Summary
Ilana Feldman’s term for the governing style of both the British Mandate and the Egyptian Administration in Gaza: government focused on coping with current conditions rather than long-range planning, acting on partial understandings with limited resources and tenuous authority, and thereby managing endemic crisis and holding questions of legitimacy in Abeyance (Governing Gaza, PDF p.20, p.35-37).
Details
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Tactical government shifts in response to crisis, often works without long-term planning, and presumes little stability in governing conditions; through it the crises endemic in Gaza in 1917-67 were managed, contributing to the tenacity of government despite its instabilities (PDF p.20).
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Feldman draws the term from Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life, expanding his account of tactics as the preserve of the weak to governmental practice; the distinction from strategic government concerns scale of action, scope of imagination, range of planning and stability of resources, not purposefulness (PDF p.35-36).
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Neither regime had time, space or money to settle in Gaza, budgets were severely constrained, policies were uncertain, and both were governments supposed to end with no clear path to an end, so planning for an imaginable future was never possible (PDF p.36-37).
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Its disadvantage was unpredictability: tactical more than strategic, the governments survived by in effect relinquishing control over their future (PDF p.31).
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Chapter 4 ties tactical government to technical competence: in Gaza large-scale government was neither possible nor often sought, government coped and made do, and “the skills of the bricoleur, not the expert, that were required” (PDF p.111-112 / printed p.94-95).
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Chapter 5 shows tactical government in Crisis services: both governments wanted not to be overinvolved — fearing overcommitment and overspending — yet needed involvement for fear of a population out of control, of moral disintegration and of political challenge, and tactical government was the means through which these contradictory impulses were managed; housing in particular moved from need to service to regulatory domain without any formal decision (PDF p.159-164 / printed p.142-147).
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Chapter 6 shows tactical government in Everyday services: jurisdictional tussles over which part of government should provide which services redirected attention from legitimacy, and the 1936 Gaza City Council decision to resume water, cleaning and lighting during the general strike — presented as a bulwark against central government taking over the municipality — kept services working and averted a crisis of abeyance (PDF p.177 / printed p.160, PDF p.182-184 / printed p.165-167).
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Chapter 7’s conclusion: control and propriety were the most difficult feature of tactical government, demanding precisely the over-involvement government in Gaza generally struggled to avoid, and it was in the expansive community services that the most sustained resistance emerged (PDF p.235 / printed p.218).
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Chapter 8: tactical government depended on exceptionality and on keeping spaces beyond service alive, but offered no horizon; it could help manage the moment while leaving the future very uncertain, and the settlement, road, land and water projects of the Israeli occupation exhibit none of its restricted scope, scale and imagination (PDF p.238-239 / printed p.221-222, PDF p.245 / printed p.228).