Militarised violence in the service of state-imposed emergencies over Palestine and Kenya

Colonial states of emergency are declared and promulgated to contain the disorder of rebellion, resistance and revolt and to effect a return to an order integral to colonial settlement and occupation. The paper draws on colonial archives, analysis of emergency and colonialism evident in the literature, and the contribution of images to guide apprehension of the sites and locations of the emergency landscapes and the geographies of resistance of Kenya from the 1950s and across historic Palestine since 1948. Positing the practices enabled through Emergency regulations as intensified forms of instrumentalised colonial governmentality and violence, part of the structure of settler colonialism, the paper examines the racialised vocabularies of the British colonial administration of the Emergency over Kenya and the Zionist/Israeli state/military frames of Palestinian resistance, the technologies and architectures of subjugation and punishment through which the threat of disorder is contained in carceral zones, and the militarised violence of the colonial response to resistance characterised as catastrophic threat from an enemy located within frames of terrorism, disloyalty and illegality. Photographs taken as part of an inquiry into the architectures, remnants, material assemblages and spatial arrangements found in the emergency landscapes and the geographies of resistance of post-colonial Kenya and across the multiple geographies of historic Palestine are included as evidence of the photographic event and as provocation to thought in an encounter with the workings of colonialism and of resistance. This writing on Emergency applies archival, visual, theoretical and spatial modes of inquiry to historic and contemporary provisions and practices authorised under colonial stateimposed emergencies. It brings forward the rhetoric and events found in archives, the theoretical concerns on emergency and colonialism evident in the literature, and the contribution of images to apprehension of the sites and locations of the emergency landscapes and the geographies of resistance of Kenya from the 1950s and across historic Palestine since 1948. It aims to bring attention to the technologies of oppression authorised through colonial


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Cosmopolitan Civil Societies Journal, Vol.6, No.3, 2014 1945 which Israel adopted when, on the 21 st May 1948, it declared a state of emergency over Palestine, only days after the declaration of the establishment of the Israeli state on the lands, villages and cities lost to Palestinians through the war of 1948, al Nakba.The state of emergency -promulgated for the defence of the state, the maintenance of public order, supplies and essential services (Mahozy 2012, p. 148;Law and Administration Ordinance No. 1 of 5708-1948), and the suppression of mutiny, rebellion, or riot (Adv. Ben Natan et al. 2009) -has been renewed in the Israeli Knesset every year since 1948.In 2012 the Supreme Court rejected a petition first filed in 1999 by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) to cancel the state of emergency in place since 1948 on the grounds that, in part '(Israel) is not a normal country in that its existential threats have yet to be quelled' (ACRI 2012).In October 1952 the colonial office declared an Emergency over Kenya to impose order on the Land and Freedom movement (also known as Mau Mau), a resistance movement framed as lawlessness, violence and disorder (TNA CO/822/443 October 1952).The Emergency in Kenya would last eight years until negotiations brought about a transfer of power and independence.Mau Mau, illegal under Emergency regulations, remained proscribed as a movement and an organisation until 2003 when the Kibaki government lifted the proscription and the case for compensation could begin.Palestine, having been under some form of state of emergency at least since 1937, arguably since 1920 under the Mandate and under Israeli control since 1948, is said to be in a state of 'permanent' (Adalah 2013) or 'perpetual emergency ' (al Haq 1989).
Colonial sovereignty, suggests Stephen Morton writing on Kenya's colonial state of emergency, 'was experienced as a permanent state of emergency from the standpoint of the colonised'; the emergency over Kenya signifying the violence and injustice inherent to colonial rule (Morton 2002, p. 112), inherent, one might add, to the 'logic of elimination' that Wolfe (2008 p.102) identifies as central to the settler-colonial project. 5Premised as it is on 'the securing -the obtaining and maintaining -of territory' (Wolfe 2008, p.120), settler colonialism frames those features found in common, 6 both historically in Kenya and across contemporary Palestine including, but not limited to, discursive frames of terra nullius, the 5 Wolfe (2008) distinguishes settler colonialism, determined by this 'logic of elimination' as a primary motivation, from other forms of colonialism that he characterises as chattel slavery (US) or franchise colonialism (India) p.103. 6 Notwithstanding that the settlement of Palestine started as anti-colonialism began the process of securing independence from colonial rule (Israel-Palestine has been described as 'the only successful settler nationbuilding of the twentieth century ' Elkins and Pederson 2005, p.3) there are innumerable common practices of colonial rule between Kenya and Palestine.See Elkins and Pederson, 2005.dispossessions and re-territorialisation of what colonialism intended as permanent settlement (Wolfe 2008, p.112), and what Elkins describes as 'settler tyranny'. 7  Figure 1.The Wall, Abu Dis, Palestine 2007.
Photo: Annie Pfingst This writing is accompanied by photographs taken as part of my inquiry into the architectures, remnants, material assemblages and spatial arrangements found in the emergency landscapes and the geographies of resistance of post-colonial Kenya and across the multiple geographies of historic Palestine.Taken as I walked, was guided, stopped to observe, they are inscribed here as encounters to work together with the material gathered from the archives, from Kenyan and Palestinian writings, and from discursive analysis in an apprehension of the work of emergency.Images are offered here not as forensic evidence but as evidence of the photographic event or the event that photography has encountered (Azoulay 2012, pp.11-27) and as provocation to thought, an opportunity to '"slow down" reasoning' as  (Stengers 2005. p. 1).As an encounter with the workings of colonialism and of resistance, this is also the moment to contemplate the 'civil contract of photography' in which the ethics of viewing shifts to the 'spectator's responsibility toward what is visible' (Azoulay 2008, p.131;Pfingst & Rosengarten 2012, pp.102-5).Butler reminds us that apprehension is a process of framing through which some lives are recognisable as life whilst others do not register as grievable, do not command our recognition of their deaths and thus not of their lives (2008, pp. 2-15).This essay considers the conditions of state-imposed emergencies through which categories of life not apprehended as grievable, are not protected but rather framed as threats not only to order but to the 'foundational fictions' (Stoler 2002, p. 99) of colonial regimes rendering them subject to the extremes of colonial emergency practices of control, containment and punishment.(2008, pp.148-169).Three forms of violence, according to Mbembe -founding violence, the violence of legitimation that in turn produced 'an imaginary capacity converting the founding violence into authorizing authority' and a third form of violence that would ensure the 'maintenance, spread and permanence' of the authorizing authority -form the seamless web of colonial sovereignty (2001, pp. 24-25).This writing departs from Agamben's analysis of the occurrence of sovereign violence outside the law as necessarily delineating the state of exception and draws instead on the codification of  encounter with a remnant, a landscape, when we look across or dig down into the vertical strata of the land; or walk between the buildings in a boys rehabilitation school that was once a detention camp; or along the deep ditches that are all that is left of the trenches; the grid arrangement of houses and shambas that mirrors the straight lines of a concentrated village; or down the steep path through the forest, across rocks and a river to find ourselves at the mouth of a cave used by Mau Mau for shelter and gathering?
I remember walking past two women standing, talking on the Jerusalem side of the Apartheid Wall -small figures against the immense grey concrete structure reaching metres above their heads.Abu Dis.It was a still moment in this landscape of separation, enclosure and control.
Farther behind us an old man walked slowly along the road.Earlier a military vehicle had sped along the military road that is an integral part of the construction of the Wall.How do we apprehend the lines of people waiting, the concrete holding sheds, the electronic monitoring, the glassed in soldiers booth, the guns, military vehicles and radios of the checkpoint; the concrete panels, the round towers of the Wall topped by barbed wire; the surveillance cameras dotted throughout the old city of Jerusalem, the soldiers; the wide swathe of a settlement lying across the Judean Hills seen from the road between Beit Sahur and Ramallah; a Palestinian town glimpsed in the valley?How might we apprehend the miles on miles of fences that guard the military installations and zones across the southern Naqab/Negev?
This inquiry works at the intersection of the knowledges held in Kenyan and Palestinian writings and collections, images, both historic and current, including photographs made by the author through this inquiry on Emergency, and the archives of colonial files and documents encountered as 'sites of contested knowledges' (Hamilton et al., 2002, p.15).
Apprehension of the secret letters, orders, directives, opinions, photographs, lists, intelligence and security reports, legal deliberations and juridical decisions contained in the British colonial 'migrated files' 8 provoke a particular set of considerations.Colonial framing of the colonial enterprise is administrative, privileged and dominant in official and imperial discourse. 9The files frame beginnings to rebellion, riot, or resistance as phenomena that explode into the colonial space as if from somewhere outside.There is no 'before' 10 -8 Boxes of files on the late British colonial administration across 37 colonies were found and released to the National Archives as a result of the Mau Mau case at the High Court in London.They are tagged as the 'migrated files'. 9See Ranajit Guha, 1988, 'The Prose of Counter-Insurgency' . 10From the archival records it is clear that the precursors to emergency practices existed within the structures of the British colonial project in Kenya -from the expropriation of land to the Kipande system, from identity cards to passbooks and movement permits, from squatter lines to the concentrated villages - Intended to be at least secret and hidden if not destroyed, the files on Kenya did in effect 'testify that a life did exist, that deeds were enacted, and struggles engaged in or evaded' (Mbembe 2002, p. 22) as the High Court in London judged that the case could go to a full trial asserting the rights of the claimants on the basis of the material available to the court including from the recently released files.A year later the British Government agreed an out of court compensation settlement. 12n the second half of this essay, I examine the racialised vocabularies found in the British     Spatial disintegration and fragmentation, themselves technologies of control and domination (Ophir 2009), assemble landscapes of emergency and re-assemble multiple geographies of resistance.Every location becomes the site for the confrontation between the agency of 13 Mbembe suggests that coming as it did at the end of the European colonial period and at the beginning of decolonization, the late modern colonial occupation of the Palestinian territories, combines the disciplinary, the biopolitical and the necropolitical manifesting in territorial fragmentation, a splintering occupation, and infrastructural warfare (2003, pp. 27-30).across the Gaza Strip, more than 16,700 housing units were destroyed or severely damaged (UNOCHA oPt 12 August 2014).In order to control and limit movement and deny access to food and supplies, colonial emergency practices delineate zones of exclusion across which it is forbidden to pass and in which growing crops was prohibited.In Kenya, a zone was demarcated between the fields and Mt Kenya and the growing of maize and potatoes prohibited.Israel delineated a military buffer zone inside the Gaza border -the most fertile of Gaza's land no longer available for cultivation.In Al Jalazone refugee camp outside Ramallah, building goes up, a vertical stack of apartments, so that the original small concrete shelters from the 1950s are hidden, barely visible, some disused, others disappeared into the vertical structures that have overtaken them; in Aqabat Jaber refugee camp in Jericho infrastructure for water and waste is implemented in order to enable a passable life without ever forgetting that life continues as the life of refugees.The UN distributes food, now no longer to all refugees, but to those in hardship, disabled, old.In Iftliq, the Bedouin rebuild their houses and communal structures after the everyday occurrence of demolition.Their poverty and precarity palpable as they live crammed up against the rocky hills in Israeli controlled Area C of the Occupied Jordan Valley.

Figure 4 :
Figure 4: Site of mass grave, Kiawara, Nyeri, Kenya 2013.Photo: Annie Pfingst colonial administration of the Emergency over Kenya and the Zionist/Israeli state/military frames of Palestinian resistance, the technologies and architectures of subjugation and punishment through which the threats of disorder are contained in carceral zones, and the military violence of the colonial response to resistance characterised as catastrophic threat from an enemy located within frames of terrorism, disloyalty and illegality.

Figure 9 .
Figure 9. Balata refugee camp, Nablus, Palestine 2007.Photo: Annie Pfingst fighters and restrict their access to food.The Wall fragments the geography of the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem leaving in its wake the debris of construction: demolished houses and villages; uprooted orchards and olive trees; broken wells and farm buildings, stonewalls and terraces.Since 1948, swathes of Palestinian property have been demolished and rendered uninhabitable through military exercises including in Gaza.Military incursions -in Jenin and Nablus as part of the 2002 Operation Defensive Shield -reshape the fabric of Palestinian urban space, including that of refugee camps.Some 27,000 Palestinian structures have been demolished in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (including East Jerusalem) since 1967 some through military destruction (47% between 1967 and 2012), some under Civil/Administrative Authority, and some as punitive measures (ICAHD 2014).The demolition of Bedouin structures is a daily occurrence across East Jerusalem, the Naqab and throughout the Jordan Valley.During the 2014 Israeli aerial bombing and land offensive

Figure 17 .
Figure 17.Jordan Valley, Palestine.Photo: Annie Pfingst are only ever interprGuha 1988)f intent or colonial imagining according to colonial configurations and discourses of power(Hamilton 2002, p. 9;Guha 1988)resulting in a linear narration that elides 'traces of marginal lives'(Hamilton et al. (ed.) 2002, p.12).Traces of marginal lives appear as names in the lists of the administration of detention and capital and collective punishment, or in propaganda flyers for capture, or in the correspondence between those seeking permission to enter or leave closed zones or seeking redress for harm under detention and the administrators of the colonial emergency; lives framed within colonial governmentality.In composing truth/fact, the archive, whose existence Mbembe posits 'constitutes a constant threat to the state' (2002, p.23) assembles time, places fragments of life in order, and formulates a coherent story of beginnings and Registration of Natives Ordinance (1921); Masters and Servants Ordinance (1906); Native Administration Ordinances, Outlying Districts Ordinance (1902); the Special Districts Administration Ordinance (1934).deliberationsends to create 'an illusion of totality and continuity' (2002, p.21) in effect constructing what Stoler describes as colonialism's 'moral narration' (2002, p.90).The files from the administration of the Emergency against Mau Mau reveal that those resisting colonial rule were considered law breakers, political agitators, terrorists at large, rebels, bad persons, prominent gangsters, agitators, enemy actors, 'leaders of violent resistance against the forces of law and order' engaged in 'acts of rebellion' (TNA FCO 141/6809 1956). 11igure 5. Mau Mau shelter, Mount Kenya 2013.Photo: Annie Pfingst Cosmopolitan Civil Societies Journal, Vol.6, No.3, 2014