On the Structural Role and Coming End of “The Occupation”

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/arabstudquar.38.4.0688
• Published date: 01 October 2016
• Date: 01 October 2016
• Pages: 688-693
• Author: Adi Ophir

688 ARAB STUDIES QUARTERLY

www.plutojournals.com/asq/

On the Structural Role and Coming End of “The Occupation”

Adi Ophir

If one could measure scholarly interest in given regions by the ratio of the number

of texts produced per capita in the researched region, and if the competition would

be limited to the last three decades, I bet Israel/Palestine would rip the first prize.

Elia Zureik is a great surveyor of this academic production (in English only, how-

ever). He covers scholarship in numerous domains, written by Palestinians,

Israelis, and international scholars alike. Although he is clearly—and rightfully—

biased toward postcolonial and Foucauldian theoretical perspectives, he is open to

learn from anyone, even from the most conservative, positivist, and ideologically

driven Zionist scholars, and he knows how to integrate their works to form a

coherent synthesis. He reads the latter straightforwardly, for their findings, but

also symptomatically, because the knowledge and blindness they produce is part

of the phenomenon to be explained—Israel’s distinct form of settler colonialism.

Noting carefully important theoretical and ideological shifts in the history of this

vast field of knowledge, Zureik manages to work his way through numerous stud-

ies and to weave them into his account of the ongoing Zionist settler-colonial

project. Zureik focuses on five aspects of the history and present of the Zionist

enterprise and its State apparatuses: colonization, the surveillance and biopolitical

apparatuses, the economy of violence and catastrophization, and the Internet as a

new ground for oppression and resistance. Together these form a sophisticated and

certainly the most comprehensive account of the Israeli rule of the Palestinian

people and territories.

One of many things Zureik’s great synthesis helps us understand, but which the

author does not spell out explicitly, is the structural function of “the occupation”

within the present formation of the Israeli regime. This is the question I would like

to address below, looking at the way this discursive-military-legal construct gov-

erns the deployment of the State apparatuses and technologies of power Zureik

describes and analyzes, and determines the division of labor and coordination

among them.1

Israel’s policies with respect to Palestine and the Palestinians seem to be plagued

by a contradiction or at least a real tension between two divergent projects: on the

one hand, a project of expansion that brings relatively small groups of settlers in

contact and conflict with a much larger native population; on the other hand, a

majoritarian project, the struggle to secure a clear Jewish majority in the colonized

Adi Ophir, Professor Emeritus, Tel Aviv University, Israel; Mellon Visiting Professor, The Cogut

Center for the Humanities and the Program for Middle East Studies, Brown University, Providence,

RI, USA.