yourself with the place, with the losses. Because you’re thinking about what happened there, about all the people that got killed and injured, about the people that you’ve read about in the papers.” For some, sitting in the café now had a valence of patriotic defiance, seen as unwillingness to give in to Palestinian violence and its efforts to disrupt daily life.
As I observed time and again, people who entered the reopened café lingered by the doorway to survey the new space before proceeding to the counter. They scanned the entirety of the space, seeming to look as much from curiosity as from concern. Was the café rebuilt as before? Was it safer now? Many patrons ordered their coffee to take out, something considerably more common after the bombing. People who sat down with their coffee tended to sit along the back wall, a common safety-minded practice of positioning oneself as far as possible from the potential entry-point of a suicide bomber. Israelis sometimes used the term omek estrategi, “strategic depth,” which in military terminology refers to the distance between the front lines and key inner population centers. In specifically Israeli military discourse, there is the idea that Israel must attack Palestinians first to ensure that military activities take place on enemy territory, something that Ariel Sharon long advocated. When the concept was transplanted to civilian urban space, the doorway to a downtown Jerusalem café becomes the buffer zone and the space outside that, enemy territory. There was always a combination of cynical humor and gravity when people used “strategic depth” to describe where they wanted to sit. They recognized the absurdity of their depiction of cafés as war zones, but they still really experienced public spaces as zones of lurking threat and everyday risk calculation. It was as Allen Feldman wrote about the polarity between the observer and the observed: “that relations of domination are spatially marked by the increase of perceptual (and thus social) distance from the body of the Other” (1994: 92).
Perhaps the gawking patrons noticed what I had observed: that the café appeared much the same as it had before the bombing. The newly rebuilt Café Hillel was fronted, as it had been before, with large plate-glass windows lined inside with a long wooden bar and a row of stools. Adjacent to the cashiers’ counter, a glass display case of cakes and sandwiches still greeted patrons upon entering and small round tables still stood in the large indoor space. But what had been a large outdoor seating area was now enclosed like a greenhouse with tall glass windows. The enclosure seemed to stand as a shield against future bombings, yet with its planked wooden floors and a black cloth awning overhead, it retained an outdoor feel and did not revise the atmosphere of the café as a whole. Why was the café rebuilt so similarly to its pre-bombing form? One would have thought that the café’s owners, not to mention its patrons, would want the café to feel more fortified, to be enclosed in brick, perhaps, instead of defenseless glass. But the politics of rebuilding during conflict combined with the psychology of security to create a unique set of aesthetic values.
During the height of the second intifada, in 2002 and 2003, it was generally only venues with security guards that could attract enough patrons to remain open, but only successful venues were able to afford guards in the first place. Cafés and restaurants around the country were responsible for hiring and paying for their own security guards. Similarly, as systematic and state-driven as post-bombing reconstruction appeared, the owners of bombed commercial venues were largely accountable for the completion, though not the entire cost, of rebuilding. Although the state, generally in the form of the local municipal police, gave case-specific guidelines for rebuilding with increased fortification, the implementation of those guidelines and the course of the place’s securitization was a collaborative process.
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