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Following the Hamas-led massacre and invasion of Israel on October 7, 2023, Israel has launched a continued assault on Gaza, deploying aerial bombing, ground invasions, and a total blockade in its effort to destroy Hamas. In these 12 months the assault has killed approximately 42,000 Palestinian, displaced over 90% of Gazans, and destroyed over half of all Gazan buildings (BBC Visual Journalism Team, 2024) This widespread destruction, combined with Israels blockade, has created a major humanitarian crisis consisting of famine, spread of infectious diseases, and a collapsed healthcare sector (Batrawy, 2024). To explore the (in)humanity of this crisis, the developing field of everyday security studies can provide valuable insights. As opposed to earlier positivistic theories of security, everyday security studies focus on the daily, habitual, and mundane aspects of life and how they relate to in/security. Where the referent object of traditional theories of security may be the state, international institutions, politicians, military or the bourgeois, everyday security explores those often relegated to the private sphere: civilians, workers, women, and children. By exploring the spatial, temporal, and affective experiences of non-elite actors within Gaza, we can illuminate Israeli security apparatuses of blockade, bombing, ground invasion, surveillance, and forced displacement. This lens allows for a greater understanding of both the wider Israeli-Palestinian conflict and other global conflicts that oppress groups via acts of everyday violence, be it Ukrainians, Kurds, Kashmiris, or the Rohingya.
Conceptualising the Everyday
The field of everyday security studies is a relatively new development in International Relations (IR), emerging in the past 20 years out of the post-positivist turn in the 1990s. Where traditional, positivist security studies focus on the macro-level of the state, international organisations, the balance of global power, or political economy, these new developments draw focus to the micro level, the everyday experiences of individuals within structural situations of violence and in/security. The everyday explores the daily, mundane, and habitual instead of the exceptional event; it explores the experience of the civilian, worker, or housewife instead of the political executive, military, or bourgeois. This method of analysis is heavily influenced by both the field of feminist security studies—which deconstruct the binary dichotomies of masculine/feminine, private/public, and international/domestic—as well as criminological, sociological, and psychological studies of the everyday (Peoples & Vaughn-Williams, 2020). Conducting a meta-analysis of a number of key papers that explore the everyday in security studies, Nyman (2021, pp. 317) identified three dimensions that comprise the everyday: mundane space, temporal routine practices, and affective lived experience**.**These dimensions are not neatly defined and often interact but produce a useful framework to examine both the subjects’ everyday experience of techniques of top-down in/security and the subject’s bottom-up practices of everyday security to ensure survival (Lemanski 2012). By incorporating an analysis of the everyday, the field of security studies can expand its scope and depth, exploring the often unseen and silenced voices that live in/security.
Mass Surveillance in the Gazan Panopticon
The current war on Gaza is part of a larger ongoing conflict, which Pace and Yacobi (2021) call “settler colonialism (without settlers)”, building on Patrick Wolfe’s concept of Settler Colonialism as an ongoing logic of elimination. To Wolfe (2006), settler-Colonialism is not a genocidal or invasive event but an ongoing power structure, dispersed across all aspects of the settling state and society. Following Israels decisive victory during the 1967 Six Day War, it occupied and established settlements within Gaza until 2005. While Hamas has maintained political authority over the strip since 2007, Israel has continued to impose its settler-colonial sovereignty at a distance, via an ongoing blockade, the deployment of advanced weapons, surveillance technologies, and infrastructural violence; methods that Pace and Yacobi call slow violence*.* Israel has been testing and developing these advanced surveillance and military technologies and techniques in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem for over 50 years, of which it sells to the global market as a key export (Lowenstein, 2024). Within the open-air prison of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem, Israel operates a panopticist network of AI assisted security cameras, body cameras, and drones connected to extensive biometric databases, such as the Blue Wolf facial database, that can identify an individual, their education, family history, and security level (Lowenstein, 2024. pp. 63-65). Palestinian subjectivity must operate under the Israeli gaze, creating a situation of fear, uncertainty, and psychological trauma.