Biometric Statecraft, Policing, and Fingerprint Technology in Palestine/Israel, 1920-1948

After the League of Nations designated Palestine as a British Mandate in 1920, British colonial authorities created a Fingerprint Bureau in their newly-formed Palestine Police. When Israel was established in 1948, the Israel Police acquired the Bureau’s experts, methods, and technologies. Based on research in British, Israeli, and Palestinian archives, this paper traces the history of the Bureau to show that it was part of three entities’ evolving statecrafts in Palestine. First, the British Mandate government included the Bureau – which comprised experts and methods from Scotland Yard and colonial police departments in India, Ceylon, Kenya, and South Africa – in their “civilian” policing and nation-building efforts in Palestine. Second, the Haganah, the Labor-Zionist paramilitary organization in Palestine, infiltrated the Bureau in the 1940s. There, they collected expertise and technologies to further their emerging nationalist and state-building ambitions, and transferred the Bureau’s methods and infrastructures to the newly-formed Israel Police in 1948. Third, the Israel Police tried to reclaim the Bureau’s fingerprint systems as a tool of Israeli state and nation-building, including in their failed 1948 proposal for a national fingerprint registry. Although the Palestine Police features prominently in histories of colonial policing, its Fingerprint Bureau has received less attention. However, the Bureau was a key node in biometrics’ circulations throughout the British Empire, and lends insight into British Mandate, Labor-Zionist, and Israeli statecrafts in Palestine/Israel – and their consequences – between 1920-1948. The Bureau’s history also offers possibilities for studying the impacts of a new state’s acquisition of technologies from its colonial predecessors. As the Israel Police remade the Bureau’s infrastructures in the service of their own statecraft, they also reproduced the colonial statecraft of which these infrastructures were originally a part. The paper concludes by considering this legacy of “biometric statecraft” in citizenship, exclusion, and biometric systems in 1948 and afterwards.