Summary
In Ilana Feldman’s account of Gaza, the dynamic by which questions of a government’s legitimacy, consent and coercion remained suspended rather than resolved, permitting rule to persist under fraught and uncertain conditions in both the British Mandate and the Egyptian Administration (Governing Gaza, PDF p.34-37).
Details
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Bureaucratic authority and the legitimacy of a specific government need to be distinguished, and held apart by government work; in Gaza any sustained claim to legitimacy was almost certain to fail, so gestures toward legitimacy were localized, often aborted and never dominant (PDF p.34-35).
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Feldman contrasts Gaza with Lisa Wedeen’s Syria: no spectacular declaration of support was demanded in Gaza, and rule operated not through an absence of belief but through a lack of attention to the regime (PDF p.35).
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Tactical government provided the mechanism: deferral put legitimacy aside to a vaguely imagined future time of Palestinian self-determination, and distraction averted attention to the mundane and the day to day, so the instability of government was mobilized to promote its persistence (PDF p.37).
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Chapter 6 adds cracks in abeyance: moments when people connected service problems to fundamental questions about government’s character and legitimacy, and the 1936 strike, when the stakes of participating in daily government work had to be confronted head-on, making abeyance most fragile (PDF p.177 / printed p.160, PDF p.184 / printed p.167).
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Chapter 7 adds propriety as a mechanism: the language of propriety displaced the site of control to the seemingly distinct realm of society, so demands could appear social rather than governmental, distracting attention from the regimes imposing them (PDF p.208 / printed p.191).
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Chapter 7 adds education as a case in which abeyance failed: distraction and deferral gave way to direct political challenge in schools under the Mandate, and after World War II abeyance was no longer a sufficient technique, the British giving up on their civic project and the Mandate as a whole (PDF p.227 / printed p.210).
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Chapter 8 adds the limits: tactical government could not work indefinitely, and under the Israeli occupation legitimacy could not be held in abeyance in the same manner, since Israel claimed the land itself; the U.S. occupation of Iraq likewise put legitimacy front and center, so abeyance was not entirely available (PDF p.239 / printed p.222, PDF p.242-243 / printed p.225-226).