ABSTRACT
Momentum continues to gather behind application of Foucault’s concept of biopolitics to Israeli surveillance and management of the Palestinian population. From land acquisition to the separation wall understood as “spacio-cide” (Hanafi 2005), through agency in a “state of exception” (Lentin 2008), to the closure regime (Parsons and Salter 2008) and policing (Parsons 2010), conceptual and empirical foundations have started to settle. This chapter builds on them by engaging the Foucauldian injunction to seek out the motive forces opposed to, as well as providing for, control. Important ground has been broken, as Zureik notes, by anthropologists documenting quotidian resistance to occupation (Chapter 1, this volume). Further insight is gained in this collection by Abujidi’s treatment of resistance in Nablus through knowledge, quotidian practice, and commemoration (Chapter 16). This chapter shifts up a level to examine resistance among two sets of Palestinian institutions: the Palestinian Authority (PA) security apparatus, and the two leading political factions that have variously commanded and dismantled parts of it – the nationalist Fatah movement and the Islamist Hamas.
