Ilana Feldman, Governing Gaza (New Release) (Book Review‪)‬

Ilana Feldman, Governing Gaza. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. 344 pp. As the scholarly literature on the history of twentieth century Palestine becomes more expansive, emerging themes pertaining to this embattled land have begun to be broached in perceptive ways. Yet, very few works on this site of enduring national conflict have been as stimulating, perceptive, and theoretically sophisticated as Ilana Feldman's Governing Gaza: Bureaucracy, Authority, and the Work of Rule 1917-1967. Amid contemporary dynamics of suffering, hardship, and resistance in the Gaza Strip (what some have referred to as "the world's largest open-air prison"), few might actually conclude that the history of domination in this tiny strip of hardship has been centrally about files, documents, and records, not simply sheer coercion, human rights abuses, and military conquest. Feldman's work succeeds at demonstrating how these various practices are, in fact, bound up inextricably.