Surveillance in Palestinian Jerusalem: Busy with Dying, Birth, and Bedrooms

(65) The journey from the checkpoint to the bedroom – more generally, from the public sites of confrontation to the “intimate politics of the everyday” (2) – is one that Shalhoub-Kevorkian is particularly equipped to make, with her detailed understanding of the law and her many investigations into the dynamics of gender, race, and colonial oppression, as well as her attentiveness to the voices of Palestinian women and men. Shalhoub-Kevorkian excavates the “demographic threat” that lay behind the rhetoric of security that justified this ruling and quotes Judge Asher Gruin (who became the head of the court a month later): “Human rights are not a prescription for national suicide” (53), apparently haunted by the dreaded return of Palestinian refugees through the sleight of hand of marriage. The former head of the International Law Division of the Israeli military, Daniel Reisner, described to Weizman an “exercise” he undertook with Israeli army officers to calculate an “acceptable” ratio of collateral civilian deaths while targeting an armed militant: each officer wrote a number on a piece of paper: the average, Reisner notes, was 3.14 civilians. For the politics of fear obviously circulates fear among the colonized but also produced a “feared Other” (whether imagined or taking a physical form – consider the empty streets of Tel Aviv in the wake of a Palestinian shooter escaping after killing two Israelis in early January 2016) that shapes the colonizer. [...]in her discussion of birth in Jerusalem, the author notes the “fear that seeps into the very mind and body of the subject” at the checkpoint (145), but she also analyzes how the colonizing state “produces and maintains a state of institutionalized fear regarding the Palestinian newborn child” (146).