Environment and Planning A 2015, volume 47, pages 2308 – 2323 doi:10.1177/0308518X15598263 Managing violence: aid, counterinsurgency, and the humanitarian present in Palestine Lisa Bhungalia Department of Geography, Ohio State University, 1120 Derby Hall, 154 N Oval Mall, Columbus, OH 43210-1361, USA; e-mail: bhungalia.1@osu.edu Received 27 February 2014; in revised form 25 February 2015 Abstract. 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’. Keywords: liberal war, violence, humanitarianism, counterinsurgency, Israel/Palestine Introduction: Jenin’s ‘redesign’ (1) In April 2002, Israeli Defense Forces entered Jenin refugee camp as part of a broader counterinsurgency campaign carried out across the West Bank. The offensive, Israeli officials claimed, was aimed at dismantling terrorist infrastructure behind attacks in Israel. Declaring the area a “closed military zone”, the IDF proceeded to carry out an eleven-day siege on Jenin refugee camp involving “one thousand ground troops, columns of tanks and armored bulldozers, and aerial bombardments from Apache helicopters” (Tabar, 2012, page 44). The D-9 bulldozer, as Stephen Graham (2003) has detailed, was used to demolish much of the camp’s infrastructure, including the clearing of a 40 000 m 2 area in the camp’s center. By the time the siege ended, 140 buildings—most of them multifamily housing units—had been destroyed, 200 others were damaged, and an estimated quarter of Jenin’s population of 14 000 had been rendered homeless (HRW, 2002; UN, 2002). When aid teams were finally permitted access back into the area, they found much of the camp reduced to rubble (HRW, 2002). Situating Jenin within broader trends of urban warfare, Eyal Weizman (2003) has argued that the violence inflicted on Jenin camp was guided by a military logic of “designed destruction” (rather than total destruction), whereby the IDF enhanced its (1) This phrasing comes from Linda Tabar’s (2012) account of the 2001 military assault in Jenin.