was opened to new scrutiny.14 Following international criticism in the fall of 2002 that Hashmira guards were working in settlements the UN considers illegal, Group 4 Falck (which had since been renamed G4S and fully acquired Hashmira) removed Hashmira guards from the West Bank. Even when Hashmira guards ceased to work as settlement soldiers, however, the company continued to uphold Israeli military experience as the source and model for Hashmira’s professionalism and proficiency. All guards, the company claimed on its Web site in 2006, were veterans of IDF “combat units” and “senior security forces.” The company not only invoked the IDF to bolster its guards’ authority but also depicted its divisions as akin to military units. Their Elite Professional Units, for example, provided “security services at restricted and sensitive installations” such as the port of Haifa and Israel Railway trains. The company lauded its “fleet of operational vehicles” and its “logistic command and control network.” In the company newsletter and in statements by its current president Yigal Shermister, terms such as missions, recruitment, risk factors, and enemy population evoke government concepts of counterterrorism.
As the history of Hashmira lays bare, despite the normative distinction between public and private that is implied in the term “private security company” (Neocleous 2007), security in Israel has long been a collaboration between government and civilian institutions, an enterprise elemental to state sovereignty yet still assumed by civilian bodies.15 It is a domain of state authority even as it is enacted and molded by organizations that predate the state. The alliance between civilian and military bodies is often obscured or normalized. This is exemplified, for example, by the Hashmira Company’s Shopping Mall Units, which provide security services and entrance inspections at shopping centers around the country, including the Azrieli Mall in Tel Aviv and the Malha Mall in Jerusalem. The army rhetoric used gives imagined authority to the guards work and militarizes the civilian space, while the pedestrian title of the unit normalizes the guards’ state-like surveillance. “Security,” as Ben-Gurion said in 1948 and as has remained germane since, “is involved in all branches of life” (Ben-Eliezer 1998: 207).
Fieldwork in Security
Hashmira’s vacillation between state and civilian domains not only characterizes contemporary security but also informs the ethnographic study of security. Just as a history of Israeli security cannot assume that actions in the name of national security are always carried out by the state in a formal or bounded sense, so too must a study of Israeli security look beyond prescribed state institutions of security. In a country where self-defense is a locus of national identity in addition to a strategy for state-building, Israeli citizens do not easily enact and make sense of national discourses of security. Israelis constantly negotiate and generate discourses of fear, threat, and safety with their minds and bodies, as individuals and in relationship with others. In what follows, I describe the fieldwork I conducted in Israel between July 2003 and August 2004, and again in the summer of 2005. My research focused on everyday security in two rather different Israeli cities—Jerusalem and Arad—whose residents’ fears, imaginaries of danger, and engagement with national discourses of security were ultimately more similar than the cities’ diverse histories and national symbolism would suggest.
As the capital of the country and the most divisive piece of land in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Jerusalem is the most natural place in the country to study security.16 Jerusalem, the heart of Israeli civic ritual and religious pilgrimage, is also the heart of Israeli security, the Israeli city most palpably saturated by security guards, Israeli soldiers, border police, and municipal police. Israeli Jews and Palestinians both claim Jerusalem as their national capital, and both lay claim to land in East and West Jerusalem. In many respects, the line between East and West Jerusalem, between the Israeli state and a prospective Palestinian state, is a palpable ethnic, religious, cultural, and economic border. And yet with Palestinian-populated towns in West Jerusalem and Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem, it is impossible to call East Jerusalem a strictly Palestinian city or West Jerusalem a Jewish one. In fact, the Jewish population within the municipal borders of Jerusalem makes up approximately threequarters of all Jewish settlers in the occupied Palestinian territories (Weizman 2007: 26; Savitch and Garb 2006: 156). A city where contemporary barriers and borders overlay and intersect with ancient fortification, it is the place in which, more than any other Israeli city, Israeli Jews are fretful and fearful about the integration or mere presence of Palestinians.
Arad, a small city 60 miles south of Jerusalem, served as a second field site, a place where I could study how fear and desires for security affect daily life even when political tensions did not so overtly dominate life. Arad was established in 1961 by a team of Israeli architects, economists, demographers, and politicians driven by a nationalist devotion to settlement and determined to create a successful and economically viable development town in the desert. After its population swelled with a surge of Russian Jewish immigration in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Arad was designated a city in 1995. By 2003, its population had grown to 28,000 due to the influx of Ethiopian and Argentinean immigrants whom the state settled there, a size comparable to many of Israel’s other small cities and large settlements. Although Arad was a place where, as many of its residents told me, “nothing happens,” it experienced many of the problems common to other Jewish cities and towns at the time, such as the recession of 2003 and the recurring emotional and economic reverberations from Palestinian suicide bombings elsewhere in the country. The city lacked Jerusalem’s internationally contested borders but sat ten miles from Palestinian towns in the West Bank and abutted several Bedouin villages. Jewish residents’ talk of the “Palestinian threat” often focused on their anxieties about these neighboring Palestinians. As I realized over the course of my fieldwork, despite geopolitical differences between Arad and Jerusalem, people in both cities conveyed a similar range of political affect. This book draws on insight from interviews and life in both Jerusalem and Arad.
I began my fieldwork in Jerusalem by living in an apartment on a street in Talbiyya, a Jewish neighborhood that was home from the 1920s until 1948 to affluent Palestinian Christians (Bisharat 2007: 88). I lived on Hovevei Zion Street, literally translated “lovers of Zion” and referring to the Zionist organization formed in Eastern Europe in the 1880s that assembled some of the earliest Jewish settlers of Palestine.17 It was not uncommon for Jewish residents of this neighborhood to volunteer in Israel’s Civil Guard (Ha-Mishmar ha-Ezraḥi), a branch of the Israel Police and the largest volunteer organization in the country. The Civil Guard was founded in 1974 as a civilian apparatus to monitor Palestinian “terrorist activity” in towns near the Lebanon border and soon became a division of the Israel police.18 In the fall of 2004, I too became a volunteer in the organization. Presenting my U.S. passport, my student visa, and the phone number of the police station in my hometown in Virginia gave me the “security clearance” necessary to volunteer. Authorization is generally granted only to permanent residents but exceptions are often made for Jews visiting from foreign countries. In my case, approval was facilitated by the head of my local base, who was sympathetic to my desire to conduct graduate research. Once clearance was granted and I sat through a training session, I was allowed to don a yellow reflective vest on weekly pedestrian patrols of downtown Jerusalem, the crackling reports from the police radios we carried mingling with fellow volunteers’ reinforcement or dismissal of reported threats.
Living alone for this early phase of fieldwork, I quickly sensed my distance from the essence of the daily life I had come to study. After all, family networks, parental responsibility, and intimate relations were the units through which Israelis tended to express their fears of Palestinians and anxieties about ongoing violence. Alertness, for example, was seen as a trait of good parenting. Mothers and fathers discussed whether it was safe for their child to take a particular bus, walk a certain route, or go on a school field trip. Fear and violence also set family networks in motion, particularly cell phone networks. In many families, after a Palestinian suicide bombing, it was the formal or default task of one individual to make a round of cell-phone calls. The calls were streamlined and rote: “Are you okay? Okay, bye” sufficed. One family I saw regularly announced several weeks after meeting them that I would be part of their family list of post-attack phone calls.
