Summary
Feldman’s term, in Chapter 7 of Governing Gaza, for services such as education and religious affairs that elaborated civic ideals, defined public mores and policed propriety for a collective — but bounded — client, distinguished by religion, nationality or refugee status, and that projected their vision toward a future civic life (Governing Gaza, PDF p.207-209 / printed p.190-192).
Details
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Community services addressed government concerns about control, political threat and security without (often) employing actual force, and made it ever more difficult to disentangle state from society, even as they relied on the apparent solidity of that distinction (PDF p.207 / printed p.190).
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Their space was the civic: agreement that civic life entailed participation promoting an active citizenry coexisted with deep disagreement about what such a public should look like, and the public had to be continually formed (PDF p.207 / printed p.190).
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After Pierre Mayol, the civic entailed obligation and recognition through propriety, which “represses what is ‘not proper,’ ‘what one does not do’” and also articulates what is proper; civic associations, regulated and surveilled, offered a space for the management of the “conduct of conduct” of Gazans by Gazans (PDF p.207-208 / printed p.190-191).
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The language of propriety displaced the site of control to the seemingly distinct realm of society, so demands could appear social rather than governmental — a working of Abeyance that was never perfect, since community members also brought government in as an ally in policing society (PDF p.208-209 / printed p.191-192).
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Unlike Crisis services and Everyday services, community services projected forward to an imagined better society, which, under Tactical government with its shortened vision, gave them an additional layer of uncertainty (PDF p.209 / printed p.192).
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Chapter 7’s education section (PDF p.221-235 / printed p.204-218) gives community services their fullest case: Mandate schooling promoted a social, apolitical citizenship uncoupled from the national, while the Administration promoted the nation and deferred citizenship to a future Palestine — “good citizens [muwatinin salahin] when they return to their country” (PDF p.231 / printed p.214) — and teachers in both periods taught a contesting second curriculum, so education was the domain in which Abeyance most plainly failed.
Related pages
Governing Gaza, Crisis services, Everyday services, Supreme Muslim Council, Society for the Preservation of Public Morals, Abeyance