ABSTRACT
Why, in Amira Hass’s words, does the “magnetic ID card” fit into the picture of separate development of Israeli and Palestinian people in such a “natural way”? And why, furthermore, might this “strike fear in anyone who understands that ‘separation’ and peace are contradictory terms”? The answer lies in the ways that colonialism was imposed in Israel, sorting the population by ethnic categories and using various identification cards (hereafter “IDs”; see Lyon 2009) as markers of citizenship. This is a practice that has been documented in several situations of “internal colonialism,” including South Africa, and these comparative examples throw light on the Palestinian experience both before and after 1967. But going beyond this, IDs also “fit naturally” in two other senses: first is that IDs are increasingly in evidence in a process dubbed by Nikolas Rose the “securitizing of identity” (Rose 1999) in which the condition of freedom – whether economic or political – is the production of some legitimate identification; second is that the use of surveillance and security technologies such as IDs is likely to expand proportionately to the experience of widening gaps of opportunity and access.
