Living Emergency: Israel's Permit Regime in the Occupied West Bank. By Yael Berda. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018.

• Published date: 01 June 2019
• Date: 01 June 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12407

own histories and contemporary controversies regarding national-

ity, citizenship, immigration, and identity. The book’s appeal is to

a wide multidisciplinary audience and its contribution to the field

of migration and mobility studies is particularly pertinent and

valuable. Klaaren’s contribution to sociolegal studies is consider-

able – and particularly exciting for law and society scholars who

are engaged in research on the global movement of people. His

books will also be useful to law and society scholars examining the

possibilities and limitations of law and legal processes.

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Living Emergency: Israel’s Permit Regime in the Occupied West Bank.

By Yael Berda. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018.

Reviewed by Noura Erakat, School of Integrative Studies, George

Mason University

Yael Berda’s Living Emergency uses ethnographic data compiled

during her career as a human rights attorney and legal analysis to

scrutinize Israel’s permit regime in the occupied West Bank. The

short book, part of Stanford University Press’s Briefs series, is

divided into four chapters and uses Israel’s management of

Palestinians as an “extreme case (study)” of population control

through a logic of security (9) and demonstrates the interplay of

surveillance, emergency, and law. Berda relies on conversations

with Palestinian clients as well officials from the military Civil

Administration to provide a penetrating analysis of the, often,

erratic logic, processes, and effects, of a bureaucratic edifice that

appears otherwise formidable. She highlights that the permit

regime regulating movement and predicated on data collection

and surveillance is not as deliberate nor as precise as we tend to

imagine repressive regimes to be.

Israel has directly controlled the movement of Palestinians

from the West Bank and Gaza within the territories and across a

nonexistent border into Israel since the 1967 War. Israel has

attempted to integrate as much of the territories with as little

Palestinians as possible in order to expand the state’s jurisdiction

without disrupting its Jewish demographic majority. Israel’s over-

arching ambitions, for territory without its natives, has shaped its

military bureaucracy.

Book Reviews 619