A state of exception: Frameworks and institutions of israeli surveillance of palestinians, 1948–1967

From 1923 to 1948, what is currently the State of Israel and the Occupied Territories was governed by Great Britain under the League of Nations (later the United Nations) mandate system, which legitimated a form of quasi-colonial rule over territories, such as Mandatory Palestine, deemed not ready for independence. On November 30, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a partition plan that would see Mandatory Palestine divided into Palestinian and Jewish states, triggering a civil war that broadened into the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, during which the Jewish community (the Yishuv) declared the State of Israel in Mandatory Palestine. During the last stage of the 1948 War, and following the almost total cleansing of the Palestinians from the territories that were assigned to the Jewish state according to the United Nations partition resolution, Israeli leaders and military commanders decided to go ahead with the occupation of the parts of the Galilee that were allocated to the Palestinian state. This was to be done promptly in order to forestall any intervention by the international community. Consequently, a double movement military campaign was launched in order to reach the international borders of Palestine with Syria and Lebanon, thus leaving large Palestinian communities unremoved. Moreover, in the peace talks that followed the war, Israel laid claim to and subsequently received the Jordaniancontrolled Triangle area. The Palestinian residents of these regions along with the small, scattered communities in some cities and Bedouin tribes in the Negev constituted a sizeable minority. Israeli leaders and military commanders viewed the existence of these Palestinians as momentary, expecting their transfer in an imminent second round of violence. And indeed various transfer plans were prepared.