Ilana Feldman has a keen eye for extracting the fabric of everyday relations from seemingly dry bureaucratic documents. Her first, 2008 book on Gaza offered a rare view of life under British (1917–1947) and then Egyptian (1948–1967) rule, employing the insightful concept of “tactical government” (i.e., only short-term governmental commitments) as a framework for analyzing relations between a population and its quasi-legitimate rulers. I began the present book expecting it would be guided by that same notion. After all, the modus operandi of police everywhere is a sort of tactical mode of government, busy as it is with specific acts or outbreaks of crime, danger, or disturbances of the public order.

This book focuses on the policing apparatus that Egypt imposed on Gaza, which in turn shaped and created the very society it ruled. Egypt entered the Gaza Strip as a guardian of Palestinian interests, never asserting de jure sovereignty but maintaining a de facto authoritarian rule over the territory and its inhabitants. The latter, following the catastrophic results of the 1948 war with Israel, consisted of eighty thousand “original” residents and roughly a quarter of a million refugees. While the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) was assigned a major role in facilitating housing, health, education, and food programs, the Egyptian government was mainly concerned with law and order in its broad sense: internal security, prevention of crime, and securing the tenuous 1947 armistice borderline between the Gaza Strip and Israel.

Little in this book converses with the notion of “tactical government,” although the potential exists between the lines. Feldman, grounding her analytical effort in the works of Foucault, Loader, and Chatterjee, offers the notion of “security society” as an overall conceptual matrix for making sense of Gaza. She wants to know how techniques like surveillance and interrogation interacted with approaches such as mitigating disputes so as to enable (or disable) public and private spaces, identities, and relations.

Feldman notes a dialectic: the more eager the police were to expand the scope of their curiosity and probe deeper into ways of thinking, talking, and gossiping, the more the policing apparatus became a venue for channeling claims and complaints, expressing “public opinion,” and exerting influence on micro-scale issues like family disputes and macro-scale ones like Palestinian resistance to Israel. So, while this book may be read as another study of how a police force construes a population as a potential threat—relying on informers and methods of surveillance that spread fear and uncertainty—it also shows how such methods actively make a community, legitimize distinctions and categories among the ruled, and mark the limits of the public sphere. In one beautiful part of the book, Feldman tells about a multitude of police “reports about nothing,” which nonetheless added up to a meaningful nothing since they signaled the readiness of the police to be interested in everything and to be present everywhere. Her main insight here is that although constant police surveillance of thought and talk is certainly repressive, it is also a way to discover what people think and hence develop constructive responses.

Overall, the book uncovers the uneasy tension that existed between Egypt's caring obligations and its nervousness about a population it ruled only half-heartedly. Along this continuum, the population (or fragments thereof) was by and large perceived as suspect. The police relied heavily on spying and actively recruited or passively facilitated a host of informers. Everything and everyone became a threat and potential risk: neighbors, colleagues, family members, union members, professionals, and in fact anyone with “political” opinions. One result, Feldman writes, was the emergence of a “highly policed public sphere”: communists and Islamists were threated with jail, journalists and teachers were constantly surveilled, and every civil servant was under the gaze of authorities.

The book is valuable across several disciplines, including history, sociology, anthropology, and criminology. It illuminates how police work can shape or break the fabric of a society. Feldman notes the distinction that emerged between refugees and veteran inhabitants, which bred not only complex relations within the population but also differential treatment by the authorities. Refugees were the prime recipients of UNRWA services, and this alone could deepen resentment; they were sometimes seen as deserters who had abdicated Palestine to the Zionists. Police may have been more suspicious of refugees and the spaces of refugee camps and therefore might have subjected them to more brutal treatment, but this topic is mostly glossed over (37–39). Feldman tells us relatively little about the complicated triangle of relations between rulers, original inhabitants, and refugees.

She also examines two important international institutional players: UNRWA was a key distributer of social goods. We are not told much about how, if, and when UNRWA was implicated in police work and interrogations; many local people worked in its service and it is reasonable to expect that the police worked to learn what went on behind its compounds' walls. Another chapter considers UNEF, the first peacekeeping force of its kind in UN history, which acted as a buffer between Israel and the Gaza Strip and therefore participated in creating a “security space” along the latter's borders. Feldman writes that border-crossing into Israel was a key police concern, and one can add that infiltration moved in both directions since Israeli commando units periodically carried out what they called “retaliatory attacks” on selected Egyptian and Palestinian targets. Feldman's book contributes to our understanding of how unauthorized border-crossing triggers policing responses that penetrate deep into the territory itself, shaping the whole into one big “security space.” Moreover, border-crossing was not limited to the border with Israel, and smuggling from the Egyptian-controlled Sinai Peninsula was also a serious concern. Feldman gives too little attention to smuggling, but she does offer one important insight: the Egyptians did not trust Palestinian policemen to effectively fight smugglers (78). Again, there seems to me to be an opening here to an issue that deserves more attention, especially since controversies over smuggling between the Gaza Strip and Egypt remain so relevant today.

Finally, Feldman looks at moral policing and examines issues of propriety and so-called “honor killings.” The police were often called upon to broker peace between warring parties. Their readiness to act “outside the law” or respect “traditional ways of justice” was not in itself unique,Footnote ¹ yet Feldman also shows how such police interventions into everyday life enhanced their capacity to know what was going on generally, enlist informers, and transport knowledge acquired in one setting to another (e.g., unwarranted political activism). Here, Feldman blurs the line between the private and the public in the creation of a “security society.” She could do more to show how social fabrics are made and unmade through police work. That said, this book is a must-read for anyone interested in the history and sociology of the Gaza Strip. Many of the issues Feldman addresses remain important today, with Gaza still choked between Israel and Egypt.