Palestine has long been a key node in circuits of global counterinsurgency. Under the British Mandate, the territory served as a staging ground for the consolidation of British imperial policing and pacification strategies, and following mandate rule, as a testing ground for Israeli experiments in asymmetric warfare and demographic engineering, not barring considerable US diplomatic and material support. In its most recent occupation of Iraq, the US adopted various population control measures and biopolitical technologies long used by the Israeli military in the occupied territories. Yet counterinsurgency is often assumed to be kinetic, or related to outright violence and lethal force while its “non-kinetic” counterparts are often overlooked. This paper explores the ways in which practices of colonial subjugation and management are being mobilized through the less sensational, seemingly mundane spaces and practices of aid governance – to be precise, through the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Beginning historically, this paper situates USAID within a brief genealogy of US counterinsurgency theory and maps linkages between USAID and the “population-centric” approach in US counterinsurgency thinking. Centrally I argue that the “population-centric” approach seeks to modulate and render invisible the ongoing operation of both lethal and non-lethal forms of violence. This paper then turns to a detailed account of how those living in the West Bank and Gaza are negotiating the contours of the American security state in Palestine and the attendant forms of “risk-based” and disciplinary management to which American power is giving rise. Lastly, this paper engages broader questions concerning the ways in which US aid intervention in Palestine relates to larger questions of sovereignty, national struggle and ever-more sophisticated modes of colonial management. In attending to such questions, this paper suggests that far from waning, American power remains a significant force in the making and unmaking of political geographies at the global scale and in the Middle East specifically.