Abstract:
Since the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in 1993 following the Oslo Accords, Israel supposedly handed its duties of safeguarding the economic and social interests of the West Bank’s Palestinian population to the Palestinian Authority. In doing so, it allegedly followed a separation strategy and granted the Palestinian people the right to self-determination by allowing them to govern themselves. This essay uses Foucault’s ideas on power and governmentality to investigate whether Israel has truly ceased governing the Palestinian population and whether the PA is properly equipped to serve as a state apparatus. The essay’s central thesis is that, despite the separation, Israel employs bio-political technologies that both regulate Palestinian life and incapacitate the PA from fulfilling its regulatory duties towards Palestinians. In making that argument, the essay introduces a brief explication of Foucault’s modes of power before analysing, through Foucauldian lens, three primary ways through which the state of Israel intervenes in Palestinian life today. It looks at the erection of checkpoints, the building and maintenance of settlements, and the usage of laws, administrative policies and economic policies. The concept of ‘dispowerment’ is introduced as a neologism to describe a state apparatus’s situation when the conditions for the possibility of its acting as a bio-power apparatus are made absent. For a state to be fully dispowered, it must have had its bio-political technologies rendered ineffective rendering the state an impotent bio-power apparatus. The investigation finds that Israel continues to regulate Palestinian life in the West Bank and that the structure of the occupation dispowers the PA. In other words, under the current structure of the occupation, neither Israel separated nor the PA regulated.
