Acknowledgments

Funding for research included in this article was provided by the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Council of American Overseas Research Centers. Support for dissertation writing, in the course of which I first developed many of these arguments, came from the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation and the Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies at the University of Michigan. I thank all these institutions for their support. For reading the dissertation and helping sharpen my arguments there I am indebted to Brinkley Messick, Ann Stoler, Juan Cole, Val Daniel, Pamila Gupta, Rachel Heiman, Mandana Limbert, Brian Mooney, and Karen Strassler. I presented earlier versions of this essay at Columbia University, University of Chicago, and New York University, and I am grateful to those audiences for their questions and comments. For careful readings and detailed critiques of drafts, particular thanks go to Nadia Abu El-Haj, Sandrine Berteaux, Miriam Ticktin, Emmanuelle Saada, and three anonymous CSSH reviewers.

In September 1964 עAli Taleb, an employee in the Agricultural Directorate in Gaza, petitioned the civil service administration for what he claimed was a long overdue promotion. On the face of it, there is nothing particularly surprising about such a petition—עAli was certainly not the first employee to feel he deserved more recognition for his work. What makes his petition peculiar were the circumstances which generated it. The Gaza Strip, the territory in whose civil service עAli was employed, came into existence in 1948 as a result of the war over the establishment of Israel. Before 1948, Gaza was a district of Palestine, governed like the rest of the country as a mandate granted to the British government by the League of Nations. When the 1948 war ended in defeat for the Arab forces, the Egyptian army occupied the Gaza area, which it administered for the next twenty years. עAli was hired in 1937 by the Mandate government—and under its rules of promotion—but it was the Egyptian Administration (henceforth “Administration”) which he expected to fulfill the obligations of this system. “I was nominated to be promoted to Grade 3 under the previous Mandate government,” עAli explained, noting that, “before my turn arrived the Mandate ended and the Arab Administration came to the Strip.”

Given the enormous upheavals that Gaza, and no doubt עAli himself, experienced in the years between 1937 and 1964, it seems remarkable that he would expect British obligations to pertain to Egyptian administrators. That this is exactly what he expected is clear from his petition: “Naturally, I should not be deprived of my rights for transfer and promotion because of a lack of meaningful understanding of the position I am doing currently. Therefore, I petition you, Sir, to look into my transfer to permanent Grade 3 after my long service.”¹

Throughout its long history, Gaza has often been a battleground between empires, located at the crossroads of major events and historical transformations, though it has rarely been at the center of these events. The twentieth century has been no exception. The dramas of colonialism, anti-colonial nationalism, and nation-state building have all had an impact on Gaza, though none can entirely define its government. During the Mandate, Palestine was part of the larger British colonial empire, though mandates—authorized by the “international community” (in the form of the League of Nations) and designed to end (even if in practice bringing them to an end required forms of resistance typical of other colonies)—were a quite particular form of colonialism.⁴

The mandate system, developed in the aftermath of World War I to manage German colonial holdings and the territories of the Ottoman Empire, was a colonial form that was intimately connected to the idea of the nation-state. The stated purpose of a mandate was precisely the future production of such a state in the mandated territories. In the case of class “A” mandates, places such as Palestine that were in a “high stage of development,”⁵

Within the mandate system, Palestine was unique, in part because of its specific ‘dual' mandate.⁸

As particular as was British rule in Palestine, the Egyptian Administration of the Gaza Strip was even more so. The 1948 war over Palestine was a life-shattering experience, and Gazan government and society were utterly transformed. The armistice agreement between Israel and Egypt that ended the fighting defined the provisional boundaries of what was now the Gaza Strip—an area 28 miles long and 6 miles across at its widest point. The pre-war population of 80,000 was joined by about 250,000 refugees. The Egyptian Government, which had entered the war with a promise to defend Palestine, found itself instead the custodian over this small sliver of Palestinian land. The terms of Egyptian rule over this territory were profoundly unclear. The Egyptian Administration had a less certain legal status than the Mandate, though it had greater (though still limited) capacity to reference authenticity and legitimacy in its rule.

When, in 1954, Egypt formally defined its relationship to Gaza with the issuance of a constitution for the Strip, the text stressed that Egypt “has no ambitions in this area,” but that it had gone to Gaza to “protect the Arab character of this Strip.”¹¹

The rich body of work on colonial processes of control provides a helpful starting point for an exploration of rule in Gaza. It is important to remember, though, that the Egyptian Administration cannot be easily subsumed under the category of colonialism, if for no other reason than that Gazans do not consider it to have been colonial. In the literature on colonialism, there is considerable debate about how to classify colonial relations with subject populations. Do concepts of legitimacy, hegemony, or governmentality apply in colonial conditions? Or, does the importance of force and coercion to the persistence of colonial rule render these irrelevant?¹³

Comaroff also reminds us that such explorations must trace the specificities of different colonial conditions—in the case at hand the specificities of the mandate system, and that system as applied in Palestine. One of its distinguishing features, as I noted, was that mandate governments were not as fully “states without nations”¹⁶

Analytics of Government

What analytic approach is, then, the most helpful in understanding government in Gaza across this difficult period, where government was both colonial and not, and was concerned with the nation-state but not defined by it? In this essay I offer both methodological and theoretical suggestions for exploring the work of government in Gaza, and outline an analytic that can shed light on more than just Gaza. Methodologically, I build on the insights of scholars concerned with the history and practice of everyday life. Such work, diverse in its interests, highlights the micro-physics of power that are enacted in the most apparently ordinary of interactions.¹⁷

Rather than focusing on ordinary experiences in the home, the marketplace, or the neighborhood, I highlight the domain of the office and the circuits of mundane, quotidian practices of bureaucracy. Civil servants—those who enact these practices, who make these circuits, and who give life to the office—occupy a peculiar location in the governmental process. On one hand, they are functionaries and representatives of a particular government or administration. On the other, they are also members of the community that is being governed. They are served as much as they serve. They are both the face of government to a disgruntled public and members of that public who may themselves be as dissatisfied as their clients. They are, then, always both here and there: they are the public and the government, they are the participants and the resistors, and they produce both the orderly and the tactical. Because of this precarious location, civil servants offer tremendous insight into the ways that government is able to do its work.

From this methodological attention to the ordinary (under conditions that were almost always extraordinary) emerges the closely connected theoretical insight that the authority and tenacity of government in Gaza were derived, not so much from legitimacy, authenticity, or even from ‘good policy,' but from the form, shape, and habits of its daily practice. It is in the work and lives of low-level, local, civil servants, in the marginalia of files, and in their paths of movement and networks of repetition, that the production of government can appear most clearly. This is not to say that policy-makers and the significant documents they produce are insignificant to government, but that they are not all that matters. In the daily work of rule, the paths of papers and the habits of civil servants intersected, and sometimes collided, creating and recreating trajectories of work that together defined a governmental field.

This governmental field, though, was not a totality in any conventional sense. Rather, it was a domain in which seemingly, and often actually, contradictory practices coexisted. To the extent that government was able to persist—and in both the British and Egyptian periods there were moments of crisis that put that persistence into serious doubt—it did so through making those contradictions productive. Government utilized both the regularity of repetitive bureaucracy and the mobility of tactical practice to manage the unstable conditions in Gaza. Under very difficult conditions, it was able to persist by turning those difficulties to its advantage—by, for instance, deflecting the questions of legitimacy that neither administration could answer. The advantage of such practices was that governments were able to survive challenges that seem like they should have brought the entire edifice crashing down. Their disadvantage was that, being tactical more than strategic, it was nearly impossible to predict what outcomes might result from their enactment or what shape the persisting government might take. Both the British Mandate and the Egyptian Administration survived by, in effect, relinquishing control over their future.

The remainder of this essay explicates the practice of government in Gaza through consideration of both the regular and regularizing work of filing and civil service habit and the particular and sometimes erratic details of service provision. The first part explores the production of bureaucratic authority without authenticity and the second traces the persistence of government without legitimacy.¹⁹

Lisa Wedeen's analysis of Hafez Al-Asad's rule in Syria elucidates the ways that governments can sustain themselves without relying on legitimacy or always needing force.²⁰

The interrelated problems of how to govern without stability, and the mechanisms (however piecemeal) that developed to respond to these problems do not only illuminate government in the narrow sense. They also offer insight into the complex ways that government, place, and population work on each other—truly a governmental field. In the details of bureaucracy, one encounters tensions between local authorities and central administration, critiques of civil servants by members of the public, and reconfigurations of the boundaries between governmental and private domains. Each of these moments serves as a reminder that in the production and persistence of governing forms it is not only a government that is at stake, but the formation and transformation of place and people.²¹

In Gaza, this formation has been accompanied by repeated ruptures in the domain of rulers and political institutions, as well as in the territory and population itself. At the same time, as עAli's petition highlights, even under such dramatic conditions understanding government does not require a choice between continuity and rupture, but lies in apprehending both.²²

Producing Bureaucratic Authority

For any government bureaucracy, the question of authority is crucial. However highly developed its mechanisms, however organized its networks of relations, it cannot long function without both its practitioners and the public recognizing its demands as authoritative. This authority is best understood not as an objective achievement but rather as an ongoing process. It is enacted through practice, not established once and for all. In the dynamic of authorization professional and private attitudes and actions intersect, reinforce, and sometimes rearrange each other. In this process, civil servants are a meeting point for the conflicts swirling in and through society. The authorizing (and authorized) gestures, attitudes, and statements of such employees are crucial to this enactment.

Explorations of bureaucratic authority have often focused on the dynamics of authenticity.²³

What mechanisms are available for authorization in non-national contexts? Thomas Osborne offers one suggestion, arguing that in colonial India ‘ethical competence' provided the means of producing “authoritative subjects with the authorization to subjects others to authority.”²⁶

In the elaboration of authority in Gaza, where conditions on the ground offered little stability, it was through the workings of bureaucracy itself that authority was produced. This was a distinctly circular process, and to the extent that it was successful it was precisely because of its circularity. While external sources of authority were occasionally called upon—the promise of future independence, the benefits of reform, or the connection to cultural identity—none could provide a stable ground for authority. Promises, improvements, and connections were too often undermined by betrayals, regressions, and dislocations. What were most reliable were the general characteristics of bureaucracy itself—the iterative networks of filing and the habitual practices of civil servants. These features of bureaucratic operation are, of course, general—not limited to one department, regime, or form of government. For this reason, exploring how they worked to produce governing authority in Gaza can shed light on the more general condition of modern rule.

Files and filing—the masses of paperwork, their paths of movement, their networks of storage—form, as Weber tells us, the backbone of modern bureaucracy. Crucial to the management of files and to maximizing their utility are the practices of civil servants: “The management of the modern office is based upon written documents (‘the files'). . . . There is, therefore, a staff of subaltern officials and scribes of all sorts. The body of officials actively engaged in a ‘public' office, along with the respective apparatus of material implements and the files, make up a ‘bureau.'”²⁹

Over the course of the British Mandate and Egyptian Administration in Gaza, filing came to occupy an increasingly large place in the governing order. Throughout their colonial empire the British were prodigious documenters, and they left a massive paper trail for students of colonialism. In Gaza, and Palestine more generally, they built upon the scaffolding of Ottoman documentary production to create an expansive system of paperwork. When Egyptian authorities took over administration in Gaza, they came with their own experience of British colonialism (and British filing), and kept the local system largely intact.

Files are effective in consolidating governing authority in part because they delimit a framework for interaction among people—both ‘civilians' and civil servants—that contributes to shaping relations among them.³⁰

British regulations for document writing demanded an extreme degree of stylistic conformity. They covered everything from what size paper should be used for different documents, to how the date should be written on a letter, to how correspondence should be acknowledged. These regulations ensured that each document produced by government would resemble every other structurally similar document. One order, for instance, decreed that letters from government officials to private individuals should not include a distribution list, but “if it is specifically desirable to bring the fact of such distribution to the notice of the addressee an appropriate addition should be made to the text.”³³

This regulation and others like it were immediately concerned with the boundary between government and the public, and were attentive to the unintended effects that documents might produce in their readers. Other aspects of style management were focused more specifically on the internal life of the civil service (an internal life that, to be sure, always had permeable boundaries). The files of Palestine government correspondence, for instance, were organized for conversation. They generally share the same basic format: letters, drafts, and legislation form the body, or folios, of the file which opens with the minutes, a running commentary by various interested officials on the papers in the file.³⁴

The distinction between these two styles of administrative conversation was connected to the presumed level of privacy of the correspondence. Minutes were designed to be internal commentary, whereas formal letters might reach the public's attention. By providing a ‘private space' for written communication among government officials, minutes appear to have contributed to forming a civil service culture. Here in the margins of files, civil servants were afforded opportunities to address each other, and each other's work, in ‘spontaneous' and ‘natural' ways—a more informal style permitted in these non-public parts of files. Even with the apparently clear line of distinction between the spaces of a file, conversation was carried on across that divide, albeit in a different register.

Similar concerns about style were evident in the Egyptian Administration as well—highlighted, for instance, in an article in the Egyptian civil service magazine that offered concrete advice to civil servants about how to write the most effective memos.³⁷

The advice given in the article stresses the particular demands made by the Arabic language on memo writers. One need not become an Arabic expert, the article assures its readers, but one must “be able to express what you want with a ‘clear' expression and with formulations that have ‘limited precise meanings.'” Memo writers were advised to avoid words with more than one meaning, since these might obscure one's ideas. In writing memos one should not affect a literary pose, but rather focus on using correct syntax and grammar, since mistakes here might dramatically distort the intended meaning.³⁹

While the article's suggestions do not delineate as precisely as British regulations the form of the document, they do express a clear interest in standardization. If administrative writers followed its advice and steered clear of “perverse and infrequent words” and complicated constructions, the result would certainly be to minimize diversity of style in official writing. By emphasizing the effect on civil servants' careers of the form of their documents, the article seeks to invest them in the project of standardization. This same process also enabled others (superiors, citizens) to observe and document the practices of these civil servants. The uniformity of documentary style not only supported the authority of documents, it offered a means for comparing, and judging, civil servants.

That a ‘civil service culture' did develop among government personnel and that these civil servants (muwazzafīn) did feel invested in the projects of regularity and standardization that defined civil service ‘quality' is evident in the ways they talk about their careers and positions.⁴¹

While Salim did not suggest that only civil servants were respectable, he did intimate that respectability was intrinsic to civil service in a way that was not true for the general population. He did not imagine that all civil servants achieved this respectability, but perceived a failure to do so as a definitional failure—one had failed in one's job, and in being what one should be as a civil servant. He commented: “If you behaved in your work in a good manner, straight, the people will respect you. . . . It is up to you. You have to prove yourself in society as a civil servant. There are civil servants who retired without anyone mentioning them, and there are others in high-ranking positions, but nobody says good morning to them.”⁴³

A lack of respectability could effect, not only one's position in society, but one's ability to advance at work. Muhammad Ghazi, a clerk in the Egyptian-era health department, attributed his success to his differences from other, less respectable employees: “Some employees had bad habits. Some drank coffee at their desks, some talked, some smoked cigarettes. This was not me. I progressed a lot, even compared to the employees who had seniority over me.”⁴⁴

To be a good civil servant, though, sometimes meant taking an adversarial position vis-à-vis a member of the public. Civil servants had to know when to be forceful, and relied on the authority engendered by their position and their person to make such confrontations effective. At the same time, such actions worked to further solidify their authority. One can find instances of forceful bureaucracy in both filing and personnel practice. A seemingly minor story told to me by Khaled ‘Emad, a former head of the Gaza Municipality electricity department, illuminates the significance of this practice. A regular part of his job, he told me, was to go to the field to respond to complaints, or to inspect the quality of work, and if he found problems he would direct his ‘force' against the negligent employee. One day he was sent to investigate a complaint made by a citizen about a failure of garbage collection from his house. However, when Khaled and the complainant left the municipality offices, the latter seemed to lose interest in the investigation: “The man invited me to smoke arghile [a waterpipe] with him at a café, and not to go to his house. I returned to the mayor and told him that the guy wanted me to smoke arghile with him at the café instead of checking the workers' work. The mayor told me to leave the garbage at the man's house for a week as a fine.”⁴⁷

Whether the complaint was fabricated, or the man simply thought his long-term service prospects would be better with Khaled as an ally is not clear. What is clear is that this infraction demanded a response. Equally important to Khaled was that the punishment had to be appropriate. As he told me: “I had contacts with the people and through my contacts I knew everyone—the good and the bad, the educated and the uneducated—and understood that you have to cope with them all. It is illogical to beat someone who asked you to smoke arghile with him at a café.” So being a good civil servant and treating the public with respect meant not only producing a pleasant encounter with government but also exercising a carefully calibrated forcefulness, which itself engendered respect among the population.

Among the clearest cases of such forcefulness in files are those involving the police. In tracking the contours of public behavior and attitudes by collecting as much information as possible about individuals, these files work also to affect that behavior. Almost no aspect of life is left unexposed in the Egyptian-era files of Idara al-Mabahith al-עAmma (General Investigation Bureau, a unit of the Interior and Public Security Administration). They include incident reports about specific events, daily and weekly reports by police officers to department inspectors, and monthly reports by regional governors and inspectors to the head of the Interior and Public Security Administration. The reports focus on ‘public' matters—political activity, public opinion, organizational formations—but treat ‘private' life as well. All public meetings were attended by an officer of the Mabahith, and private gatherings were noted and observed. Conflicts between and within families were detailed, and their mediation by mukhtars (village leaders) discussed. Individual behaviors, especially if unusual or potentially political, were included in the files. Mabahith reports were concerned as much with talk as with actions, and they reported on public opinion and prevailing rumors. For the most part, these files do not provide analysis, nor, regarding rumors,do they distinguish between fact and fiction.

The Mabahith al-עAmma files indicate clearly how compilation works in filing. Accumulation works here to give weight and significance to seemingly insignificant moments. The Mabahith files are filled with events of no apparent import and people of no obvious significance.⁴⁸

The import of such a report is necessarily relational. If any of the participants already had files, then their personal profiles could lend an interpretation to the event. Similarly, if something threatening were to happen in the future, this report could be included in a dossier. Or if a previous report indicated that something was likely to happen, this report could serve to confirm it. These police reports created an available archive of information that could be drawn upon if need be. Their role was to police the possible, to inform about what could happen as much as what had happened.

Gazans remember the effectiveness of such compilation for policing in general. As one Gazan, told me, praising Egyptian-era policing: “If someone's shop was robbed, the thief was caught within twenty-four hours, because thieves were registered in the government files. . . . they investigated and they would catch ten or fifteen people and beat them so they told them who did it.”⁵⁰

The greatest evidence that bureaucratic authority was successfully produced in the Mandate and the Administration is that, for the most part, both civil servants and members of the general public continued to participate in government. It is notable that working in the Mandate or the Administration governments was not widely perceived as an act of collaboration, even though neither was national and both, particularly the Mandate, could be seen to be acting against the national interests of the population. To the contrary, as Gazans consistently told me: “work in the government does not mean that all civil servants are spies for the government or collaborating with the government.”⁵¹

Such widespread agreement indicates the strength of the authority produced through compilation and habit. Given the tremendous political problems that characterized both the Mandate and the Administration, only the strength of habit could keep doubt from overwhelming the ability of civil servants to do their jobs. There were moments when habits were decisively broken, a notable instance being the failures of Palestinian police when confronted with the upheavals of a Palestinian national revolt in 1936. But more often political problems caused a shudder rather than a complete disruption in the smooth, habitual operations of civil service. That bureaucratic authority did not rely primarily on a claim to national authenticity meant that evidence that government was ‘inauthentic' did not necessarily undermine this authority.

Bureaucratic Service and Tactical Practice: Legitimacy in Abeyance

Despite the dramatic transformations in both Gaza and the regimes that governed it, the practices of filing and the habits of civil servants look very similar (though not identical) across the fifty-year period under consideration here. This continuity despite disjuncture offers one explanation for the faith in ‘government' that עAli expressed in his petition. When one looks at particular service domains rather than the general bureaucratic form, one finds many distinctions between the Mandate and Administration. Questions of what services to offer and how to provide them were answered somewhat differently by each. Nonetheless, even in domains where they differed the service practices of each were embedded in a shared style of governing. Responding to the difficult conditions in Gaza and the uncertain status and future of government itself, this governing style can be called “tactical” to distinguish it from forms of strategic government that utilize long-range planning, comprehensive analysis, and relatively coherent policies as the mechanisms of rule. The kind of planning that characterizes strategic government demands either the stability produced by legitimacy or, alternately, a degree of force that renders legitimacy irrelevant. Neither condition prevailed in Gaza.

In developing the term “tactical government” I draw from Michel de Certeau's work in The Practice of Everyday Life, but I am expanding his insights about persons' responses to a disciplinary environment to include the domain of governmental practice. In de Certeau's view, the tactical is eminently the realm of the every-person, the consumer, the ordinary subject.⁵³

The remarkable extent and depth of the difficulties facing officials was one of the distinctive features shaping Gaza's governmental practice. Neither British nor Egyptian administrators had time, space, or money to ‘settle down' in Gaza. Not only were government budgets severely constrained, government policies were often very uncertain.⁵⁶

Even as they tried to mitigate the contradictions of administration, each regime was confronted by a persistent temporal uncertainty. Both the Mandate and the Administration were governments that were supposed to end, but neither had a clear plan to produce that end. At the same time, each feared that the end might be not so much produced as enforced. This temporal insecurity meant that even when government did attempt to plan, to develop policy, it was never possible to know with any clarity what future one might be planning for.

Tactical government offered a means for the Mandate and the Administration to cope with these conditions. Furthermore, it provided a mechanism through which questions of legitimacy—which could never be resolved or entirely occluded—could be held in abeyance. With its preference for the temporary, the piecemeal, and the makeshift, tactical government permitted deferral and distraction to occupy the space of resolution. Deferral meant putting aside questions of legitimacy to a vaguely imagined future time, when there would be Palestinian self-determination in Gaza. Distraction meant that attentions—of government, civil service, population—were averted from the challenges of consent and coercion and focused on the mundane, the day to day, and getting by. In this way the stakes and possible outcomes of particular practices and policies were often not discerned by either practitioners or the public. It was this dynamics of abeyance that permitted the persistence of rule in Gaza under conditions that were always fraught and uncertain.

What did this government look like in action? To at least partially answer this question, I turn to the particular work of housing service. Housing provides a particularly clear instance of ruling anxiety, and of tactical government utilized as an instrument of response. It also illuminates important differences between the Mandate and Administration. In addressing housing problems, each government had first to decide whether housing should or should not be considered a service at all, and either answer had troubling implications. While shelter is an immediate and apparently straightforward need, fulfillment of it rapidly produces an array of social, legal, and political entanglements. Building houses raises questions of town planning, construction regulations, land ownership, and social dynamics. These issues made the Mandate government, especially, reluctant to define housing as a service. Still, these same concerns also indicate ways that such a service could be productive for government. When government was forced to fully take on housing as a service, as was the Egyptian Administration due to the extreme crisis caused by the dispossession of 1948, that service was also able to participate in social policy.

World War I wrought enormous devastation in Gaza, and much of Gaza City was destroyed. As Herbert Samuel (the first High Commissioner of Palestine) described it, “the town of Gaza suffered probably more from Military action during the war than any other town in this theatre of operations. . . . The original population has now dwindled to something like one-third of its number, and in the present ruinous condition of the town there is little to attract the remainder of its inhabitants to return or a fresh population to settle there.”⁵⁷

British officials worried about the financial drain on already limited government resources, about setting a precedent that would impose future obligations on Government that it might wish to avoid, and that the relationship between municipalities and Government might be disrupted by government intervention in what was felt to be a municipal (or possibly private) arena.⁶⁰

This “Gaza Development Scheme” was a complicated and not entirely workable amalgam of poor relief, town planning, and municipal development. It did not provide direct grants to those whose homes had been destroyed. Rather, according to an early proposed version of the plan (1923), the Government would cede (loan, really) 5,000 dunams of land to the west of the city to the Gaza Municipality, which would then offer the land for sale. The proceeds would provide the capital for a “Gaza Building Society” that would, in turn, provide loans to homeowners whose houses had been destroyed during the war.⁶²

Numerous complications delayed this scheme's implementation, and though Government approved the scheme in principle as early as 1924, a final draft of the purchase agreement was not approved until August 1933.⁶³

While much of damaged Gaza was eventually rebuilt, and the new Gaza neighborhood of Rimal was established, this happened less through Government servicing than through government regulation. The plan, once intended as a means of providing some housing service without involving Government too much, had evolved into a Government-regulated commercial venture. There was no formal decision to abandon the service aspect of the scheme, just as there had been no single cause for delays in its implementation. However, as it was actualized, public funds seem to have disappeared.⁶⁶

Even this regulatory practice, however, was, like all domains of British rule in Gaza, unsettled and conflict-ridden. The Gaza District Town Planning Commission—which did not even begin meeting until 1940 though Gaza had been designated a town planning area as early as 1923–expressed considerable frustration at the difficulties involved in getting home builders in Rimal to follow the rules laid out in the planning scheme.⁶⁷

Faced with a public that was disregarding regulations and a municipal body that was failing to enforce compliance, Government was forced, contrary to its own intentions, to increase civil service involvement Gaza's daily life. The Commission ordered that the Regional Engineer be dispatched to Gaza each month to serve “as an advisory member on the Building Permit Sub-committee of the Local Town Planning Commission.”⁷⁰

It was not until 1947 that the Planning Commission felt prepared to claim success at enforcing regulations. According to the minutes of a meeting from June of that year: “After a slow start and a lot of uphill work . . . real progress was at last being made. . . . having cleared up a considerable number of infringements which had been allowed in the past the Committee was concentrating on the future.”⁷²

Responsibility for ensuring that building regulations were followed had been removed from the municipality, which now served as an agent of the Planning Commission in this regard. Thus, while Government had initially been reluctant to undertake housing services partly because of an unwillingness to take on municipal responsibility, in the transition from service to regulation this is precisely what occurred. Over the course of the Mandate housing went from need, to service, to regulatory domain. The outcome of this process was an involvement of Government at a level of detail that had not been anticipated, a general incapacity to do more than react to problems in implementation, and the emergence of a complicated field of government service that rendered the stakes of its work opaque.

Most of the improvements of the Mandate years were made irrelevant by the 1948 war over Palestine and the subsequent creation of the Gaza Strip. With three times the population and much less land, housing was a crisis, not a development problem. This housing crisis highlights an important distinction between refugees and native Gazans. Since it was precisely in terms of losing one's home that a refugee was defined, housing both marked distance between the two groups and helped produce that distance. At the same time, the housing crisis in Gaza also brought these two groups (newly defined as such) into intimate relations with each other.

Jamil Nizar, a refugee from Asdud who was a child in 1948, described the close quarters in the house where his family rented space from native Gazans: “. . . we lived in a room and the owner's family lived in the other room. If I were my father, I would not have been able to survive.”⁷³

Even though housing created native-refugee tensions, many refugees also recall the efforts Gazans made to help them when they first arrived.⁷⁶

The severity of the crisis which faced the refugees coming into Gaza did not afford the Egyptian Administration or UNRWA the luxury of debating whether it was “appropriate” to service housing, as did Mandate officials. It was evident to all that housing was a pressing and immediate need. The very severity of the need meant that the implications of this service work for the nature of government, and for the relationship between the (transformed) local population and that government, could not be the focus of anyone's attention. This contextual distraction later shared space with a practice of deferral that was equally connected to conditions in Gaza.

From the start, Egyptian administrators understood that the dimensions of the housing crisis extended beyond the need for shelter. From their perspective, the crisis was a social one as well, since improper living conditions left society in general at risk for a “decline into depravity.”⁷⁸

Refugee living conditions in Gaza during the first years after 1948 horrified Egyptian Administrators, who saw them as dangerous to the moral welfare of the society. According to a report by the Bureau of Refugees, Government Aid, and Social Affairs, camp conditions were not much more satisfactory than in those in mosques: “where there was a family living in their nation in a spacious independent house, they have come to a life where they live in one narrow room, or a small tent. The family needs to tend to all of its needs in this small space—sleeping, cooking, washing, showering, meeting guests, etc. There is no doubt that this situation cannot be sustained.” Even worse, the report went on, “there are many circumstances of two families who have no connection having to live in one tent or room.”⁷⁹

UNRWA also saw the need to improve conditions in the camps, and was eager to replace tents with more solid houses⁸⁰

The ‘public' ownership of camps increased UNRWA's regulatory oversight over the use of the houses, which themselves were UNRWA property. Any construction within a camp required permission from the officer in charge, and the finished product would itself become UNRWA property.⁸³

The joint management of camps—in which UNRWA provided services and the Egyptian Administration was responsible for security—further complicated the governmental field. That their respective authorities were entangled seemed clear to the population, and its complexity was reflected in the multiple directions of complaint and critique. Petitions about UNRWA practice were sent to the Egyptian Administration, and protests about Administration policy were staged outside UNRWA offices. These complicated relations certainly clouded the meaning of particular policies for judgments of government, though this did not limit critiques of those policies. Refugees were acutely aware of both their need for housing assistance and the potentially negative implications of such assistance for the resolution of their condition. The establishment of refugee camps was a response to the incapacity of the population to care for its own housing needs (due to the crisis of dispossession), but they also ensured that this capacity for self-sufficiency would be continually deferred, and made a return to their homes less likely.

Not only were the housing services provided by refugee camps limited in their capacity to fulfill the broader social needs the Administration saw as crucial, they were also limited in their very capacity to house refugees—only about half of the refugee population ever lived in camps. In these conditions of perpetual deferral, Egyptian Administrators eventually had to develop additional, more permanent housing policies. Mirroring a practice deployed in Egypt, the Administration sold public land to civil servants as a perquisite of their service to government. Through a lottery system, plots of state land were made available at “symbolic” (that is, very low) prices to employees—first to those with more than ten-years experience and later to those with less.⁸⁶

This distribution of land, taking place as it did in the new circumstances where Gaza was inhabited by both natives and refugees, had a significant effect on the social landscape. As civil servants, refugees had the opportunity to acquire land in Gaza. Property ownership did not diminish people's desires to return to their homes, nor lessen their claims to their lands left behind, but it did bind them to their new place of residence. It also muted some of the differences between refugees and native inhabitants. While clear distinctions between the groups remain today, living in the same neighborhoods and sharing the same everyday space did blunt the edges of their differences.⁸⁸

The land sales met with an enormously positive response. Judgments by Gazans of the Egyptian Administration vary considerably, but nearly all speak with glowing praise about two aspects of Egyptian rule: the provision of free university education to vast numbers of Gazans and the low-cost sale of land to government employees.⁸⁹

At stake in the details of Egyptian housing service—as in the details of Mandate services—was nothing less than the persistence of government. These practices that kept people participating in a dynamic to which they could not assign legitimacy also formed material through which both community and place were shaped and reshaped. When frustration over perpetual deferral seemed likely to produce a crisis, the distraction provided by improved services could avert it. Alternately, when political demands rendered distraction insufficient, future promise could counsel patience. The way these things worked together was not necessarily planned, but it was clearly productive. At the same time, this mode of practice both represented and was produced out of genuine limitations on governmental capacity. When government worked in Gaza, when it participated in the shaping of place and people, it did so in ways that neither policy-makers nor practitioners could entirely control or even understand.

Conclusion

Because of its distinctive conditions and history, Gaza has demanded a new approach to understanding government. Looked at from both sides of the crucial division of 1948, ruling practices during the British Mandate and the Egyptian Administration suggest that עAli was right to identify an enduring governmental work across regimes. They suggest that he was also right to be anxious about whether such continuities would prove more significant than state-level disjunctures (and in his particular case they did not). Even as one finds both self-referential authorization and tactical deferrals and distraction during the Mandate and the Administration, there were important differences in the way these broad modes of rule were enacted, in the details of the governing work involved, and in the effects of such practices. These differences were not only related to a change from a mandate colonial regime to a ‘caretaker' administration, but were intimately connected to transformations in the place and population that government sought to manage. With bureaucratic practice at the center of analysis, it becomes possible to see how contradiction and connection, rupture and continuity, regularity and exceptionality, participate in a governing dynamic that was both tenuous and effective.

Even as this comparison across regimes can help us understand government in Gaza, the analytic developed here can also be helpful in analyzing rule in other, more ordinary, conditions. The techniques of Gaza's government were not its unique inventions, but the absence of stable frames and consistent resources did produce a particularly strong reliance on the daily mechanisms of government to authorize and shape rule. These mechanisms, though, have broad relevance beyond Gaza—the self-referential authorization so evident in Gaza's bureaucracy also seems to be at work in governments that do claim authenticity. The distraction and deferral that kept legitimacy in abeyance may be tactically mobilized by states that do depend on an acceptance of their legitimacy. The centrality of these practices in Gaza's government, and the relative absence of other structures that might appear to authorize and stabilize this government, make it easier to see how they work there. The Gaza case is therefore helpful not only for understanding government in Gaza, and Palestine, but government more generally. Thus this particular, and peculiar, place no longer appears so radically exceptional, and this in and of itself is a crucial lesson.