of security to proliferate exclusive notions of us and them, inside and outside.
Chapter 6 studies how homes were physically redesigned and socially reconceived during the intifada as sites for safe sociality. Israelis sought solace through domestic purchases, such as DVDs and coffee machines, and domestic fantasies, such as those afforded by design magazines and furniture shopping. Drinking cappuccinos at home or leafing through glossy home design magazines, however, produced an uncanny comfort. This incongruity echoed other ways the state entered the Israeli home, such as in the outfitting of basement bomb shelters with gas masks or the cycling of military uniforms in and out of home washing machines. Through domestications of security, excessive enclaving facilitated blindness to violence and Palestinian suffering. Even when Israeli Jews tried to distance themselves from Israeli politics, fantasies of escape at home subdued the urgency of resolving conflict.
Israelis conceived the state, like the home, as a comfortably fortified enclave when they imagined the emergent separation wall between Israel and the West Bank. Three tours around the wall are the focus of Chapter 7. While the sensors, video cameras, and panoptic watchtowers of the wall claimed to survey and illuminate Palestinians on the other side, tours of the wall purported to scrutinize the wall itself, offering tourists privileged views, both visual and political. These tours, however, ultimately did less to evaluate the wall than to extend the wall’s fortifying qualities. Circumambulation of the wall embodied a form of surveillance that did not truly see Palestinians on the other side, but rather, like the wall, reinforced fantasies of a safe and bounded Israeli homeland.
In this everyday life saturated with security, Israeli Jews generally remained aware of security’s inefficacies and contradictions, whether questioning the ability of the separation wall to thwart Palestinian suicide bombings or cynically implying that the state pantomimes superficial protection. Even those apparently critical of Israeli violence against Palestinians, however, still craved not just national security but also everyday security. People tended to see their desire for well-being as outside politics: they did not, for example, want the separation wall to define Israeli borders, but they did want it to keep their children safe. This, regrettably, was the politics of security at its most powerful. People experienced their daily engagement with security as benign, nonviolent, and politically inconsequential, and yet it was firmly woven into a larger Israeli political fabric of occupation and exclusion. This is not to say that desires for protection inevitably reproduced the conditions of state policy or that experiences of fear necessarily led to the proliferation of state discourse.19 The affective side of security, that is, the role of emotion, intimacy, and the body in reproducing state notions of safety and threat, suggests that critiques of state discourses of security can truly reverberate only when they are sensitive to the multiple guises that state security assumes in the form of escape, fantasy, and desire for the normal.
Vered’s wedding convoy that opened this Introduction was an ephemeral domain of security in which vision coexisted with blindness, the familiar with the foreboding, and fantasy with materiality. So too does everyday security thrive in the junctures of these seeming incommensurabilities. Actions taken in the name of security by the State of Israel or by individuals, in their seemingly innocuous desire for comfort and often-subconscious everyday practices of suspicion and exclusion, did not resolve the binaries of safety and danger, private and state, self and other, or peace and violence. Rather, security held these binaries in tension, becoming an end unto itself, creating its own authority, its own truths. Ultimately, the illusion of normalization that security provided in moments like the drive to the wedding in Jerusalem precluded ardent efforts to get out of conflict. Providing comfort in its very enactment, security prompted only resistance to meaningful resolution to conflict.
Chapter 1
A Genealogy of Israeli Security
With intrusion-detection systems and metal-detection archways, Elite Professional Units and Shopping Mall Units, Hashmira Security Technologies Ltd. is Israel’s largest security company and the largest private employer in the country. Its employees, veterans of IDF combat units, guard Israeli ports and military defense-related institutions across the country. The company provides monitoring technologies to the Israeli prison system and to Israel Railways and calls its “Moked 99” unit Israel’s largest private police force. With earnings that grew from $60 million in 1995 to $185 million in 2003, Hashmira’s revenue and scope reflect the expansion of Israel’s security industry in the 1990s, itself tied to the global proliferation of security corporations working within and across national borders.1 The second intifada further bolstered Israel’s military industrial complex, and, with it, Hashmira’s earnings.2 Recent expansion notwithstanding, Hashmira’s roots are deeper than this period of Israeli and Palestinian violence. Hashmira was founded more than a decade before the State of Israel, a company spurred by Jewish settlers’ desires to lay claim to land and prevail over the protests of native Palestinian inhabitants. In many ways, to tell the history of Hashmira is to tell a history of security and defense in the State of Israel. The growth of the company delineates the details of Jewish settlement, Israeli land seizure, and state panopticism. In order to contextualize the ethnographic chapters that follow, this chapter structures a brief genealogy of Israeli security as a state preoccupation and national culture around a chronology of the Hashmira security company. My focus is the history of Israeli state security, but I use the security company as a lens to show how an economy of security has been integral to Israel’s history and to demonstrate that security is a discourse and set of practices generated jointly by civilians and the state.3 Security, as this history intimates, is a technology of nationalism rather than its fate.4
Histories of Israeli defense frequently depict Israeli practices of security as inevitable outcomes of historical circumstance. Even scholarship critical of Israel’s relations with Palestinians and neighboring Arab countries renders Israeli defense an unavoidable reaction to Palestinian hostility toward Jewish settlement. Scholars portray Jews in Palestine as “forced to defend themselves” and present force as something to which Jewish settlers need to “resort” (Shapira 1992: 367, 122). Studies of Israeli politics that present the “threat of annihilation” (Shalit 1994) as a purely material reality describe security as an inexorable, inescapable response to danger. These ideas about the inevitability and necessity of force can risk corroborating and naturalizing actions in the name of national security. This chapter’s genealogy frames Israeli security not only as an outcome of long-standing conflict with Palestinians but also as a set of institutions and dispositions grounded in the Jewish nationalist aspiration to create Israel as a “normal” nation with desires for territorial expansion. It recognizes that Israeli discourses of “security” generate their own logic and sources of justification that are independent of “real” threats, and that defense is not an inevitable reaction but a condition of possibility for Israeli statehood and national identity. In studying security in contemporary Israeli life, as in historicizing security, national discourses of defense and threat can all too easily attract attention to the domains of political life, such as military institutions, that themselves presume the presence of threat and the necessity of defense. The second half of this chapter outlines the fieldwork in everyday life that informs this book’s focus on agents other than “threat”—such as family and fear—that perpetuate desires for security.
National Security Before the Nation-State
Although Jewish immigration to Palestine grew steadily beginning with the First Aliyah from Europe and Yemen to Palestine in 1881, it was not until the mid-1930s that large-scale conflict between Jews and Arabs in Palestine began to take shape (Dowty 2005: 77). During the period of British rule (1920–48), the Jewish community in Palestine swelled from one-sixth to nearly one-third of the population of Palestine, sparking
