Book review

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/arabstudquar.38.4.0676
• Pages: 676278-679
• Published date: 01 October 2016
• Date: 01 October 2016
• Author: Fouad Moughrabi

www.plutojournals.com/asq/

Fouad Moughrabi, Emeritus Professor of Political Science, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga,

USA.

REVIEW SYMPOSIUM

Fouad Moughrabi, Symposium Editor

Elia Zureik. Israel’s Colonial Project in Palestine: Brutal Pursuit.

London and New York: Routledge, 2016. 278 pages. Paperback

$52.95

Fouad Moughrabi

If there is any doubt that a paradigm shift has occurred in the discourse on Israel/

Palestine, professor Zureik’s brilliant new book puts it to rest. This work takes us

back to what the core of the conflict is really all about, namely, one that pits a rapa-

cious settler colonial movement against a native population deeply attached to its

land and history. Gone is the discourse of partition that was supposed to produce

a two-state settlement. This reframing serves to set the historical record straight

and contributes to a clearer understanding of the problem.

Zureik looks at the key foundational concerns of this colonial movement,

namely, the dispossession of the indigenous population through violence, repres-

sive state laws and practices, and racialized forms of monitoring. These laws and

practices, according to him, extend from informal to technologically sophisticated

formal means of monitoring and control. The author discusses two key elements

of control: one is the relationship between colonialism and what Michel Foucault

calls “biopolitics” which involves both racism and surveillance, a central tool of

governance. The second is the place of territory in the exercise of surveillance and

control. Relying upon Patrick Wolfe’s seminal work, Zureik shows how territori-

ality determines individual (im)mobility, access to land, use of time, economic

viability, and indeed life chances. The author highlights how “biopolitics and ter-

ritoriality intersect at various levels to advance the state’s racialized agenda and

how they are framed by Western-based colonial law to facilitate the seizure of

territory, privatization of communal land, dispossession of indigenous people, and

population transfer.”

To my knowledge, this is the first major attempt to situate the discussion of

surveillance and discipline as a key instrument of the colonial experience in con-

trol of territory and population management. More than any other major work, this