Security Theology, Surveillance, and the Politics of Fear by Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian

In the summer of 2014 Israel waged a fifty-day military assault on Gaza that claimed the lives of 2,205 Palestinians, leaving in its wake a scale of destruction and displacement human rights groups deemed unprecedented since the beginning of Israel’s 1967 occupation. Israel rationalized its assault on the occupied territory as a matter of national security. Yet how could such a scale of human devastation against a captive population (under siege, no less) be justified in the name of security? Completed in the midst of the assault, the renowned Palestinian feminist scholar and activist Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s Security Theology, Surveillance, and the Politics of Fear provides an urgently needed analysis of Israel’s security paradigm embedded in a settler colonial logic. Of central concern to the author are the ways matters of security for the “Jewish state” enable deployment of a violent, quotidian surveillance over racialized bodies and lives, producing Israel’s “political...