Legacies of British Empire and Emergency Law

Yael Berda's new book puts Israel's management of Palestinians into perspective

After two weeks of traveling, including two fantastic workshops in Paris, I’m back on my blog again with a gigantic pile of books to review and discuss. Thanks for your support!

Yael Berda, Colonial Bureaucracy and Contemporary Citizenship: Legacies of Race and Emergency in the Former British Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2023)

On June 9, Yael Berda and Dahlia Scheindlin published an important piece in Foreign Affairs under the provocative title “Israel’s Annexation of the West Bank Has Already Begun.” Their focus was on the Israeli government’s move to place the West Bank under civilian authority rather than military rule — a decision with wide-ranging implications for international law and for the lives of both Palestinians and Israeli settlers that might easily escape scrutiny:

This administrative change equates to declaring Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank, a violation of the UN Charter’s prohibition against territorial conquest. Three leading Israeli civil and human rights organizations have insisted that the bureaucratic shift amounts to the de jure annexation of the West Bank. The transfer shatters the illusion that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank is temporary; it further entrenches an unequal, two-tiered legal system for Israelis and Palestinians; and it solidifies permanent Israeli control over the West Bank.

It’s an important addendum to and another step along the path of the argument I made earlier this year along with Shibley Telhami, Nathan Brown and Michael Barnett about the consolidation of Israel’s “One State Reality,” one more piece of evidence for an already overwhelmingly apparent and deeply unjust reality. Michael Koplow, a sincere two-state advocate, recently put the implications of such moves succinctly here:

What this Israeli government, in a faster and more comprehensive manner than any before it, is doing is proving the truth of the one-state reality the authors describe, and hastening the day in which their prescription becomes a fait accompli as well.

At any rate, I sat down with Berda and Scheindlin to talk about their article and broader research agendas for the final episode of the 12th season of our podcast; you can listen to my conversation with them here (start at 36:37).

And now, let’s talk about Berda’s new book.

Scheindlin and Berda’s important article made me move Yael Berda’s new book Colonial Bureaucracy and Contemporary Citizenship up to the top of my daunting reading list. It’s a really impressive achievement, digging deep into the lasting bureaucratic and administrative legacies of British empire for Israel’s contemporary governance of Palestinians. Berda’s important previous book, Living Emergency, rigorously documented Israel’s use of emergency law, the permit regime and checkpoints to control Palestinian movement in, to and from the West Bank. Colonial Bureaucracy and Contemporary Citizenship widens the lens, placing Israel and Palestine within the context of a British empire which developed mechanisms for managing subordinate populations across the globe, with particular attention to cases of post-colonial partition such as India and Cyprus. This historical and comparative lens helps to illuminate the origins of a full range of policies and practices by which Israel controls, surveils and regulates the lives of the Palestinians under its effective control.

Berda’s account is deeply embedded within the large interdisciplinary critical literature on the British empire in general and on the Palestine mandate specifically, placing the Palestine mandate solidly within its late-colonial context and the well-developed sets of practices the British brought to management of the nonwhite populations they ruled (Lord Cromer’s Egypt plays an unsurprisingly important cameo role). The comparative lens reveals fascinating commonalities in the regulation of populations by the newly created states — and the long-lasting institutional impact of decisions often made on an ad hoc basis by colonial bureaucrats. Critically, she argues that these colonial practices carried over — sometimes formally and sometimes informally — into the newly independent states; in Israel, she notes, “colonial emergency laws were the baseplate of a military government that imposed authority on the part of the Palestinian population that had remained in what became Israel”. All of these new governments placed a high priority on managing the mobility of and maintaining control over suspect populations, as well as on preventing the return of refugees. In the case of Israel, she argues, those patterns and practices extended to its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza following 1967.

Berda emphasizes bureaucracy and the ambiguities enabled by emergency law in her account of the classification and regulatory practices of the new states. She leaves little doubt about the centrality of racial classifications in these practices, with racial hierarchy informing the unequal attentions of the state. The book “couples the bureaucratic work of population classification according to suspicion with the bureaucratic work of ordering mobility through spacial-legal means.” Race, she observes, was “the relational marker that made the colonies ‘safe’ from the ‘dangers of universalism’ by enabling the differentiation between citizens and subjects” (it’s hard not to read “the dangers of universalism” through the lens of today’s debates; I suspect she would like us to make that inference). It was not quite as simple as the pure racialization of all Arabs — Berda carefully traces the “degrees of suspicion” with which Israel viewed different segments of the Palestinian population, gradations based on social class, personal relationships, intelligence collection, and much more. Those classifications allowed the bureaucracy to “match” specific forms of governance, surveillance, and control to specific populations based on their perceived risk. I saw a lot of James Scott’s treatment of “legibility” here, but to be fair I tend to see Scott’s treatment of legibility and the state most everywhere these days.

Much of Berda’s attention goes to the practices of bureaucracy, both colonial and postcolonial, under the state of emergency. Drawing on a wide range of theorists, from Arendt to Nasser Hussain to my GW colleague Ilana Feldman, she highlights the tactical adaptability of a bureaucracy operating under conditions of endless emergency law. Inheritance of colonial bureaucracy and its civil service which developed and “operated within a political system of pronounced racial hierarchy.. a perpetual state of emergency, uncertain domains of jurisdiction justified by that racial difference, and the perceived threat it posed to the maintenance of colonial rule.” Looking closely at the writings of British colonial officials, she identifies five “organizing principles” of this “hybrid bureaucracy”: racial hierarchy, secrecy, wide discretion and administrative flexibility, personalism, and the systemic creation of exceptions…. [which] roped subjects into the patchwork of decrees and ad hoc arrangements that engendered procedural violence and permeated social life through the grid of emergency laws.”

In practice, these classification processes and regulations created a dense web of bureaucratic measures governing Palestinians living under military rule, first inside of Israel and later in the post-1967 occupied Palestinian territories. Preventive detention and other extreme restrictions of mobility were very much part of that — but so were more mundane parts of life such as applications for passports and licenses, permission to travel within the country, or certifications of good behavior for employment. Berda traces direct lines from colonial practices to the post-independence permit and identity regimes used to govern the mobility of Palestinians inside of Israel, prevent the return of refugees, and then to control the occupied Palestinian territories. She emphasizes that this was a messy affair in practice, with state officials and police and local populations engaged in ongoing negotiations and every detail of the census intensely politicized on all sides. But that messiness was, in a way, the point.

Colonial Bureaucracy and Contemporary Citizenship is a strong work of comparative imperial history, theoretically grounded and empirically rich, which should be of interest to a wide range of historically-minded readers. Those readers primarily interested in the specifics of contemporary Israel and Palestine might want to start with Living Emergency; the new book might be understood in part as a prequel to that important earlier book. I can’t really judge her analysis of Cyprus and India, but I certainly learned a lot from them and especially appreciated the discussions of the diffusion of ideas and practices across the British empire. And the historical perspective helps to contextualize her and Scheindlin’s analysis of the critical importance of the extension of civil law into the occupied Palestinian territories.