daily life were thus not ancillary to military expressions of power and sovereignty but rather part of the same reality. People encountered national security not only in West Bank checkpoints, Palestinian refugee camps, or the hallways of the Knesset but also in homes, cafés, and magazines, spaces of consumption and intimacy where security had particular resonance precisely because of its seeming innocuousness. State power and political belief materialized in individuals’ use and interaction with (and, equally, avoidance of) particular streets, corners, and barricaded spaces. These everyday practices also implicated a politics of exclusion and separation.
Attention to everyday manifestations of security requires a phenomenological lens, for security is an embodied phenomenon, carried in physical bodies as well as in their dispositions and routines. In the cultural phenomenology of Thomas Csordas (1999), one of the most sustained applications of phenomenology in anthropology, Csordas draws on Maurice Merleau-Ponty, according to whom people are their bodies and bodies exist in a reciprocal relationship with the environment around them. Csordas also draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s (1977) concept of habitus, wherein social life is generated and regulated by an embodied, socially conditioned system of dispositions. Csordas thus studies embodiment not as a process of inscription but rather as itself the “existential condition” of cultural life (1999: 143).15 In daily life in Israel, security involved perception, imagination, and intersubjective experience. Security constituted gesture, movement, and “the phenomenon of habit” (Merleau-Ponty 2005 [1962]: 128) as much as it constituted knowledge and power.
In a book on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, readers often expect one of three kinds of works: a psychological study of Israeli anxiety, a side-by-side comparison of Israeli Jews and Palestinians, or a critique of the State of Israel through a study of its effects on Palestinian life. This book does not fall into any of these categories. Particularly since the first intifada, it has become common among Israeli scholars of psychology to study Israeli “trauma” and Israeli behavior and emotion as forms of “resilience” and “coping.”16 These, however, are themselves terms that tend to presume the designation of Israelis as victims. My own study is ethnographic rather than psychological, examining the political discourses and cultural politics that become entangled with feeling and consciousness. This book adopts a critical approach to Israeli politics and practice, not by suppressing Israeli voices or avoiding Israel as an object of study (Stein and Swedenberg 2005: 11)17 but rather by focusing intensively on Israeli subjectivity and experiences. Why does the Israeli population persist in supporting an occupying government? What are the forces that perpetuate Israeli desires for separation from Palestinians? Answering these questions demands an understanding of Israeli state discourses and everyday practices of security and surveillance. Studies of Palestinian life have certainly been vital to grasping the detrimental effects of Israeli occupation and colonization, from the ways Israeli bureaucracy conceals Palestinian humanity and suffering behind layers of legal documents (Kelly 2006a) to the Israeli legal practices in the West Bank and Gaza that function as an apparatus of Israeli control to reinforce national boundaries and accentuate Jewish-Arab distinctions (Hajjar 2005).18 Yet the very nature of security itself—its assumptions about what is inside and what is outside, its binaries of safe and dangerous, us and them—must be approached, at least in part, from the perspective of those whom security claims to protect.
The first chapter of this book introduces the political economy of security in Israel. It organizes a brief genealogy of security as a state preoccupation and national culture in Israel around a chronology of Hashmira Security Technologies Ltd., now the largest public company in Israel. Beginning with the company’s founding in 1937, the settings in which Hashmira guards worked and the roles they played reflect the interdependence and even indistinguishability of “private” and “state” security in Israel. We see that the Israeli military complex responds to Palestinian violence, but we also see that nationalist desires for Jewish territory and power themselves propagate violence in the form of “defense.” The close relationship in Israel between civilian and military institutions, and the often indefinite boundaries in daily life as well as on the front line between security and violence, demand particular ethnographic sensitivities. The second half of this chapter describes my own fieldwork methodologies for the study of everyday security.
Each subsequent chapter in this book is an ethnographic study of one moment or expression of everyday security, including rebuilding a bombed café, experiencing fear and resilience, enacting terrorist profiles, commuting to work, organizing one’s home, and touring the separation wall. Specifically, Chapter 2 offers a micro-history of a popular Jerusalem café destroyed in a Palestinian suicide bombing. In the thirty days over which the café was rebuilt, Israelis secured, consecrated, and then normalized the site. This is a study of security through architecture and aesthetics, for, in the café’s rebuilding, built form mediated particular notions of national strength. The solidity of bricks and fragile transparency of glass became not only structural elements but also signs of political perseverance. Israeli police, government officials, and security guards engaged in this aesthetic of security as much as did the café’s customers and managers, all working to render material their desires for political and social normalization. Even those who expressed cynicism about security’s efficacy held tightly onto its ideas and practices. Skepticism and symbolism of security both relied on strong imaginaries of the state and its power.
The desire for defense in Israel has long been undergirded by fear and a sense of Jewish vulnerability. Chapter 3 studies the fear that, during the second intifada, assumed particular rhetorical and material forms. Referring explicitly to suicide bombings and implicitly to Palestinians, fear circulated as an Israeli code of social knowledge, harnessed to express anger at Palestinian violence or to criticize government tactics. Fear was a political discourse, but it was also intensely intimate and bodily. People’s personal sensations of fear conveyed “I am an Israeli Jew” or “Israel is under threat”; their feelings of fear not only commented on the political conflict but also became part of their attachment to the state. This chapter analyzes the concurrently political and affective significance of fear in Israel.
Israeli Jews so internalized and normalized fear of Palestinians and state discourses about suicide bombers that they felt they could trust their instincts of suspicion to identify potential threats. Discourses of suspicion generated a host of state technologies and bodily habits. Chapter 4 studies Israeli alertness for so-called “suspicious people,” comparing police and government profiles of “suspicious people” with individuals’ everyday practices of suspicion. Through fleeting gestures and wary glances, pedestrians and security guards alike not only embodied state perceptions of danger and modes of seeing Palestinians, but also proliferated state blindness to Palestinians. Despite the ubiquity of suspicion, Israeli Jews rarely apprehended suicide bombers. It was not so much the presence of “suspicious people” as their absence that enabled the discourse to persist as part of daily life.
The next two chapters describe everyday fantasies of normalization in which Israeli Jews imagined ways for life to go on “as usual” during conflict, and indeed even acted as if things were normal, even as any semblance of the normal became ever fainter, even as the new normal had itself become menacing. Chapter 5 studies security through spatial stories of people’s daily commutes to work in Jerusalem. For the four commuters I describe, deciphering media information and popular conceptions of safe and dangerous space to determine a morning itinerary was less a calculation of risk than a negotiation of memory, emotion, faith, and subjectivity. People’s paths through the city were superimposed with memories of past bombings, private experiences, theological beliefs, and intimate relationships. As personal creativity and military logic coalesced, everyday projections of security reflected and reproduced national discourses of security in daily life. The matrix of routes people selected or avoided reflected not only their fear of terror but also their confidence in the ability to “cope,” that is, to surmount Palestinian
