Since October 2023, Israel has intensified its indiscriminate attack on UN schools, NGOs, and aid workers in Gaza with more than 61,000 Palestinians killed, more than half of whom are women and children. The United States has demonstrated its unequivocal support for Israel through its funding of billions of dollars in weapons, which surpasses $20 billion at the time of writing. Lisa Bhungalia’s Elastic Empire: Refashioning War Through Aid contextualizes the United States’s overzealous funding of Israel’s right to self-defense against Palestinians, as racialized subjects of U.S. empire. Bhungalia’s work follows the U.S. financial war on terror to analyze this process of racializing Palestinians. Elastic Empire arrives at a critical time in the history of U.S. involvement in Palestine. In her book, Bhungalia ethnographically analyzes the expansion of U.S. empire in Palestine through Israeli occupation, a helpful pretext to understand Israel’s attacks on Gaza and the West Bank since October 2023.

Bhungalia’s research for the book is set between 2009–2021. It follows the aftermath of the U.S. financial war on terror in occupied Palestine, which was in part realized by executive orders designed to impede terrorist institutions by financially constraining them. On September 23, 2001, then-U.S. president George W. Bush signed executive order (“E.O.”) 13224, an emergency order that granted the United States the ability to financially constrain any person or institution deemed to be funding or engaging in terrorism. This order would produce a series of policies and regulations for humanitarian organizations providing aid in Palestine. Bhungalia’s book demonstrates how the humanitarian sphere became implicated in the U.S. financial war on terror, what Bhungalia refers to as the “U.S. legal-war architecture,” which is at the center of the inquires of the book. It is this U.S. legal-war architecture that implicates Palestinians as subjects of Israeli occupation and, by extension, U.S. empire.

Elastic Empire is divided into five chapters including an introduction and conclusion. Each section of the book explores the materialization of U.S. empire for Palestinians in their everyday lives through ethnographic research.

In the first chapter of the book, Bhungalia explores what she terms the “legal-war architecture” (36), a product of “transnational circuits and ‘lessons and borrowings’ between the United States and Israel from the 1970s on” (47) wherein Palestine becomes the site of experimentation for such lessons. This chapter begins with the case of Muhammad Salah, a Palestinian-American citizen who in 1993 attempted to enter Gaza to deliver aid. Salah was detained in January of that year by Israel where he was held and tortured for five years. After his release, Salah would become the first U.S. citizen to be identified as a “Specially Designated Terrorist” (36). This designation restricted anyone from working or associating with Salah, socially isolating and sanctioning him until his untimely death at the age of 62 in 2016. Bhungalia contends that this legal-war architecture practices a type of speculative work that produces worlds where the possibility of terrorism and weapons is more important than the empirical proof of such weapons’ existence (41-42), what she calls the “politics of the could be.” It is this architecture that produces racialized threats, of which she provides multiple examples such as Muhammad Salah and Palestinian aid organizations in chapters 3 and 4. Through this configuration of the war-legal architecture, the Palestinian subject is always speculatively ready to be a terrorist.

In the second chapter, Bhungalia builds on Eyal Weizman’s concept of “elastic geographies” to introduce “elastic sovereignty” (51). By tracing the effects of the financial war on terror on aid institutions in Palestine, Bhungalia is able to argue and observe a type of sovereignty that follows elastic geographies: in this case, “by tracing the transnational operation of U.S. terrorism law… . [in] gray spaces through which sovereign power takes hold, yet in such a way that does not necessarily eschew law” (51). To explore this process, Bhungalia develops the concept of the “(inter)mediary sphere,” built upon Bruno Latour’s intermediaries and mediators (52). The (inter)mediary sphere is the international NGOs and contractors that manage U.S. aid flows worldwide (52-53) and into the West Bank and Gaza specifically. This chapter powerfully narrates how war rewrites itself into the humanitarian sphere following the long and bureaucratic vetting processes of USAID working with NGOs in Gaza (see detailed ethnographic capture of this on pages 61-62).

In the third chapter, Bhungalia follows the impact on NGOs of the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) terrorist list in the pre- and post-Oslo periods. Bhungalia does not approach the list as a database but as a lively “topological technology” that “does particular kinds of work – enfolding and isolating, fragmenting and consolidating, disassembling and recognizing sociopolitical formations and relationalities” integrating “faraway subjects into punitive regimes” (87). In this chapter, we are offered a glimpse of resistance attempts against U.S. sovereignty in Palestine. In the pre-Oslo period, the Palestinian Non-Governmental Organizations Network (PNGO) initially resisted USAID and the conditions that created Palestinians’ need for aid. In the post-Oslo period, PNGOs would lose their funding because of their refusal to adopt E.O. 13224, for refusing to sign the order that strips Palestinians of any right to resist. Through the embedding of the E.O. 13224 as a clause for aid, it was made clear to Palestinian institutions that aid was only possible through pacification (95-96).

The fourth chapter of the book traces the aftermath of the suspension of U.S. funding during the Trump administration. As Israel was intensifying its settlements in the West Bank, European and American aid came at a heavier cost. At this time, Israel was renewing its campaign against the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement implicating NGOs accused of terrorism with the movement and claiming that many NGOs in Palestine were receiving funding to undermine and delegitimize Israel. One of the most important takeaways from this chapter is the production of Palestinians as threats first and as “humanitarian subjects… but rarely as political subjects endowed with rights” second (132).

In the fifth and last chapter, Bhungalia theorizes “asphyxiatory violence” which I found to be her strongest intervention yet. It is a modality of violence and a process that she conceptualizes as a slow death that is met not with a bullet or a bomb, but with the designation of “terrorist” (144). Here Bhungalia builds on the work of Jasbir Paur and Laleh Khalili.Footnote ¹ Asphyxiatory violence is not meant to kill immediately but to diminish life capacities. Bhungalia argues, with reference to Nicholas Mulder’s sanctions as war thesis,Footnote ² that the modality of asphyxiatory violence demonstrates that Israel has surpassed its own war limits. Bhungalia contends that asphyxiatory violence is war itself (143, 161) and achieves its objective through slower forms of violence that constrict and remove the “conditions of livability through forced disconnection and isolation” (25). Such modalities of violence demonstrate how empire writes itself into law and aid specifically, since “aid has an international global mobility, empire here shifts from not only being in the details or liminal spaces… but it is also in the humanitarian spaces” (17).

Overall Elastic Empire provides a nuanced capture of how the local and the global are inextricably intertwined and how such entanglements translate U.S. empire into a tangible everyday experience for Palestinians. Bhungalia’s work provides a timely and necessary understanding of how war continues to live in the absence of war. Through such explorations, Bhungalia offers a rich pretext to the ongoing genocide of Palestinians and the shifting frames of war in Palestine through the policies and practices of U.S. empire.