Marla - Feldman and Khalili

Feldman contests the meanings and functions of the “special relationship” between the U.S. and Israel, identifying “a conjuncture when struggles over hegemony in the United States became entangled with transformed relations of rule in Israel and Palestine,” and demonstrating “how this coupling drew on…Zionism as a symbolic storehouse for the hegemonic articulation of liberal freedom and colonial violence” (2).

Feldman contends that “the competing meanings given the ‘special relationship” between the United States, Israel, and Palestine are compellingly clarified by the analytical concept U.S. imperial culture. U.S. imperial culture names the crucible within which an enduring U.S. national ideology of territorial expansion and its attendant regimes of racial domination and war-making have been codified, reified, naturalized, and contested” (8).

Asking “How have artists, activists, intellectuals, state agents, and scholars in the United States written through, about, and against the historical shadowing of Palestine and Palestinians within Euro-American modernity” (17), Feldman turns to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, generally recognized by U.S. historians for embedding the “culture of poverty” into state policy regarding the provision of social services.

Feldman provides a thorough analysis of Moynihan’s writings, highlighting his role in the development of racial liberalism within a Cold War exceptionalist framework. If Moynihan is an author of U.S. imperial culture (an external manifestation of state power), and the two earlier writings analyzed by Feldman had a direct impact on the practice of social work in the context of my study, how could those writings be utilized as evidence of internal manifestation of state power?

Drawing on an impressive array of archival resources, Khalili “analyzes the ways in which liberal counterinsurgencies are situated in much broader global trends that structure transnational elite politics and ideologies of rule. (She) argues that the more tactics of war are represented and remade as more ‘humane,’ population-centric, and developmental, the greater the risk of such wars becoming acceptable. (She) ultimately contends that these liberal forms of asymmetric warfare…are also…innovations in indirect forms of rule, where coercion is not so much displaced by as dressed in the garb of hegemony” (9-10).

In the first chapter, Khalili presents “The Forebears” of imperial and colonial counterinsurgencies, not only illustrating the development of new forms of asymmetric warfare, but also their application into the twentieth century.

I don’t believe I have ever encountered a collection of so many despicable human beings in such a compact analytical space, but the most troubling aspect of this genealogy of counterinsurgency is the clarity of its progression—not just achieving dominance, but also convincing its victims that oppression is in their best interests. This is perhaps best exemplified by a developmental agenda, or “armed social work.” (26).

Ultimately, Khalili points to themes that will shape twenty-first thinking, including “humane” imperial policing, and counterinsurgency as “either simultaneous or sequential application of military force and civic action,” which will require ongoing racialization of local populations who “as an object of warfare and civic action…has to be studied, categorized, known” (42-43).