Description
This paper examines the intersection between counterinsurgency and humanitarian governance through the case of Israeli settler colonialism in Palestine. It zooms in on a branch of the Israeli military called Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT). COGAT is the military-civilian administration that rules over both non-citizen Palestinians throughout the 1967 occupied territories and Israeli settlers residing in Area C of the West Bank. Since the Oslo Accords in the 1990s, it has increasingly coordinated the provision of humanitarian assistance to Palestinians with a collection of international governments, donors, UN agencies, and NGOs. As a non-combat branch that remains active in times of war, COGAT has become a crucial player in Israeli counterinsurgency campaigns that focus on pacifying the civilian population. Along with tracing the historical emergence of this branch that was created shortly after the 1967 Six Day War, the paper draws on forty interviews with former COGAT officials, Israeli military veterans and humanitarian workers in Israel/Palestine to make two primary contributions. First, it is argued that COGAT has adopted humanitarian methods of population control to advance its counterinsurgency predicated on confining natives inside settler colonial enclaves. Second, Israeli military coordination with international and local actors has enabled a form of indirect rule, whereby COGAT outsources the humanitarian governance of Palestinians to players ostensibly external to its system.
