This article examines the political and productive work of humor under conditions of precarity, war, and occupation. Drawing on the case of Palestine but making links to other contexts of violence and war, it explores the transgressive power of humor to destabilize existing power relations and established hierarchies by calling into question the norms and “rationalities” that underpin our social world. Palestine’s laughter in particular, it contends, constitutes a mode and practice of refusal to normalize conditions of subjugation. Accordingly, this article explores how humor, as wielded on the part of subjugated populations, constitutes a different kind of political grammar that cannot be adequately captured by the language of resistance. To laugh in the face of power is not to say: “I oppose you”—rather it is to assert: “your power has no authority over me.” It is to refuse that power authorizing force. As such, this article maintains that closer inspection of the relationship between humor, laughter, and power carves out new space for a working theory of the political, one wherein power is not opposed but disavowed. This disavowal, I argue, is also productive: it is to assert that other political orders and possibilities exist.

In September 2007 Israel's security cabinet approved a 'hostile entity' classification for the Gaza Strip and intensified its economic and diplomatic blockade of this Hamas-controlled region. Taking the 'hostile entity' classification as a point of entry, this paper examines the construction of Gaza as an insurgent zone, a liminal space within which Israel's executive discretion has authorizing force. Central to this process, it argues, is a blurring of lines between the civilian and combatant-the elimination of a purely civilian space. This paper begins with an analysis of the discursive strategies employed to collapse the space between the civilian body and battlefield in Gaza. It then turns to an examination of socio-spatial practices mobilized around the 'hostile entity' classification, foremost Israel's sanctions policy, and argues this counter-insurgency strategy entails regulation and management of the Palestinian body combined with the active subjugation of Palestinian life to the power of death. Centrally, this paper attends to the relationship between geopolitics and violence at the scale of the (Palestinian) body.

Violence and humanitarianism are conventionally understood to be in opposition to one another. And yet, humanitarianism is also deeply entangled with violence-not only in tending to the after effects of human or natural catastrophe, but, at times, also (re)producing and perpetuating ongoing conditions of violence. Taking up Weizman's notion critiquing "lesser evil" solutions to human suffering, we extend the exploration of humanitarian interventions to the structural and symbolic violences enacted through the institutions, mechanisms, instruments, and "moral technologies" that are mobilized in the governance of people and spaces deemed in "need." At the same time we attend to the thresholds within humanitarian forms of engagement where slippage into assaultive violence condenses-often through the spatial policing of circulation, the drive toward legibility, and/or opaque processes of conditional vetting. These moments and spaces shed light on the multiple, hierarchical visions of humanity that animate humanitarianism.

Violence is most often theorized in relation to overt and sensational displays of sovereign power and military force. Less frequently, however, is violence considered within the remit of humanitarian technologies, discourses, and practices. Taking Eyal Weizman's theorization of the relationship between humanitarianism and violence as a point of departure, this paper traces the deepening entanglements between liberal war, violence, and civilian intervention in Palestine/Israel. Drawing on research conducted in the West Bank on the US Agency for International Development and the vast web of aid intermediaries, experts, lawyers, and contractors through which it operates, this paper attends to the ways in which counterinsurgency and pacification strategies are being mobilized through the networks of aid governance. Centrally this paper argues that, while the foreign aid regime in the Palestinian territories has served to mitigate the most deleterious effects of military occupation and dispossession, it has at the same time, further extended a regime of war and policing into ever-more intimate spaces of Palestinian everyday life. In tracing these processes, this paper brings to the fore the persistence of war in moments when direct military violence is held in abeyance. More broadly, it argues that the case of Palestine lends insight into the multiple forms of violence that exist within our concept of 'war'-not only the spectacular and the crisis-laden, but also the mundane, bureaucratic, routinized, and largely concealed. In so doing, this paper invites a consideration of the ways in which regimes of war and violence are reproduced through mediums, practices, and institutions that emerge to realize 'stability' and 'peace'.

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