Iritz Katz, The Common Camp: Architecture of Power and Resistance in Israel–Palestine, Minnesota, MI: University of Minnesota Press, 2022, 368 pp., USD 35 (paperback).
When Hannah Arendt wrote that the camp was “the only ‘country’ that the world had to offer the stateless,” she was commenting not only on the Nazi genocidal concentration camps but also on the refugee or internment camp which was supposedly created to provide relief and safety for those fleeing state violence. The practice of concentrating civilians in guarded camps, as part of wartime counter-insurgency strategies supporting ethnically-targeted eliminationist aims, or in the context of the imperial project of preserving physical and moral hygiene, predated the Nazi concentration camps of the 1930’s (Smith and Stucki 2011). The German annihilation of over eighty per cent of indigenous Herero in 1904 led to the creation of concentration camps, supported by German missionaries, which were characterised by slave labour, hunger and disease (Mamdani 2002). Colonial concentration camps, of the kind detailed by Elkins (2005) and Anderson (2006) in Kenya, operated on the basis of what Mamdani calls “race branding” and allowed not only for the isolation of groups identified as “enemy” (e.g. the Kikuyu) but for their ready extermination. The inherent relationship between the camp and colonialism evident in the foregoing examples is central to Katz’s extensive survey of the camp phenomena in historic Palestine.
Historically, as Katz shows, the military camp formed the design model for all types of camp to follow — from the ancient Roman military castra to the colonial camps of southern Africa and Cuba, through to Nazi concentration camps, camp spaces of organised resistance in Palestine and the post-genocidal refugee camps of the Great Lakes and Bangladesh.
Irit Katz locates the camp not only as a space of containment but as a “spatial practice,” and a manifestation of both domination and resistance. Understanding the camp as a function of power relations makes sense of the fact that concentration/detention camps, protest camps and refugee camps all rely on the same technologies of security and control and the same technologies of biopolitical management. In this rich, and fascinating book, Katz examines the variety of camp that has defined Israel’s settler colonial project and the oppression and resistance each generate.
Genocide, mass forced displacement, and imperial and settler colonialism all lead to the establishment of what Katz describes as “the peculiar spatial entity,” the camp. But as she illustrates the camp is not only a space by which the strong can dominate the weak, in which the dangerous or troubled population is contained, segregated and controlled within securitised boundaries. The camp is also a space in which both civilian and military forces may consolidate and strengthen their power. The book explores this form of camp in relation to both the early Zionist settlers, the Jewish immigrant camps which gathered up Jewish would-be immigrants to Israel, Israel’s ongoing illegal settlement programme in the West Bank and East Jerusalem (and formally in Gaza until 2005) and the use of temporary camps by Palestinians in the occupied territories against the Israeli occupation. Katz cites one powerful example from 2018, when Gazans along the Israel/Gaza border fence launched protests from five makeshift camps, against Israeli and for the Great March of Return Campaign. There is too the makeshift camp that emerges following the mass Israeli forced expulsion of indigenous Palestinians from their homes. Most visible in the Negev, these temporary camps, unrecognised by the state, transform over time into forever vulnerable villages. In the process of unrecognition, the indigenous Palestinian inhabitants are suspended in a state of official invisibility.
In covering this expansive notion of the camp the book moves between the repressive and resistance functions of the camp with sometimes dizzying empirical haste, but this also captures the inherent and dialectical nature of the camp and its ever shifting parameters of resistance and control. There is thus a powerful truth in the genealogical narrative form which provides for the reader a visceral appreciation of the flux and complexity of the camp.
In fundamental ways Katz, while not explicitly employing the language of genocide, shows the camp to be both a material and metaphorical embodiment of Israel’s settler colonial attempts to annihilate the indigenous Palestinians. The camp in both its transitory and permanent manifestations, in its occupier and occupied forms, tells the story of Israel’s 76-year genocide and the dire consequences of Palestinian dispossession. The camp is thus both a necropolitical site of dehumanisation, identity destruction and death and a space where activism, resistance and new identities may be forged.
There is much to be learned from Irit Katz’s erudite and deeply informative book. As I write, Israel, with terrifying ferocity, is conducting its annihilation phase of genocide in Gaza. With the desperate echoes of the 1948 Nakba emblazoned in the hearts and minds of each and every Palestinian, Gazans are again forced to confront the horrifying and immediate reality of the refugee camp as a permanent future. In reality, of course, the Gaza strip has been a camp/ghetto/prison for over seventeen years. Gaza is now being obliterated, yet despite all Israeli intentions, the Palestinians have not been. Only time, Palestinian sumud and international solidarity will establish whether the camps that emerge from the genocide, as surely they will, are capable of generating new forms of political power and resistance.