seemed to settle over the space, like the “uncanny silence” that Thomas Blom Hansen observed amid the Bombay riots (2001: 12). Though in ruins, the bombed Café Hillel was sanitized, as if a quick cleaning could prevent the bombing from becoming permanently etched into the civilian psyche.
By late morning, Emek Refaʾim Street was lined with state and civilian personnel, each group “overcoming threats to disorder” in its own way (Mehta and Chatterji 2001: 234). Television vans with cameras and journalists with microphones had been stationed since daybreak. Bulldozers carried wreckage and police directed the mounting traffic. Three tall soldiers in gray uniforms and two city police officers leaned on a parked police car, looking silently upward toward the café. Nearby, twelve male and female magavnikim, or “Border Police,” the Israeli border gendarmerie, stood between two heavy military jeeps. They wore olive-green uniforms, rifles slung over their shoulders. The role of this military presence at the café that morning was unclear: they were neither clearing the area nor inspecting passersby, but their uniforms and conspicuous weaponry nonetheless invoked the power of state sovereignty. Although the nature of the state’s authority was indistinct, performances of law and order still reified state power. As Jean and John Comaroff write in their reflection on images and perceptions of lawlessness in postcolonial South Africa, “So it is with the spectacle of policing, the staging of which strives to make actual, both to its subjects and to itself, the authorized face, and force, of the state—of a state, that is, whose legitimacy is far from unequivocal” (2004: 805). Indeed, even the quiet presence of the Israeli authorities simultaneously displayed and normalized the bombing. With a relaxed posture and muted conversation, they conveyed with uncanny reassurance that this had happened many times before and that they knew what to do. Despite its seeming passivity, the military presence enacted what Don Handelman calls in a description of Israeli emergency response the “state-owned and state-sponsored ways of remaking order from chaos” (2004: 12).2
Figure 2. Near the café, Israeli Border Police cluster around their jeeps.
And yet, attempts to reclaim order at this bomb scene and even efforts to embody the state were hardly the sole task of the state. Intimate practices also permeated the site that morning. Standing next to me and staring into the bombed space was a young woman wearing a white bandana and smoking a cigarette. Next to her was a male newspaper photographer, seemingly distracted in quiet solemnity. I was tied to the site in my own way. I had been at Café Hillel the night before, sitting at a small table by the entrance and near the security guard as I waited for a fellow student from my Hebrew class to arrive. When she did, we moved inside to a seat near the back, which was her preference. After finishing our coffees, I returned home and as I crawled into bed, I heard one ambulance siren, then another, and a third. There is an intifada aphorism that one siren signals a pregnant lady, two signals a heart attack, and three a suicide bombing. A quick check online at the Haʾaretz Web site confirmed that there had been a suicide bombing—at Café Hillel. I immediately called the friend I had just met; even without family in the country, there is the impulse to call. We spoke briefly, our “what if’s felt redundant. My return to Café Hillel the next morning was as much cathartic as analytic.
The woman in the bandana, the photographer, and I stood for nearly an hour without speaking. The photographer snapped a picture every few minutes. I periodically made a note in my notebook. The woman continued to gaze and smoke. We were joined for a few moments by a middle-aged man who wore a yarmulke and carried a small prayer book, with which he prayed quietly to himself before joining us in our staring and then moving on. In this space of death, Jewish ritual was summoned and performed and Jewish objects, such as candles and prayer books, were mobilized. Two religious high school girls dressed in long denim skirts and sneakers approached next, each carrying a pocket prayer book and a cell phone, each object, presumably, a conduit for a different kind of communication. Mobile phones, in fact, dotted the landscape that day. Inside the café, an interior space even without walls, rotating groups of men spoke as much on their phones as with each other. Barking into the speaker, they negotiated with insurance companies and made plans for the rebuilding.3 Several passersby arrived at the scene only to call a friend or relative to tell them they were here, and then moved on. Some took photographs with their cell phones. Others cried into their phones; words were superfluous.
While we stared and as the neighborhood woke up and began to go to work and to school, the bombed site was first cordoned off and then enclosed. Heavy red plastic barriers replaced the red-and-white tape of the night’s temporary cordons. Behind the barrier sat male and female security guards wearing fluorescent yellow vests emblazoned with the name of their security company and the label “Security and Guarding.” By late morning, at least eight of these hired guards stood shaded by two large orange sun umbrellas advertising Straus, the ice-cream company. If the red barrier shielded daily life from a messy public space thrust into conflict, the guards, too, functioned as a kind of border. They buffered the bombed landscape with a human face that provided a security that was both commanding and compassionate.
Figure 3. A newspaper photographer and a high school girl with a prayer book and cell phone look into the shell of the café.
While a range of civilian spaces had been targets of Palestinian bombings during the second intifada, Israeli Jews tended to see cafés as the primary index of Palestinian violence. This was because Israeli aspirations toward cosmopolitanism and secularism were embodied in the country’s café culture, an ethos that selectively obscured the legacy of the Arab coffeehouse in favor of the European café (Stein 2002: 17). Bombed cafés thus stood as emblems of a precarious nation, symbols of the ways Palestinian violence transformed Israeli daily life, assaulted normative consumption, and threatened Jewish nationalism (Stein 2002). Thus when Israelis maintained that morning coffee and al fresco dining lay at the crux of conflict, they did so with little sarcasm. The normalization sought in cafés was as imperative as national order sought through pioneers’ shovels or soldiers’ guns. The idea of the normal has special resonance in Israel, a country where Jewish nationalism aimed to “normalize” the Jewish people and make them into a nation like other nations. During the second intifada, Israeli Jews in their twenties and thirties often conjured a different kind of normal, one that entailed veiling Zionism with a cosmopolitan busyness. The café culture somehow simultaneously signified this post-Zionist normal as well as the nationalist concept of Israel as a normal nation. It was not surprising, then, that the act of rebuilding and returning to a café after a bombing was, for many Israelis during the second intifada, a decisive act of normalization and perseverance.
Everything about the reconstruction of a building destroyed violently amid conflict is contested and fraught with meaning. Who does the rebuilding and where, whether it is rebuilt the same as before, whether there is an overt memorial plaque—all are open to question. Much of the literature on the rebuilding of structures ruined during war or conflict focuses on postconflict settings, contexts in which a victor has often been declared, large-scale relief work has begun, and national narratives have begun to coalesce. Nicholas Saunders’s study of the meaning contained in the landscape of the World War II Western Front, for example, shows that some landscapes of conflict are deliberately maintained in a state of destruction to serve as a testament to past aggression (2001: 42). In contrast, in the case of Israeli establishments destroyed by Palestinian bombings during the second intifada, rebuilding occurred while conflict persisted. This endowed the reconstruction efforts with significance—as modes of retaliation more than forms of memorialization, as symbols of perseverance rather than closure. Rebuilding itself became a form of participation in the conflict, tied up with discourses of violence, notions of nationhood, and strategies of security. The Israeli public expected and the state ensured the expedient renovation of bombed sites. Every café or restaurant destroyed in a suicide bombing during the second intifada was rebuilt, often in the same location. Not only the fact of rebuilding but also the process of rebuilding became routinized, with a protocol shaped by responses
