Accumulation and Surveillance: The Military Rule in Lydda, July 1948-July 1949

This chapter examines the year of military rule in Lydda (1948-1949), using David Harvey’s concept of accumulation by dispossession. Earlier studies on the military rule in post-1948 Israel/Palestine analyzed the recurrent practices of looting, legally sanctioned appropriation, and spatial supervision as separate phenomena, largely ignoring their interrelations. The current study points to the links between these phenomena and argues that they enabled one another. The anti-looting campaign yielded spatial supervision, which reached its peak following attempted escapes by Palestinians. Efforts to overcome the looting and the escape attempts created a surveillance economy that grafted practices of looting, appropriation, and supervision upon the space that came to be settled by Jewish immigrants. In this context, accumulation by dispossession is shown to have followed national-colonial logic, according to which the goal of deriving maximal economic profit from Palestinian labor was qualified by a commitment to maintaining low unemployment among the Jewish settlers.