Of Dowries and Brides: A Structural Analysis of Israel's Occupation

Abstract

In this article I attempt to uncover some of the causes leading to the dramatic changes that have taken place over the past four decades in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Drawing attention to the way in which the Palestinian inhabitants have been managed, my central thesis is that the occupation's very structure, rather than the policy choices of the Israeli government, has led to the shifts in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. More specifically, I maintain that the interactions, excesses, and contradictions produced by the means of control that have been applied in the Occupied Territories can help explain why, following the 1967 war, a politics of life, which aims to secure the livelihood of the occupied residents, was emphasized by the military government and why we are currently witnessing a macabre politics characterized by an increasing number of deaths. An interrogation of this kind is advantageous because it helps us see beyond the smoke screen of political proclamations, and thus improves our understanding of why the acrimonious Israeli–Palestinian conflict has developed in the way that it has.

¹ I would like to the thank Nitza Berkovitch, Adi Ophir, Catherine Rottenberg, and Yuval Yonay as well as the anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions.

When I asked Eshkol what we were going to do with a million Arabs, he answered: “I get it. You want the dowry, but you don't like the bride!”

Golda Meir in a Mapai Party Meeting three months after the 1967 war2

² Cited in Shlomo Gazit, The Carrot and the Stick: Israel's Policy in Judea and Samaria, 1967–1969 (Washington, DC: B'nai Brith Books, 1995), p. 135. Levi Eshkol was Israel's prime minister at the time and Golda Meir was the general secretary of the Mapai Party.

Notes

¹ I would like to the thank Nitza Berkovitch, Adi Ophir, Catherine Rottenberg, and Yuval Yonay as well as the anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions.

² Cited in Shlomo Gazit, The Carrot and the Stick: Israel's Policy in Judea and Samaria, 1967–1969 (Washington, DC: B'nai Brith Books, 1995), p. 135. Levi Eshkol was Israel's prime minister at the time and Golda Meir was the general secretary of the Mapai Party.

³ Shlomo Gazit, Trapped Fools: Thirty Years of Israeli Policy in the Territories (London: Frank Cass, 2003), p. 162.

⁴ Coordinator of Government Operations in the Administered Territories, Two Years of Military Government, 1967–1969 (Tel-Aviv: Israeli Defense Forces, May 1969), p. 39; Amnesty International, “Under the Rubble: House Demolition and Destruction of Land and Property,” MDE 15/033/2004, London, May 18, 2004.

⁵ The numbers are taken from several sources. B'tselem, The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, has documented the number of Palestinians who were killed since the eruption of the first Intifada in December 1987. The number of Palestinians killed during the first two decades of the occupation was gathered from several sources. According to the Palestinian Organization of Families of Deceased, an estimated 400 Gazans were killed during the first 20 years of occupation. Ha'aretz, August 23, 2005. David Ronen claims that 87 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank from the end of the war until December 1967. David Ronen, The Year of the Shabak (Tel-Aviv: Ministry of Defense Publishing House, 1989), p. 57 [in Hebrew]. Meron Benvenisti notes that between 1968 and 1983, 92 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank. Meron Benvenisti, The West Bank Data Project, 1986 Report, Demographic, Economic, Legal, Social, and Political Developments in the West Bank (Washington, DC: The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1986), p. 63. In 1986 and 1987 another 30 were killed. Meron Benvenisti, The West Bank Data Project, 1987 Report, Demographic, Economic, Legal, Social, and Political Developments in the West Bank (Washington, DC: The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1987), p. 42. Al Haq notes that in 1984, 11 Palestinians were killed. Al Haq's Response to the Chapter on Israel and the Occupied Territories in the U.S.'s State Department Report, Al Haq, “Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 1984” (Ramallah: Al Haq, 1985), p. 5. Thus, the total amount is 620 Palestinians, while there is missing data for the year 1985 in the West Bank.

⁶ Among the important books which have analyzed these issues are: Noam Chomsky, Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians (Boston: South End Press, 1999); Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–2001 (New York: Vintage, 2001); Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage, 1992); Avraham Sela, The Decline of the Arab-Israeli Conflict: Middle East Politics and the Quest for Regional Order (New York: SUNY Press, 1997); Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2001); Mark Tessler, A History of the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).

⁷ These studies include Raja Shehadeh and Jonathan Kuttab, The West Bank and the Rule of Law (Ramallah: The International Commission of Lawyers, 1980); Naseer Hasan Aruri (ed.), Occupation: Israel over Palestine (London: Zed Books, 1984); Raja Shehadeh, Occupier's Law: Israel and the West Bank (Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1985); Geoffrey Aronson, Creating Facts: Israel, Palestinians and the West Bank (Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1987); Alan Dowty, The Jewish State: A Century Later (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001); Gershon Shafir and Yoav Peled, The New Israel: Peacemaking and Liberalization (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001); Asher Arian, The Second Republic: Politics in Israel (Chatham, NJ: Chatham House Publishers, 1997); Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar, Lords of the Land: The Settlers and the State of Israel 1967–2004 (Tel-Aviv Israel: Kinneret Zmora-Beitan, Dvir, 2004) [in Hebrew]; Lisa Hajjar, Courting Conflict: The Israeli Military Court System in the West Bank and Gaza (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 2005).

⁸ For studies that have emphasized the agency of Palestinians, see Ibrahim Dakkak, “Back to Square One: A Study of the Reemergence of the Palestinian Identity in the West Bank, 1967–1980,” in Alexander Scholch (ed.), Palestinians over the Green Line: Studies on the Relations between Palestinians on Both Sides of the 1949 Armistice Line since 1967 (London: Ithaca Press, 1983); Joost R. Hiltermann, Behind the Intifada: Labor and Women's Movements in The Occupied Territories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); Baruch Kimmerling and Joel Migdal, The Palestinian People: A History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Lockman and Beinin (eds), Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising against Israeli Occupation (Boston: South End Press, 1989); Julie Peteet, Gender in Crisis: Women and the Palestinian Resistance Movement (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991); Zeev Schiff and Ehud Ya'ari, Intifada (Tel-Aviv: Schoken Books, 1990) [in Hebrew]; Roane Carey, The New Intifada: Resisting Israel's Apartheid (London: Verso Books, 2001).

⁹ Timothy Mitchell, “The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics,” The American Political Science Review 85:1 (1991), pp. 77–96.

¹⁰ Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage, 1979); and Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1990).

¹¹ Neve Gordon, “Foucault's Subject: An Ontological Reading,” Polity, 31:3 (1999), pp. 395–414.

¹² Although Fatah had been created a number of years earlier and Palestinian refugees had been infiltrating into Israel since the 1948 war, the fact that Israel was now sole sovereign over Mandatory Palestine sharpened contestory claims and rekindled the Palestinian struggle. See Kimmerling and Migdal, op. cit., pp. 240–259.

¹³ Alan Dowty and Alvin S. Rubenstein (eds), Arab Israeli Conflict: Perspectives (New York: Harper Collins, 1990); Ian Black and Benny Morris, Israel's Secret Wars: The Untold History of Israeli Intelligence (London: Hamish Manilton, 1991), pp. 206–235.

¹⁴ The annexation applied to the territory itself, whereas its inhabitants were given the option to become Israeli citizens, but in order to do so they had to relinquish their Jordanian citizenship. Only a small number complied. Nonetheless, all of the inhabitants were made permanent Jerusalem residents and could vote for municipal elections. Eitan Felner, A Policy of Discrimination, Land Expropriation, Planning and Building in East Jerusalem (Jerusalem: B'tselem, 1995); Yael Stein, The Quiet Deportation: Revocation of Residency of East Jerusalem Palestinians (Jerusalem: HaMoked and B'tselem, 1997).

¹⁵ Sasson Levi, “Local Government in the Administered Territories,” in Daniel J. Elazar (ed.), Judea, Samaria and Gaza: Views on the Present and Future (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy and Research, 1982).

¹⁶ About 100,000 Muslim and a few Christian inhabitants became refugees, while Israel allowed only 5,875 Druze, 385 Alawis, and 300 Kuneitra residents, mostly Circassans, to stay. See W. W. Harris, “War and Settlement Change: the Golan Heights and the Jordan Rift, 1967–1977,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 3:3 (1978), pp. 309–330. Harris shows that a disproportional number of inhabitants fled or were expelled during the 1967 war from two regions, the Golan Heights and the Jordan Valley. It appears that this was not coincidental and that Israel was interested in emptying both these regions from their populations in order to create a vacant buffer against Jordan and Syria.

¹⁷ Israel withdrew from the Sinai Peninsula following the 1979 Camp David peace agreement with Egypt.

¹⁸ These strains of political thought were also shaped by a series of practices, but analyzing these practices is not the topic of this article.

¹⁹ Michael Feige, One Space, Two Places: Gush Emunim, Peace Now, and the Construction of Israeli Space (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2002), p. 41 [in Hebrew]; Neve Gordon, “The Militarist and Messianic Ideologies,” Middle East Report, July 2004 online edition, < http://www.merip.org/mero/mero070804.html>.

²⁰ Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford: Oneworld, 2006). The reason the campaign was not considered ethnic cleansing at the time is because Israel managed to convince both its Jewish citizenry and the large majority of the international community that the Palestinian inhabitants had fled due to the instructions of the leaders of other Arab countries and not as a result of Israeli actions. See Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 2^nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

²¹ For the demographic effects of the 1948 war, see Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, op. cit. For the policy in the Jordan Valley, see Harris, op. cit. For the decision regarding the Latrun enclave, see Gazit, The Carrot and the Stick, op. cit., p. 45. An estimated 70,000 Palestinians fled from the Jordan Valley during the war due to air bombardment of the villages and refugee camps, while the residents of four villages in the Latrun enclave were expelled from their homes and the villages were bulldozed. In addition, Israel also annexed to its territory a strip of land parallel to the 1949 armistice (that is, the Green Line) along a few kilometers north and south of the Latrun area. This strip of land had been known as “no man's land,” because from 1948 to 1967 it was not subject to the control of either the Israeli or Jordanian side. During the war, Israel expelled the residents of the villages of Imwas, Yalu, and Bayt Nuba and destroyed their homes. Yehezkel Lein, Land Grab: Israel's Settlement Policy in the West Bank (Jerusalem: B'tselem, 2002), p. 12 [in Hebrew].

²² Gazit, The Carrot and the Stick, op. cit., p. 45.

²³ There are numerous books underscoring this view. One prominent example is Benjamin Netanyahu, A Place among the Nations (New York, Bantam, 1993).

²⁴ Zertal and Eldar, op. cit., pp. 13–81, show how the Israeli government approved the confiscation of land immediately after the war. See also Aronson, op. cit., pp. 9–31.

²⁵ Full annexation would mean the application of Israeli law to the land.

²⁶ For a basic outline of the Allon plan, see Aronson, op. cit., pp. 14–16, 31.

²⁷ For documentation of the contingency plans, including the “Granite Plan,” regarding the perpetration within the Israeli military for the activation of a military government in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, see Gazit, The Carrot and the Stick, op. cit., pp. 3–31. From 1956, the military actively discussed the prospect of occupying the West Bank, and slowly it became common sense that this might happen. Shlomo Ahronson, “Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin's Security Doctrine and the Road to the Six Day War,” Ha'aretz, November 2, 2005 [in Hebrew]. In 1958, Chief of Staff Haim Laskov submitted a proposal to occupy the West Bank, but David Ben-Gurion did not approve it. See Moshe Zak, “The Shift in Ben-Gurion's Attitude toward the Kingdom of Jordan,” Israel Studies, 1:2 (1996), pp. 147–148.

²⁸ Meir Shamgar, who was the military advocate general from 1961 to 1968, prepared the comprehensive Manual for the Military Advocate in Military Government. See Meir Shamgar, “Legal Concepts and Problems of the Israeli Military Government: The Initial Stage,” in Meir Shamgar (ed.), Military Government in the Territories Administered by Israel 1967–1980, The Legal Aspects (Jerusalem: Harry Sacher Institute for Legislative Research and Comparative Law, 1982). For a short description of the seminars, see also Ronen, op. cit., p. 18.

²⁹ Between 1948 and 1966 the Palestinians who had remained in Israel and had become citizens were subjected to a military government. For a description of the controlling mechanisms used inside Israel proper, consult Ian Lustick, Arabs in the Jewish State, Israel's Control of a National Minority (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980); Elia Zureik, The Palestinians in Israel: A Study in Internal Colonialism (London: Routledge & Paul, 1979). Elsewhere I discuss the major difference between the forms of control used in Israel proper and those used in the OT, Neve Gordon, Israel's Occupation (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008). Finally, both Sara Roy and Shabtai Teveth suggest that some of the controlling apparatuses were informed by Israel's brief occupation of the Gaza Strip in 1956. Sara Roy, The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-development (Washington, DC: Institute for Palestinian Studies, 1995); Teveth, The Cursed Blessing, translated by Myra Bank (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1970), pp. 10–11.

³⁰ For a more detailed discussion about the textbooks, see Neve Gordon, Israel's Occupation (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008).

³¹ Shlomo Gazit, Lecture, Tel-Aviv University, June 10, 2006.

³² Coordinator of Government Operations in the Administered Territories, Three Years of Military Government, 1967–1970 (Tel-Aviv: Ministry of Defense, 1970), p. 4.

³³ Black and Morris, op. cit., pp. 261–262.

³⁴ Neve Gordon, “On Power and Visibility: An Arendtian Corrective of Foucault,” Human Studies 25:2 (2002), pp. 125–145.

³⁵ Foucault, The History of Sexuality, op. cit., pp. 88–97.

³⁶ Mitchell, op. cit., p. 93, Gordon, Israel's Occupation, op. cit.

³⁷ Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), pp. 242–247.

³⁸ Tamara Barnea and Rafiq Husseini (eds), Cooperate and Separate, Separate and Cooperate: The Disengagement of the Palestinian Health Care System from Israel and its Emergence as an Independent System (New York: Greenwood Press, 2002).

³⁹ Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, op. cit., pp. 246–247.

⁴⁰ Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Vintage, 1980).

⁴¹ Proclamation 2, June 7, 1967, Clause 3 (a), on file with author.

⁴² Employing some of Carl Schmitt's insights, Giorgio Agamben has turned the Foucauldian characterization of sovereign power on its head, suggesting that sovereignty is actually defined through the state of exception, namely, the power to withdraw and suspend the law. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); and Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

⁴³ Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (eds), Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), pp. 87–104.

⁴⁴ Thus, governing in modern societies is “undertaken by a multiplicity of authorities and agencies, employing a variety of techniques and forms of knowledge that seek to shape conduct by working through our desires, aspirations, interests and beliefs, for definite but shifting ends and with a diverse set of relatively unpredictable consequences, effects and outcomes.” Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (Sage Publications, 1999), p. 11.

⁴⁵ Thus, governing in modern societies is “undertaken by a multiplicity of authorities and agencies, employing a variety of techniques and forms of knowledge that seek to shape conduct by working through our desires, aspirations, interests and beliefs, for definite but shifting ends and with a diverse set of relatively unpredictable consequences, effects and outcomes.” Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (Sage Publications, 1999), pp. 19–20.

⁴⁶ My analysis intimates, however, that a rigid distinction among sovereign, disciplinary, and biopower cannot be sustained. For instance, controlling apparatuses and practices operating by and through sovereign power continue to have a disciplinary component within them, while there is almost always a trace of sovereign violence within practices that operate by disciplining the inhabitants.

⁴⁷ Despite the difficulty of sustaining the distinction among sovereign, disciplinary, and biopower, the emphasis of one mode of power and the de-emphasis of the other reflect important differences in the methods used to manage a population and therefore the distinction is crucial. A politics of life is ultimately very different from a politics of death and must—necessarily—be maintained through forms of control operating in the service of disciplinary and biopower.

⁴⁸ Over the years, schools, and particularly universities, were sites of Palestinian resistance, and Israel did not hesitate to shut down educational institutions for extended periods. Sarah Graham-Brown, Education, Repression, Liberation: Palestinians (London: World University Service, 1984).

⁴⁹ Foucault, Power/Knowledge, op. cit., pp. 107–108. Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control”, OCTOBER 59 (Winter 1992), pp. 3–7.

⁵⁰ For an analysis of settlements and settlers as civilian apparatuses of control, consult Rafi Segal and Eyal Weizman, A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture (London: Verso, 2003), and Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation (New York: Verso, 2007).

⁵¹ Meron Benvenisti and Shlomo Khayat, The West Bank and Gaza Atlas (Jerusalem: The Jerusalem Post, 1987), pp. 112–113; Roy, op. cit., pp. 175–181; Lein, op. cit., p. 18.

⁵² The term “structure” is not used here in its rigid totalizing sense. The structure of the occupation is not external to the everyday reality in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and is therefore tenuous, diverse, and changing. By highlighting a number of its components, however, I hope to uncover the way power has been organized in the territories while simultaneously showing that power creates its own vulnerabilities.

⁵³ Gordon, Israel's Occupation, op. cit.

⁵⁴ Coordinator of Government Operations in the Administered Territories, Three Years of Military Government, 1967–1970 (Tel-Aviv: Ministry of Defense, 1970), p. 4.

⁵⁵ Black and Morris, op. cit., pp. 261–262.

⁵⁶ One major operation, which was in many respects exceptional in the degree of violence employed, was Israel's assault on Fatah and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) armed resistance in the Gaza Strip's refugee camps during 1971. A fence was erected to surround the region, and Israeli troops, working closely with the Shabak and Palestinian collaborators, combed the area for “wanted” men. The men and their families were rounded up, and approximately 12,000 inhabitants were sent to the remote Abu Zneima detention center on the coast of the Sinai Peninsula. An estimated 2,000 houses were demolished in various refugee camps in order to widen roads and create fields of fire. These demolitions displaced, again, over 15,000 refugees. Between July and December 1971, Israeli troops killed or captured 742 Palestinian fedayin (the name of the Palestinian guerillas, which means self-sacrifice in Arabic). Black and Morris, op. cit., p. 262; Roy, op. cit., p. 105.

⁵⁷ Books were disqualified either due to the promotion of Palestinian nationalist aspirations or due to anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish vitriol. The books are listed in military order 107 from August 27, 1967, which states that “This lists 55 books which are banned from being taught in schools. These include Arabic language books, history, geography, sociology and philosophy books.”

⁵⁸ Graham-Brown, op. cit., p. 77.

⁵⁹ Moshe Ma'oz, Palestinian Leadership on the West Bank: The Changing Role of the Arab Mayors under Jordan and Israel (London: Frank Cass, 1984), p. 72.

⁶⁰ Schiff and Ya'ari, op. cit., pp. 223–225. For other attempts to create religious divisions see Salim Tamari, “Eyeless in Judea: Israel's Strategy of Collaborators and Forgeries,” Middle East Report 164–165, May–August 1990, pp. 39–44.

⁶¹ Coordinator of Government Operations in the Administered Territories, Two Years of Military Government, op. cit., pp. 10–11, 39.

⁶² Roy, op. cit., p. 222.

⁶³ Central Bureau of Statistics, National Accountability: Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip, 1968–1993, publication 1012 (Tel Aviv: Central Bureau of Statistics, 1996), p. 20 [in Hebrew].

⁶⁴ Raphael Meron, Economic Development in Judea-Samaria and the Gaza District, Economic Growth and Structural Change, 1970–1980 (Jerusalem: Bank of Israel Research Department, 1983), p. 6.

⁶⁵ Central Bureau of Statistics, op. cit., p. 125.

⁶⁶ Yehezkel Lein, Builders of Zion: Human Rights Violations of Palestinians from the Occupied Territories Working in Israel and the Settlements (Jerusalem: B'tselem, 1999), p. 8.

⁶⁷ United Nations, “Report of the Secretary-General, Development and International Economic Co-Operation: Living Conditions of the Palestinian People in the Occupied Arab Territories,” A/35/533, October 17, 1980.

⁶⁸ Central Bureau of Statistics, op. cit., p. 18.

⁶⁹ Michel Foucault, “Afterword: The Subject and Power,” in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 208–226.

⁷⁰ Central Bureau of Statistics, op. cit., p. 17.

⁷¹ Central Bureau of Statistics, op. cit., pp. 86, 105.

⁷² Central Bureau of Statistics, op. cit., pp. 86, 105.

⁷³ Lev Grinberg, HaHistadrut Meal Hakol [The Histadrut Above All] (Jerusalem: Nevo, 1993).

⁷⁴ The Palestinian laborers also did not receive the same benefits granted to Israelis, such as bonuses for seniority, and were not incorporated into the Israeli social safety net, which offers Israeli citizens a variety of social security allowances.

⁷⁵ Emanuel Farjoun, “Palestinian Workers in Israel – A Reserve Army of Labor,” Khamsin 7, pp. 107–143.

⁷⁶ Roy, op. cit., p. 218.

⁷⁷ O. A. Hamed and R. A. Shaban, “One-Sided Customs and Monetary Union: The Case of the West Bank and Gaza Strip under Israeli Occupation” in S. Fischer, D. Rodrik and E. Tuma (eds), The Economics of Middle East Peace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), pp. 117–148; I. Diwan and R. A. Shaban, Development under Adversity? The Palestinian Economy in Transition (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2002), pp. 3–4.

⁷⁸ Lein, Builders of Zion, op. cit., p. 27.

⁷⁹ Salim Tamari, “Building Other People's Homes: The Palestinian Peasant's Household and Work in Israel,” Journal of Palestine Studies 11:1 (1981), p. 33.

⁸⁰ Joel S. Migdal, Palestinian Society and Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 62.

⁸¹ On July 19, 1967, Israel organized a conference for the mukhtars in Nablus, where they were “warned that they would be punished if foreigners or terrorists would be found in their villages and if they distribute the communist party's paper Al-Itihad.” Each village mukhtar was paid 75 Israeli pounds a month, while the second mukhtar in the same village was paid 50. Michael Shashar, The Seventh Day War: The Diary of the Military Government in Judea and Samaria (June-December 1967) (Tel-Aviv: Sifriat Poalim, 1997), pp. 105, 161 [in Hebrew]. See also Military Order 176, which authorizes the military commander to dismiss any mukhtar.

⁸² Schiff and Ya'ari, op. cit., p. 91.

⁸³ Mitchell, op. cit., p. 93.

⁸⁴ Hiltermann, op. cit., p. 8.

⁸⁵ Schiff and Ya'ari, op. cit., pp. 82–83.

⁸⁶ Surely other social processes weakened the traditional elite, some of which began before Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. These include greater emphasis on the importance of education for both men and women, the impact of social displacement, and the need to make economic readjustments. See Don Peretz, “Palestinian Social Stratification: The Political Implications”, Journal of Palestine Studies 7:1 (Autumn 1997), pp. 48–74.

⁸⁷ Hiltermann, op. cit., p. 8.

⁸⁸ Central Bureau of Statistics, op. cit., p. 135.

⁸⁹ Migdal, op. cit., p. 67.

⁹⁰ Sheila Ryan, “Israeli Economic Policy in the Occupied Areas: Foundations of a New Imperialism”, MERIP 24 (January 1974), pp. 3–24.

⁹¹ “Israel Restructures West Bank Economy, Interview with A. R. Husseini,” Middle East Report 60 (September 1977), pp. 21–23.

⁹² Benvenisti, The West Bank Data Project, 1986 Report, op. cit., p. 10.

⁹³ Benvenisti, The West Bank Data Project, 1986 Report, op. cit., pp. 8–9.

⁹⁴ Neve Gordon, “From Colonization to Separation: Exploring the Structure of Israel's Occupation,” Third World Quarterly 29:1 (2008), forthcoming.

⁹⁵ The colonial enterprise is, to be sure, a multifaceted and complex phenomenon and cannot be defined in one sentence or passage. For an analysis of the different dimensions and types of the colonial project, see Gershon Shafir, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

⁹⁶ Meron Benvenisti, Intimate Enemies: Jews and Arabs in a Shared Land (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995). See also, in this context, Amira Hass, Drinking the Sea at Gaza: Days and Nights in a Land under Siege (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1996); Edward Said, Peace and its Discontents (New York: Vintage, 1996); Graham Usher, Dispatches from Palestine: The Rise and Fall of the Oslo Peace Process (London: Pluto Press, 1999); Neve Gordon, “Outsourcing Violations: The Israeli Case,” Journal of Human Rights 1:3 (2002), pp. 321–337.

⁹⁷ See Hajjar, Courting Conflict, op. cit., and David Kretzmer, The Occupation of Justice: the Supreme Court of Israel and the Occupied Territories (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2002).

⁹⁸ B'tselem, “The Palestinian Economy During the Period of the Oslo Accords: 1994–2000”, < http://www.btselem.org>.