Israel's Colonial Project in Palestine

Elia Zureik is head of the department of sociology and anthropology at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies in Qatar, and is professor emeritus of sociology at Queen’s University in Ontario, where he is the holder of the Research Excellence Award.

• Preface Introduction 1.Researching Palestine and the Palestinians: A Road Map 2.Zionism and Colonialism 3.Colonialism as Surveillance 4. Biopolitics, Eugenics, and Population Discourse 5.From Calibrated Suffering to Necropolitics 6.The Internet and Acts of Everyday Resistance Conclusion

Zureik (Queen's Univ., Canada) examines the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a struggle between a settler population (i.e., Jews from Europe and elsewhere) and the country's indigenous people. Zureik focuses on methods of control, including "surveillance and information gathering," "biopolitics" (including "demography and population management," and eugenics), and violence. He also deals with the internet as an instrument of "surveillance and resistance." The author draws extensively on theoretical literature (notably, works by Michel Foucault). Unlike his earlier study focusing on Palestinians ("Israeli Arabs") within Israel's pre-1967 frontiers, this book brings in those in the West Bank and Gaza, as well as refugees living outside historic Palestine. Although Zureik begins by pointing to the influence of his personal experience as a Palestinian in Israel on his perspective - the "social context - he has provided a solid, documented analysis of a reality that, in the past, generally was not understood in the West. This book will prove useful to serious students of Middle Eastern politics and, more broadly, of methods whereby subordinate populations are controlled. G.E. Perry, Indiana State University (emeritus), in CHOICE