In late January of 2015, I hosted a talk at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, delivered by Jeff Halper, an internationally recognized activist-scholar based out of Israel. He was visiting Ottawa on a fund-raising tour and I was meeting him for the first time. Halper is the founder of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) and a Nobel Peace Prize nominee. I quickly came to like him. Short, stocky, white-bearded, and affable, Jeff delivered an impactful and well-researched presentation about the Israeli security–industrial complex. His talk was based on his forthcoming book1 that examined how Israel “strategically niche-fills the contours of the world's arms and security industries” and, moreover, on how the Israeli state's continuing “securocratic” order may be understood within the context of a capitalist world-system based on pacification. A colleague in my Department aptly summarized his presentation as equally “enlightening and terrifying.”

Yet, despite the power of his talk, one point kept gnawing at me. Why was it that despite decades of domination into all facets of Palestinian life, the Israeli state had found no way of making the Palestinians productive? In fact, contrary to what pacification theory would suggest, the Israeli securocratic order had shown a clear disinterest in fostering any productive activities in the occupied territories. Yet the key elements were there: violent and relentless dispossession; the obliteration of means of self-sufficiency; and the exercise of military and policing domination. Still, there was no tangible evidence that the Israelis cared much about extracting any surplus-value from the Palestinians. Were they a particularly poor example of colonial rule? Where was the commodification of labor and the intensification of work? Certainly, there were small-scale examples here and there. Cheap, security-vetted Palestinian laborers were allowed to work in Israel but, of course, were not permitted to vote. Small shops did produce some goods, often as coops organized by women. But clearly these projects did not come close to addressing the overriding motor of pacification as I have described it: the exploitation of labor; the making of productive subjects. This had been a matter of some concern for me both theoretically and politically as the Left tried to take stock of the capitalist order in the wake of the Great Recession of 2008.