as an obsessed concern with death than as a “binding force,”19 a sign of friendship. One woman in her late twenties even broke up a relationship with a man who didn’t call her after suicide bombings. Israelis mocked these cellular chains but still clung to them. At a bar in Arad, one soldier home for the weekend recounted to a group of friends that, once, he was sitting with friends when a Palestinian suicide bombing occurred nearby. The phones of these friends began to ring as their parents checked in, but his phone stayed silent. He later asked his parents why they did not call and they said they knew he doesn’t take the bus that was blown up. Everyone hearing this story laughed. With a facial expression that said, “What, they don’t care about me?!” he divulged his mild offense at his parents’ lack of overprotection.
To make family life and space a more important focus of my research, I divided my time between the homes of four families I met through my small social network, three in Jerusalem and one in Arad. Israeli Jews are a heterogeneous group in terms of country of origin, date of immigration, religious observance, and political belief. While the families I lived with are not statistically representative of Israeli society, they do represent a demographic range within the country, encompassing the observant and secular, high-school-educated and Ph.D.s, Ashkenazi (Jews descended from Jewish communities in Eastern Europe) and Mizrahi (Jews from the Middle East and Central Asia).20 All these families had at least three generations who had lived in Israel and, by and large, served in the IDF (unlike, for example, ultra-Orthodox Israelis or recent immigrants above drafting age), enabling me to consider how military knowledge extends into daily civilian life and how experiences of this period of violence compare with earlier periods. My intent when I refer to Israelis or Israeli Jews is neither to generalize or homogenize them nor to eclipse formal and informal acts of true political dissent and critique. Rather, my aim is to discern, through their daily lives, some larger patterns of seeing, experiencing, and speaking about political life. The insights and experiences of these families—as family units and as individuals—reverberate through this book, alongside a range of other voices. I introduce these families here, with their names and identifying details changed.
Shlomit and Ilan Maimon lived in Ramat Eshkol, a neighborhood built in East Jerusalem after 1967. Their three-story attached stone home was recently renovated, with space for children and grandchildren, always coming and going. Shlomit’s father came to Palestine from Germany in 1933 at age fifteen, and her mother came from Germany in 1939 at seventeen with the Youth Aliya.21 Both were founding members of a religious kibbutz in the north of Israel, where they met before moving to Katamon in Jerusalem in 1948 and then, in 1972, to the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City. Ilan’s family came to Palestine in the late nineteenth century from Russia and settled in Safed and then moved to Haifa in the 1920s, where Ilan was born. Shlomit, sixty when I began my fieldwork, was a paralegal and Ilan, sixty-four, was a professor of physics at Hebrew University. They considered themselves dati (religious), which meant that they abided by Jewish dietary laws, were Sabbath observant, and observed the festivals of the Jewish calendar. They had three daughters, one son, and five grandchildren. All their children served in the IDF and received college degrees. Two daughters lived with their families in Jerusalem, the other lived in a Jewish settlement outside Jerusalem, and their son lived in Haifa. Shlomit and Ilan watched their grandchildren at least once a week after school, and frequently hosted their children on the Sabbath.
Closer in age to the Maimons’ children, Noa and Gil Shahar lived at the westernmost edge of Jerusalem in Motza, a quiet neighborhood more affordable than those closer to the city center but still within the Green Line. This was important to Noa and Gil, who considered themselves left-wing Israelis lapsed in their Zionism and attuned to their government’s repression of Palestinians. The area they lived in was not without its own complicated history. In the 1890s, Motza became the first Jewish village outside Jerusalem when it was established on farmland purchased from the nearby Palestinian village Qalunya. In 1948, Qalunya villagers attacked upper Motza, and the Palmach, the military branch of the Haganah, destroyed the village, from which many residents had fled following the massacre at the nearby village of Deir Yassin (Benvenisti 2000: 113–14; Segev 1999: 324). Noa and Gil lived in a small house dating, they believed, from the late Ottoman era, on top of a steep hill. Gil’s parents emigrated from Afghanistan as children in the early 1950s. Noa’s father came to Israel from Syria with his parents in 1964, and her mother emigrated from Poland in 1949. In their early thirties and with an infant son, Noa and Gil were, in a number of ways, representative of the middle-class, secular couples that lived in their neighborhood. Gil commuted to work at an office in Tel Aviv for the Israel Airports Authority, a government-owned corporation, and Noa taught math at a high school in Jerusalem. They had recently purchased an apartment in Modiʾin, a rapidly growing Israeli city between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. They would move there in 2005, following a larger trend of young Jerusalemites leaving the city for peripheral suburbs and settlements, attracted to easier access to jobs in Tel Aviv and more affordable real estate, and repelled by the increasingly ultra-Orthodox population of Jerusalem. After 2000, security became an additional impetus.
Unlike the Maimon and Shahar families, I met Sheri and Yinon Kashani, twenty-two and twenty-four respectively, through my volunteer work for a Jerusalem-based nonprofit organization called ATZUM. Established in 2002, ATZUM was one of a new genre of nonprofit organizations that began to proliferate in Israel shortly after the beginning of the second intifada. Privately funded, these “terror victims’ funds” saw themselves as supplements to or substitutes for government welfare services and offered financial and psychosocial support to individuals and families affected by Palestinian suicide bombings (Ochs 2006). In April 2002, Sheri’s mother had been one of seven killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber (al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades claimed responsibility for the attack) who detonated a bomb at a bus stop on Jaffa Road near the outdoor market Maḥane Yehuda. This made Sheri and her family “terror victims” to the Israeli government, and a social worker for Bituaḥ Leumi, Israel’s National Insurance, eventually referred them to ATZUM. The two institutions helped Sheri and her husband secure money and loans to purchase a two-bedroom basement apartment in Pisgat Zeʾev, a Jewish settlement within the Jerusalem municipality, where they lived with their two daughters, aged two and four. Sheri worked as a receptionist at an ophthalmology office in Jerusalem and Yinon worked for a Jerusalem-based security company installing home security systems in Jerusalem and in Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Both Sheri and Yinon’s parents were Iranian Jews who emigrated from Iran in the early 1980s in the wake of the 1979 Revolution. Their families were traditionally observant, although Sheri and Yinon, who were both born in Israel, had themselves become even more so over the course of their years in religious state schools and the religious Zionist youth movement Bʾnei Akiva.
In Arad, I lived with Naomi and Arieh Bergmann, who had moved to the city as a newly married couple in 1978. They first lived in an apartment and then moved into a home their parents had purchased for them, a villa, as they called it in Hebrew, with three bedrooms and a small yard overlooking the desert. Naomi was a social worker for the local school system and Arieh worked as a mechanic for the city. Arieh, born in Poland, escaped in 1943 and moved to Israel in 1947. Naomi’s father was born in Hungary in 1919 and in 1935 fled through Prague to Israel with the Zionist youth organization Ha-Shomer Ha-Tsaʾir, or the Youth Guard, and with the help of Haganah. Naomi’s mother, also from Hungary, survived the Holocaust and fled to Israel soon after the war. Naomi and Arieh had two sons; the older son generally lived in Tel Aviv but was traveling with his girlfriend for a year in Australia and the younger was still in the army. Both had grown up in Arad. As residents of Arad for nearly all their adult lives, Naomi and Arieh had a large circle of friends in the city, but they often spoke of leaving, now that their sons were grown, for a more cosmopolitan place.
Even though none of the families I lived with called themselves Jewish settlers, two families lived in what the United Nations considers Jewish settlements. The Maimons’ neighborhood of Ramat Eshkol was the first Jewish housing project built on land Israel took from Jordan during the 1967 war. The Kashanis’ neighborhood of Pisgat Zeʾev was also built east of the Green Line on land de facto annexed in 1967. The government calls it a Jewish neighborhood, part of the Jerusalem municipality, but the United Nations,
