The Gaza Strip's modern history has been unique: a territory carved out by war and armistice lines, governed by a care-taking administration followed by an occupying military regime, hovering as a space outside of any nation-state, where substantial numbers of the population are refugees. Between 1948 and 1967, Egypt's administration functioned as a placeholder until, presumably, Gaza would be included as part of a Palestinian state. While Egyptian rule was neither a colonial nor occupying force, its forms of governmentality were nonetheless robust and significant.

Ilana Feldman's Police Encounters considers the specificity of this exceptional political feature while placing it in the context of what are considered “normal” conditions of government: the role of security in modern rule and everyday life. A number of questions are central to Feldman's analysis: How do governing and policing apparatuses work? How do subjects participate in and influence such a totalizing project? What forms do political talk and action take under such a regime? How does citizenship matter outside the confines of a nation-state? The book explores the range of matters that concerned police personnel as well as the mechanisms through which Gazans participated in that policing project, carefully analyzing which avenues for influence and effect existed in a system designed for control and containment.

Police Encounters is a meticulous work of historical ethnography. Surveillance reports, interrogation transcripts, investigation files, reports on public opinion, informant statements, internal correspondence, committee records, policy and procedure statements from the Egyptian Administration (now under lock and key in the Israel State Archives) and from the UN Relief and Works Agency and UN peacekeeping forces (deployed in 1950 and 1957, respectively) are enriched by the inclusion of details from memoirs, press accounts, and interviews with Gazans and retired policemen. The documents demonstrate the range of policing techniques, such as public participation, widespread surveillance, the use of informants, and police violence, and how these intersect with and define political activity, petty crime, and the management of public and moral life.

Feldman makes no secret that in and of themselves many of these documents highlight mundane, trivial matters, whose aftermath often remains inconclusive. This does not diminish the strength of the argument, however. That the documents track otherwise unremarkable events reveals the extent to which daily life was under scrutiny by an extensive and expansive policing apparatus. As Feldman convincingly argues, these are “snapshots of moments” (p. 23), compilations of police encounters whose effects were not immediately transformative but accumulative.

That sense of accumulation—of tidbits cementing an order of things—echoes in Feldman's writing and methodological approach. The book unfolds like investigative work, piecing together a structural analysis of a “security society” that avoids being inconclusive or mundane. Her approach balances a detailed description of the trees with a comprehensive portrait of the forest. Anthropologically significant insights bring into view daily life and a security regime concerned with control over social as well as moral order, crime, and politics: thefts of wallets and other petty crimes, honor killings, press censorship, drunkenness, local protests (against the transfer of a doctor to a different hospital, for example), border crossings of armed guerilla fighters or grazing sheep, political meetings, and so much more. The reader gets a vivid sense of daily life in Gaza.

But if everything was under the scrutiny of the regime, the security apparatus was also a venue within which Gazans pressed claims and exerted influence. Feldman tackles an important theoretical issue here. First, she posits that this security society is a third category alongside civil society and political society—a space of action that requires us to consider police and subjects not as bound in a dualistic relationship, but as part of a network of multiple relations. Second, policing and surveillance are more complicated than a simple framework built on fear and coercion—what Louis Althusser termed a “repressive state apparatus.” Instead, the rubrics under which this particular security society functioned were national interest and social propriety. Third, Egyptian rule in Gaza was also not simply an example of Michel Foucault's “society of security” built on a liberal security nexus. Egyptian rule was neither liberal nor built on precision in a Foucauldian sense. Rather, the Egyptian practice of policing the Gaza Strip relied on indistinction and uncertainty. Underlying this approach is the important argument that the securitization of territory may paradoxically bring about a sense of insecurity.

There was nuance in the Egyptian authorities’ approach to Palestinians as well. The administration was built on a balance between control and concession, between setting limits and creating (limited) opportunities. There were multiple, sometimes overlapping modes of governing Gazans—and thus multiple forms of being Gazan: as citizens, as a population, or as people. As such, Gazans would invariably be legal and political subjects, targets of welfare and other forms of state intervention, or else construed as a potential problem and object of suspicion. In other words, the actions of the Egyptian administration depended on how Palestinians—to say nothing of their needs and rights—were to be defined: citizen, subject, native, refugee, “Palestinian,” human. Feldman stresses and demonstrates that Gazans were involved in the policing work themselves, whether in the service of order and safety, moral security, or simple self-interest. There were many forms of participation.

Police Encounters does not suggest that the Egyptian administration of Gaza was ineffectual or lenient towards Palestinians. Rather, by drawing on a wealth of details, Feldman demonstrates how policing is a space of both constraint and possibility, of control and action, an event that produces uncertainty and suspicion as well as comfort and security. In light of the contemporary context in which Israel and Egypt exercise distant and “invisible” forms of surveillance upon Gaza—to say nothing of direct policing—as well as the increasingly repressive regime in Egypt, Feldman's book is important for historicizing today's security societies. Police Encounters is an enriching account of Gaza during a period that remains understudied, especially in English-language scholarship. More significantly, the book implies that even if Gaza and its history are often displaced by other events in the Middle East, they remain important for understanding how politics works, both within the Middle East and beyond.