UNCONCENTRATED GOVERNMENT AND THE RESOURCES OF RULE

Pierre Bourdieu links the issue of “concentration” directly to the question of the state. He describes the state precisely as the “culmination of a process of concentration of different species of capital”²¹

—coercive, economic, informational, and symbolic capital. This concentration, Bourdieu suggests, produces a particular statist capital which is enacted in the “bureaucratic microcosm … this universe of agents of the state.”²² In this account, concentration is fundamental to the very constitution of the state. One can see, therefore, why expertise would appear to be a universal condition of rule. Government in Gaza, though, did not fully operate by this principle of total concentration. The ruling ambitions of both the British Mandate and the Egyptian Administration were severely constrained. These governments did not, for the most part, conceive great initiatives that would have demanded the accumulation of resources of rule. This was not the “high modernist” state critiqued by James Scott.²³ The imagination of government during these periods was turned as much toward appearing to do nothing as it was toward expanding its reach and increasing its precision. There was no less governing work involved in this kind of practice, but this work was both more dispersed and on a smaller scale.

This lack of concentration—like all aspects of government in Gaza—was connected to the conditions in which such government was enacted. The British took over the government of Palestine when they defeated the Ottoman Empire in World War I. For the first five years of British rule, the country was governed by a military administration, the Occupied Enemy Territory Administration. In 1922, the League of Nations formally granted Great Britain the Mandate for Palestine, with the charge of both shepherding the country to independence and aiding the development of a Jewish national home in Palestine. The founding conditions of the Mandate ensured that the aims and policies of the new Palestine Government would always be fraught and internally contradictory. These contradictions were immediately evident to British administrators, and the effort to manage them shaped Mandatory government practice.

From the outset, the British government was cautious about making too many changes in the status quo in Palestine, a caution that would govern the entire Mandate. Because of this desire to appear not to do too much, when government did act it, did not follow a typical pattern of concentration. It remained embedded in local conditions, shaping its practice through them rather than following an extracted model. General Allenby, who led the British forces that conquered Palestine, divided the country into four administrative districts,²⁴

following the general Ottoman method, so that “not only should we disturb as little as possible the methods of Government to which the inhabitants were accustomed, but we should also be enabled to make the fullest use of the Turkish Governmental machinery.”²⁵ Whatever changes the British did make—and ultimately they made many—they were careful to justify as simply improvements on “corrupt” or “backward” Ottoman practices. Even as a rhetoric of stability was matched with a practice of transformation, budgetary constraints severely limited the capacities of government.²⁶

Given the intractability of the political problems that plagued Palestine, Mandatory efforts to “govern at a distance” were persistently complicated. For example, in 1929 (in the aftermath of disturbances over the Western Wall), the High Commissioner argued that “recent events have tended to show that closer administration is desirable in the Gaza and Beersheba Districts than has under the present arrangements been possible.”²⁷

Improving this situation required a transformation of administrative style. To this end, some officials recommended that District Officers travel on horseback: For the Mandate government, car transportation would have made technically possible more of the concentration of resources to which Bourdieu refers, but this mode of relationship was not desirable in Palestine. Car transportation would have brought government closer to a model of efficient modern rule, but governing Palestine demanded different priorities. Ultimately, it was more important to strive for actually efficient rule than for rule that fit the model of efficiency. In this way, effective administration sometimes required what appeared to be a less, rather than a more, rational style of rule.

While the “Palestinian peculiarity” goes a long way toward explaining the form of its government, this practice was also connected to the colonial nature of British rule in Palestine. As a rule, the British Colonial Service relied more on generalists than specialists—requiring civil servants who could be transferred among the very different colonial administrations and be qualified for each. A pamphlet published in 1950 as an advertisement for the service emphasized creativity, initiative, and enterprise, rather than particular skills, as the qualities needed for success as a colonial officer. In fact, the pamphlet warned potential applicants that their preservice training would not suffice to make them “competent and reliable” colonial civil servants. Whatever training one arrived with, “in order to become a craftsman at your job, you must learn it from the bottom.…[Y]ou must face the fact that it will be some time before you can consider yourself competent and experienced.”²⁹

While recognizing that acquiring such competence was a difficult task, the author of the pamphlet sought to reassure readers: “This indeed has been a catalogue of virtues, but do not despair, it is the ideal. If the impulse towards them is there, and the conviction that it is all worthwhile, your instincts and your education will see you through with the help which you will constantly receive not only from your seniors and colleagues, but also from the people.”³⁰

Given the difficulties that colonial officers faced, the cultivation of a broadly knowledgeable, ethical civil servant was of utmost importance. Robert Heussler notes, “An unusual combination of qualities was needed—courage with adaptability; firmness with sympathy; enterprise with reliability; obedience with authority. In lonely stations, far from the restraints of European public opinion and supported by lavish remuneration, the officer must remain dignified and incorruptible.”³¹

This emphasis on character was clearly evident in the hiring practices of the British Mandate, which explicitly preferred those people (mostly men) who were likely already to display the competencies that promoted service habits.³² Recruitment policy often sought out “sons or relatives of old government servants, who have traditions or experience behind them.”³³ Even when the government looked beyond this narrow group for its employees, it sought to develop competencies and habits through schooling. As in the Ottoman Empire, education during the Mandate was often intended to produce civil servants for government.³⁴ When applicants emerged from the Palestinian educational system, they had been trained, if not for service specifically, then at least with British “values” in mind.

In the effort in 1946 to fill a vacancy in Gaza's district administration, character demands dominated the hiring process. Commenting on the quality of the applicants, the district commissioner rejected one applicant partly on the grounds that “he is very pleased with himself, and his manners are deplorable.”³⁵

Recommending others for further consideration, the district commissioner praised one candidate's “character and drive, which, with proper training, might enable him to develop into a useful public servant” and commented on another that he was “genuinely interested in works of social amelioration and is intelligent enough to see the great needs of his own people at the present time.” Of one candidate who was over the age limit for the position and did not possess the requisite university education, the district commissioner argued he should nevertheless be considered, because “he is sensible and presentable and well acquainted with Government routine.” Wherever an applicant acquired his sense of style and form, it was awareness of and comfort with service habits—rather than any specific skills or expert knowledge—that appeared to be a prerequisite for getting and doing the job. The difficult political conditions in Palestine, which gave increased importance to these character traits, combined with the broader colonial concern for “quality people,” shaped the character of the Mandate civil service.

As complicated and constrained as was government practice during the Mandate, it was even more so during the Egyptian Administration. When, as a result of the 1948 war over Palestine, the Egyptian government found itself ruling over the new Gaza Strip, it faced numerous difficulties that limited the capacities of government. The Gaza District of Palestine, which had never exactly been booming, had now become an almost entirely impoverished sliver of land—its population tripled by refugees and the property of many of its native inhabitants lying on the other side of the armistice line that separated Gaza from the new state of Israel. As difficult as the conditions were in Gaza, the capacities of the Egyptian government to rule were also severely constrained. When asked about the quality of Egyptian rule, many Gazans commented on the poverty of Egypt itself. “Egypt was a poor country, and the poor cannot help the poor—but the Egyptians did give us some limited assistance,” one person said.³⁶

“The Egyptians weren't in a good situation: their material condition was hardly enough to support themselves,” commented another.³⁷

The interventions that government conceived and sought were also limited by Gaza's peculiarly uncertain status. Its boundaries were formed by the armistice line, which, as the agreement that halted active hostilities between Egypt and Israel affirmed, was “not to be construed in any sense as a political or territorial boundary, and is delineated without prejudice to rights, claims and positions of either Party to the Armistice as regards ultimate settlement of the Palestine question.”³⁸

Within the Gaza Strip, the continued insistence that Gaza stood for Palestine—the last part of “free Palestine,” the Egyptians liked to say—rendered the question of what kind of government Egypt could and should offer to Gazans always unsettled. It was not until 1954, six years into its twenty-year rule, that Egypt formally defined its relationship to Gaza with the issuance of a constitution for the Gaza Strip. This constitution stressed that Egypt “has no ambitions in this area,” but that it had gone to Gaza to “protect the Arab character of this Strip.”³⁹

Government in Gaza was further complicated by the relationship between the Egyptian Administration and United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the body charged with providing relief for Palestinian refugees. UNRWA's mandate was limited to refugees, even though the native population of Gaza was at least as destitute and in need of assistance. For refugees, however, UNRWA, in cooperation with the Egyptian government, provided most of the services this population received. Like that of the Administration, UNRWA's practice was troubled by uncertainty and limited capacity. Part of this uncertainty was produced by its short mandate: on the assumption that the Palestinian refugee problem would be resolved quickly, the Agency had initially been established for one year. One of the problems in such a short mandate, which was repeatedly extended for terms of just a few years, was that UNRWA's planning had to be equally short term. In 1954, the director complained, “The uncertainty which has existed concerning the extent and duration of the Agency's work, as well as concerning its legal status, has seriously impaired the Agency's ability to perform as adequately and effectively as it itself would deem necessary and desirable.”⁴⁰

The uncertainty of duration, however, overlay an even more fundamental question about the status of such an international service agency. As the Agency's 1953 annual report put the problem, “There is something incongruous in the presence of an alien organization, however well-intentioned, furnishing the basic necessities for a large proportion of the population of a country.”⁴¹ Of course, this incongruous condition is exactly what has persisted for more than fifty years.

While the Administration and UNRWA shared a concern with the welfare of the population, jurisdiction over that welfare had to be continually negotiated. Sometimes these negotiations were over questions of policy, such as a debate about whether UNRWA should provide aid to native Gazans. Other times, it was over practice, such as a back and forth over who should pay for public toilets for the village of Beit Hanoun. In the former instance, the U.N. General Assembly was, in fact, responsible for UNRWA's jurisdiction. In 1955, UNRWA's director prepared a report for the General Assembly on “other claimants for relief,” which detailed the conditions of Gaza's natives. The report noted that of 95,000 natives, 70,000 were registered with the Egyptian authorities as being in need of assistance and stated that “nearly the whole population is therefore in need as result of the establishment of the demarcation line and of the impossibility of moving goods and persons across it legally.”⁴²

Despite this strong statement, the General Assembly did not extend the mandate.⁴³ UNRWA practice, therefore, was bound by a policy that its own leadership found inadequate.

The debates over practice in which the Administration and UNRWA repeatedly found themselves engaged occurred at a different level but frequently centered on the same sorts of questions. The Administration often sought UNRWA funding for public projects undertaken outside refugee camps on the grounds that those projects would benefit refugees. In the instance of the public toilets, UNRWA agreed to assist in putting in toilets, provided that the village paid half the cost.⁴⁴

Unfortunately, an Administration official noted, the village had neither funds nor a local council to raise them, and “the people of the village are refugees and the responsibility for their maintenance lies with the Agency.”⁴⁵ With some exasperation, and unsuccessfully, the UNRWA representative argued, “It is the opinion of the Agency that the inhabitants of this village, living in their own houses and cultivating lands, can meet this requirement, the Agency will then have fulfilled its capability of assisting groups of refugees outside camps.”⁴⁶ Efforts to provide services for Gaza's inhabitants were frequently complicated during the Administration both by attempts to make other parties responsible for such provision and by concerns about the possible implications of service provision.⁴⁷ These uncertainties of jurisdiction highlight the interrelated incapacities of government and population. No one, it seemed—not UNRWA, the Administration, or the population—had sufficient resources to manage adequately the needs of daily existence. “Unconcentrated” rule, then, occupied the space of both policy and outcome, both choice and requirement, and its effects were felt by all the parties to government.

BUREAUCRATIC COMPETENCE AND GAZA'S CIVIL SERVANTS

The work of government under such conditions certainly demanded a particular sort of civil-service practice. When I talked with retired civil servants in Gaza about their jobs and careers, they frequently described their skills in terms of experience, not expertise. Just as the colonial-service pamphlet emphasized the importance of learning on the job, so did Gaza's civil servants. As Da

ud Ahmed told me, “After I finished high school… I was appointed the office manager of the governor, and I did not know the governor or the governed because I was a new student. They taught me for a month, the training period, and then I understood everything.”

⁴⁸

Ibrahim Ahmed told a similar story of skills developed through experience. Hired as the director of a printing office, a position for which he had little background, he learned the work by talking with the other employees: “[y]ou know what I did: I asked the messenger, the janitor, ‘What is this and what is that?’ to the extent that they wondered and said to me, ‘You are the director; why don't you go and sit at your office?’ I said to them that I wanted to know everything. I learned…and I added to my knowledge and experience.”⁴⁹

Identifying a change in governing conditions, Muhammad Ghazi, an employee in the Gaza Health Department from 1953 until 1994, told me he had left his job after the Palestinian Authority entered Gaza precisely because he felt the work of the future (“the stage of the state,” as he put it) required expertise that he, despite his many years of service, could not provide. “They insisted that I stay for my experience, and the minister asked me to work as his adviser and he decided that I should work a part-time job as an adviser for the administrative affairs,” he said. “But I felt that this position, too, requires someone with more learning and administrative training…so I quit.”⁵⁰

Muhammad judged himself more than competent for the governing needs of the Administration but lacking the expertise that the “stage of the state” demanded.⁵¹

That government during the British Mandate and Egyptian Administration was not principally defined by expertise never rendered the competence and qualification of government employees unimportant. To the contrary, both the officials who did the hiring and the civil servants who did the work were extremely concerned with the capacities of civil servants. It should also be noted that neither government was entirely devoid of experts. During both the Mandate and the Administration, there were some civil servants who were demonstrably experts—one can think of doctors and religious officials, judges, and, to a certain extent, teachers. The governments of both the Mandate and the Administration also occasionally brought in outside experts to offer advice on aspects of Administration.⁵²

The bulk of civil-service work, though, relied on a much more generalized conception of competence. To see more clearly just what competence meant in the context of Gaza's civil service, it is helpful to consider the course of a career. Muhammad Ghazi's provides a good instance.

I met Muhammad in the offices of the Retired Civil Servants Association in Gaza City. In the course of my fieldwork, I spent a great deal of time at the association, as well as at its UNRWA counterpart, the Association of Retired Arab UNRWA Employees. These associations advocated for the rights of retirees in matters of pension and social-security benefits, tried to assist them in whatever difficulties they faced, and provided a social gathering place for their members. The officers of the Retired Civil Servants Association, as well as a fluid group of regulars, would gather in its offices every day. In between attending to association business, they would drink coffee and tea, play backgammon, argue politics, and reminisce about how things used to be. I had many conversations with these retirees about their work experiences and their views on government. Muhammad talked to me at great length (and on one occasion on tape) about his work and life, and what he said echoed the comments of other retirees.

Muhammad was very proud of his achievements over the course of his career, rising as he did from the position of clerk to that of deputy director-general of the health department. Describing his success, Muhammad stressed that it was his experience and his competence, not his expert qualifications, that had worked to his advantage: “The certificate [level of education] was not important. What was important was leadership—that is, how to manage.” He also stressed that he was not uniquely skilled at using his experience to his advantage. Rather, anyone who cared about his work could take on any position. “Someone who knows how to read the alphabet and is open-minded can be a writer; someone who can count from one to ten can be an accountant,” he said. “Then he will acquire experience and open his mind for the job—he can know everything.… I worked in many positions. It was like I was born in all jobs” (emphasis added).

Experience is also significant in an expert regime, but the nature and place of such experience is different. Where expertise defines government, getting a job in the first place requires definite and detailed qualifications—particular levels of education, specific kinds of training.⁵³

As we have seen, getting a job in Gaza's government depended to a great degree on apparent acclimation to a civil-service culture and on a perceived capacity to learn. To be sure, civil servants always learn on the job, but in expert government acquired knowledge is utilized to further elaborate the models of procedure and outcome that define a particular area of expertise, while in Gaza's government such knowledge remained both individual and general.⁵⁴ It was individual in the sense that the knowledge any particular civil servant acquired remained “his,” to be used to improve his own work but not extracted to inform a larger model. It was general in that such knowledge could be applied to a wide variety of civil-service positions—being as useful in the education department as in the health department.

This particular feature of Gaza's civil service also suggests that government's “knowledge” was somewhat different here from that in an expert regime. Modern government is generally described in terms of increasing—and increasingly precise—knowledge of its subjects and of its own operations. Foucault explains this knowledge work very clearly, and many others have elaborated its deployment in different settings.⁵⁵

In Gaza, government knowledge remained somewhat imprecise: not defined by statistical exactitude but, rather, by broad applicability. It was more about located know-how than extractable models. This privileging of “situated knowledge”⁵⁶ gave Muhammad a clear sense of his importance to bureaucratic operations. “The clerk has more information than anybody else in the directorate, because he witnesses everything that comes in or goes out,” he said. “Even though I was simple [uneducated], I saw everything.… I was able to absorb a lot of information.” That Gaza's civil service was staffed across the board more by generalists than specialists did not reduce hierarchies within its structure, but it did mean that access to technical information was not always how those hierarchies were marked.

The terms in which Muhammad described his advances in the civil-service hierarchy make this distinction particularly clear. He attributed his many promotions to his adaptability and to his energy. Suggesting that adaptability allows an employee to turn a difficulty to his own advantage, Muhammad commented, “The word ḥāḍir [yes, sir] is very important. It is not wrong when [your boss] says that you are going to be transferred to another place. The civil servant has to accept this because he is going to learn in the new position.… I worked in all the positions.” In fact, Muhammad suggested that he sought out opportunities to learn new things, to acquire new skills (he mentioned learning to type as an example). He compared himself to other, more complacent, employees who lacked his energy and therefore did not have his success. There were some muwaẓẓafīn (civil servants), he commented,

Lack of care could also affect the relationship a civil servant had with members of the public. As Salim Rashid, another retiree, put it, “You have to prove yourself in the society as an employee. There are employees who retired without anyone taking note, and there are others in high-ranking positions but nobody says good morning to them.”⁵⁷ It was not a lack of particular skills that held these muwaẓẓafīn back but, rather, a lack of desire to achieve more. In this context, civil-service competence was more about general capability than specific expertise, more about desire to work than mastery of a particular field.

POVERTY SERVICES AND GOVERNMENTAL MAKING DO

The conditions of limited capacity and circumscribed interventions, the relative absence of expertise, and the generalist definitions of competence gave particular shape to Gaza's administrative practice and to its care of the population. To consider this shape more closely, I turn now to the provision of government services and to a particularly important one in Gaza: “poverty services.” In the management of Gaza's population, especially after 1948, the most stable “object of knowledge” about this population came to be what Alice O'Connor (in a study of U.S. poverty policy) calls “poverty knowledge.” Poverty knowledge in the United States, O'Connor argues, was transformed in the 20th century from a disconnected array of anthropological studies into a “precise, federally funded analytic science”⁵⁸

that depended on the technical tools of “‘hard’ quantitative data, econometric modeling techniques, and cost/benefit policy analysis.”⁵⁹ In Gaza, poverty knowledge never coalesced around such precise tools. Just as technical training was not a defining feature of Gaza's civil-service competence, statistics were not a key part of Gaza's poverty knowledge.⁶⁰

In looking at the delivery of poverty services—from food provisioning to social services—it is clear that Gaza's service work, like other aspects of its government, proceeded “not quite” according to the model provided by standard conceptions of modern government. The development of poverty services from the Mandate to the Administration illuminates precisely both a global historical transformation, in which Gaza's services were linked to broader trends in conceptualizing poverty and the possible solutions for it, and a local distinctiveness, as these services followed a particular trajectory, not taking up the new tools of development that were used elsewhere. In tracing how poverty services intersected with the deployment of a nonexpert civil-service competence, this section considers both the kinds of knowledge that were developed around poverty and the service practices that sought to address these conditions.

Gaza began the Mandate in terrible condition—devastated by the destruction of war and the dispersal of its population. British observers described the city as “a scene of very sad desolation.”⁶¹

Gazans who are old enough to remember this period recall intense hunger. “An orange rind lying on the ground covered in sand, I would pick it up and wipe it off on my clothes and eat it, I was so hungry. Hunger is cruel, and life was terrible.”⁶² Responding to these conditions, the British military administration did provide some food aid, assistance that was trumpeted in British propaganda efforts. Jaridat Filastin, the official newspaper of the British military forces, commented in 1918 on British efforts to aid the needy in Palestine: “[The administration] has spent a lot of money to assist the unfortunate and the industrial sector, giving out seeds and food to those in need, and establishing camps to aid the poor and unfortunate in all parts of the country.”⁶³ Despite this early activism, for most of the Mandate the government offered relatively little in the way of poverty services, relying more on market forces, private actors, and the promise of development to offer whatever assistance might be needed.⁶⁴

The reluctance to service poverty, which was itself part of the broader dynamic of constricted government, helps explain the nature of poverty knowledge during this period. To understand how this knowledge differed from the expert knowledge described by O'Connor, it is helpful to consider what development meant in the Palestinian context. Development discourse and practice seems to be the epitome of expertise as a governing practice.⁶⁵

The apparent contradiction in saying that poverty knowledge in the Mandate was both nonexpert and concerned with development is resolved if one remembers that the field of development as expertise really emerged only in the post–World War II period. So when British officials used the language of development—and they did—the word did not carry with it the arsenal of techniques, instruments, and personnel that would be available to “development experts” only a few years later. As discussed by British officials and observers of the Mandate, development implied the capacity for progress within the broad trajectory of “global history.” And it was this history, rather than statistical models or econometric calculations, that provided the means of analyzing Palestinian poverty. This global history is clearly articulated in the many reports commissioned by the government over the years.⁶⁶ While these reports were immediately intended to suggest solutions to Palestine's political instability, the problem of Palestinian poverty was necessarily connected to these conditions.

In the view of Sir John Hope-Simpson's Report on Immigration, Land Settlement, and Development in Palestine commissioned in the wake of widespread violence in 1929, development—which would enable increased productivity and thus might counteract the effects of Arab dispossession from some of their land—offered the only possible hope for containing political turmoil in the country (and it was a wan hope, at that).⁶⁷

By increasing the capacity of the land, development could also make it possible to fulfill the Mandate goal of promoting Jewish settlement in Palestine. As the report stated, “There exists no easy method of carrying out the provisions of the Mandate. Development is the only way.… With development, that standard [of living among fellahin] could be raised so that it would permit reasonable conditions of livelihood to that backward class of the community and a margin of land could at the same time be provided for additional colonisation.”⁶⁸

The 1946 Survey of Palestine, produced for the benefit of the Anglo-American commission that was trying to determine the best future for Palestine, treated the problem of social services in the context of a world history that helped make sense of Palestine's particular poverty problem:

While the successive reports issued over the Mandate situated Palestinian poverty ever more firmly within a global comparative framework that provided little space for Palestine's particular history, the actual conditions in Palestine did necessitate some welfare programming.⁷⁰

The first regular government-supported relief projects were implemented during the 1936–39 rebellion, and aid “was given at first to families where the breadwinner was detained under Emergency Regulations and was later extended to families which suffered indirectly from the prevailing conditions—the unemployed and the chronic poor.”⁷¹

Economic conditions improved considerably during World War II, although a department of social welfare was established in 1944, with a primary mandate of promoting municipal assistance to the poor. The survey indicated that while the social welfare department did provide some direct assistance to “the unemployed and the chronic poor” in the form of ration tickets, its ultimate goal was to coordinate municipality-led welfare committees. “In order to stimulate local effort Government has borne the full cost of feeding in those districts where local funds have only been sufficient to meet initial capital expenditure. It is, however, the policy of Government to contribute half the cost of approved welfare schemes and as soon as possible to place the responsibility for welfare on the Municipalities.”⁷² This goal of devolution was inhibited by the capacities of different localities, and particularly by the distinctions between Palestine's two communities: Jewish and Arab. At the time of the survey's 1946 publication, only Jaffa among the Arab municipalities had succeeded in establishing a welfare department.

Even if it did not have a welfare department organized according to the model mandated by the central government, the Gaza City municipality did have an interest in providing relief to the poor. The registers of decisions of the Gaza City Council record many instances of the council's providing assistance to poor inhabitants of the city, offering them tax relief, stipends, and scholarships.⁷³

It is clear that well before government encouraged the establishment of “local welfare committees,” the Gaza City municipality felt it had a public responsibility to provide aid to the poor. The character of this aid makes clear that these services were not provided according to the dictates of any project of poverty alleviation. As recorded in the registers, decisions about assistance seem to have been ad hoc and were certainly not referred to any “expert” who might judge the need of applicants. There was no attempt to extract a model of poverty or to measure the outcome of this aid.

The 1936 general strike, which led to much greater need, did produce a more regularized provision of municipal aid. The council authorized the founding and funding of a committee to coordinate assistance to the “poor and unfortunate,” noting that “because of the current conditions many people have become in need of assistance” and that “it is the responsibility of the municipality in conditions like this to help those in need.”⁷⁴

While British officials sought as much as possible to leave such responsibility to market forces, the municipality was much less reluctant to provide some poverty services. That neither developed expert services was connected both to the historical moment in which these services were deployed (in the era of predevelopment development) and to the particular conditions of Palestine's government (the limited resources and lack of concentration discussed earlier).

During the Egyptian Administration, impoverishment was much more widespread, and concomitantly, poverty services were developed much more comprehensively than during the Mandate. The refugees who crowded Gaza were destitute—without homes and often without money. As one refugee recalled, “One could not feed his children. People were stealing bread from those who went to the bakery. People were starving.”⁷⁵

Gaza's 80,000 native inhabitants were not much better off, having lost much of their property with the creation of the Gaza Strip. Given this immense need, it was not possible to imagine that “the market” might resolve Gaza's poverty, nor was there much of a market left in this truncated space. Poverty services, therefore, were implemented as soon as possible and continued throughout the Administration. Considering the details of this service practice clearly indicates how it differed from an expertly defined service regime and reinforces the point that this difference was not simply a historical matter. Administration poverty practices, which were developed and deployed very much in the “age of development,” were still not fully “expert.” The difference between Egyptian rule in Egypt and Egyptian rule in Gaza becomes apparent in this regard. While in Egypt itself, at precisely the same time, expertise was becoming more firmly ensconced as a ruling regime, in Gaza these tools continued to play a limited role.⁷⁶

Just as Mandate practices were forced to shift in response to conditions in Palestine, the character of Egyptian Administration poverty services shifted over time. Rather than a transformation from no service to service, as during the Mandate, the administration's service style shifted from “humanitarian” to “bureaucratic.” The humanitarian approach to poverty servicing is exemplified in the “mercy trains [qiṭārāt al-raḥma],” which traveled between Cairo and Gaza in the first years of the Administration, carrying food and clothing donated by Egyptians for the Palestinians. These Egyptian-organized mercy trains were part of a larger humanitarian landscape that included relief efforts by the American Friend's Service Committee and, after a few years, by UNRWA.⁷⁷

UNRWA and the Egyptian Administration cooperated in providing relief, and UNRWA's annual report for1952–53 noted that it assisted in the “distribution of goods given by the people of Egypt to the refugees and local residents of the area, and transported by the ‘mercy trains’ which carried thousands of tons of foodstuffs and household supplies to Gaza as a result of a personal appeal by General Naguib to the people of Egypt.”⁷⁸ The arrival (to Gaza) and departure (from Cairo) of these trains were much noted in the press of both places, which devoted lengthy articles to describing both donation and receipt of the goods. An article in the Egyptian newspaper al-Ahram, for example, told how an Egyptian schoolboy was so moved by the plight of the Palestinians that he donated all his money for their assistance. The article recounted that he went to the train conductor and said, “Here is my monthly allowance. I present it to my brothers the refugees.”⁷⁹ It seems likely that this description was meant both to showcase the generosity of the Egyptians and to encourage more donations.⁸⁰ By projecting its service for Gaza as a humanitarian effort rather than as part of a rationalized bureaucratic structure, the Administration was able to proceed without fully inhabiting the role of government.

While the humanitarian approach to poverty—coded as “relief” rather than “service”—was part of a general ambivalence on the part of the Egyptian Administration about the nature of its rule in Gaza, the logistical demands of meeting people's needs made it impossible to maintain this stance for very long. As relief became service, it was increasingly important to rationalize government practice. A 1953 report by the Department of Refugee Supervision, Government Assistance, and Social Affairs (henceforth Refugee Affairs) described the work of the Flour Distribution Bureau, a department responsible for providing assistance to native Gazans who were not eligible for UNRWA rations. The report praised the bureau's employees and noted,

This new, rationalized system was born not of any particular expertise—with time management, or resource allocation, or some such thing—but of the experience of the employees working in the bureau. It marks quite a difference from the reforms of the post-Oslo period, when international experts flooded Gaza and the West Bank with advice about how to rationalize everything from pension administration to municipal servicing according to internationally developed models and protocols. The rationalization of flour distribution was entirely connected to the circumstances of Gaza and the practices of its civil servants.⁸²

The success of this increased rationalization in—and, therefore, improvement of—food-service provision was threatened, however, by ongoing instability in government. Despite the increasing emphasis on bureaucratic continuity, the Egyptian government was not capable of ensuring that the details of work would run smoothly. The procedures of flour distribution were undermined by an unpredictable supply of flour from Egypt. “Sometimes months will go by,” the report noted, “without any flour being sent.” The report attributed these disruptions and uncertainties directly to budgetary constraints in Egypt. While recognizing the causes of delay, the report stressed the importance of keeping the distribution regular, saying, “We have to continue to distribute to the poor at their regular appointments in order to protect the governmental machinery.”⁸³

To ensure continuity of service, and to protect the hard-won rationalization of practice, the Flour Distribution Bureau was sometimes forced to resort to “borrowing” flour from UNRWA. This kind of making do was typical of the tactical practice of government in Gaza. It shored up the rationalization of government work at the expense of breaking down the strict—and supposedly impenetrable—boundary between sources of aid for “natives” and “refugees.”⁸⁴

The problems that emerged in the work of the flour bureau were connected not to civil servants' competence, but to the capacities of government. For the most part, civil-service practice in fact seemed more than adequate to the task of servicing Gaza. There were times, however, when a lack of expertise did appear to government to be a problem; when competence did seem to demand such techniques. Consider, for example, the provision of social services. Given the inability of either the administration or UNRWA to provide the jobs that might have ameliorated the impoverished conditions of Gazans, the “social-service centers” set up by the administration in various refugee camps in hopes of improving the morale and character of the population occupied a central place in Gaza's poverty services. The refugee-affairs report explained that these centers had been designed to “improve social conditions…by providing sports, cultural, and moral activities, especially to the shabāb [youth].”

⁸⁵

Each center was overseen by a “social researcher [bāhith ijtimā

ī]” who was responsible for implementing these projects. Despite the hopes for such centers, the report expressed disappointment with their actualization:

The Refugee Affairs Department was clearly frustrated that the centers were restricted to such mundane activities—activities that it thought only passed the time but did not improve the character of the youth.⁸⁷

In answer to the question of why these centers were generally so ineffective, the report pointed to the person of the bāhith, who was for the most part a young person from the camp itself and distinguished from the other shabāb only by “his meager monthly salary.” The report indicated that “right now the bāhith ijtimā

ī does not have enough experience, or culture itself, to qualify him for this difficult mission.” Incapacities of government and population came together in the inability to fill this position with a qualified person. Given the widespread destitution among the refugee population, it was both imperative to hire people from among that population and difficult to find fully qualified personnel “locally.” The center employee needed both to be of the population and to stand apart from it—to offer an example to the youth. The devastation of dispossession made it difficult to find such a “distinguished” person. In an effort to produce as much distinction as possible, the Administration planned to make a high-school diploma a requirement for the position, and in the early 1950s, this degree was still a rarity. Further, UNRWA agreed to provide job training for the center employees, providing a mechanism of distinguishing them further. The Refugee Affairs report expressed some hope that these changes would improve matters, but it remained cautious.

The problem posed by the staffing of social-service centers highlights, as did Muhammad Ghazi's reflections on civil-service competence, the particular place of population in Gaza's government. If an expert regime deploys statistics and models in its efforts to improve the welfare of the population, thereby defining and delimiting that population as it “serves” it, this government proceeded with local personnel, ad hoc planning, and a general sense of things in its efforts. The Mandate era's focus on development entailed a general notion of progress and improvement rather than a “detailed set of prescriptions, including goals and quantifiable targets, investment needs, design criteria, methodologies, and time sequences.”⁸⁸

The Administration's concern with rationalization of service delivery was based on experience rather than on information that was “statistically rigorous” and “methodologically sophisticated.”⁸⁹ Each administration was concerned with the population—both in improving its welfare and in controlling the threats it might pose—but each proceeded with a “vague” understanding of both the nature of its relationship to that population and of the character of the population itself.