Governing Gaza

Summary

A historical ethnography of the civil service in Gaza during the British Mandate (1917-48) and the Egyptian Administration (1948-67), arguing that bureaucratic authority in Gaza was produced reiteratively through filing and the repetitive habits of civil servants, and that government persisted, despite lacking legitimacy or a stable state ground, through Tactical government that held questions of legitimacy in Abeyance (Governing Gaza, PDF p.18-20, p.31-37).

What the file is

Governing Gaza: Bureaucracy, Authority, and the Work of Rule, 1917-1967, by Ilana Feldman, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2008. 343 PDF pages, about 131,056 words in the text copy supplied. Access basis given with the source: open-license (OA via OAPEN; licence not stated in scan). The text copy carries PDF page markers and is clean for prose; the three maps (PDF p.15-17) and the three figures in Chapter 2 (PDF p.57, p.63, p.66) are images whose captions are legible in the text copy but whose image content is not, and figures and the 2½ percent market fee on PDF p.66 were checked against the original. Printed page numbers run seventeen behind PDF pages throughout the range read so far (Introduction begins printed p.1 on PDF p.18; Chapter 4 begins printed p.91 on PDF p.108). PDF p.79 is a blank page, checked against the original. Figure 4 (PDF p.68) is a petition document image whose caption is legible in the text copy but whose small internal text is not. Figures 5-7 (PDF p.156, p.158, p.167) are photographs — milk distribution at Khan Yunis, rations distribution, and Khan Younis refugee camp in 1954 — whose captions and credits were checked against the original. PDF p.139 is a blank page, checked against the original. Figure 8 (PDF p.176) is a handwritten Arabic report of a Deir Belah village council meeting, and Figure 9 (PDF p.187) is a 1956 photograph of a water pump in Shati refugee camp; both captions and credits were checked against the original. Figures 10-11 (PDF p.229, p.230) are photographs — teaching in a refugee camp (AFSC archives) and a tent school in Shati refugee camp in the 1950s (UNRWA photo archive); both captions and credits were checked against the original. PDF p.253 is a blank page, checked against the original. In the Notes read in part 6, several apparent slips were checked against the original and are the book’s own as printed: the January 14, 1992 letter date in Chapter 2 n.50 (PDF p.271, in a 1922 discussion), the 9 April 1848 Staff Notice date in Chapter 2 n.73 (PDF p.272), the doubled “known known” in Chapter 6 n.51 (PDF p.300), “James Holtson” for Holston in Chapter 7 n.57 (PDF p.306), and the 1959 dates on the Khan Yunis mabahith correspondence in Chapter 7 n.49-50 (PDF p.306) in a sequence concerning the 1953 Society of the Followers of Sunna. PDF p.313 is a blank page, checked against the original, as is PDF p.342. The Bibliography (PDF p.314-329 / printed p.297-312) is organised as Archives and Libraries, Government Offices and Private Papers, Government Publications, United Nations Publications, Periodicals, and Books and Articles (Abdel-Malek to Yurchak). The Index (PDF p.330-341 / printed p.313-324) gives printed-page and note locators, with illustrations in italics. PDF p.343 is the back cover / cataloguing page, giving the author’s George Washington University affiliation and the Library of Congress data, including ISBN-13 978-0-8223-4222-9 (cloth) and 978-0-8223-4240-3 (paperback).

Section by section

• Front matter (PDF p.1-9): cover, title page (Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2008), copyright page, dedication to the author’s mother Marcia Feldman and grandmother Sylvia Smith, and contents: Acknowledgments ix; Note on Transliteration xiii; 1. Introduction 1; Part One, Producing Bureaucratic Authority — 2. Ruling Files 31, 3. On Being a Civil Servant 63, 4. Civil Service Competence and the Course of a Career 91; Part Two, Tactical Practice and Government Work — 5. Service in Crisis 123, 6. Servicing Everyday Life 155, 7. Community Services and Formations of Civic Life 189; 8. Conclusion 219; Notes 237; Bibliography 297; Index 313.

• Acknowledgments (PDF p.10-13 / printed p.ix-xii): the book rests on tape-recorded conversations with retired civil servants and other Gazans who cannot be named under a privacy commitment, research assistants Emad Karam and Mushir Amer, and archival research at Dar al-Watha’iq and Dar al-Kutub in Cairo, the Israel State Archives and the Jewish National Library in Jerusalem, the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, the National Archives/PRO in London, the American Friends Service Committee Archives in Philadelphia and the United Nations Archives in New York, and in Gaza City offices of the Palestinian Housing Ministry, Awqaf Ministry, Comptroller General’s Office, Pensions and Social Security Administration, ‘Omari Mosque library and Gaza City Municipality. Some ideas were first published in 2005 in Comparative Studies in Society and History 47, 4: 863-91. Funding and intellectual formation are recorded in the reading notes, including a Michigan doctorate in anthropology and history and Zachary Lockman at NYU’s Kevorkian Center.

• Note on Transliteration (PDF p.14 / printed p.xiii): a modified IJMES system excluding diacritical marks; spoken Arabic transliterated according to local pronunciation.

• Maps (PDF p.15-17): Map 1, Mandate Palestine’s administrative boundaries; Map 2, detail from a Survey of Palestine map of the Gaza area; Map 3, the 1949 Armistice Lines (UN no. 547.1); all redrawn by Hamdi Attia from New York Public Library / UN sources.

• Chapter 1, Introduction: Government Practice and the Place of Gaza (PDF p.18-45 / printed p.1-28): Gaza, often described as on the verge of being ungovernable, has had a surfeit of government, and everyday government work continues in crisis — after 1948 providing daily rations to refugees became everyday work, while in the 1920s electricity was not part of that field. To understand the Nakba of 1948, the mechanisms through which loss was managed — an ethics of care, service bureaucracies, new documentation — matter alongside the political facts. Part One examines the production of authority through filing repetitions, accumulation of documents and civil servants’ habits; Part Two examines tactical government in services such as shelter, utilities and education. Fieldwork: two years in Gaza (1998 and 1999) in the latter Oslo period, archival work also in Cairo and Jerusalem, further research in London and the US and returns in the summers of 2003, 2004 and 2005, mainly with retired civil servants and in the Pensions Administration, Gaza City Municipality, Awqaf Administration and Housing Ministry; the post-Oslo order is described at PDF p.21-22, including permits separating Gaza and the West Bank, aid-funded development after the Palestinian Authority was established in 1994, closure reducing work in Israel, and natural resources disproportionately available to the eight thousand Jewish settlers in Gaza, as printed.

• Chapter 1 — Ruling Histories (PDF p.22-27 / printed p.5-10): mandates, authorized by the League of Nations and designed to end, were a distinct colonial form proceeding from a sacred trust of civilization; sovereignty was never settled, and in Palestine Britain’s dual obligation — to the native population and to promoting a Jewish national home — made the Mandate’s legitimacy a poor foundation, with distraction and deferral crucial to its government. The 1948 war transformed Gaza: the Israel-Egypt armistice defined the provisional Gaza Strip, twenty-eight miles long and six miles across at its widest, whose prewar population of eighty thousand was joined by around a quarter million refugees (PDF p.24). Egypt, which never claimed sovereignty and formally supported the All-Palestine Government, administered the Strip until 1967 except for a four-month Israeli occupation in 1956-57, presenting itself as caretaker preserving a separate Palestinian space; its second, Nasser-era period brought expanded education, an expanded civil service, civil-service housing and ubiquitous security services, the Legislative Council (established 1957) and the Arab National Union (established 1959, the only party allowed), and, in 1964, formal though not practical PLO authority, the Palestine Liberation Army and, in 1965, military conscription (PDF p.25-26). From 1950 Egypt shared administrative responsibility with UNRWA, which, because refugees formed a large majority, governed Gaza as much as Egypt did (PDF p.26-27).

• Chapter 1 — Analytics of Government, Reiterative authority and tactical government (PDF p.27-37 / printed p.10-20): colonial rule is approached through its paradox of consent and coercion, citing John Comaroff; the Egyptian Administration is not subsumed under colonialism, not least because Gazans do not consider it to have been colonial. Three questions structure the book: how governing authority is produced and reproduced, how government persists under untenable conditions, and what government does. Authority, following Richard Sennett, is an ongoing process enacted through practice, and in Gaza, where a claim to national authenticity could not ground authority — Michael Herzfeld is cited on authenticity and intransigence — bureaucracy produced its own authority circularly through the reiterative networks of filing and the repetitive habits of civil servants. Repetition in bureaucracy is highlighted, not obscured: files must appear like other files. Bureaucratic authority is distinguished from the legitimacy of a specific government; in Gaza legitimacy questions were held in abeyance, by deferral to a future of Palestinian self-determination and by distraction to the mundane, a dynamic drawn in part from Lisa Wedeen on Syria and from Michel de Certeau on tactics. Both regimes were supposed to end, neither had a clear path to an end, budgets were severely constrained and policies uncertain, so government was tactical — coping rather than long-range planning, on partial understandings and limited resources.

• Chapter 1 — Governing Practices and the Shaping of Gaza, and the shape of the book (PDF p.38-45 / printed p.21-28): before 1948 Gaza City was a moderately prosperous administrative and commercial centre of a largely peasant district in crisis; its municipal council, established by the Ottomans in 1893 (as in Khan Yunis), operated under Ottoman rules until the 1934 Municipal Corporations Ordinance confirmed centralized approval of almost all municipal decisions, with mayors appointed from among the elected. Powerful families named are the Shawwa, Husseini and Sourani. Gaza was described by British and Palestinians alike as backward and neglected, its economy agricultural, Majdal known for weaving and Gaza City for soap and pottery. After 1948, dispossession, the refugee/native division, dangerous crossings of the armistice line, Egyptian suspicion, and, after a 1955 raid that killed Egyptian soldiers, the establishment of fida’iyyin units reshaped Gaza; expanded education and civil service opened social mobility, Gaza was designated a free-trade zone and became a tourist destination for Egyptians, yet an Egyptian report from 1959 calculated unemployment at 87 percent (PDF p.41, checked against the original). Services bind and produce places, people and government. The book’s sources are archival and ethnographic, its record expansive but incomplete — including a file in the Israel State Archives that appeared to be scooped-out trash from both regimes, preserved because whoever handled it recognized government documents — and its focus is middle- and low-level Gazan civil servants rather than British and Egyptian superiors or planners.

• Part One divider (PDF p.46-47): Producing Bureaucratic Authority.

• Chapter 2, Ruling Files (PDF p.48-66 / printed p.31-49; chapter continues in part 2): filing, in the Max Weber epigraph and in Feldman’s argument, is a quintessential feature of modern government; Mandate rule, building on Ottoman documentary scaffolding, was file heavy, and Egyptian administrators, trained under British rule and with their own documentary histories, proliferated documentation. Because filing conventions are general, the authority filing produces does not necessarily connect to a specific regime and can impart authority without conferring legitimacy; Carter Findley on nineteenth-century Ottoman disciplinary writing and Foucault on description as control and domination are cited. Archives work extractively on files, displacing them from their systems of practice and lessening their authority; Palestinians preserve deeds, keys and land registry documents from before 1948, while the Palestine Research Center seizure in Beirut and the Gazan Civil Servants’ Association’s destruction of its own records in 1967 show archival accumulation under violence. A file is defined as a compilation of documents in a network with horizontal and vertical relations; files are authoritative by compilation and accumulation, not by author, elegance or an authoritative original. Gaza has no national archives; Mandate documents, prepared for shipping to Britain but lost in the departure chaos, are largely in the Israel State Archives, and Egyptian records seized by Israel in 1956 and 1967 there were kept entire but uncatalogued and unclassified, were shut after another researcher sought sensitive Jordanian-equivalent papers, and survive in an in-between space (PDF p.52-54).

• Chapter 2 — Producing files: regulating resemblance, Egyptian style, personal form, limits of content (PDF p.54-64 / printed p.37-47): Mandate writing involved translation among English, Arabic and Hebrew and three governmental readers — local administrators, officials in Britain, and the League of Nations — while the Egyptian Administration answered to no larger body, the UN being a partner through UNRWA rather than a supervisor. The Chief Secretariat’s filing code, destroyed in the July 22, 1946 bombing of its King David Hotel offices in Jerusalem by Jewish militants, which took more than ninety lives, was restated in office orders regulating minute matters such as dating correspondence; uniformity made a document authoritative by resemblance of each to each, with no original, and also regulated content, as in the bar on distribution lists in letters to private individuals. Mandate files were built for conversation: folios carried formal discussion while the opening minutes carried casual, off-the-record commentary, cynicism and infighting, and that form policed what ideas could be entertained as policy. Egyptian preoccupation with writing style is shown in Majallat al-Muwazzafin’s 1956 article on memo literature, which made memo writing a sign of competence and a means of advancement and urged clear, precise Arabic. Civil servants writing about themselves — Administration-era promotion petitions by tax collector Musbah Ahmed, in service since 1943 and still Grade 3 while colleagues reached Grade 2, and by ‘Ali Taleb, in the Agricultural Administration since 1937, whose promotion was overtaken by the end of the Mandate (Musbah was promoted, ‘Ali was not, though backed by his superior) — followed a shared deferential style that called the Administration to its own principles of justice and equality. Content was also governed by procedure: Egyptian personnel files tracked marital status, children and, for men, wives because monthly allowances were calculated by family size, so children who reached majority simply disappeared from the files; police files, by contrast, included everything, and the Mabahith files of the Interior and Public Security Administration compiled incident, daily, weekly and monthly reports on public meetings, private gatherings, family conflicts, rumours and trivial movements alike, policing the possible through accumulation.

• Chapter 2 — Compiling categories and accumulating authority (PDF p.65-66 / printed p.48-49; continues): compilation also distinguished categories of people and place. Gaza occupies the periphery of Mandate-wide files, often a sentence or two on its backwardness, while Municipality and Local Government files — budget estimates, election regulations, citizen complaints, municipal ordinances — located Gaza in a hierarchy of rule and gave local conflict an arena, so files helped make Gaza as a place. Mandate government was highly centralized: Gaza ordinances on market fees (vendors charged a 5 percent tax on fruits and vegetables sold and purchasers 2½ percent, checked against the original at PDF p.66) and on polluting the public water supply, municipal budgets, and a shared municipal engineer for Gaza, Majdal, Khan Yunis, Beersheba and Faluja all required the chief secretary’s approval. Figure 3 is a petition from Gazans complaining about proposed water meters.

• Chapter 2 — Compiling categories, continued, and Access and Control, File Storage, Conclusion (PDF p.67-78 / printed p.50-61; chapter complete): local government files mark municipalities’ subordinate position and provide a venue and arbiter for local conflict, mostly usable by elites — in 1930 Gazan notables complained to the high commissioner about mayor Fahmi Husseini maintaining a private law practice — and the accumulation of charges and countercharges continually consolidates the category of the Gaza locality, vis-à-vis which government was always an outside party. Access and control: Mandate Secretariat files were top secret (British officers only, by hand, kept in a locked steel box or cupboard), secret (by rank, never by messenger) or open, distinctions that marked nationality, rank and job inside a non-monolithic civil service and a lurking uncertainty about civil servants’ nationalist loyalties; an Egyptian director of administrative affairs’ order barred employees receiving visitors or showing them any papers, making the direct superior responsible. Circulation was regulated so copies marked their original file, whole files were sent out only when typing a letter would be more work, and return dates and messenger instructions were specified; in 1960 the Gaza Executive Council mandated the Personal Investigation Bureau to centralise criminal records, forward capital and six-month-plus judgments, and issue certificates of conduct excluding overturned and short judgments. Storage: Mandate retention left decisions largely to clerks with officer approval, salvaged serviceable material and recorded destroyed or archived files on index cards; at the Mandate’s end, personnel files were sorted to an Accounts Clearance Office in Cyprus, to London, for destruction or to the UN Palestine Commission — plans the end-of-April 1948 chaos described by last chief secretary Henry Gurney left unexecuted — while the Egyptian Administration, which ended unplanned in June 1967, kept the Personal Investigation Bureau’s primary registers permanently and its certificate registers for two years. Conclusion: filing is a fully peopled regime that minimises its people’s apparent agency, files exercising authority that seems to refer only to other files, and the interactions among bureaucratic instruments consolidated ruling authority even as it may never have acquired legitimacy.

• Chapter 3, On Being a Civil Servant (PDF p.80-107 / printed p.63-90; chapter complete): civil servants (muwazzafin), institutionally distinguished from ‘ummal by monthly pay, a pension and association membership, occupy a fault line as local hires of a foreign regime who are also members of the governed community; their personnel authority, articulated through character and reputation, was explicitly distinguished from the government employing them, keeping authority distinct from legitimacy. Who counted was contentious — teachers, policemen, clerics, electricians and nurses as well as clerks — defined by ethic, style and benefits more than job type. On ‘Arif al-‘Arif’s figures the Gaza civil service in 1943 was 2,775 people, the bulk policemen, 162 of them English; under the Administration its ranks expanded as its salaries and status diminished. Feldman’s Reflective habit: habits of belief, formed in contemplation of duty, respectability and good and bad work, drawing on tape-recorded conversations whose narrative thinness on the Palestinian Authority and on native-refugee relations is itself analysed. Duty was concrete and instrumental — charity-like service to nation and community among the Mandate-era wealthy and the women teachers, duty to family among Administration-era entrants such as Ahmed Ismail, who submitted more than sixty applications to UNRWA and rose from labourer in a rations distribution centre to field distribution officer, and Da’ud Ahmed, for whom the job was to serve people, “not to control or humiliate them”. Respectability and etiquette produced authority and could bring advancement (Muhammad Ghazi) or its absence disgrace (Salim Rashid), while distinction created tension: service was supposed to be among equals, yet Hanan’s charity stance carried urban, north-south and anti-refugee superiority, junior employees resented senior indifference, and yet a civil servant was a prized marriage prospect while salaries held. Bad habits: Bseiso’s 1947 complaint about Sheikh Adel Shareef’s lateness and office entertaining; “routine” in Arabic as red tape obstructing citizens; and Wasta, in market inspector Bahat Hassan’s frank account of punishing only violators from weaker families than his own. Public complaint in al-Difa’ (May 1935, customs employees’ lateness), praise in Sawt al-‘Uruba (a Quaker volunteer’s five-minute Gaza paperwork against four days in Jordan), a 1945 land registry bribery complaint against Registrar of Lands Gaza and Chief Clerk Habib El-Sayegh, and a 1958 student complaint about teachers breaking the Ramadan fast — investigated as true, the explanation offered being that the teachers were Communists — show the public judging civil servants in the civil service’s own terms. Politics and the repose of habit: both regimes barred civil servants’ political activity, with no private realm for politics; Mandate civil servants coped by subterfuge (Hanan writing nationalist articles in her sister’s name) and disassociation (“We never felt we were working for the government”, Yasmin), the 1956 Israeli occupation a moment of rupture when many stayed home. Under the Administration the Muslim Brotherhood (banned after 1948, legalised 1952, repressed after the 1954 attempt on Nasser’s life) and the Communist Party (crackdown 1958-59 after the Iraqi revolution) both drew civil servants, especially teachers; Ibrahim Mahmoud was imprisoned twenty-one months without trial in 1959 yet still disassociated good Egyptian education and health work from political repression. UNRWA’s September 1959 neutrality circular, barring its staff from the Arab National Union, conflicted with the Administration, which objected that working for UNRWA did not require forgetting one’s nation or treating Israel as a normal country. Civil service associations — Mandate First and Second Division associations formed after assurances they were not trade unions, with the Second Division’s 1946 strike winning substantial concessions, and Administration government and UNRWA associations — expressed discontent in ways that reinforced, rather than undermined, the repose of habit; the government association’s Abu Sami insisted it “had nothing to do with politics, only civil rights”. Conclusion: flexible, reflective habits were tenacious, doubt arising not from strain alone but when tensions became crises.

• Chapter 4, Civil Service Competence and the Course of a Career (PDF p.108-117 / printed p.91-100; chapter continues in part 3): governing authority has no single form; in Gaza, where its foundations were tenuous, the processes acclimating civil servants and developing their personas sustained the balance among its parts. Habit was operationalised as Bureaucratic competence over a career from hiring to retirement. Competence in Gaza was technical without being expertise (coping, tactical, the bricoleur rather than the expert, against the generalist/expert histories and Timothy Mitchell on Egypt), social in local knowledge and differentiated service (Muhammad Ghazi on making a complainant feel content; Salim Rashid giving a TV importer a month’s travel permit and a sidewalk seller a week, then defusing his complaint with coffee), and ethical as Foucauldian self-cultivation (Thomas Osborne on India, Saba Mahmood on Foucault), circular and potentially dangerous yet contested by public, civil servants and officials. Hiring: Mandate recruitment sought “sons or relatives of old government servants, who have traditions or experience behind them” and schooling in British values; Herbert Samuel’s June 1921 letter to Winston Churchill about unsuitable officers retained with offers of permanent engagement, and Churchill’s reply on compensation, show the cost of hiring wrong; officers engaged as advisers and translators for linguistic attainments later seemed unsuited to daily administration. By 1946 character was central: a Gaza district administration applicant was rejected as very pleased with himself, his manners deplorable, while another was praised for being “genuinely interested in works of social amelioration” and a third, over-age and without a university education, recommended as sensible, presentable and well acquainted with Government routine. After the Nakba, appointment became more fraught: the best route was prior Mandate service, which the Administration tried to rehire, and later applications appealed to sympathy and figured jobs as welfare; an August 1949 complaint by Beersheba-origin civil servants not given positions begins at the end of the range and continues in part 3.

• Chapter 4 — hiring concluded, training, spaces, advancement, punishment, retirement (PDF p.118-137 / printed p.101-120; chapter complete): the Beersheba petitioners, who had followed the Egyptian army from Hebron and Bethlehem to Gaza on 1 May 1949 claiming that 90 percent of Beersheba employees were working and paid while 10 percent were kept in difficult circumstances unjustly, were refused: the deputy governor-general held that they had been told to stay, came “on their own responsibility” without request or need, and by disobeying had placed themselves outside the boundaries of service and of the continuity principle (PDF p.118). After 1956 the service expanded as a form of welfare: Hussam Abdullah, a refugee from Nazareth and al-Azhar graduate, won a 1958 Khan Yunis mosque post by petitioning the qadi, the head of the Islamic appeals court and the district governor with his qualifications and his suffering; overstaffing left a department head giving three or four newcomers a desk and newspapers, and a principal repeatedly retimetabling as schools needing twenty teachers were given forty (PDF p.119-120). Training debates set a Mandate education director’s view that absence of powers of supervision was “probably congenital and irremediable” against Muhammad Ghazi’s self-training account; engagement, not expertise, marked the competent employee (PDF p.120-122). Spaces of service: Mandate offices displayed competence through efficiency and guarding information — the 1934 Gaza land registry iron safe (up to LP 50 under article 58 sub para 3) for train-borne land purchasers, and the 1941 archives-room complaint — while Administration offices displayed it through a public performance of knowledge in crowded, unprivate rooms; Khaled ‘Emad’s garbage-complaint story shows carefully calibrated forcefulness, the mayor ordering the complainant’s garbage left for a week as a fine after he invited Khaled to smoke argile instead of showing the problem (PDF p.122-126). Promotion: the 1926 committee found the clerical system “formed under a system of opportunism”, proposed cadres and equivalence with a promotion committee for exceptional cases; under the Administration Khalil Rishad of Diwan al-Muwazzafin described promotion protests as his most persistent difficulty while insisting “there is no 100 percent justice”, and memories ranged from promotion sold for money and wasta to files examined and bribery rare (PDF p.126-129). Punishment defined the field’s boundaries: Gaza railway clerk Khalil Hammanieh, acquitted of rape after marrying the girl, was dismissed for associated charges and a file of two fines, two warnings and eighteen cautions, the general manager insisting the discharge was “decided upon independently from the charge of rape”; in nearly one hundred Egyptian-era personnel files no dismissal was found, sanctions being warnings and fines — nurse Mariam Samira at Nasser Hospital, Khan Yunis, fined a week’s salary (the health director had decided two weeks) for hitting and cursing nurse Rana Zeinab in front of patients on 14 June 1964, an act against “the honor of the nursing profession” (PDF p.129-133). Retirement: Mandate pension conflicts forced married women to resign on marriage and be rehired as temporaries, pregnancy being treated as an embarrassment in the office, and shari’a court personnel — under the Supreme Muslim Council, not the high commissioner — won pensions only under a special ordinance after the association argued their whole time was at the disposal of government and their salaries paid wholly from government funds; the government monthly life pension against UNRWA’s lump sum shaped retirees’ dignity, one government retiree receiving his salary on the first of the month keeping “my dignity until the last day of my life” (PDF p.133-137).

• Part Two divider (PDF p.138): Tactical Practice and Government Work. PDF p.139 is blank.

• Chapter 5, Service in Crisis (PDF p.140-169 / printed p.123-152; chapter continues in part 4): services lay at the heart of government’s relation with the population yet were an obligation both governments were anxious to avoid extending; the chapter treats Crisis services — food and shelter understood as temporary and destined to leave the service domain — and the Ethic of care reconfigured as service, in Foucault’s hierarchical sense of care of the self as also “the art of governing”, rather than Carol Gilligan’s nonhierarchical vision (PDF p.140-143). The contours of crisis: Gaza decimated in three battles in 1917, its expulsion recorded by the Municipality as “the Gaza Emigration”; Mandate riots in 1921, 1929 and 1933 and revolts in 1936-39 and 1946, with officials aware poor conditions produced security threats yet imagining development as a private market process; a late-Mandate development committee reported departments so reduced that “The service rendered by the various departments of Government fall short of the reasonable requirements of the country” and vital activities “must be abandoned as beyond the power of Government to undertake” (PDF p.143-144). Under the Administration exceptional conditions were the norm: UNRWA’s 1952 refugee definition (normal residence in Palestine for a minimum of two years before 1948, loss of home and livelihood) left natives who had lost land and livelihood as destitute as refugees but ineligible; al-Ahram described refugees as “living in a society with no religion, no morals, and no community life”, the Refugee Affairs department stated a humanitarian mission against “the decline into depravity”, UNRWA worried about relief’s debilitating effect over time and the “development of a professional refugee mentality”, ration-card births eagerly reported and deaths reluctantly reported, and idleness among 300,000 people concentrated in the Strip; native Gazans such as Hanan expressed the same fears more harshly, describing refugee begging, an “unimaginable decline in values” and “class rancor” (haqd al-tabaqi) (PDF p.145-147).

• Chapter 5 — food in the Mandate (PDF p.148-152 / printed p.131-135): WWI famine in Gaza — Musa selling his mother’s hens’ eggs for 1 or 2½ piasters to buy turmus, jummaiz and flour, eating a sand-covered orange rind — gave way to a remembered ayyam al-balad of self-sufficiency and communal care that was partly nostalgic, since peasant poverty, indebtedness and landlessness persisted (the Hope-Simpson report’s “extreme poverty”); tea and coffee were then luxuries offered to guests at the mukhtar’s. Care was hierarchical and integral to inequality: Abu Hassan’s landless neighbours took vegetables themselves as zakat, the givers “happy” but not entirely in charge. Government stayed out of food except exceptionally (1936-39 detainees’ families, 1947 drought water); WWII rationing, run while maintaining “normal channels of trade”, was a singular temporary intervention whose village population records the Quakers later used to count refugees, and Majdal’s municipality was allowed to monopolise flour sales on the district commissioner’s argument that objectors were “profiteers” and profits were “spent on improving the streets and schools”.

• Chapter 5 — food after 1948 (PDF p.152-159 / printed p.135-142): the nakba tripled Gaza’s population and threw almost everyone into poverty; departures were chaotic (planes firing on Majdal), arrivals fought over distributions — Im ‘Amir: “We were fighting over the distribution of supplies and every day two people were injured” — and the ethic of mutual care broke down into stealing bread, uprooting Gazans’ carrots for sale, and sand put in loaves sold to refugees. Humiliation was managed through a discourse of international obligation: aid from first the AFSC and then UNRWA was a recognition of responsibility, absolving nothing and conferring no legitimacy — Abu Ayub of Shati camp likened it to a beating followed by food. The Administration’s early mercy trains (qitarat al-rahma) carrying Egyptian donations were coded as relief, not service, letting Egypt govern without fully inhabiting the role; codification gave mukhtars new identifying and distributing power and corruption opportunities that frustrated the AFSC. Rationalisation followed: the flour distribution bureau, with ten civil servants and fourteen workers, moved from 400 ration cards by 3 p.m. to 600 before 12 p.m. under fixed appointments, regularity being needed, in the report’s words, “to continue to distribute to the poor at their regular appointments”; disassociation let Gazans both claim UN relief as a right and charge that UNRWA aimed to make “the Palestinian forget his homeland since he takes the flour sack”.

• Chapter 5 — housing in the Mandate (PDF p.159-164 / printed p.142-147): housing posed the tactical paradox in its sharpest form. Herbert Samuel described wartime Gaza — prewar population 40,000, third largest town in Palestine, its population dwindled to about a third — and pleaded that rebuilding would make its population “deeply grateful” and aid “the popularity of British rule”, but no significant funds followed; an official held that if building at Gaza was not an economic proposition “public funds should not be invested in it any more than private funds”. The Gaza Development Scheme ceded government land to the municipality to sell, funding a Gaza Building Society to lend to war-damaged homeowners; approved in principle in 1924, its purchase agreement was finalised only in August 1933, of an anticipated two thousand plots only seventy-seven had been sold by 1932 and only four begun, largely for lack of water, sales beginning in earnest in 1934 with 322 plots; it never aimed to expand the owning class. Rebuilding and the new Rimal neighbourhood came mainly through regulation: Gaza a town planning area from 1923, the District Town Planning Commission meeting only from 1940, the regional scheme still without force of law in 1945 though permits and fees were collected “as if it was in fact in force”, and only in June 1947 did the Commission claim it was “concentrating on the future” — housing moving from need to service to regulatory domain, with the municipality reduced to the Commission’s agent.

• Chapter 5 — housing after 1948 (PDF p.165-169 / printed p.148-152; continues): with three times the population and much less land there was no luxury of debating whether housing was a service. Refugees rented single rooms from native families, squatted and were expelled, and were moved from fields, schools and mosques into camps of tents, later concrete and asbestos houses. Refugee Affairs saw a social crisis: families who had lived “in a spacious independent house” now tending all needs in one narrow room or small tent, and two unconnected families sharing one tent or room forced unrelated men and women into intimate space. Housing became social policy — regularising lives, reshaping neighbourhoods and the moral climate. UNRWA replaced tents with solid houses in Gaza before any other area of its operation, without the resistance met in Syria and Lebanon, its stated conviction that “the reintegration of refugees on the Gaza strip is impossible” perhaps easing fears of resettlement; its 1954 annual report pictured camps taking on the appearance of “villages and towns, with school buildings, small workshops and communal facilities”, though they remained makeshift, their homes UNRWA-owned on land retaining its original ownership, construction requiring the camp officer’s permission and becoming UNRWA property, and residents barred from sheltering others, installing water taps or cultivating. Joint management — UNRWA services, Administration security — sent petitions about UNRWA to the Administration and protests about the Administration to UNRWA offices. Only about half the refugee population ever lived in camps. The Administration then sold state land by lottery at “symbolic” prices to civil servants, first those with over ten years’ service: refugee servants could acquire land, binding them to Gaza and blunting native-refugee difference without diminishing return claims, and the sales were among the two aspects of Egyptian rule nearly all Gazans praise — the sentence naming them continues in part 4.

• Chapter 5 — conclusion (PDF p.170-171 / printed p.153-154; chapter complete): the two praised aspects are free university education to vast numbers of Gazans and the low-cost sale of land to government employees. The coexistence of the promise of independence with services that might be contrary to it was made possible by the limited scale of tactical practice, which did not easily cohere into a totality; both promise and service were necessary, and their contradictions were productive for rule. Crisis services, persistent but not permanent and provided by state institutions and community practice alike, expanded government’s reach while proclaiming their domains beyond the state — Mandate rationing defined as exceptional, Administration food explained by international obligation and humanitarian relief, housing turned to social policy — and their effects on place and people always exceeded their intentions.

• Chapter 6, Servicing Everyday Life (PDF p.172-205 / printed p.155-188; chapter complete): Everyday services — water, utilities, roads, transport and communications — shaped place through mundane repetition. The chapter opens with the dueling 1943 Gaza histories of ‘Arif al-‘Arif and Hilmi Abu Sha’ban: Abu Sha’ban, a Gaza native and municipal clerk, held that al-‘Arif knew Gazans only as an official and misread “Gazan character”, and that municipal water expansion mattered as bureaucratisation producing government capacity, not as meeting basic needs — at the beginning of the Mandate subscribers to the municipal water supply numbered only in the hundreds, and after the elected council in 1928 compelled all Gazans to pay water fees, Abu Sha’ban says revenue from water increased from hundreds to thousands of pounds, and new wells followed, and the 1932 Rimal water scheme was financed by a Barclay’s Bank loan “without a Government guarantee” in December 1932. Compulsory participation bound people and government in bidirectional obligation and produced new incapacities: in 1936 the Gaza City Council resumed cleaning, lighting and water during the general strike because, as it decided, “the people of Gaza are dying of thirst” and were suffering from illnesses — the mayor having argued in the debate that continued stoppage risked residents leaving their cities and central government taking over the administration of the municipalities — and in 1941 almost sixty Rimal residents petitioned against water meters, central authorities declining to intervene. Jurisdiction was contested throughout — the Mandate centre reserved oversight and non-intervention over municipalities, the Administration integrated councils and clashed internally (Said Abu Sharkh’s 1960 complaint about Deir Belah), and UNRWA and the legislative council (chaired by Haidar Abdul Shafi) added layers, with the refugee/native service division challenged over funding.

• Chapter 6 — camp water, the water department, Nuseirat, and connections (PDF p.186-205 / printed p.169-188): in camps everyday utilities were barely existent at first — the 1953 Refugee Supervision report gives one faucet for every three hundred people, and 1961 camp regulations prohibited private water taps — in part because incorporation might signal acceptance of permanent displacement; whether Gaza municipality serviced Shati camp from 1960, as Abu Jamal and Khaled ‘Emad recalled, or had cut off assistance by the June 1966 Shati nadwa, at which residents requested exactly such services, cannot be said with certainty from the sources given. Abu Jamal’s water-department procedure and 8 a.m.-2 p.m. day show ordinary regularity as a “practical science of the singular”. In Nuseirat camp in April 1967, mabahith papers on ‘Ali Harb’s piped-water project record residents’ objection that water was UNRWA’s responsibility, and a compromise permitting non-payers to keep using pumps. Roads drew petitions and press complaints charging unequal provision compared with Jewish settlements — al-Difa’ in January 1935: the Gaza-Jaffa road was paved only as far as the last Jewish settlement — and Feldman concludes incapacity was read by Palestinians as a tactic used to shape Gaza. After 1948 the border bisected roads, telephones and the railroad; Gaza was re-placed toward Cairo (Zuheir Rayyis’s 1959 “train of troubles”, qitar al-mata’ib, also an “artery of life” connecting Gaza “with the beating heart of Arabism”), a Gazan bus concession was refused by the Egyptian transport minister, and Jabalya camp’s transport crisis (1963 mabahith report; 1966 petition by about fifty civil servants) was treated as government’s responsibility even though a private company provided the service.

• Chapter 7, Community Services and Formations of Civic Life (PDF p.206-220 / printed p.189-203; chapter continues in part 5): Community services such as education and religious affairs elaborated civic ideals and defined public mores, forcefully without (often) actual force, for a collective but bounded client distinguished by religion, nationality or refugee status, and projected toward a future civic life. After Pierre Mayol, the civic entailed obligation and recognition through propriety, and associations policed the “conduct of conduct” of Gazans by Gazans. Religious services’ dominant idiom was moral improvement tied to the community and to politics. The Supreme Muslim Council, created to authorise Islamic services under a Christian mandatory, was held by the Palestine government in its 1936 report to the League of Nations to be an administrative rather than a political body, dealing with Moslem religious affairs, yet its personnel bound moral and political futures together. The Gaza Society for the Preservation of Public Morals, established 3 June 1935, worked by moral authority against land sales to Zionists, missionary schools and alcohol, petitioning government (its Fahmi Hakura permit objection refused), preaching in villages (Said Muhammad Allah in Simsim, 10 February 1936) and privately dissuading land sellers with “sweet speech and logic”. Under the Administration the Council was integrated into government and dissolved in 1957, its responsibilities devolved to the governor-general, the Administration, the shari’a appeals court and the local waqf administration, after the governor-general’s 1949 stopgap request to the Egyptian Awqaf Ministry, which agreed to send carpets and contribute 190 pounds; independent religious societies were refused room (the 1953 Khan Yunis Society of the Followers of Sunna), religious servicing was dispersed across government and elaborated through the school system, and at the end of May 1967 mosque sermon topics for Safar 1387 included urging people not to hoard food because the government was responsible for supplies.

• Chapter 7 — Civics and Citizenry: Educational Services in Gaza (PDF p.221-235 / printed p.204-218; chapter complete): education elaborated civic life through the sometimes conflicting figures of the “national” and the “citizen”, which in Gaza were to a degree uncoupled: the Mandate promoted a social, apolitical citizenship transcending national distinction, while the Administration, unable to actualize the formal citizenship in an independent Palestine it promised, promoted the nation as dominant subject position — and in both periods teachers, the most political of civil servants, taught a second, contesting curriculum alongside the official one. Mandate schooling was in theory compulsory but nowhere near universal, its limited clientele reproducing class distinctions while teachers, as gatekeepers of scarce places and examinations (Sami Ibrahim in Majdal), held high social status. The village curriculum weighted toward agriculture was intended to deliver “an education that will at once enlighten the peasant, make him a contented citizen, and keep him on the land”, while the town curriculum taught general, universal duties of the citizen; nationalists, recorded by education inspector A. L. Tibawi, charged that its international character attacked Palestinian national consciousness, even as former teachers such as Hanan held its level high — “However, we still dislike them”. The Education Ordinance of 1933, in the general language of “order” and “morals”, provided for firing teachers proven to have imparted teaching of a “seditious, disloyal, immoral, or otherwise harmful character”; the Peel Commission Report of 1937 nonetheless identified the purely Arab government school system as making “good Arab patriots”, and school strikes on Balfour Declaration Day and after 1944 proved, in Tibawi’s account, unstoppable by penalties — education was a case in which Abeyance failed, and after World War II the British gave up on their civic project and the Mandate as a whole. Under the Administration a carefully circumscribed, dependent nationalism was promoted instead, teachers injecting political citizenship — the right of opposition and organization — in return; the Administration made universal primary and secondary education a reality and provided free university education, recalled by Gazans as a “golden age”, beginning from volunteer street teaching in 1949 (Mahdi Ayub) and relying almost entirely on Egyptian textbooks, so students were schooled in the manner of Egyptian citizens yet not to be such citizens. The Administration and UNRWA struggled over curriculum: in the 1959/60 Beit Hanoun agricultural school conflict UNRWA withdrew funding for a school it held not “useful”, while the Administration held its purpose was that refugees should be “good citizens [muwatinin salahin] when they return to their country” — even as its own 1959 Report on Education in Gaza charged both curricula with too little vocational training. National education in the schools was cultural and moral — Ibrahim Mahmoud’s cultural committee implanting patriotism through practices, stories and cooperation — while unauthorized political expression was surveilled: the October 12, 1959 Bureij camp school leaflet file, whose leaflet declared “Palestine is our country” and “Long Live Gamal Abdul Nasser” yet was investigated because its expression had not been authorized, exposed factionalism among Communist, Muslim Brotherhood and Ba’th teachers; teachers and students led the 1955 demonstrations against Sinai resettlement and the 1959 imprisonment of many teachers failed to contain expression. The creation of the PLO in 1964, its replacement of the National Union, the Palestine Liberation Army and the March 1965 conscription law alluded, in Feldman’s account following Yezid Sayigh, to the impossibility of deferring Palestinian national aspirations indefinitely. Chapter conclusion: control and propriety were the most difficult feature of Tactical government — expansive community services produced the most sustained resistance, and confrontations sometimes produced crises in abeyance but also often sustained rule.

• Chapter 8, Conclusion: Gaza and an Anthropology of Government (PDF p.236-252 / printed p.219-235; chapter and main text complete): government, population and place shaped each other in multiple directions; the two styles of rule — Reiterative authority, relying on regularity and a bureaucratic hall of mirrors in which there appeared to be no perspective outside service, and tactical government, relying on exceptionality and keeping spaces beyond service alive but offering no horizon — worked together precisely by not cohering into a totality, contradictions being generally productive for governments that did not work through sovereignty or legitimacy, in a place where government was enacted, not planned, most clearly in mundane processes such as a minor change in bureaucratic procedure. Gaza is thereby shown as a more ordinary place, its governing techniques identifiable only through the lens of practice. Beyond Gaza: the U.S. occupation of Iraq is read as disregarding reiterative authority in de-Ba’thification — against Weber’s dictum that a rationally ordered officialdom continues to function after occupation — while overreaching tactically by putting legitimacy front and center, so abeyance was not available. The Israeli occupation, by contrast, began with a Weberian policy of “government but not administration” and disassociation, many Administration civil servants continuing in their jobs, but marked a more fundamental break: interference to control resistance, the 1972 dismissal of Gaza City’s mayor over his refusal to provide municipal services to Shati camp, Ariel Sharon’s camp road-widening which, in Sara Roy’s account as quoted, built nearly 200 miles of security roads and destroyed thousands of refugee dwellings, and settlement, road, land and water projects exhibiting none of tactical government’s restricted scope — Israel, having laid claim to Palestine while separating population from place, answered the first intifada (1987-93), in which many civil servants, especially police, resigned, not by giving up rule but by its increased brutality. The Palestinian Authority (PNA) created by the 1993 Oslo Accords seemed a successful implementation of occupation at a distance and made legitimacy feel possible, yet shared bureaucratic operations (border crossings, identification documents, permits) and closure kept its authority tenuous and contested; in April 2002 Israeli forces attacking administrative infrastructure seized, among other records, “all school test records since 1960” in the Ministry of Education — an “administrative massacre”, in the Palestinian minister of information’s words as quoted — the seizing working to disrupt bureaucratic continuity. Hamas rose on its apparent lack of corruption, its political positions and its extensive social service networks; after its January 2006 Legislative Council majority, donors withheld funds and Israel refused to transfer tax revenues, essentially bankrupting the government and leaving civil servants unpaid, and in June 2007 Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip while Fatah consolidated power in the West Bank. The book closes with an anthropology of government: neither a unitary theory of modern government nor disparate alternatives, but regimes of practice as both subject and site of research — bureaucratic life is everyday life — with the Gazan case showing that important techniques of producing authority and managing continuity are not always derived from the form of the state.

• Notes (PDF p.254-269; notes continue in part 6): Notes to Chapter 1 (notes 1-104, complete in this part) supply the Introduction’s full apparatus, including the Oslo Accords and second intifada (n.3), Sara Roy’s “de-development” (n.4), the All-Palestine Government — Shlaim: “It claimed jurisdiction over the whole of Palestine, yet it had no administration, no civil service, no money, no real army of its own” (n.34) — Mandate sovereignty and dual obligation sources, the theoretical literature on governmentality, authority, reiteration and practice (Foucault, Sennett, Herzfeld, Derrida, Butler, de Certeau, Wedeen, Weber, Sassen), and archival citations including the tax-farming files (n.91) and the discontinuity of Mandate and Administration sources (n.100). Notes to Chapter 2 (notes 1-35, in this part; chapter notes continue) supply the filing apparatus: Ottoman bureaucratic histories (Findley, Shaw), Foucault on disciplinary writing (n.3, n.7), the archival turn (Stoler, Derrida, Messick), the Israel State Archives catalogue on salvaged Mandate records (n.18), and the Chief Secretary’s Office Orders Nos. 1, 3, 10 and 35 of 1946-47 (n.21, n.23, n.25, n.27) and the 1956 “Literature of Memos” article (n.35).

• Notes to Chapter 2, concluded (PDF p.270-273 / printed p.253-256; notes 36-77): Cole on print and on Ottoman rhetorical promotion (n.36-37); the grade system, promotions by seniority more than performance (n.38); the privacy rule — interviewees’ and personnel-file subjects’ names changed, last names not used at all even as pseudonyms (n.40); PSSA personnel files #244, #242/434 and the punishment files for late reporting of family changes (n.41-43); allowance eligibility changes that made children reappear — unmarried daughters over seventeen in 1963, student sons of age in 1965 (n.44); police files’ built-in potential for failure through indiscriminate accumulation (n.48); Gaza defined in a 1922 district-organization discussion as “The somewhat backward district over which it is proposed to place him” (n.50, letter dated January 14, 1992 as printed); the 1935 Gaza municipal bylaws and the 1930 municipal-elections petition signatories (n.52, n.54); secrecy, circulation and retention apparatus (Office Orders No. 1, No. 35, #44 and #3; the 1956 Employee Affairs circular; Executive Council Decision #6 of 1960; the Personal Investigation Bureau’s 1965 permanent orders and 1966 Schedule of Bureau Documents, n.57-77), including the Egyptian practice of differentiating file access by rank and position rather than nationality, unlike the Mandate (n.61), and the single retention requirement that “particular care should be taken not to destroy files and documents relating to Government claims to land” (n.72).

• Notes to Chapter 3 (PDF p.273-281 / printed p.256-264; notes 1-95, complete): Berger’s classic images of British, French and Egyptian civil servants (n.1); al-‘Arif’s breakdown of the 1943 Gaza civil service — First Division 31 (19 British, 12 Arab), Second Division 243 (13 British, 230 Arab), police officers 2,193 (130 British, 2,063 Arab), messengers/janitors 308, all Arab — against a Gaza subdistrict settled population estimated at 136,650 in 1944 and a Gaza City population of around 36,000 (n.4); the Peirce apparatus for reflective habit — habit as acquired disposition and tendency not certainty, doubt as the irritation that moves belief, belief as readiness to act (n.5-11) — set against Bourdieu’s habitus, with thought itself treated as practice (n.13); a long methodological note on memory and oral history (n.12) and the evaluative character of remembered conduct (n.16); respectability’s retirement currency in Ibrahim Mahmoud’s hospital story (n.27); the generalized, category-based service relation distinguished from patron-client relations (n.31); Taqqu and Bhabha’s “mimic men” on Mandate civil servants’ British manners (n.34); the press record on both sides — Mir’at al-Sharq (30 December 1926) praising national civil servants whose British superiors put “their honorable names on the papers which the national civil servants exhausted themselves in preparing”, Sawt al-‘Uruba (14 October 1949) reporting bribery complaints (n.51); the 1946 strike’s high commissioner statement of 26 April 1946, with Lockman and De Vries cited (n.89); UNRWA Staff Circular No. A/1 of 1 September 1959 and the unresolved January 1961 Gazan UNRWA employees’ petition to run for National Union office (n.79-81); and the association record from the 1927 proposed-association memorandum to the mabahith reports on the association’s tendentious January 1960 officer elections (n.85-95).

• Notes to Chapter 4 (PDF p.281-288 / printed p.264-271; notes 1-80, complete, under the heading “4. The Civil Service Career”, with the chapter’s first epigraph cited to the 1926 Permanent and Pensionable Cadre committee report): the generalist/expert literature and Gaza’s experts — doctors, religious officials, judges and, to a certain extent, teachers — who did not form the bulk of the service (n.3-6); the 1950 Colonial Service pamphlet’s warning that preservice training would not make applicants “competent and reliable” (n.8); Findley on Ottoman secular civil schools’ “unabashed vocationalism” (n.18); the Samuel-Churchill hiring correspondence of 1921 and the 1946 Gaza district letters (n.19-23); post-Nakba hiring’s near-impossibility without prior service, the Egyptian army workers told the army was a separate administration, and UNRWA’s 1952-53 surplus of refugee ex-government clerks (n.24); the Beersheba petitioners’ own June 1949 account of their refusal and the absence of any further archival mention, with the Administration’s one-quarter salary reduction stretching its budget (n.25-27); the 1959 report’s 87 percent unemployment figure (n.30); the 1926 cadre committee’s five-grade scheme — maximum salary in forty-two years for men, thirty-six for women — and its stated opposition to equating women’s salaries with men’s (n.46); Farag Abadir’s dismissal and the railway manager’s “peace time establishments” judgment (n.53); the 1911 Penal Code Article 206 amendment suspending abduction-and-rape prosecution on marriage, unchanged in the 1927 revision (n.56); the one Administration dismissal account found, Deir Belah tax collector ‘Adel Mahmud, fired in May 1960 over missing lighting fuel (n.57); British pensions still received and admired against Egyptian and Palestinian retirement experience (n.64); Woolf’s Three Guineas on “Miss” and “Mrs” in Whitehall (n.68); and the shari’a court pension struggle in full — Haj Amin al-Husseini’s 9 June 1929 letter, the chief secretary’s 4 August 1929 jurisdictional refusal, Ruhi Bey Abdul Hadi’s and Musa Alami’s opposed memoranda, the shari’a court as “a Government department except for the point that the appointment and dismissal of the Qadis is with the S.M.C.”, and the Executive Council decision of 17 May 1933 (n.71-77).

• Notes to Chapter 5 (PDF p.288-296 / printed p.271-279; notes 1-104, complete, plus the epigraph note on Gilsenan’s famine orange): state-boundary and care literature (Gilligan, Foucault, n.1-4); the Shaw, Hope-Simpson and Peel reports and A Survey of Palestine (n.7-9); UNRWA’s Special Report on other claimants for relief and Feldman’s “Difficult Distinctions” on aid to native Gazans (n.10-11); the famine’s Levant-wide scope (Schilcher, n.25); Gaza region cultivatable land at 30 percent of Palestine’s, with Roy’s 1935 barley figures — 70 percent of total area under barley cultivation but 30 percent of crop yield (n.31); Boym on nostalgia (n.32); Hope-Simpson and Peel on fellah conditions, Survey of Palestine on rationing’s difficulty across standards of living from “nomadic Bedouin” to “cultivated Europeans” (n.34, n.37); Majdal renamed Ashkelon, its remaining Arab inhabitants expelled by the Israeli army in 1950 (n.43); AFSC’s Rafah background material on refugees denuding land of burnable things and a landowner shutting off camp water taps (n.51); Al-Raqib (30 December 1952) answering the mercy train by demanding trains of return, weapons and fighters (n.56); ration figures neither provider deemed sufficient — Egyptian and U.S. (through CARE) issues at a basic 1,050 calories per person per day against UNRWA’s 1,500, and the Administration assisting 60,000 of the Strip’s original 86,000 inhabitants at 5–6 kilos of flour per month (n.59); natives “in an even worse economic position than the refugees” and the flour bureau borrowing flour from UNRWA across the reiterated jurisdictional line (n.60, n.63); the rebuilding file — Samuel to Curzon, September 1920, the bank-guarantee refusal, Keith-Roach’s “big bluff” minute, the delays including “stultification of the Town Plan by shiftings of sand”, and no evidence that new Gaza land-sale monies were deposited in a loan fund (n.67-77); the Town Planning Commission’s twelve house type-plans with compulsory loggia and terrace, plastering, overhanging eaves and tiled roofs, to which Rimal’s old houses still conform (n.82); UNRWA’s 1955 report — no refugees in Gaza camps remaining in tents, with some 2,800 shelter applications from outside camps unmet (n.94); camp land, the 1953 tax exemption for landowners whose land refugees occupied, and UNRWA rent for private camp land (n.100); and the land lotteries — five in all, the first two, before the 1956 occupation seized their records, offering approximately twelve hundred one-dunam plots at forty to sixty pounds per plot, the Housing Ministry holding registers only for the last three (n.102).

• Notes to Chapter 6 (PDF p.296-302 / printed p.279-285; notes 1-82, complete): Skeik and Abu Sha’ban citations for the dueling 1943 histories (n.1-3); Haraway’s situated knowledges (n.4); de Certeau and Giard’s pluralization (n.6); the administrative governors’ 1956 jurisdiction — monthly reports, tracking public opinion, forwarding complaints, supervising police, overseeing mukhtar appointments, and “constant contact” with local powers — partly explaining Abu Sharkh’s complaint (n.11); Haidar Abdul Shafi’s biography as given — Gaza Palestinian Red Crescent founder, 1991 Madrid Conference representative, Legislative Council member and al-Mubadara cofounder, died September 2007 (n.12); the forty-eight private wells in the city and Khan Yunis’s law “for the payment of water fees by all residents of Khan Yunis whether water is supplied or not” (n.19, n.22); the 1941 Rimal petitioners’ complaint that their quarter was singled out for meters and that the poor would be charged at the same rate as the wealthy (n.34); Roy on Gaza City’s prewar population of 35,000 and annual income of £P 100,000 serving a population of 170,000 on the same budget (n.36); camp water at ten liters a day per person against Gaza City’s ordinary thirty to forty liters (n.37); the present-day failure of water equivalence — severe shortage and undrinkable faucet water at research time (n.47); the midcamps named — Nuseirat, Bureij and Maghazi, “known known” collectively as printed (n.51); the Nuseirat investigation’s silences — all witnesses denying knowledge of ‘Ali Harb’s pump destruction, both mistaken or self-protecting mabahith and protective residents held as possible, and no statements taken from women, who did the work of getting water (n.54, n.56); road and press files from the 1933 notables’ letter to Al-Difa’ of 1935, with restricted settler roads under the later Israeli occupation noted (n.62-71); newspapers heard read aloud in villages (n.72); the 1949 telephone files and Al-Tahrir’s 10 October 1959 “Train of Troubles” (n.74-78); and the Jabalya reports of 10 July 1963 and 10 July 1966, with a southern civil servants’ group awaiting the outcome to present a similar petition (n.80-82).

• Notes to Chapter 7 (PDF p.302-309 / printed p.285-292; notes 1-98, in this part; chapter notes continue in part 7): the chapter’s second epigraph cited in full to the Arab UNRWA Employees Association bylaws of 3 March 1961; Feldman’s 2002 Michigan dissertation on security services (n.1); Mayol on propriety and Gordon on governmental rationality (n.2-4); the discussion limited to Islamic services given Gaza’s almost entirely Muslim population (n.5); Habermas and the public sphere, Asad’s nasiha and Hirschkind’s da’wa as moral criticism among community members (n.7-8); Kupferschmidt on the Supreme Muslim Council and Dumper on waqf politics in Gaza, 1948–1967 (n.9-10); missionary concern increasing after 1929, converts undoubtedly small (n.21); the morals society’s papers — mukhtars preaching “to defend the nation and protect their lands” (January 1937), Hassan Hamad blocked at the Shaja’iyya mosque in April 1936, the late-1935/early-1936 bayan on neglected prayer, zakat, alcohol, usury and gambling, and the 1934 letter on the English hospital’s missionary school “spreading poison to the children of this nation [umma]” (n.29-34); Dumper on the SMC’s post-1948 structural problem — a national body with only one local council left to oversee (n.40); dispersal’s frictions — the shari’a appeals court in 1959 with “a large administrative responsibility without any administrative employees”, and the Fallah school teachers’ 1958 transfer and pension-equivalency problem (n.46); the Society of the Followers of Sunna file (bylaws April 1953; Khan Yunis mabahith correspondence dated 1959 as printed, n.49-50) and the conditional permission for a Sufi zawiya whose members swore “that we will not allow any one who is suspected or wanted to the security services to enter our place” (n.50); education notes — Mandate school statistics difficult to come by: Gaza subdistrict thirty government schools with 1,788 students (1,436 boys and 352 girls) in 1925–26, Tibawi’s Southern District figures of 5,161 girls in school in 1945 out of a total of 24,584 against 3,563 out of 16,574 in 1941, secondary schooling limited to one Gaza City school in 1941 (n.60); Al-Raqib (27 November 1951) on UNRWA’s teacher-publication permission rule as making civil servants “human machines” (n.64); the 1940 committee on textbooks with “local knowledge”, commenting that until such books became available the teaching of history and geography in the Arab system must remain largely ineffective (n.68); Hammami on Nasserist Arabism as hegemonic by the end of the 1950s, with education creating consent (n.75); AFSC’s December 1949 education report and Egyptian teachers brought in before Gazan graduates took over (n.79-80); a native Gazan’s account of refugees exceeding natives in education (n.81); the January 1959 technical committee — a few government classes using local books, all UNRWA schools using Egyptian books (n.84); the 1959 Report on Education’s best suggestion, increasing work opportunities for Gazans abroad and taxing those salaries (n.88); UNRWA employing refugees only, Ibrahim Mahmoud’s college degree overriding the restriction in 1952 (n.89); Starrett on education as “enculturation of the children of the nation’s masses” (n.91); and the Bureij file apparatus — Basisu’s Descent into the Water, Abu ‘Amr on party activity, and Ibrahim’s insistence that he and many teachers were falsely accused of party affiliation, his only crime being to demand support for the Palestinian struggle (n.92-98; note 98 continues in part 7).

• Notes to Chapter 7, concluded, and Notes to Chapter 8 (PDF p.310-312 / printed p.293-295): Chapter 7 n.98 concluded — Basisu was a communist, Ibrahim said he and many other teachers were falsely accused of party affiliation and his only crime was to demand support for the Palestinian struggle, and Basisu notes how closely teacher and communist were connected in the Administration’s imagination, the interrogation response to a teacher identifying himself being recorded in Descent into the Water (p.68) — followed by n.99 (UN Archives letter of 22 April 1965), n.100 (Sayigh, “Escalation or Containment?”) and n.101 (Law Number 4 of 1965 Concerning Military and National Service, 10 March 1965, in UN translation), completing Chapter 7’s notes at n.101. Chapter 8’s notes (n.1-35, complete) supply the Conclusion’s apparatus: Rose and Foucault on governing advanced liberal democracies (n.1); the postcolonial and feminist-history literature (n.2-4); Coronil and Das (n.5-6); Davis, Meeker and van Beek on state memory and imagination (n.7); Chandrasekaran on Iraq (n.8); Weber, Economy and Society, 989 (n.9); the Gaza-under-occupation literature including Raphaeli (n.10-12); the 13 March 1999 Gaza City interview and the June 1967 New York Times reports (n.13-15); Mosely Lesch and Roy on the 1972 mayoral dismissal, with the earlier January 1971 dismissal and the lack of detail on councils outside Gaza City noted (n.16-19); the August 1971 New York Times report on evictions from the three most crowded camps and bulldozing, and the opposed refugee assessments of the resettlement houses in April 1973 (n.20-21); Segal and Weizman on Israeli architecture and Segev’s 1967 (n.22-23); the Oslo Areas A/B/C definitions as given — Area A approximately 65 percent of Gaza and 3 percent of the West Bank, Area B about 23 percent of the West Bank (n.24); the Gaza electricity plant built and then destroyed by Israeli forces in summer 2006 (n.25); Schmemann’s April 2002 New York Times report on the Ramallah seizures, noted as West Bank records (n.26); Eyad Sarraj’s fall 2005 diagnosis, quoted from Erlanger’s New York Times report of 17 October 2005 (n.27); and the modernity, neoliberal-governmentality and anthropology-of-the-state literature closing the book — Asad, Mitchell, Chakrabarty and Knauft (n.28), Ferguson, Ong and Rose (n.29), Gupta and Ferguson, Peck and Tickell and Chesluk (n.30), Trouillot, with Feldman’s contention that anthropological techniques can illuminate bureaucratic practice (n.31), Marcus (n.32), Ong and Bernal (n.33), Sassen (n.34) and Foucault, “Questions of Method,” 75 (n.35).

• Bibliography (PDF p.314-329 / printed p.297-312; complete): Archives and Libraries (ten collections, AFSC Philadelphia to the United Nations Archives, including Dar al-Watha’iq and Dar al-Kutub in Cairo, the Israel State Archives and the ‘Omari Mosque Library); Government Offices and Private Papers (the Awqaf Administration, Gaza City Municipal Council, Housing Ministry and Pensions and Social Security Administration, all of the Palestinian National Authority in Gaza City, and the Papers of ‘Uthman al-Tabba’); Government Publications (Gaza City Municipality 1996; Palestine Government annual reports to the League of Nations 1924-39 and Education Department reports and curricula; Palestine Police Force reports 1934-38; the Peel Royal Commission Report, the 1929 Disturbances Commission Report and the Hope-Simpson Report, all as Cmd. papers; A Survey of Palestine; and the United Arab Republic’s Gaza: Springboard for the liberation of Palestine); United Nations Publications (the 1948 Mediator reports, the 1952 UNHCR report, UNRWA annual reports 1951-67, its 1955 Special Report on other claimants, and its 1982 brief history); Periodicals (ten titles: Al-Ahram, Al-Difa’, Filastin, Jaridat Filastin, Majallat al-Muwazzafin, Mir’at al-Sharq, Palestine Gazette, Al-Raqib, Sawt al-‘Uruba, Al-Waqai’ al-Filastiniyya); and Books and Articles, Abdel-Malek to Yurchak, including Feldman’s own six earlier works (the 2002 Michigan dissertation, two 2005 articles, and the 2006-07 articles) from which parts of the book derive.

• Index (PDF p.330-341 / printed p.313-324; complete): an alphabetical index, A (abeyance of legitimacy) to Z (Zionism), whose locators are printed pages and note numbers and whose italic references indicate illustrations; its longest entries are for files, civil servants, the British Mandate, the Egyptian Administration, Gaza, legitimacy, refugees and UNRWA, and it indexes the book’s own analytic terms — abeyance, tactical government, crisis services, everyday services, community services, reflective and bureaucratic authority — at the pages where they are defined and used.

• Back cover / cataloguing page (PDF p.343; PDF p.342 is blank, checked against the original): the author is assistant professor of anthropology and international affairs at George Washington University; the Library of Congress data repeat the title and dates, state that the book includes bibliographical references and index, and give the two ISBN-13s and the subjects Gaza Strip—Politics and government—20th century and Representative government and representation—Gaza Strip.

Key passages

• “Teacher? That means Communist, you son of a bitch” (Governing Gaza, PDF p.310 / printed p.293, Basisu’s Descent into the Water as quoted in Chapter 7 n.98, describing interrogation).

• “an education that will at once enlighten the peasant, make him a contented citizen, and keep him on the land” (Governing Gaza, PDF p.224 / printed p.207, a Mandate educational official as quoted in the book).

• “The intent in this improvement is not to settle [tawtin] them in the places where they are living, but the goal is that they should be good citizens [muwatinin salahin] when they return to their country” (Governing Gaza, PDF p.231 / printed p.214, the Administration on the Beit Hanoun school, as quoted in the book).

• “I am a Ba’thist, and I am not afraid of anyone, not even Gamal Abdul Nasser” (Governing Gaza, PDF p.233 / printed p.216, the Bureij school principal, in a police informant’s report as quoted in the book).

• “government but not administration” (Governing Gaza, PDF p.243 / printed p.226, Israel’s initial occupation policy as quoted in the book).

• “administrative massacre” (Governing Gaza, PDF p.247 / printed p.230, the Palestinian minister of information on the April 2002 seizures, as quoted in the book).

• “the well-being and development of such peoples form a sacred trust of civilization” (Governing Gaza, PDF p.23 / printed p.6).

• “a system of bureaucratic stricture and degradation” (Governing Gaza, PDF p.21 / printed p.4).

• “it is the claim to authenticity that allows the bureaucrat to justify a stance of intransigence” (Governing Gaza, PDF p.32 / printed p.15, Feldman quoting Michael Herzfeld).

• “I have worked as a government tax collector in the Finance Department since 1943” (Governing Gaza, PDF p.60 / printed p.43, Musbah Ahmed’s promotion petition as quoted in the book).

• “The Mayor of Gaza is kept occupied with his own private business to an extent as to neglect the interests of the town which is more needy of organisation and attention probably than any other town in this country” (Governing Gaza, PDF p.67 / printed p.50, the 1930 notables’ complaint).

• “I was put in this job to serve the people, not to control or humiliate them” (Governing Gaza, PDF p.89 / printed p.72, Da’ud Ahmed).

• “the skills of the bricoleur, not the expert, that were required” (Governing Gaza, PDF p.112 / printed p.95).

• “absence of powers of supervision, being a trait of character, is probably congenital and irremediable” (Governing Gaza, PDF p.121 / printed p.104, a Mandate education director on a proposed training course).

• “The service rendered by the various departments of Government fall short of the reasonable requirements of the country” (Governing Gaza, PDF p.144 / printed p.127, a late-Mandate development committee report as quoted in the book).

• “We have to continue to distribute to the poor at their regular appointments” (Governing Gaza, PDF p.158 / printed p.141, a Refugee Affairs flour distribution report as quoted in the book; the sentence ends on PDF p.159 with the words in order to protect the governmental machinery).

• “the reintegration of refugees on the Gaza strip is impossible, since it can hardly support its previous inhabitants” (Governing Gaza, PDF p.167 / printed p.150, UNRWA as quoted in the book).

• “the municipality succeeded in connecting water to every house. Water was available to everyone” (Governing Gaza, PDF p.190 / printed p.173, Abu Jamal on the Administration).

• “He wants to sell water pipes to the people, even though this is UNRWA’s responsibility” (Governing Gaza, PDF p.193 / printed p.176, a policeman’s report on the Nuseirat project, as quoted in the book).

• “connects Gaza with the beating heart of Arabism and brings to us everyday our brothers and honored visitors” (Governing Gaza, PDF p.201 / printed p.184, Zuheir Rayyis in al-Tahrir on the Gaza-Cairo train, as quoted in the book).

Evidence the work relies on

• Ethnographic work in Gaza in 1998-99 (with returns in 2003, 2004 and 2005) with retired civil servants in offices, retirees’ associations and homes, and observation in the Pensions Administration, Gaza City Municipality, Awqaf Administration and Housing Ministry, as presented at PDF p.20, p.43-44.

• Government files of the British Mandate and the Egyptian Administration — administrative correspondence, official reports, personnel files, and records of police, waqf administration, municipal councils and civic associations — largely in the Israel State Archives, including Egyptian records seized in 1956 and 1967 and Mandate Secretariat office orders restated after the 1946 King David Hotel bombing, as presented at PDF p.52-55.

• Egyptian civil-service print: Majallat al-Muwazzafin, the journal of the Egyptian Civil Service Commission, in particular its 1956 memo-writing article, as presented at PDF p.58-59.

• The theoretical literature the Introduction and Chapter 2 cite: Max Weber on bureaucracy and legitimated domination, Michel Foucault on disciplinary writing and governmentality, Michel de Certeau on tactics and citation, Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler on reiteration, Antony Anghie on the mandate system, John Comaroff on colonial governance, Lisa Wedeen on Syria, Richard Sennett on authority, Michael Herzfeld on authenticity, and Carter Findley on Ottoman filing, each as credited in the reading notes.

• Tape-recorded conversations with retired civil servants in Gaza (1998-99 and after), including Salim Rashid, Jamal Yusef, Ahmed Ismail, Da’ud Ahmed, Ibrahim Mahmoud, Bahat Hassan, Hanan, Yasmin and Qasim Jamal as quoted in Chapter 3, together with the Palestinian press of both periods (al-Difa’ and Sawt al-‘Uruba) and civil service association records, as presented at PDF p.80-107.

• Secretariat secrecy, circulation and retention regulations, the Personal Investigation Bureau’s 1960 rules, the Accounts Clearance Office personnel-file orders, and the 1946 Gaza district administration hiring correspondence and the 1921 Samuel-Churchill exchange, as presented at PDF p.69-77, p.115-117.

• Chapter 4’s career evidence: the August 1949 Beersheba petition and the deputy governor-general’s refusal, Hussam Abdullah’s 1958 Khan Yunis mosque petitions, the Second Division association’s 1946 training report and the education director’s response, the 1934 and 1941 Gaza land registry inspection reports, Khaled ‘Emad’s garbage-complaint account, the 1926 clerical reorganisation committee report, Khalil Rishad’s account of promotion protests, the Hammanieh dismissal correspondence, Mariam Samira’s sanction papers, and the married-women and shari’a court pension correspondence, as presented at PDF p.118-137.

• Chapter 6’s service evidence: Abu Sha’ban’s and al-‘Arif’s 1943 Gaza histories; Gaza City Council Registers of Council Decisions (1936 strike debates); the 1941 Rimal water-meter petition; Said Abu Sharkh’s 1960 Deir Belah complaint; the 1953 Department of Refugee Supervision report and 1961 camp regulations; Abu Jamal’s and Khaled ‘Emad’s accounts of municipal water and electricity work; the April 1967 mabahith papers on the Nuseirat piped-water project; road petitions and al-Difa’ and Filastin press complaints; Zuheir Rayyis’s 1959 al-Tahrir article; and the 1963 and 1966 Jabalya transport reports and petition, as presented at PDF p.172-205.

• Chapter 7’s religious-service evidence in this range: the Peel Commission’s 1937 report and the Arab UNRWA Employees Association’s 1961 bylaws (chapter epigraphs); the Palestine government’s 1936 report to the League of Nations on the Supreme Muslim Council; the Gaza Society for the Preservation of Public Morals’ records, including its 1936 supervision request, Said Muhammad Allah’s Simsim report, its monthly report on missionary schools and its land-sale interventions; the 1949 governor-general’s request to the Egyptian Awqaf Ministry; and Administration police files, including the 1953 Society of the Followers of Sunna investigation, as presented at PDF p.206-220.

• Chapter 5’s service evidence: tape-recorded conversations with Abu Said, Abu Nadim, Musa, Abu Hassan, Amal, Im ‘Amir, Da’ud Ahmed, Hanan and Abu Ayub; Jaridat Filastin (1918) and al-Ahram on refugee morals; the late-Mandate development committee report; Refugee Affairs department statements and its flour distribution bureau report; UNRWA annual reports including its 1952 refugee definition and 1954 camp report; AFSC records; Herbert Samuel on wartime Gaza; and the Gaza Development Scheme and Town Planning Commission records (1932 Southern District report, 1941 Land Settlement Department report, June 1947 minutes), as presented at PDF p.140-169.

• Chapter 7’s education evidence: Ylana Miller on Colonial Office schooling aims; Qasim Jamal, Sami Ibrahim, Hanan and Ibrahim Skeik’s recollections; town and village curricula and the 1933 Education Ordinance; Tibawi’s history and his 1941-45 Southern District education report; the Peel Commission Report of 1937 on Arab schooling and nationalism; Mahdi Ayub’s and Ibrahim Mahmoud’s accounts; the 1952 Arab League delegation exchange; the Egyptian committee’s 1959 examination and the 1959 Report on Education in Gaza; the Administration-UNRWA Beit Hanoun school correspondence of 1959/60; and the police file on the Bureij Middle School leaflet of October 12, 1959, as presented at PDF p.221-235.

• Chapter 8’s beyond-Gaza evidence: Weber on officialdom after occupation; the CPA’s de-Ba’thification in Iraq; Israel’s initial occupation policy and Gazan civil servants’ accounts of continuing work in 1967; the 1972 Gaza mayor dismissal and Sara Roy on Sharon’s security roads; PNA shared bureaucratic operations and closure; and reports of the April 2002 Ramallah ministry seizures, Hamas’s 2006 election and the ensuing salary crisis, as presented at PDF p.241-249.

• Notes evidence (this part): the Chapter 1 notes’ Mandate, Oslo, All-Palestine Government and theory citations and ISA, Dar al-Watha’iq, CO and FO archival references, and the Chapter 2 notes’ Ottoman, archival-theory and Secretariat office-order citations, as presented at PDF p.254-269.

• Notes and bibliography evidence (part 7): the Chapter 7 notes’ UN Archives file S-0530-0151, file C-32 and the 1965 military service law; the Chapter 8 notes’ New York Times reports of June 1967, August 1971, April 1973, April 2002 and October 2005, Raphaeli, Mosely Lesch, Roy and Segev, and the governmentality and anthropology-of-the-state literature; and the Bibliography’s ten archival collections, five government-office and private-paper holdings in Gaza City and Cairo, government and UN publications and ten periodicals, as presented at PDF p.310-329.

• Notes evidence (part 6): the Chapter 2 notes’ PSSA personnel files, Secretariat office orders and Personal Investigation Bureau schedules; the Chapter 3 notes’ interview dates, Peirce, Bourdieu and oral-history literature, al-‘Arif’s civil-service breakdown, and association and press records; the Chapter 4 notes’ 1926 cadre committee report, CO hiring correspondence, PSSA sanction and pension files and SMC correspondence; the Chapter 5 notes’ Shaw, Hope-Simpson and Peel reports, AFSC background material, UNRWA annual and special reports, the rebuilding and town-planning files, and the Waqa’i’ al-Filastiniyya land-lottery announcements; the Chapter 6 notes’ council minutes, Refugee Affairs water figures and mabahith reports; and the Chapter 7 notes’ society papers at UT, Kupferschmidt and Dumper, Hammami’s dissertation, Department of Education annual reports and Tibawi’s Southern District report, and the Bureij police file, as presented at PDF p.270-309.

Analysis

Feldman’s method, as presented in this part, is a historical ethnography that reads government documents alongside ethnographic work with the Gazan civil servants who produced and used them, approaching bureaucracy not as a bounded institution but as a regime of practices whose regularities, logic and self-evidence are productive of governing form. Its central analytic moves in this part are the separation of bureaucratic authority from regime legitimacy, the account of that authority as reiterative and self-referential, and the account of persistence through tactical practice and the abeyance of legitimacy. The evidence given in this part for those moves is largely programmatic and illustrative — programmatic statements in Chapter 1, and in Chapter 2 the Secretariat regulations, the 1956 memo article, two promotion petitions and the personnel and police filing rules — with the fuller service-by-service evidence assigned by the contents to Chapters 5-7. Chapter 4, completed in part 3, grounds the competence account in the full career arc — training disputes, office space, promotion equivalence, punishment files and pension eligibility — showing the borders of the service being defined at its closure as much as at hiring. Chapter 5, begun in part 3, supplies the first service evidence: food and housing as crisis services whose exceptional, temporary framing let both governments extend obligation while holding legitimacy in abeyance, the evidence being Mandate and Administration departmental records and UNRWA and AFSC reports read against retired Gazans’ remembered experience of famine, rationing and camps; remembered ayyam al-balad abundance is itself flagged in the book as partly nostalgic against the Mandate reports of peasant poverty it also cites. Chapter 6, completed in part 4, supplies the everyday-service evidence: water, roads and transport show government and place being produced in mundane repetition, with jurisdiction contests both sustaining abeyance and cracking it when unequal provision (notably roads compared with Jewish settlements) made incapacity legible as a tactic. Chapter 7, begun in part 4, extends the account to civic formation: propriety displaces control into society while religious providers, from the Supreme Muslim Council to the Gaza morals society, bind moral improvement to national politics in ways neither regime fully contained. Chapters 3-4, read in part 2, supply the personnel side of the same moves: the reflective-habit account rests on the retired civil servants’ own evaluations, read by Feldman as both evidence about habit and part of habit formation, with narrative thinness treated as interpretable rather than as absence, and the competence account on career moments — hiring correspondence, promotions and the etiquettes of encounters — that show competence being judged in the terms civil servants themselves used.

Chapter 7, completed in part 5, closes the community-services account: education is the domain where abeyance most plainly failed under the Mandate and where the Administration’s expansive project produced the most sustained resistance, the national/citizen uncoupling giving the chapter its analytic frame. Chapter 8, also completed in part 5, restates the book’s two styles of rule as a nontotalizing field known only through practice, and tests the analytic beyond Gaza — Iraq as reiterative authority disregarded and tactical government overreached, the Israeli occupation and the PNA as a more fundamental break in which sovereignty claims over land removed tactical government’s restricted scope — so the conclusion’s claims rest on the preceding service evidence plus the post-1967 record it cites (Roy, Sayigh and the 2002 Ramallah reports). The Notes begun in this part carry the work’s scholarly and archival apparatus in full; their evidential weight is assessed with the bibliography in the final part. The Notes read in part 6 (Chapters 2-7) confirm that apparatus chapter by chapter: each chapter’s central claims rest on named archival files (ISA record groups, DW Qawa’im al-Mushir groups, PSSA personnel files) and dated interviews, supplemented by the theoretical literature the notes cite in full, and the notes repeatedly flag the limits of that record themselves — access to sensitive Israeli archival material not granted (Ch.2 n.46), no further archival mention of the Beersheba petitioners (Ch.4 n.27), no evidence the new Gaza loan fund received its monies (Ch.5 n.77), no well-digging records (Ch.6 n.25), no statements from women in the Nuseirat file (Ch.6 n.56), and Mandate school statistics difficult to come by (Ch.7 n.60). The final part completes that assessment: the Chapter 7 notes close at n.101 and the Chapter 8 notes (n.1-35) show the Conclusion resting on the same mix — dated interviews, contemporary New York Times reporting and the secondary literature it names — rather than on new archival files, and the Bibliography as a whole confirms the work’s base in ten archives, the Gaza City offices of the Palestinian National Authority, Mandate and Administration publications, UNRWA’s annual reports and the Arabic and English press of both periods. The Index adds no evidence; it is recorded here as part of the file. With the Notes, Bibliography and Index read, nothing in the work is left unaccounted for.

People, organizations, places and events

Ilana Feldman, Gaza, UNRWA, Palestine Liberation Organization, Gamal Abd al-Nasser, Mabahith, Fahmi Husseini, Personal Investigation Bureau, Muslim Brotherhood, Second Division Civil Service Association, ‘Arif al-‘Arif, Herbert Samuel, American Friends Service Committee, Khan Younis, Gaza Development Scheme, Beersheba, Majdal, Hilmi Abu Sha’ban, Supreme Muslim Council, Society for the Preservation of Public Morals, Peel Commission, Jabalia, Shati camp, Nuseirat camp, A. L. Tibawi, Beit Hanoun, Bureij camp, Hamas, Palestinian Authority, Arik Sharon

Concepts

Tactical government, Reiterative authority, Abeyance, De-development, Nakba, Reflective habit, Bureaucratic competence, Wasta, Ethic of care, Crisis services, Right of Return, Everyday services, Community services

How it relates to other sources

• Feldman’s Gaza — its pre-1948 population of eighty thousand joined by around a quarter million refugees (PDF p.24) — is the same order of figure given in Light in Gaza, whose Introduction gives roughly 100,000 inhabitants joined by 200,000 refugees and whose Abusalama chapter gives 80,000 alongside 200,000 refugees; both accounts stand on the Gaza page with their sources.
• Her account of UNRWA from 1950 as sharing government of Gaza with Egypt, with an expansive relief-and-works jurisdiction, extends the accounts on the UNRWA page, where Pappe gives UNRWA’s origin in a UN decision not to use the International Refugee Organization and Said treats its nonpolitical paternalism.
• Her description of the post-Oslo Gaza she worked in — bureaucratic stricture, closure and de-development — is the setting Baconi’s chapter in Rethinking Statehood in Palestine analyses for the later blockade period, under Sara Roy’s term De-development.

Open questions

• The market-fee ordinance on PDF p.66 is garbled in the text copy for the purchasers’ rate; the original reads 2½ percent, as recorded in the reading notes and used above.

• Maps 1-3 (PDF p.15-17) and Figures 1-3 (PDF p.57, p.63, p.66) are images; their captions were read and the figure subjects recorded, but their internal detail is not in the text copy.

• Figure 4 (PDF p.68) is an image of a petition document; its caption was read and checked against the original, but its small internal text is not in the text copy.

• Figures 5-7 (PDF p.156, p.158, p.167) are photographs; their captions and credits were read and checked against the original, but their image content is not in the text copy.

• PDF p.313 and PDF p.342 are blank, each checked against the original.

• Text-copy slips in the Bibliography and back matter, held as recorded in the reading notes: “Mayoal” for Mayol and “du Guy” for du Gay (PDF p.319), “Buerhig” for Buehrig and “Comaro√” for Comaroff (PDF p.317-318), “Schi√” for Schiff (PDF p.326), “Je√ries” for Jeffries (PDF p.322), the editor’s name in the Schilcher citation given as “Spansolo” in the text copy (PDF p.326), and the Library of Congress class number on PDF p.343 given in the text copy as “953%.1” for 953’.1; the original at PDF p.343 reads 953’.1, checked in this part.

• Whether Gaza municipality provided services to Shati camp during the Administration cannot be said with certainty from the sources given in the book: Abu Jamal and Khaled ‘Emad recalled extension from 1960, while the only archival document found, the June 1966 Shati nadwa police report, records residents requesting such services and the mayor saying municipal assistance had been cut off (PDF p.188-189 / printed p.171-172).

• Figures 8-9 (PDF p.176, p.187) are images — a handwritten Arabic council report with thumbprints and a photograph of a water pump in Shati camp in 1956; their captions and credits were read and checked against the original, but the handwritten report’s internal text is not in the text copy.

• Figures 10-11 (PDF p.229, p.230) are photographs; their captions and credits were read and checked against the original, but their image content is not in the text copy.

• PDF p.253 is blank, checked against the original.

• Text-copy slips in the Notes, held as recorded in the reading notes: “Sussx Academic Press” for Sussex (PDF p.255), “Buerhig” for Buehrig and garbled surnames for Schiff and Comaroff (PDF p.259), “Mayoal” for Mayol (PDF p.261), “Gerht” for Gerth and a garbled surname for Aronoff (PDF p.262); the garble at PDF p.235 was checked against the original, which reads “scuffles”.

• Slips in the Notes read in part 6, each checked against the original and confirmed as the book’s own as printed: a letter dated January 14, 1992 in a 1922 discussion (Ch.2 n.50, PDF p.271; the same file and subject are dated 14 January 1922 at Ch.1 n.88, PDF p.264); a Staff Notice dated 9 April 1848 (Ch.2 n.73, PDF p.272); “known known” doubled (Ch.6 n.51, PDF p.300); “Pluralizationis” (Ch.6 n.6, PDF p.297); “James Holtson” for Holston (Ch.7 n.57, PDF p.306); Khan Yunis mabahith correspondence on the Society of the Followers of Sunna dated 5 March 1959 and 24 June 1959 (Ch.7 n.49-50, PDF p.306), six years after the society’s April 1953 bylaws. Further as-printed items held in the reading notes: “Paul du Guy” for du Gay (Ch.4 n.11, PDF p.282), Salim Rashid described as “discussed in chapter 2” (Ch.7 n.38, PDF p.305), the differing spellings of Abu ‘Amr’s title between Ch.3 n.71 (PDF p.279) and Ch.7 n.97 (PDF p.309), and the Chapter 6 n.44 citation to ISA RG 2 where RG 115 is used elsewhere for the same box (PDF p.299).

Coverage

PDF p.1-343 of 343, read in full in parts 1-7 of 7