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Explaining spacio-cide in the Palestinian territory: Colonization, separation,

and state of exception
Sari Hanafi
Current Sociology 2013 61: 190 originally published online 14 September 2012
DOI: 10.1177/0011392112456505

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456505
2012
CSI61210.1177/0011392112456505Current SociologyHanafi

Article CS

Current Sociology
61(2) 190–205
Explaining spacio-cide in © The Author(s) 2012
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DOI: 10.1177/0011392112456505
Colonization, separation, csi.sagepub.com

and state of exception

Sari Hanafi
American University of Beirut, Lebanon

Abstract
This article argues that the Israeli colonial project is ‘spacio-cidal’ (as opposed to
genocidal) in that it targets land for the purpose of rendering inevitable the ‘voluntary’
transfer of the Palestinian population primarily by targeting the space upon which the
Palestinian people live. The spacio-cide is a deliberate ideology with unified rational,
albeit dynamic process because it is in constant interaction with the emerging context
and the actions of the Palestinian resistance. By describing and questioning different
aspects of the military-judicial-civil apparatuses, this article examines how the realization
of the spacio-cidal project becomes possible through a regime that deploys three
principles, namely: the principle of colonization, the principle of separation, and the
state of exception that mediates between these two seemingly contradictory principles.

Keywords
Bio-politics, colonialism, Palestinian–Israeli conflict, state of exception

Since the Zionist myth of a land without people for a people without land, the policy of
successive Israeli governments has been to appropriate land while ignoring the people on
it. The founding myth has been perpetuated, and, in its more modern form, can be seen
in the policy of acquiring the most land with the fewest people. The resulting institution-
alized invisibility of the Palestinian people both feeds and is being fed by Israel’s every-
day settler-colonial practices.1 This enforced invisibility sustains an Israeli system
neither interested in killing nor in assimilating the Palestinians. Asking the Palestinians
of Israel to be loyal to the State has never brought with it the prize of equal citizenship;

Corresponding author:
Sari Hanafi, American University of Beirut, Sociology, Anthropology and Media Studies Department, PO
Box 11-0236, Beirut 1107 2020, Lebanon.
Email: sh41@aub.edu.lb

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Hanafi 191

while the Israeli narrative sees Jerusalem as its ‘eternal unified capital,’ it does not try to
economically and urbanely integrate the quarter of a million Palestinians of the city.
This article has two parts. In the first, I argue that the Israeli colonial project is what I
coin ‘spacio-cidal’ (as opposed to genocidal) in that it targets land for the purpose of
rendering inevitable the ‘voluntary’ transfer of the Palestinian population primarily by
targeting the space upon which the Palestinian people live. My argument refers to Israel/
Palestine on both sides of the Green Line, even if the form and magnitude of the spacio-
cide significantly vary between the inside and the outside of the Green Line. In this
article I focus only on the spacio-cide in the Palestinian territory.
By describing and questioning different aspects of the military-judicial-civil appara-
tuses, I examine, in the second part of this article, how it becomes possible to realize the
spacio-cidal project through a regime that deploys three principles, namely: the princi-
ple of colonization, the principle of separation, and the state of exception that mediates
between these two seemingly contradictory principles. I reveal their ideological under-
pinnings and the forces entrenched behind them. Although Palestinian political/military
actions have challenged these three principles, I will not deal with the Palestinian
agency unless it is important to understand the repercussions for the Israeli regime in
the territory.
This article draws upon secondary data produced by different organizations concern-
ing the occupation and a series of interviews that I conducted between 2001 and 2005 in
the Palestinian territories among many Israeli and Palestinian stakeholders dealing with
the occupation.2 In addition, as coordinator of a research team with Adi Ophir and Michal
Givoni composed of Israeli, Palestinian, and international researchers, I benefited from
the discussion and the data provided by this team.

What is spacio-cide?
Compared to other colonial and ethnic conflicts (Rwanda–Burundi, Serbia–Bosnia, etc.),
the 1948 war did not, relatively speaking, produce many casualties. The notion of
al-Nakba (the Catastrophe) is based on the loss of land and refugeehood, rather than the
loss of life. Even after six years of Intifada, the number of victims is relatively low.
During 63 years around 112,000 died (89,000 Arabs and 23,000 Israelis) compared to the
six weeks of madness in Rwanda in which some 800,000 people were killed or to four
years of Bosnian–Serbian conflict (100,000–200,000 killed).
The Israeli settler-colonial project is not a genocidal project in a legal sense3 but a
‘spacio-cidal’ one. In every conflict, belligerents define their enemy and shape their
mode of action accordingly. In the Palestinian–Israeli conflict, the Israeli target is the
place.
As we will see in detail, spacio-cide is mainly land confiscation in order to construct
Jewish settlement, house demolition, and population transfer. In order to realize this,
spacio-cide involves a mix of three strategies. First, it involves ‘space annihilation,’ to
paraphrase Kenneth Hewitt (1983), which is a mass destruction of space, similar to that
witnessed in Europe during the Second World War (destruction of Dresden, Hiroshima,
settlements in northwest France), though differently in the case of Israeli practices. The
most flagrant example is the destruction of the Jenin refugee camp. The second strategy

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192 Current Sociology Monograph 1 61(2)

is that of ethnic cleansing, which was used as a first step toward the dispossession. Ilan
Pappe (2006) demonstrated how ethnic cleansing was not a circumstance of war, but
rather a purported goal of combat for early Israeli military units led by David
Ben-Gurion. After 1967, this strategy has taken the form of creating settlements in the
Palestinian territory populated entirely by Jews. The third strategy, deployed in the face
of resistance to space annihilation and ethnic cleansing, consists of what Oren Yiftachel
(2006) calls ‘creeping apartheid.’ Creeping apartheid utilizes increasingly impregnable
ethnic, geographic, and economic barriers between groups vying for recognition, power,
and resources. As we will see, Palestinian spaces are especially difficult to live in because
of the growing apartheid system being applied to them.
Spacio-cide does not entail therefore the ‘postmortem city,’ as Chris Hables Gray
described an aerial ‘damage assessment’ map of Tokyo after the US firebombing devas-
tated the city in March 1945, resulting in the killing of over 130,000 civilians in a few
hours (Graham, 2004). It is rather a spectacle of destruction without/with little death.
Different reports produced by the Jerusalem Emergency Committee, a working group set
up by Jerusalem-based NGOs after the April 2002 Israeli invasion, showed systematic
destruction of public places: all but two Palestinian ministries and 67 NGOs were totally
or partially destroyed. Destruction was not the side effect of the war but the main lever-
age of political pressure. What was striking about this wanton destruction was the van-
dalism. To seize documents and computer hard drives from the Ministry of Education
can be ‘understood’ within the framework of a military hunt for information that would
prove that the Palestinian public educational system ‘produced incitement and engen-
dered suicide bombers,’ but why did soldiers also have to smash the computer screens
and tear apart the furniture? In the war on Gaza that started in December 2008, 1334
people had been killed by 20 January 2009 (against 18 Israelis), but what is spectacular
is the destruction: 4100 completely destroyed housing units and 17,000 partially dam-
aged buildings and housing units.4
During the war years in the former Yugoslavia, architect and former mayor of Belgrade
Bogdan Bogdanovich (1993) was one of the first to coin the term ‘urbicide’ to describe
the destruction of cities in the Balkans. Serbian nationalism romanticized rural villages
where a single community spirit predominated. The city in this context was a symbol of
communal and cultural multiplicity, the antithesis of the Serbian ideal. In the Palestinian
occupied territories, the entire landscape has been targeted. The weapons of mass destruc-
tion are not so much tanks as bulldozers, which have destroyed streets, houses, cars, and
dunam after dunam of olive trees. It is a war in an age of literal agoraphobia, the fear of
space, seeking not the division of territory but its abolition. A trail of devastation stretches
as far as the eye can see: a jumble of demolished buildings, leveled hillsides, and flat-
tened wild and cultivated vegetation. This barrage of concentrated damage has been
wrought not only by the bombs and tanks of traditional warfare, but by industrious,
vigorous destruction that has toppled properties like a violent tax assessor. So far, these
policies have climaxed with the destruction of a third of the Jenin refugee camp.
The Israeli project during this Intifada has as its objective to make a kind of ‘demo-
graphic transfer’ or what one Israeli minister has called a ‘voluntary transfer’ of the
Palestinian population by transforming the Palestinian topos to atopia, turning territory
into mere land. It is by the means of spacio-cide that Israel is preparing such a population

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Hanafi 193

transfer, and already, since the beginning of the Intifada 2000, around 180,000 Palestinians
have left the country, some 5.3% of the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza.
The spacio-cide has been applied independently of the peace process to increase the
settlement of the Jewish population. Even after the signing of these accords, the number
of settlers increased three-fold (from 268,756 in 1993 to 518,974 in 2010)5 and the area
of the settlements doubled, constituting 144 settlements. Even after the Israeli with-
drawal from the Gaza Strip, Israel evacuated 8500 settlers from Gaza and part of north-
ern West Bank but embarked on plans to make room for 30,000 new settlers that year
alone (2005), primarily in and around occupied East Jerusalem.6
House demolitions are another tactic used to induce this transfer. From the beginning
of the current Intifada in September 2000 (until September 2007) 77,759 housing units
were damaged, of which 8103 were destroyed completely, in the Palestinian territory.7
And the numbers just keep rising. This destruction has taken place mainly in Rafah,
Jenin, Nablus, Hebron, and Jerusalem, and many of the refugees of these demolitions
were already refugees from 1948 or 1967.
Transfer is also brought about by the ‘de-naturalization’ of some 200,000
Palestinians who have found themselves trapped between Israel’s West Bank barriers
and are now neither in Palestinian nor Israeli space, but are rather de facto stateless
and space-less.
People have been forced to migrate internally as well. In Hebron, for instance, some
5000 people (850 families) have left the Old City to neighboring villages because of
Jewish settler vigilantism, harassment and violence, and Israeli army imposed curfews.
This ‘spacio-cide’ has been rendered possible by the Israeli division of the Palestinian
territory into zones A, B, B-, B+, C, H1, and H2. These areas are fragmented by the
bypass routes system, dividing the West Bank into 64 small cantons. In such a scheme,
Palestinian national infrastructure development became almost impossible, due to the
fragmentation of space, but also to the fragmentation of the Palestinian political system.
The Palestinian National Authority (PNA) cannot, for example, implement water reser-
voir projects for a set of villages if the pipeline passes through zone C. Paving of the new
road between Bethlehem and Hebron was halted in 1999 because Israel did not grant
authorization to pass through zone C. There has been urban development in zones A and
B, but these are always surrounded by Israeli zones, curtailing the possibilities for indus-
trial or residential urban expansion.
Furthermore, either unwilling or unable to pressure Israel, the international commu-
nity’s various agencies have been reluctant to negotiate with the Israeli authority con-
cerning funding projects in Jerusalem or Palestinian localities in zone C.

Is spacio-cide a total project?

As Coward (2007) argues about urbicide, the lexical kinship with genocide means that
spacio-cide could, by association, draw on a number of assumptions underpinning the
former category. Thus the use of the term ‘spacio-cide’ emphasizes both the magnitude
of the wrecking and destruction, and the deliberate exterminatory logic of the space liv-
ability that underpins the assault on the space, whether it is a built/urban area, landscape
or land property. Any reading of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict using the genocide as the

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194 Current Sociology Monograph 1 61(2)

extent of the colonial violence will be incapable of understanding the dynamic of this
conflict.
The spacio-cide is thus a deliberate ideology with a unified rationale, albeit with
dynamic process because it is in constant interaction with the emerging context and the
actions of the Palestinian resistance. For instance the massive destruction in the Gaza
Strip through the war waged in December 2008 cannot be understood without studying
the acts of Hamas. Spacio-cide is not a total project aiming to appropriate all the
Palestinian territory and expel its inhabitants but the potential is there, in case Palestinians
undermine the settlement project in the West Bank. Spacio-cide is a mere state policy but
always with the complexity of the state. The practices of widespread destruction are
produced by four actors: the military forces, settlers’ land grabbing, urban planners, and
capitalist real estate speculators. While these actors may seem to be distinct actors, they
are often working closely together to bring the spacio-cidal strategies into realization.
The example of Jaffa city is a striking example in this regard. In 1948, Israeli polit-
ical-military authorities forcibly expelled the majority of the population from the city
as a precursor to expropriating their land using the Absentees’ Property Law of 1950.
In the 1980s, the state sought to develop southern Tel Aviv at the expense of those in
Jaffa. One of the targeted areas was the strategic Al-Ajami coastal quarter. Contrary to
the former strand of liberalism wherein the state acted as forceful arbitrageur between
different market actors, in its neoliberal form, the state involves itself in the market by
establishing alliances with specialized capitalists. In the case of Jaffa, this alliance was
made very obvious by impeding the Arab population from reconstruction and refur-
bishing the Al-Ajami quarter. The Jewish population, however, was afraid to live in a
location in cohabitation with Palestinians. In the beginning of the gentrification pro-
cess, the Tel Aviv municipality intervened by allowing the construction of a heavily
fortified, gated community at Andromeda Hill, the heart of Al-Ajami. Capitalist gen-
trification quickly developed into an ethno-gentrification project, to borrow the term
from Daniel Monterescu (2009), in which inhabitants are solely Jewish and mainly
come from abroad. With the help of the state, this was the spearhead for real estate
developers and speculators eager to buy up more land and promote the ‘Judaization’ of
the area. Yet somehow since the 1980s, all of this occurs without the incidence of ‘vio-
lence’ and without property confiscation, only through neoliberal systemic forces.
While spacio-cide is a good term to describe the whole Israeli project from 1948 to
the present day, one should acknowledge that its techniques differ through time and the
salient stage is after 1967 when it becomes the main colonial practice in the Palestinian
territory. While the potentiality of the spacio-cide as practice is always present, in certain
moments after 1967 it has become more thinkable, more conscious, and therefore more
do-able and more extreme than in the past.

Regime with three principles

In this section, I depict the military-judicial-civil apparatuses, arguing that in order to
apprehend the spacio-cidal project one should look to the Israeli power matrix which is
composed of three principles, namely: the principle of colonization, the principle of separa-
tion, and the state of exception that mediates between these two principles (see Figure 1).

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Hanafi 195

Figure 1. Israeli power matrix.

Principle of colonization
The principle of colonization is the everyday practices engineered by various Israeli
actors’ governmentalities in order to ‘manage the lives of the colonized inhabitants while
exploiting the captured territory’s resources’ (Gordon, 2009: 240). It entails two strate-
gies. The first one is the systematic dispossession that severely undermined the Palestinian
social fabric. As I mentioned before, Israel has confiscated land in the Palestinian terri-
tories in order to construct Jewish colonies and military outposts. A report by Peace Now
(2006) reveals that the jurisdictional area of settlements in the West Bank is 10 times
greater than the settlements’ built-up area. Despite the potential for expansion, 90% of
the settlements seize additional land, mostly private Palestinian lands.
The second strategy is that of economic dependency. Even before the Oslo process
Israeli authorities had tied the Palestinian economy to the Israeli one within a policy
that Sara Roy (1987) coined as ‘de-development.’ Referring to Meron Benvensti, Roy
explains the lack of growth in Gazan industries and investment by the fact that Israel
deploys a policy of ‘integration and exclusion’: integration into the dominant econ-
omy when it benefits that economy and exclusion when it does not. This created an
industrial base inside the Gaza Strip of limited production, absorption, and marketing
capability.8
The whole Olso ‘peace process’ is about institutionalizing this dependency. Under the
aegis of this process, the 2004 Protocol on Economic Relations between Israel and the
Palestine Liberation Organization (Paris Protocol) established a number of regulations to
promote free trade between Israel and the Palestinian territories, exchange of goods, and
labor services. Palestinian imports and exports were granted equal treatment at Israeli
ports, except regarding security measures.

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196 Current Sociology Monograph 1 61(2)

However, the Paris Protocol has failed to generate development in the Palestinian ter-
ritories. Some argue that it failed because of poor implementation, while others (such as
Abu-Sada, 2009: 415; Farsakh, 2009: 402) stress the structural flaws of the economic
protocol and the fact that it was designed to Israel’s advantage. For the latter, its principal
effect was to increase the integration of the Palestinian economy within the Israeli econ-
omy. Israel’s obstacles to free trade and the free movement of labor during the second
Intifada reinforced a tendency that was already present during the Oslo years. Ever since,
Israel has been using transfer of taxes as a means of pressuring the Palestinian National
Authority. According to the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem’s special report
about the Paris Protocol: ‘The model established in the Protocol is known as a “customs
union,” the primary characteristic of which is the absence of economic borders between
members of the union. The practical effect of selecting this model was preservation of
the economic relations that had existed until then, i.e., a Palestinian economy integrated
in and dependent on the Israeli economy.’9 The protocol ignored, stresses Abu-Sada
(2009), the unequal status of the two sides: one controlling the borders and the import–
export facilities, the other a newly appointed national authority with little experience in
economic and trade matters. The economic dependency has been institutionalized and
entrenched asymmetries between Israelis and Palestinians by different means:

First, it reduces production capacity, denying access to agricultural inputs such as fertilizers and
limiting access to land and water resources. Second, the restrictions on movement severely
impede trade within the Palestinian territories and the export of products from the territories to
Israel and elsewhere. Third, Israel discriminates against Palestinian products, in addition to
taking advantage of the provisions of the Paris Protocol, which favors Israeli interests and
whose partial implementation aggravates the already terrible state of Palestinian agriculture.
Finally, the structural transformation of the Palestinian agricultural sector is hampered by the
Palestinian Ministry of Agriculture’s lack of control over the sector and the ministry’s continuing
struggle to survive due to the financial crisis of the Palestinian Authority, on the one hand and
the competition it faces from nongovernmental organizations, on the other. At the same time,
Palestinian NGOs, which concentrate on emergency projects such as rehabilitating water
sources and reclaiming land to mitigate Israeli military actions, do not have the resources to
engage in development projects. (Abu-Sada, 2009: 427)

One of the major actors of these two strategies of the principle of colonization is the
military bureaucracy. Drawing on surveillance and bio-politics, and, as we will see later,
on the state of exception, one cannot understand Israeli politics vis-a-vis the Palestinians
by only referring to the legal system in Israel, highlighting its democratic political
regime, but also by examining the practices of the military bureaucracy in using the most
sophisticated anthropological tools to divide Palestinians into categories10 in order to
manage them. Some surveys and many studies have been undertaken by Israel to provide
demographic information on the Palestinian population for purposes of surveillance and
disciplinary power. However, spacio-cide connotes a peculiar kind of bio-politics, not
one that is concerned with maximizing the health and wealth of the population, but quite
the opposite, and one intended to establish a delicate balance in which the health and
wealth of the population, and especially the physical terrain on which it exists, are mini-
mized, without effecting a total elimination.

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Hanafi 197

Bio-politics is concerned with population as a political and scientific problem, as a

biological issue of the exercise of the government. But bio-power does not act in the
individual a posteriori, as a subject of discipline in the diverse forms of rehabilitation
and institutionalization. Rather, it acts on the population in a preventive fashion. From a
consideration that insurgency/criminality should be prevented, that population should be
kept under surveillance and some of them may be punished for preventive reasons. It is
a state of ‘executive power’ or policing, monitoring, or recording that constitutes the
excess which is the reality of the norm. The Palestinian population thus becomes a purely
objective matter to be administered, rather than potential subjects of historical or social
action. This does not mean that the subject cannot emerge and resist this sovereignty, but
that sovereignty attempts to reduce the subjective trajectories of individuals to bodies
(Pandolfi, 2002).

Principle of separation
If the principle of colonization mainly concerns the control of population, the principle
of separation deals with the status of territory. Sovereign power is the main actor of the
separation. While the current Israeli regime is a product of settlement processes which
were historically part (at least to some extent) of European colonialism, its practices are
similar in many respects to other separation regimes such as apartheid in South Africa.
Separation is based on two strategies: the colonial fragmentation of Palestinian space
and the administration of Palestinian movement. First, it is about creating 87 cantons in
the West Bank, a sort of Bantustans, separated by Jewish settlements and bypass road.
The second strategy consists of setting in motion different statuses of Palestinians to
restrict the mobility of the population and confine them in specific territories.
Checkpoints, roadblocks, and panoptic towers have restricted the population’s move-
ment while destroying the economy as well as the education, healthcare, and welfare
systems (Gordon, 2009: 260).
By this logic, illegal settlements and Israeli neighborhoods continue to strangle the
neighboring Palestinian localities, without the Israeli authority taking responsibility for
this caged population. Hilla Dayan (2009: 315) gives us a very illuminating example
about Kfar Saba that strangled the neighboring town of Qalqilya, which once was a thriv-
ing commercial center and has now become a ghost town. Throughout the past few dec-
ades, Israel has developed a set of legal, criminal justice, and other law enforcement
initiatives under the broad category of counter-terrorist policy. This policy attempts to
separate and manage effectively a group of suspected and accused ‘terrorists.’ It is char-
acterized by the ‘logic of risk,’ which involves consideration of the assumed probability,
risk assessment of certain groups, and the efficient management of groups defined as the
most harmful to the society (Ajzenstadt, 2008). However, the consequences of the poli-
tics of surveillance on the individual and group liberty are very serious as it blurs the
boundaries between public and private, rewrites the norms of privacy, creates new forms
of inclusion and exclusion, and alters processes of democratic accountability (Haggerty
and Ericson, 2006).
The principle of separation is a complex one and should be read carefully in articula-
tion of the principle of colonization and for three reasons.

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198 Current Sociology Monograph 1 61(2)

First, it cannot be straightforward. It is rather a politics of segmentation using a

complex technology of territory management, like the management of plague-stricken
colonies in the Middle Ages. As formulated elegantly by Shamir (2009: 590), Michel
Foucault (1995: 198–199) invoked two modalities of power that arose between the
seventeenth and the end of the eighteenth centuries in response to the treatment of
lepers and the plague. Leprosy was treated by a logic of segregation, exclusion and
‘great confinement’. Back then, lepers were excluded from the city and locked away
in leper colonies through laws and regulations and rendered invisible through ‘exile
enclosure’ before being left to die en masse and anonymously. In contrast, the plague,
a contagious disease that spread rapidly and killed scores of people, set off a new
method of response based on spatial partitioning. This methodology involved multi-
ple separations and individualizing treatment. Quarters, streets, and housing were
under close scrutiny, surveillance, and control, whereby each of the residents would
have to present themselves to inspectors. Segmentation prompted the rise of bio-
politics, where statistics were used to assist governments in refining control and sur-
veillance techniques.
Second, the principle of separation does not mean that Israel seeks two regimes, one
for Israel and another for the Palestinian territory, but, according to Ariella Azoulay and
Adi Ophir (2008, cited in Ran, 2009), one regime that has a dual character: brutal oppres-
sion, denial of human rights, total disregard for the welfare of subjects in the occupied
territories combined with ethnic democracy in pre-1967 boundaries. For Azoulay and
Ophir, the notion that we can talk about an Israel in its pre-1967 boundaries as a distinct
social and political entity is meaningless – the regime encompasses both sides of line and
they are interdependent. And yet, they are different. Both sides of the regime are essential
to its being: it includes the occupied territories, but the basis for such inclusion is that
they remain excluded from the realm of legitimate politics. It includes them as a perma-
nent ‘outside,’ which is never free from domination but also is never absorbed into Israel.
I strongly agree with Azoulay and Ophir (2008, cited in Ran, 2009) that neither with-
drawal nor full annexation is likely: it is not a failure to decide on a policy, but a policy
decision to retain this ambiguity forever, if possible. In fact, the Israeli authority wishes
to pursue the colonization process but because of the Palestinian resistance, it opts for a
combination of separation and colonization.
Finally, separation does not mean the end of occupation within the separated
Palestinian territories. The Oslo ‘peace process,’ which was the direct result of the first
Intifada as well as of the changing political and economic circumstances in the interna-
tional realm, signified the reorganization of power, rather than its withdrawal, and
should be understood as the continuation of the occupation by other means. It is an
‘occupation by remote control’ (Gordon, 2009: 253) or an air-borne occupation
(Weizman, 2007).

State of exception
In the project of spacio-cide, normalization of the state of exception comes to facilitate
the principles of both colonization and separation (see Figure 1). By using the state of
exception Israel has used new forms of sovereignty. These new repertoires can be

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Hanafi 199

understood in a colonial governance where subjects are transformed by the bio-politics

and the extensive use of the state of exception to what Giorgio Agamben (1998) called
‘bare life.’
The sovereign power according to Agamben routinely distinguishes between those
who are to be admitted to ‘political life’ and those who are to be excluded as the mute
bearers of ‘bare life.’ It is a process of categorizing people and bodies in order to manage,
control, and keep them under surveillance and reducing them to a ‘bare life,’ a life which
refers to the body’s mere ‘vegetative’ being, separated from the particular qualities, the
social, political, and historical attributes that constitute individual subjectivity. This is a
new form of power which enables the colonial power to manage bodies according to
colonial and humanitarian categories. ‘Bare life’ is the condition when people do not
have a right to defend their rights as a minority or the right to have right, to borrow from
Hannah Arendt (1985): refugees spending several years in refugee camps without having
any knowledge about their future destiny.
Developing both the concept of bio-power and bare life, Giorgio Agamben shows
how sovereignty carries with it a ‘power over life’ by the rule of the exception, being
both above the law – as its constituting force, but also safeguarding its application. The
sovereign, according to philosopher Carl Schmitt, is the one who may proclaim the state
of exception. The sovereign is not characterized by the order that he or she institutes
through the constitution but by the suspension of this order: ‘It is not the exception that
gets subtracted from the rule, but the rule that, suspending itself, gives rise to the excep-
tion and only in this way can constitute itself as rule, by constantly maintaining a relation
to it. . . . The situation that is created by exception can neither be defined as a factual situ-
ation, nor as a situation of right, but institutes between the two a paradoxical threshold of
indifference’ (Agamben, 1998: 26).
If such a state of exception is established by law and order, what are its repertoires
deployed as power mechanisms in the colonial setting? There are six repertoires (Hanafi,
2009) but here I will highlight five.
The first repertoire, the most obvious and classic, is the state of emergency. In Israel,
Jews and Palestinians are governed by administrative rules deriving their force from the
‘state of emergency’ invoked at the formation of the state which were never cancelled.
Between 1948 and 1965, the entire area where the Arabs lived had been considered as a
military zone at the discretion of the military commanders. The same situation has per-
sisted in the Palestinian territory since 1967 until Oslo and up to now for zone C.11
The second repertoire is exercised when the sovereign does not only suspend rules
and laws but also constantly creates new categories to exempt the government from
some obligations and duties and/or to subtract undesirable categories from some rights.
This state of exception is proclaimed domestically but also at an international level
where the norms of international law are tacitly abrogated one after the other. Israeli
colonial forces are constantly creating different categories of the Palestinian population
in order to control them. Since 1990, such colonized, indistinct, displaced, localized,
and mere figure bodies have come to be classified and defined as: refugees, stateless,
residents of zones A, B, B-, B+, C, H1 or H2 (Oslo categories), inhabitants of areas in
front of Israel’s West Bank wall, behind it, potential terrorists (categories post-9/11),
etc. Thus, while populations are assigned different statuses as legal subjects, individual

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200 Current Sociology Monograph 1 61(2)

lives are suspended in an ontological no-man’s land. The objective of this classification
is primarily to exclude and make possible the spacio-cidal project. This is usually done
in a very subtle way – by applying the state of exception to one zone while keeping the
remaining territory under a kind of rule of law. Once the confiscation and the spacio-
cide process are satisfactory, or if the Palestinian resistance becomes efficient, this zone
returns to the rule of law and another zone then becomes subject to the state of excep-
tion. In that way, Israel keeps a facade of a democratic country under rule of law.
The third repertoire of the state of exception occurs when issued law carries along
with it the rule of suspension of this law without specifying a context. The suspension of
the norm does not mean its abolition, and the zone of anomie that it establishes is not
(or at least is purportedly not) unrelated to the juridical order. Using such a power tech-
nique, Israel is able to restrict Palestinian residential construction in East Jerusalem and
then ‘legally’ destroy houses built without a permit. For the remaining area of the West
Bank, Palestinian residential construction has been also constrained. Military order 418,
‘Order for the Planning of Towns, Villages and Buildings (Judea and Samaria),’ outlines
the requirements for obtaining building permits. Article 7, called ‘Special Powers,’
grants the High Planning Council the power to ‘amend, cancel or suspend for a speci-
fied period the validity of any plan or permit; to assume the powers allocated to any of
the committees mentioned in article 2 and 5; to grant any permit which any of the com-
mittees mentioned in article 2 and 5 are empowered to grant . . . ; to dispense with the
need for any permit which the Law may require’ (Coon, 1992: 280). Interviews I con-
ducted in 2005 in the West Bank12 showed an extensive use of Article 7 before the Oslo
process, prohibiting those who are politically active or even those who are not ‘coopera-
tive’ with the occupation power from acquiring a construction permit, or allowing those
who want to construct in a non-construction area the exception to build without even
passing though the high commission of construction, in return for collaborating with
Israeli intelligence. In other words, the sovereign power can use these exceptions to
annul its own regulations, in such a way that the construction permit becomes a tool for
control and surveillance.
The fourth repertoire of exception is not only used by colonial states like Israel but
also by any security state these days and pertains to the condition when society is gov-
erned less by law and order than through administration and management. A skewed
bureaucratic apparatus that operates not through Weberian rationalized rules, but rather
through miraculous interventions, and whose unpredictability is the key to its effective-
ness. The discretionary power of a soldier in a military administration office in any area
of the West Bank is absolute. He or she can order the destruction of a building without
any juridical control from the Israeli system. Even an Israeli soldier at a check point can
stop a passenger from moving, from going to work without any possibility of recourse to
any law. Since 9/11 the latter mechanism of governance is in ascendancy in many west-
ern countries. The Patriot Act issued by the US Senate on 25 October 2001 allowed the
Attorney General to ‘take into custody’ for an unlimited period any alien that endangers
the ‘national security of the US.’
The last repertoire of the state of exception is when the law has a function of inter-
play between exclusion and inclusion because sovereignty does not work merely
according to the logic of one-way exclusion. ‘Inside’ and ‘outside’ are not mutually

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Hanafi 201

exclusive but rather blurred together. This is the problem of defining precisely a
threshold, or a zone of indifference (Agamben, 1998: 23). Palestinians are excluded
from recourse to the law, but remain subject to it. Their lives are regulated and
restricted by Israeli laws and military orders which apply even to the private spheres
of marriage and children. Palestinian citizens of Israel can no longer marry their West
Bank and Gaza kinfolk and compatriots since a recent High Court ruling legitimated
a 2003 law barring ‘family reunification’ for such couples. The case of Palestinian
Jerusalemites is the epitome of exclusion/inclusion: included by virtue of the unilat-
eral Israeli annexation of their city and excluded from municipal services, master
plans, and civil liberties big and small; they live in a segregated city in which they are
residents, but not citizens.

Conclusion
To sum up, Israel’s spacio-cide is made possible through three-fold regimes: principles
of colonization and separation, mediated by the state of exception. However, the colo-
nized do not take these mechanisms lying down. They use violent and non-violent modes
of political actions; encircling the settlers after being encircled by them, constructing
home and society, creating visibility, mobilizing global movements. Palestinian ‘volun-
tary transfer’ has its Israeli counterpart: indicators show the Israeli population ‘quitting’
Israel too and the Jewish immigration gets less every year (see Figure 2).
With last year’s attempts to restore the peace talks between Palestinians and Israelis,
it becomes clearer than ever that the stumbling block to this peace is that of settlements
and the willingness of the Israeli polity to continue its colonial enterprise in the Palestinian
territories. The new Israeli government tends to privilege the principle of colonization
over that of separation and uses the state of exception in order to mediate and facilitate
the cohabitation of these two logics. While the material outcome of separation and its
twin pillars of paper persecution and enclave geography is an inflation of domestic
borders and muddled spatialities, as a mental condition, separation translates into
endemic disorientation for occupier and occupied alike (Ophir et al., 2009).

Figure 2. Immigrants by year of immigration and rate per 1000 in population, 1980–2010.
Source: Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics; at: www1.cbs.gov.il/www/hodaot2011n/21_11_045e.pdf

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202 Current Sociology Monograph 1 61(2)

The consequence of the state of exception goes beyond the spacio-cidal project. The
political project of the Palestinian people is transformed into distinct population groups
who become antagonists in the pursuit of their own interests vis-a-vis the conflict and
its potential resolution: it is in the interest of the Palestinian residents of Jerusalem to
stay outside the Palestinian national project (to access the Israeli labor market and to
benefit from the social and health system), as Israel transforms the latter into a collec-
tion of Bantustans which cannot compete with Israel; the geographical fragmentation of
the West Bank and Gaza create two (or more) distinct entities with different populations
animated by their own stereotypes and power struggles – to say nothing of the Palestinian
citizens of Israel or Palestinian refugees in the diaspora. This process became possible
as the exercise of sovereign power (as an actuality but also as a potentiality) created not
only zones of indistinction between ‘the inside’ and ‘outside’ (of the nation, town, or
home), but penetrated the entire political/social field, transforming it into a dislocated
bio-political space in which modern political categories (e.g. Islamist/nationalist, right/
left, private/public, dictatorial/democratic) are entering into a post-political zone of dis-
solution (Agamben, 1998: 4). All opposition should hence not be seen as ‘dichotomies’
but as in tension.
The normalization of the state of exception is a facilitating framework that is mod-
erated, legitimized, and reproduced by the logic of humanitarian concern that is driven
by an inverse moral aspiration and yet assumes an analogous structure of exception
(Ophir et al., 2009). For the Palestinian refugee camp dwellers, for instance, the
humanitarian organizations fall into the trap of the Israeli sovereign power that has
disqualified the life of this population from political meaning: Why are they there?
Why are they not able to return? It is a new conception of humanity stripped of its
political meaning. The recent involvement of the United Nations Relief and Works
Agency (UNRWA) in the reconstruction of the Jenin refugee camp after its partial
destruction by the IDF in 2001 is revealing in this sense. Instead of alleviating the
over-crowding of the camps by advocating the return of some refugees to their place
of origin (a third of Jenin’s refugees come from the village of Zaraan, located some 17
km west of the city), UNRWA pursued only two options: rebuilding the camp while
respecting its boundaries and asking the Jenin municipality to allocate a piece of land
to allow its expansion. Although the repatriation of refugees is not part of the mandate
of UNRWA, no officials wanted to challenge that.

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or
not-for-profit sectors.

Notes
1. For example, parts of the Israeli West Bank wall are being constructed specifically to remove
the visual presence of Palestinian villages, like the case of the wall at Route 443 and Bir
Nabalah (in the suburb of Jerusalem).
2. This fieldwork will be clarified within the text.
3. Funk (2010: 1) defines genocide as ‘deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part,
of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group.’

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Hanafi 203

4. See Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) preliminary estimate of economic

losses in the Gaza Strip caused by Israeli aggression; at: www.pcbs.gov.ps/Portals/_PCBS/
Documents/ 2028.1.2008 ‫ا نجليزي‬20%-20% ‫غزة‬20%‫خسائر‬.pdf
5. Source: www.pcbs.gov.ps/Portals/_pcbs/PressRelease/Sett_E2011.pdf
6. Source: Department of Negotiation Affairs of PLO.
7. Source: www.pcbs.gov.ps/Portals/_pcbs/intifada/damage.htm These figures are quite similar
to those calculated by the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, with more details dis-
tinguishing between demolition of houses as punishment, demolition of houses built without
permits, and demolition for alleged military purposes. See www.btselem.org/statistics
8. Concerning the market issue, Caroline Abu-Sada gave the example of the exportation of
strawberries by an Israeli exporter Agrexco. She reported that: ‘In the 2001–2002 season, the
weekly prices the Israeli farmers received were on average approximately 25 percent higher
than those paid to the Gaza cooperatives before the deduction of extra logistics and security
inspection costs from the Gaza prices, and about 35 percent higher after that deduction’ (Abu-
Sada, 2009: 423).
9. B’Tselem, ‘The Paris Protocol,’ available online at: www.btselem.org/English/Freedom_of_
Movement/Paris_Protocol.asp (accessed 25 August 2008).
10. For more about the military bureaucracy see Shenhav and Berda (2009), and on the role of
Israeli anthropologists in categorizing people see the thesis of Cedric Parizot (2001).
11. This technique of governance is common to our region, for example, in other nations such
as Syria, Egypt, and Jordan where an emergency law has been mandated and used almost
constantly since the beginning of 1960s.
12. I interviewed in 2001 many actors related to the urbanism in Hebron, Nablus, Jerusalem, and
Ramallah, as well as some people who have experienced problems with construction permits.

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Author biography
Sari Hanafi is currently a Professor of Sociology at the American University of Beirut and editor of
Idafat: The Arab Journal of Sociology (Arabic). He is also a member of the Executive Bureau of
the International Association of Sociology and the Arab Sociological Association. He is the author
of numerous journal articles and book chapters on the political and economic sociology of the
Palestinian diaspora and refugees; sociology of migration; politics of scientific research; and tran-
sitional justice. Among his recent books are: The Power of Inclusive Exclusion: Anatomy of Israeli
Rule in The Occupied Palestinian Territories (ed. with A Ophir and M Givoni, 2009) (English and
Arabic) (New York: Zone Books; Beirut: CAUS), The Emergence of a Palestinian Globalized
Elite: Donors, International Organizations and Local NGOs (ed. with L Taber, 2005) (Arabic and

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Hanafi 205

English) (Center for Democracy Studies-MUWATIN and Institute of Palestine Studies) and
Pouvoir et associations dans le monde arabe (ed. with S Bennéfissa, 2002) (Paris: CNRS).

Résumé
Cet article soutient l’idée que le projet colonial d’Israël est ‘spatiocide’ (par opposition
à un génocide) dans la mesure où il vise les terres avec pour objectif de provoquer un
inévitable transfert ‘volontaire’ de la population palestinienne, en convoitant l’espace
où vit le peuple palestinien. Le spatiocide est une idéologie délibérée qui s’accompagne
de raisons unifiées, et d’un processus dynamique car il est interagit constamment
avec le contexte émergent et les actions de la résistance palestinienne. En décrivant
et en questionnant les différents aspects de l’appareil militaro-judiciaro-civil, j’examine
comment est possible la réalisation du projet spatiocidaire via un régime qui déploie
trois principes, à savoir, le principe de la colonisation, le principe de la séparation et
l’état d’exception qui arbitre entre ces deux principes apparemment contradictoires.

Mots-clés
Conflit israélo-palestinien, état d'exception, biopolitique, colonialisme

Resumen
Este artículo plantea que el proyecto colonial israelí es ‘espacio-cida’ (en contraposición
a genocida) en que se dirige hacia el territorio con el propósito de que resulte inevitable
el desplazamiento ‘voluntario’ de la población palestina y se concentra fundamentalmente
en el espacio en el que ésta vive. El ‘espacio-cidio’ es una ideología deliberada con
una racionalidad unificada, si bien con un proceso dinámico, ya que interactúa
constantemente con el contexto emergente y las acciones de la resistencia palestina.
A través de la descripción y el planteamiento de diferentes aspectos de los aparatos
militares-judiciales-civiles, examinaré cómo es posible la realización del proyecto
‘espacio-cida’ a través de un régimen que implementa tres principios, concretamente:
el principio de la colonización, el principio de separación y el estado de excepción que
actúa como mediador entre estos dos principios a primera vista contradictorios.

Palabras clave
Conflicto palestino-israelí, estado de excepción, bio-política, colonialismo

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