This chapter describes the rebuilding of Café Hillel and shows how discourses of security materialized in particular aesthetics. As the café was remade, its built forms were imbued with the politics of nationhood, and Israeli discourses of security generated their own explanations for the space’s safety and danger.4 Assertions of Israel’s strength and wellbeing sedimented themselves in the café’s walls and windows while its physical spaces and patrons’ movements through them embodied concepts of Israeli sophistication and normality. My focus on the interplay between discourse and fortified architecture follows scholars of material culture who examine translations between cultural knowledge and materiality or, as Victor Buchli explains, “the terms by which discursive empirical reality is materialized and produced” (2002: 16). In describing the rhetoric, actors, and imaginaries involved in Café Hillel’s rebuilding, this chapter introduces the ways security works in everyday life in Israel through personal rationalization, through symbols, and through cynicism, as much as through walls and certainty. Even when security takes the form of senses and signs, it generates Israeli identity and state authority.
The Public Space of a Bombing
Bombs attain a “shadowy, mysterious presence in the life of the city,” as Vyjayanthi Rao states in his ethnographic history of the 1993 bombings in Bombay and, in their immediate aftermath, constitute a particular kind of public sphere (2007: 570). Sites of suicide bombings in Israel also became instantly mythical spaces where the nation viewed itself as under threat but able to endure, spaces where conflict was simultaneously reified and normalized. After its September bombing, Café Hillel reentered the public domain as a national, state, and religious site, a process mediated by artifacts, practices, and discourses of security.5 The site was consecrated by religious practices, whether in the form of ZAKA’s work or individual prayer, and by performances of security. Security introduced feelings of nationalism not through force or formal pronouncement but through subtle inflections of ritual and sociality.
Hired by Café Hillel from a private security company and directed by the Jerusalem police, six security guards lined the inside of Café Hillel’s red barrier on the first morning of rebuilding. I asked one vested worker why there were so many guards. He explained, in a voice suggesting I should have already known, that bombed sites are immediately bolstered following an attack for fear that a second bombing will strike soon after. As I observed in the ensuing hours, however, the guards’ role was not just preemptive; their function was undoubtedly social. The security guards kept the pedestrian public at a safe distance from the site to enable the clean-up crews and insurance appraisers to do their work. More than keeping danger and intrusion from the barricaded area, they worked to prevent the terror and tragedy from seeping into a busy Israeli workday. The guards were attentive to their own comportment and monitored that of their coworkers. Amid a mid-morning mix-up regarding the placement of the barrier, one guard commanded another: “Don’t yell. Speak quietly,” suggesting their attention to calm. The guards were conscientious about their role in projecting to the many passersby that the situation was under control and that official bodies were efficiently restoring order to the street and to daily life.
In many ways, the post-bombing scene exemplified what Baruch Kimmerling has called an “interrupted system” to describe how Israeli society can fluidly mobilize military and civilian domains during times of intensified conflict without allowing war to transgress the boundaries of ordinary life. Kimmerling focused on the sinuous transitions Israeli society is able to make between a “time of interference” and “routine time,” although at the Café Hillel site, the emergency was so routinized that calamity could have easily been mistaken for routine (1985: 11). An hour after I arrived, workers surrounded the damaged café with a tall metal frame overlaid with light-blue wooden panels, which shielded the building from view. In the coming weeks, this wall, like the security guards, not only enclosed the café as it was rebuilt but enabled the bombed space to become fleetingly a nonplace, an ambivalent space temporarily removed from the realm of the familiar (Augé 1995: 78). As the café underwent restoration and reconstitution, it became a space out of time that pedestrians perceived only partially and in fractions, even as it was a public space fully entrenched in the ongoing political conflict.
The red barricades concealed but also drew attention to the disorder that morning. Bystanders congregated and security guards worked to move the mass of people across the street. By this point, the woman in the white bandana sat on the ground, her teary face in her hands. The photographer, worn out, leaned against a wall. I, emotionally exhausted, was in tears as well. The guard must have noticed the emotion of the three of us who had been there all morning, and when he cordoned off the site, he quietly let us remain behind the barricade. He seemed as attentive to our emotional needs as to the need for social order, or perhaps he recognized that those needs were inseparable. In this way, he acted like the Parisian Metro police that Patricia Paperman describes, who were experts in social emotion, discerning affect “in subtleties of social interaction” (2003: 399). The security that the private café guards provided when they calmly answered questions, when they erected barriers, and when they cordoned off people was a security more sensitive and considerably less tangible than one might expect from armed guards at the site of a Palestinian suicide bombing.
Figure 4. A woman from the neighborhood lights memorial candles.
Artifacts of memorialization immediately filled the site. In the hours after the bombing, almost as soon as bodies had been carried away, people began to fill the concrete railing adjacent to the café with traditional Jewish memorial (yahrtzeit) candles in blue tin holders. When candles blew out in the wind, new visitors rekindled their flames. Over the course of the next day, the entire wall overflowed with candles and discarded matches. Soon, the floor beneath the wall and, later, a table set up specially, was studded with more candles as well as with flowers, small notes, and prayer books left for others to use. The bombing space became not only highly charged but also sacralized. Soon, a large Israeli flag hoisted by neighborhood residents flew from the security guard stand. The blue-and-white flag fluttering in the wind seemed to avow that rebuilding was a national duty.
In the weeks of rebuilding, the assemblage of ad hoc memorial artifacts developed more permanence. The pale-blue wall concealing construction became a backdrop for traditional Jewish Israeli bereavement-announcements mounted by family members. Printed in stark black letters, they publicized the name of the deceased, provided information about the funeral and house of mourning, and sometimes contained an inscription or biblical verse. Large colored photographs and smaller black-and-white newspaper clippings were mounted on the wall. Soon, two small tables were set up to hold large floral wreaths, some with the names of national and international charitable and political organizations, and others with individuals’ names handwritten on ribbons. These stood for days, until they withered and were replaced by new wreaths. Care for these mounted objects was the impromptu duty of the security guards, who hung up photographs given to them by visitors, taped on personal blessings, and kept the candles near the wreaths lit. These guards, employees of a security company contracted by Café Hillel and paid by the hour, were the custodians not only of the café and the crowds but also of a community’s mourning. Their “security” was far reaching, sensitive to emotions, and visibly relational.
Figure 5. A security guard sits inside the red barricade, chatting with a passerby. On the temporary blue wall behind him hang memorial posters and floral wreaths.
The Aesthetics of Security
With workers on ladders still adding final touches, Café Hillel reopened exactly one month after the bombing, the timing linked significantly to the end of shloshim, the traditional thirty-day Jewish mourning period. At a quiet but well-attended memorial ceremony, participants lit candles and
