Hamas’ rallying cry of security and stability, defense of Arab,

Palestinian and Islamic identity, and pitted resistance to Israel’s occupation acted as a beacon to the embattled Palestinians therein. Barghouti argues that even secular

Palestinians are counted among the ranks of Hamas’ supporters, reaffirming the apparent appeal of that organization.

Regarding the Nationalist aspirations of Hamas, it is interesting to note their self­identified distinction between Islamic nationalism and Palestinian Nationalism.

Consider article 36 of the Covenant, where it is stated that:

While paving its way, the Islamic Resistance Movement, emphasizes time and again to all the sons of our people, to the Arab and Islamic nations, that it does not seek personal fame, material gain, or social prominence. It does not aim to compete against any one from among our people, or take his place. Nothing of the sort at all. It will not act against any of the sons of Moslems or those who are peaceful towards it from among non­Moslems, be they here or anywhere else. It

43Iyad Barghouti and Lisa Hajjar, “The Islamist Movements in the Occupied Territories: An Interview with Iyad Barghouti,” Middle East Report, No. 183 (1993): 10. ​ ​ 44Ibid. 10.

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will only serve as a support for all groupings and organizations operating against the Zionist enemy and its lackeys.45

It is interesting to note how Hamas distinguishes between Arab and Islamic nations, and in fact declares its alliance with and acceptance of not just and Muslim organization that might oppose the Zionist cause but even any and all non­Muslim organizations that share that extant goal. This is an interesting and primarily sourced counter narrative to the often­spouted rhetoric that Hamas as a whole is a terrorist organization and nothing more.

While the notion that the entire organization of Hamas is naught but a terror cell gripping control of Gaza is absurd considering their commitment to social welfare and

infrastructural support when

applicable, it is undeniable that

Hamas’ subsidiary al­Qassam

brigades frequently engage in acts

of armed resistance that by many

accounts fit classically under the

definition of terrorism. Statistically speaking, in the 2000’s alone there were 147 suicide bombings carried out against

Israeli soft targets both within Israel and in the Occupied Territories.46 This is terrorist action, unequivocally. Also to take into account are the countless Qassam rockets

45Avalon Project, Yale Law School, “Hamas Covenant 1988: The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement” (1988): 18. 46Sean Yom and Basel Sale, “Palestinian Suicide Bombers: A Statistical Analysis” (accessed May 6, 2016).

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launched into Israel from Gaza by Hamas. Though the Qassam rockets themselves are relatively inefficient and generally cobbled together improvised firearms, they nevertheless have a discernable negative psychological effect on Israelis. Take for example one of the posts on the blog of the Israel Defense Force that claims that

Since Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005, terrorists have fired more than 11,000 rockets into Israel. Over 5 million Israelis are currently living under threat of rocket attacks. More than half a million Israelis have less than 60 seconds to find shelter after a rocket is launched from Gaza into Israel. Most rockets launched from Gaza into Israel are capable of reaching Israel’s biggest cities, including Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Rocket fire from Gaza is a constant threat facing Israel’s civilians. In 2011 alone, 630 rockets from Gaza hit Israeli towns. That’s an even higher number than in 2010, when 231 rockets hit Israel.47

Now compare this claim to Phan Nguyen of Mondoweiss’ analysis that as of July 14,

2014, rocket and mortar attacks from Gaza have incurred a death toll of only 30

Civilians and 14 IDF soldiers.48 While the terrible impact to the families and communities of those 44 killed is undeniable, this number pales in comparison to the over 10,000 wounded and 2,300 killed Palestinians resulting from Israel’s invasion of Gaza in 2014.

49 The huge disparity in these numbers is symptomatic of the disparity in necropolitical tactics between Israel and Hamas. That is to say that in its resistance against the Israeli state, hamas struggles with homemade rockets, desperate suicide attempts, and inconsistent guerilla harassment. The necropolitics of Hamas are a desperate and amateur politics. This is in stark contrast to the death­politics of Israel.

47“Rocket Attacks on Israel From Gaza,” (accessed May13, 2016) https://www.idfblog.com/facts­figures/rocket­attacks­toward­israel/. 48Phan Nguyen, “How many people have died from Gaza rockets into Israel?” ​ (July 14, 2014), http://mondoweiss.net/2014/07/rocket­deaths­israel/. 49“Ministry: Death toll from Gaza offensive topped 2,310,” (January 3, 2015)

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Where Israel deploys state terror in forms that were normalized in modern conflicts such as the Invasion of Iraq ­ chiefly heavy deployment of armor in urban combat, targeted drone and aerial shelling, and vertical domination ­ the terror of

Hamas is a significantly more personal and intimate act.

When the Qassam Brigades of Hamas carry out a suicide attack, or martyrdom operation, they are engaging in an act of total annihilation for the cause of resistance.

Where Israeli youths pilot drones and instill terror from miles away, Hamas martyrs perform terror so intimately that the body itself is transformed into a weapon.

The role of martyrdom in the Israel­Palestine conflict has shifted over the decades. For example, Eli Alshech describes the circumstances whereby martyrdom during the first Intifada (1987­1991) was promoted and encouraged by Hamas primarily as a tool to rally support and maintain relevancy in the face of the rapidly rising popularity of Fatah in the Occupied Territories50. In an analysis of collections of ethical wills, biographies and eulogies widely distributed by Hamas in the wake of suicide

50Eli Alshech, “Egoistic Martyrdom and Ḥamās' Success in the 2005 Municipal Elections: A Study of Ḥamās Martyrs' Ethical Wills, Biographies, and Eulogies” Die Welt ​ des Islams Vol. 48, Issue 1 (2008). ​

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attacks, Alshech comes to the conclusion that Hamas’ tactics for encouraging martyrdom shifted in the intervening years between 1991 and 2000. Prior to 2000,

Hamas encouraged martyrdom as a method of asserting sovereignty and statehood, of advancing political will against Fatah and as a resistance tactic against the Israelis.

After the first Intifada, Hamas had been experiencing a debilitating backslide in popular support against Fatah. Animosity between the two parties grew, and Hamas began searching for a new method of fostering public support. Alshech writes that:

First stage documents depict self­immolation attacks as acts whose purposes include liberating Islamic land, freeing the Palestinian people of the Israeli occupation, avenging the blood of previous martyrs, and spreading Islam. Eschatological goals, such as attaining eternal life, if mentioned at all, are secondary and almost marginalized.23 If martyrdom was celebrated, it was because it served to promote ends in this world.51

Prior to 2000, it appeared that Hamas exercised little control over the content of the ethical wills, biographies and eulogies distributed about its martyrs. This is reflective of the relative goals and influence of Hamas as a political and social entity at the time.

Acting on the catalyst of the Second Intifada and the consolidation of its power in Gaza and certain parts of the West Bank, Hamas revised its martyrdom program with gusto.

Describing the way in which Hamas began to display a much more careful and calculated PR campaign, Alshech writes that:

In contrast, second stage documents gradually stress more strongly the notion that martyrdom is warranted as a means of attaining paradise, thereby shifting the focus from self­immolation attacks as a way to achieve political and social goals in this world to self immolation attacks as a means of obtaining benefits in the Hereafter. While the goals of liberating the land or freeing the nation are not totally abandoned in second stage documents, they are clearly down­played in some and are marginalized in others.52

51Ibid. 32 52Ibid.

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Alshech describes this shift to the theological as a mechanism of consolidation and recruitment for Hamas. He paraphrases a mechanism defined by sociologists Eugene and Anita Weiner whereby:

Hence, when a group member publicly sacrifices his life for the sake of the group's ideology, his action is likely not only to evoke admiration among members of the group, but also to stir up a process of soul­searching among members. In the course of such reflection, members revisit and re­evaluate their beliefs about the group's ideology, attempting to discover the profound truth already discovered by martyrs. Such a process has the potential to increase members' moral devotion to the group's ideology and, thus, to create a strong convictional community that is not only supportive of, but also fully dedicated to, and invested in the group's cause.53

Alshech posits that by either editing or completely fabricating the documents being circulated after martyrdom operations, Hamas was enacting a plan of mass recruitment and incitement to suicide in order to build momentum for the eventual takeover of the

Gaza strip, which as discussed above was a complete success. He writes that “While it is impossible to determine with certainty whether the second stage documents contributed to Hamas' success in the 2005 Palestinian elections, circumstantial evidence indicates that they did.”54 He cites statistics that the publication of post­suicide documents by Hamas coincided with a raw number increase in the amount of suicide attacks being carried out by Hamas fighters, a rise from 5.85 attacks per year between

1987 and 1999 to 24.75 per year after the Second Intifada.

53Eli Alshech, “Egoistic Martyrdom and Ḥamās' Success in the 2005 Municipal Elections: A Study of Ḥamās Martyrs' Ethical Wills, Biographies, and Eulogies” Die Welt ​ des Islams Vol. 48, Issue 1 (2008), 39. ​ 54Ibid. 44.

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In conclusion, this paper has analyzed at length the complex networks that make up the relationships of sovereignty, power and terrorism at play in the Israel­Palestine conflict. We began with an close historical analysis of the pre­Israeli Jewish terrorist groups that resisted British occupation in Palestine through the lense of Achille

Mbembe’s necropower. From here were moved into a discussion of the modern tactics of terror of the Israeli state, including some of the massacres that have occurred directly under Israeli auspices

Following that, in attempting to diagnose the relationships of power at play in the

Israeli state project, we underwent a detailed analysis of the role played by the

Palestinian Authority in abetting Israel’s terror tactics and reinforcing the Jewish state’s sovereignty over the people and the land. Finally, we concluded with an analysis of

Hamas’ role in the conflict. We explored how Hamas was formed and rose to power in

Gaza, and how it utilizes the terror tactic of martyrdom to resist Israeli dominance and consolidate its political power base among Palestinians. While this analysis certainly omits many key factors, viewpoints and narratives of the Israel­Palestine conflict, I have attempted to try and break down some of the key relationships between the most powerful entities at play. By applying the power theory of Foucault and Mbembe to the raw history and visceral reality of the conflict, I hope to have both shed some light and further complicated the discourse surrounding the conflict.

36

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Images

Figure 1 (Page 3): The Sykes­Picot Lines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sykes%E2%80%93Picot_Agreement#/media/File:MPK1­42 6_Sykes_Picot_Agreement_Map_signed_8_May_1916.jpg

Figure 2 (Page 4): Settlers of the First Aliyah Arrive by Boat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Aliyah#/media/File:PikiWiki_Israel_20841_The_Palma ch.jpg

Figure 3 (Page 5): Jewish Military at Deir Yassin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deir_Yassin_massacre#/media/File:Deir_Yassin_IMG_085 8.JPG

Figure 4 (Page 6): Palestinian Refugees in 1948. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakba_Day#/media/File:Palestinian_refugees.jpg

Figure 5 (Page 9): Palestinian Identity Card. http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/pics/large/398.jpg

Figure 6 (Page 11): Panopticon­Style Prison. https://thegalleryfromoverthere.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/the­presidio­modelo­was­a ­model­prison­of­panopticon­design­built­on­isla­de­pinos­now­the­isla­de­la­juventud­in ­cuba.png?w=487

Figure 7 (Page 15): Netanyahu with Bomb. https://static.guim.co.uk/sys­images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2015/2/23/1424714172116/B inyamin­Netanyahu­009.jpg

Figure 8 (Page 21): Young Yasser Arafat. http://america.aljazeera.com/content/ajam/articles/2013/11/6/who­was­yasser­arafat/jcr: content/mainpar/adaptiveimage/src.adapt.960.high.yasser_arafat_110613.1383764513 922.jpg

Figure 9 (Page 31): Hamas Soldiers at Hamas Rally in Gaza. http://www.frontpagemag.com/sites/default/files/uploads/2012/11/hamas11.jpg

Figure 10 (Page 33): Hamas Martyr Photograph https://4.bp.blogspot.com/­lRG0tghZgKA/VzSyhkeON2I/AAAAAAAAxBQ/8cFy3x4kJB4 PML8bx0aNrArjXEsUvDWKACLcB/s1600/cdf51788dc7c3b6133e4939cdedcc364.jpg

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