1982 to create so-called Jewish continuity between Jerusalem and Neve Yaʾakov, a more northern settlement where Jews have lived since the 1920s. Both Ramat Eshkol and Pisgat Zeʾev are part of the Jerusalem municipality, but neither is legal under the international law of the Fourth Geneva Convention.22 Israeli Jews generally refer to Ramat Eshkol as a neighborhood of Jerusalem and Sheri called Pisgat Zeʾev, a suburb of Jerusalem. The reference to settlements outside the 1949 borders as Israeli neighborhoods or suburbs rather than settlements (yeshuvim) is a means of naturalizing the settlements as legitimate Israeli spaces (Weizman 2007: 8).23 Noa and Gil Shahar were the only of my informant families to regularly use the term shtaḅim to refer to settlements in the occupied territories. Most others not only tried to dodge the contentiousness of their residential space but also rarely mentioned their proximity to Palestinian towns.
The families I lived with resided within a few miles of Palestinian homes, close enough to glimpse everyday activity, and yet personal interaction was scarce.24 In Arad, for example, the only contact Naomi Bergmann had with Palestinians was with the Israeli Bedouin she hired for small construction jobs. “Last month,” she told me once, “we had an encounter with Arabs because the builders of the porch were Arab…. They worked well … I gave them water and coffee and cold drinks. But all the time the house was closed.” Naomi’s contact with “Arabs” was a strict business agreement and her description made clear that she was the one to set its terms: She offered them coffee, and she maintained social and physical borders by keeping the house closed to them—as much an expression of her desire for control as it was of her mistrust. The Maimons lived across the valley from Shuʾafat, a Palestinian neighborhood in Jerusalem that Israel occupied after 1967. Residents of Shuʾafat, some holding Israeli citizenship and others only permanent residency status, frequented the supermarket, bank, and post office down the street from the Maimons. From the Maimons’ living room, the family could see Shuʾafat’s minarets and hear its multiple muezzin and made periodic comments, excitedly or with irritation, about wedding noises drifting across the valley. And yet aside from these passing comments, Palestinian inhabitants of Shuʾafat never came closer to the Maimons’ lives than a view from their window. It was similar for the Kashanis, who lived not far east of Shuʾafat and adjacent to ‘Anata, a Palestinian town in the West Bank. Their daughters’ playground sat almost directly beneath a row of ‘Anata homes, and their young girls possessed a banal acquaintance with these neighbors’ daily life. Once, while walking to the park, we heard the muezzin from ‘Anata; Sheri’s five-year-old daughter Nava said to me matter-of-factly, “The Arabs are praying.” When we heard fireworks from ‘Anata, three-year-old Hadar said, “The Arabs are getting married.” To the young girls, Palestinians were their prayers and marriages. To the parents, their Palestinian neighbors were largely a source of irritation and a symbol of danger, even as they were effectively excluded from their line of sight. Signs of security, such as fences and walls, as we will see in the next chapter, were more blatant components of Israeli Jews’ field of vision than the Palestinian population.
Chapter 2
Senses of Security: Rebuilding Café Hillel
At 7:30 on a September morning in 2003, a middle-aged man wearing red shorts and sport sandals stood across the street from the popular Café Hillel in the German Colony, an upscale Jewish neighborhood in West Jerusalem. His head turned downward, he was reading the cover article of the daily newspaper Maʾariv, which described the previous night’s suicide bombing of this very café by a Palestinian militant. The article’s large color photograph reflected the shattered storefront he now stood opposite. In the image and before him, the café’s sign had been swept off and a blown-out roof left only a dangling black awning. Beside the man, two middle-aged women each holding a dog on a leash stood quietly facing the shell of the café from across the narrow but busy city street as they scrutinized the remains. These women soon joined three others leaning against a stone wall. As they gazed in horror, concern, and curiosity, the bystanders’ very scrutiny of the scene became part of the spectacle of the bombing.
The five women debated the order of the previous night’s events, exchanging hearsay and speaking as secondhand witnesses. “I heard that the bomber tried to get into Pizza Meter next door,” said one, “but the security guard blocked his entry, so he moved on to Café Hillel.” A second added what she had learned: “The security guard at Café Hillel tried to prevent the bomber from entering the café but was killed in the explosion.” A third woman reminded the others that the street is called Emek Refaʾim, “Valley of Ghosts.” The street’s biblical name, she implied, had augured the calamity. A mother in the group focused on the seemingly mundane details that undergirded disaster: “It was a loud explosion, but it wasn’t very big. See, the bottles on the [café’s] bar are still standing! My kids did not even wake up. Did yours?” She saw her children’s unbroken slumber as an indication of the bombing’s relatively diminutive scale, her minimization of the explosion exemplifying what Stanley Cohen calls, in his study of indifference and denial, a “dulled routinization” (Cohen 2001: 82). Reacting as if nothing had changed, or unconsciously protecting her own emotions, she readily normalized the disaster. These women were able to place the ordinary things of life, such as dogs and children, alongside a newly disjointed reality without deflating daily life itself, maintaining seemingly “orderly surfaces that deny fragmentation” (Mertz 2002: 378 n. 26).
Figure 1. Onlookers across the street from Café Hillel the morning after the bombing.
Able to speak of the attack with facility and ease, the bystanders became, as Allen Feldman did when he studied the militarized Belfast of the 1980s, “ensnared by a dialogical nexus where acts of violence had an everyday coherence and banality” (2003: 59). With numerous Palestinian suicide bombings in recent years and with marked investments of state resources and emotional energy into vigilance for Palestinian violence, when a bombing did occur, people found themselves making sense even of a sudden and dire tragedy. In the logic of daily security, bombings seemed to corroborate suspicion and substantiate hyperalertness.
Only hours before this morning assembly, the café had been a scene of chaos. At 11:30 P.M. on September 9, 2003, a Palestinian militant linked to the East Jerusalem-based Hamas group exploded himself at the entrance to Café Hillel. The large Starbucks-like café, with bold, eyecatching menu boards, trendy baristas, and vegetarian sandwiches, had opened that summer, the third branch of a successful Jerusalem chain. The bombing struck to the core of Israeli fury and fear, not only because of the ten deaths and many injuries but also because it targeted a residential area away from the city center that people saw as impervious to bombings. The suicide bombing, attributed to Hamas, came during a crumbling of the peace process. Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas had resigned amid a power struggle with Yasser Arafat, creating an upsurge of Palestinian violence, and Israel’s hunt for Hamas leaders entailed numerous deaths, injuries, and intensified restrictions on Palestinian movement.
During the night, as soon as those killed and wounded in the bombing had been removed from the site, and even before the last ambulance siren faded, ultra-Orthodox volunteers from ZAKA, with heavy beards, large black yarmulkes, and orange fluorescent vests, searched for and removed remaining body parts strewn throughout the site. The male-only civilian organization ensured that Jewish death rites were observed by collecting and later identifying and matching every scattered piece of flesh and drop of blood.1 Working alongside this civic religious presence were the municipal cleaning crews, who swept the window shards, hauled off splintered tables, and mopped puddles of blood. By morning, the remaining shell of the café was emptied of the fragments of disaster. Only small shards from the large glass windows that had formed the walls of the building were scattered amid the intermingled groups of rescue workers, municipal police, injured individuals, and onlookers. By the time the sun rose,
