Rationalizing Israel's Control Mechanisms

Israeli military and civilian agencies also cast a tightly woven administrative web across the West Bank and Gaza, setting up a centralized hierarchy of commands and responsibilities and incorporating the region into Israel's bureaucracy.^[18] This rationalization of control was a key source of Israel's growing levels of infrastructural power in Palestine. As a first step, Israeli forces established a grid of regional jurisdictions, leaving no corner of the West Bank and Gaza without a military commander. In 1981, the army placed the West Bank under the military's Central Command and folded Gaza into the southern equivalent, merging Palestine into the army's administrative framework for Israel proper. More importantly, the government extended the authority of Israel's civilian ministries to Palestine soon after the occupation began. "Once the territories had been occupied," Gazit explains, "there was no point in establishing a separate machinery alongside the regular civilian administration of Israel's government ministries … it was both necessary and desirable that one control center should direct … activity in Israel and the territories … any separation … would have created thorny problems of coordination."^[19] Thus, for example, the Israeli ministry of health took responsibility for Palestinian hospitals, while the ministry of internal affairs issued Palestinians identity cards and travel documents. Formally, Israel's civilian bureaucrats worked in Palestine only through the military command, but in practice, Israel was developing a new militarycivilian hybrid tying Palestine to Israel's civilian bureaucracy.

Bureaucratic incorporation was matched by the military government's urge to enumerate, monitor, and survey as many Palestinian objects as possible. In 1970, for example, the military published an exquisitely detailed report on the Palestinian economy and population, listing the precise number of licensed carpenters, printing presses, fire trucks, and water wells.^[20] The report even made detailed inventories of

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Palestinian workshops for cement, furniture, cigarettes, soap, metals, olive products, and sweets.^[21] Nothing was too small to count, and no object was too minor to register. Perhaps most significant in this respect was the state's registration of the Palestinian population itself and its creation of detailed document-verification procedures.^[22] Each Palestinian received a numbered card from the state that had to be carried at all times, facilitating the military's ability to track dissidents and rebels.

Israeli administrative control soon became a double-edged sword, however, since by inscribing Palestinian lives and assets into Israel's bureaucratic registries, those entities were transformed into objects of state responsibility. As Israeli leader Ben Gurion had warned in 1947, Israel's decision to issue identity papers to Palestinians eventually served as a constraint on Israeli policy. Identity papers did not entitle Palestinians to political rights within Israel, but they did create a bureaucratic status that would, eventually, be transformed into a diluted form of polity membership. If a Palestinian disappeared, the authorities could not deny his or her existence, since that person was registered with the ministry of interior; villages or property could not be destroyed at will, since they had been given an official bureaucratic niche, and by counting, registering, and controlling them, Israel had assumed a modicum of moral and legal responsibility for their fate.

Israel's imposition of an elaborate "law-and-order" structure in Palestine was another key mechanism for rationalizing state power. Immediately upon seizing the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, for example, the military proclaimed that "the Israel Defense Forces have today entered this area and assumed responsibility for security and maintenance of public order."^[23] Soon after, Israeli civilian police were deployed into the area, inserting Israeli officers over local Palestinian personnel.^[24] The military's legal division generated comprehensive laws regulating most aspects of Palestinian life, and by 1992, the authorities had issued over 1,300 new laws and regulations.^[25] Some of those laws were entirely appropriate to Palestine's status as occupied military territory, but others seem to have been driven by an urge to rationalize, control, and administer. The first category includes Order #329, which defined the term "infiltrator," and Order #1099, which specified the powers of Israeli prison guards. The second, more intrusive category includes Order #306, which determined the number of Palestinian sheep-grazing permits, and Order #1147, which specified the military permits Palestinian vegetable growers were required to obtain.

Legal scholars debated the precise status of the occupied territories

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and Israel's rights and obligations as an occupying power.^[26] Israeli representatives, for example, rejected the applicability of the Geneva Conventions to the West Bank and Gaza, arguing that sovereignty had been disputed prior to 1967, and that the territories were therefore "administered" lands whose political status was to be determined. Palestinian and international scholars disputed this interpretation, regarding it as justification for colonization and annexation. Another debate focused on the jurisdiction and fairness of the Israeli Supreme Court. Israel's defenders highlighted the court's rulings against Israeli military actions as evidence of Israel's respect for legality, while critics noted that the judges rarely argued with the military on any point of substance, suggesting that the court's main job was to legitimize Israeli rule.

Regardless of their merits, these debates obscured a broader institutional point. Israel had acknowledged its legal responsibility for events in Palestine, informing domestic and international audiences that the region was under its empirical and juridical sovereignty. As the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem pointed out, "Since 1967, the IDF [Israeli military] has borne overall responsibility for maintaining law and order in the [occupied] Territories. International law obligates, therefore, the IDF to protect the life, person, and property of all Palestinians under its control."^[27] Had the region been constituted as a frontier, Israeli officials would not have been obliged to accept responsibility for it. Palestinian interests were subordinated to those of Israel, but Jewish domination was enacted through public laws, regulations, and administrative decisions. Palestinian subordination was "lawfully" conducted in full public view, presenting a very different model than that of Bosnia, where non-Serbs were assaulted by clandestine, irregular militias operating through illegal channels.