as lacking strategy and system, as aiming to destroy Israel’s modernity and openness, as incoherent and invasive. “The confrontation with terror wrought by suicide strikers is like the fight against viruses,” said one reserve colonel (Barzilai 2004). If most Palestinians saw the second intifada as a renewed effort to resist Israeli occupation, Israeli Jews tended to see the intifada foremost as a military campaign against suicide bombings.
Whether Palestinian bombings triggered Israelis’ feelings of vulnerability or vice versa, Israeli society quickly became increasingly conservative in its views toward Palestinians and toward national security. Sharon, already the chairman of the center-right Likud Party, was easily elected prime minister in 2001 by promising greater force against Palestinians and greater security for Israelis. Political views once considered hawkish became centrist and, by the 2003 election, despite the deteriorating economic situation and increasing violence, voters strongly supported Sharon’s reelection. In this climate, post-Zionist debates about Israel’s democratic character, about its dispossession of the Palestinians, or about citizenship rather than religion as the determinant of rights, debates that had thrived in academic and popular arenas in the 1990s, lost their context as well as their conditions for possibility. Post-Zionism had entered a “deep freeze,” as a headline in Haʾaretz declared in April 2004 (Shehori 2004). “Palestinian terrorism is pushing us back into the Zionist womb,” journalist Tom Segev stated. There were certainly Israelis who described themselves as post-Zionists. As one woman in her mid-thirties who lived outside Jerusalem put it, “Post-Zionism is about our right to live here without any religious reasons and without a real narrative, a Zionist narrative, without any context. Just that we live here and this is our normal life, and we don’t need to find reasons or to justify ourselves.” Yet this woman and indeed nearly all the Israeli Jews I interviewed for this book considered themselves to be Zionists—even those who also called themselves post-Zionists, even those who were applying for European citizenship should the situation become untenable for them in Israel. Zionism was a multivalent concept, but its comfortable use during the second intifada reflected a greater concern for Jewish nationalism than for Israeli democracy.
Fear, specifically “fear of terror” (paḥad mi-terror), was spoken about as a social force that propelled government action and shaped everyday behavior. People spoke about living in constant fear, and newspapers reported on the large percentages of Israelis who were afraid they would be harmed in a suicide bombing. Israelis were deeply afraid for their own lives and for the existence of the State of Israel. As much as people looked toward the state for protection, they also disparaged their government for its inability to protect its citizens. To the right of the political spectrum, there was a need for greater state presence. To the left, the state was focused on goals other than protection of its citizens. Both the right and the left expressed a sense of abandonment by the state. As one young mother said to me: “What do I need a state for? They need to create order for me and for my family. If the government can’t protect us, then the state is not functioning.” The media griped that there was no umbrella institution to collect data on and respond to terrorism and that more money was going to security guards than to developing substantive protective technologies. As the director of the Shin Bet stated in 2003, “We have to say honestly, the defense establishment and, within it, the General Security Service have not provided the people of Israel the protective ‘suit’ they deserve” (O’Sullivan 2003).
The discourse of terror may have expressed profound fear, but the designation of something as terror was also a political tactic that delegitimized suicide bombings as a mode of political struggle by decoupling this form of resistance from a larger Palestinian nationalist effort. Israeli discourses of terror cloaked military operations in a veil of necessity and depicted state violence as a routine military response. Joseba Zulaika and William Douglass described a similar phenomenon in one of the first ethnographic studies to appraise representations of modern terrorism: “Once something that is called ‘terrorism’—no matter how loosely it is defined—becomes established in the public mind, ‘counterterrorism’ is seemingly the only prudent course of action” (1996: ix).11 In Israel, state officials presented the IDF killing of Palestinian militants as “reprisals” and the closure of Palestinian towns as “operational activities.” Government rhetoric classified air strikes against Palestinian houses, restrictions of Palestinian movement through checkpoints, and the erection of barriers outside a book fair in Jerusalem as forms of “security,” because all responded to “Palestinian threat,” or, more accurately, to Israeli anticipation of Palestinian violence. Even left-wing media sources presented the IDF’s collective punishments of Palestinians as necessary reactions to Palestinian “terror” and tended to conceal that Palestinian violence was often a reaction to Israeli force (Korn 2004). When something was designated as terror, it was as if it already necessitated and legitimated a “security” response.
Particularly after 9/11, Israeli discourse of security refracted global rhetoric on security and counterterrorism. As Joel Beinin (2003) argues, Sharon’s government harnessed the George W. Bush administration’s rhetoric on security in an attempt to legitimize its repression of Palestinians and align itself with the United States.12 Security, nonetheless, already had local resonance in Israel, where it has long referred to a broader ideology of Jewish strength and power. Over the course of many decades, security practices in Israel became synonymous with Israeli sovereignty and national identity. The state harnessed security not only as a military strategy but also as a politics of identity to delineate a self and another in time and in space. Security came to connote a desire for the normal, whether the normality of a comfortable, routine life or the normalization of Jewish politics.
In Hebrew, security is generally spoken about with two words, avtaḥa and bitaḥon, both deriving from the same root (b-t-ḥ). Avtaḥa refers to the act of securing, while bitaḥon refers to the resultant state of safety. Bitaḥon is used most commonly, often in both senses, to speak of security. Shmira refers to guarding, distinguished in everyday parlance from avtaḥa in that the latter is assumed to be armed. The term hagana can also be translated as “security,” or “defense,” but it tends to refer to full-scale war and military efforts to maintain national borders. In daily conversation, bitaḥon evokes imaginaries of “internal” Palestinian threat while hagana, or defense, evokes an “external” threat from neighboring Arab states. bitaḥon refers to ongoing conflict with Palestinians while hagana refers to circumscribed war. Frequently, however, these designations shift and overlap. With the invocation of bitaḥon, senses of “inside” and “outside” threats impinge equally on people’s senses of political, bodily, and emotional security.
National discourse in this period depicted the nation as fighting less for expanded settlement than for personal security, that is, for the safety of people’s bodies and minds as they moved through their day. Security had not always instantly implied personal bodily safety. In the first half of the 1990s, for example, early proponents of a barrier between Israel and the West Bank defended the barrier in terms of economic security, as something that would keep Palestinians from stealing Israeli cars and Israeli jobs. By 2002, however, both support for and criticism of the barrier depicted it as a wall against fear, something that could calm national hysteria and provide Israeli Jews with a sense of security, hope for peace, and calm. Israelis perceived IDF operations, likewise, as battles for the quality of their daily lives. We might view the nation’s focus on personal security as evidence of the success of Palestinian violence in making Israelis afraid even in their homes and on their streets. The frequency and severity of Palestinian suicide bombings led Israelis to feel uncomfortable in spaces and activities they most took for granted. But although Palestinian violence assaulted Israeli civilian realms, the Israeli government also harnessed the nature of this violence to remind Israelis that they were under personal threat and to portray “national security” as a necessary protection of daily life. As much as the penetration of terror into urban life made the conflict’s violence personal, Israeli reactions to Palestinian violence made “security” itself more familiar and indeed palatable to Israelis. It removed security from a realm of critique and questioning.
