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Courting Conflict: The Israeli Military Court System in the West Bank and Gaza. By Lisa Hajjar. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Pp. 312. $24.95 paper.
Reviewed by Vanessa Barker, Florida State University
After 38 years of military occupation, Israel has recently withdrawn from Gaza and the West Bank. Readers seeking to understand the historic proportions of this move, especially as it is enmeshed in the legacy of Israeli control over Palestine, will be interested in Hajjar's first-rate ethnography, Courting Conflict: The Israel Military Court System in the West Bank and Gaza.
Operating within a complex legal framework, Israel's military court system, Hajjar argues, functions as a highly repressive form of governance even as it remains shrouded in the principles of formal rational law. The military court system, Hajjar explains, has governed the everyday lives of Palestinians in the occupied territories since 1967. That is to say, the military court system not only prosecutes cases of security violations and armed resistance, but it regulates how Palestinians live their lives in the occupied territories. By applying various military orders, the court regulates how Palestinians actually move through the territories (e.g., curfews, checkpoints, permits), how they can or cannot display signs of Palestinian nationalism, how they can or cannot protest the occupation, and how they make a living, marry, and...