blurred and cyclical, with settlement spurring uprising and uprising spurring enclosure. Fortification and defense became an increasing focus of Jews’ settlement project. Jewish settlers began to conceive of their existing kibbutzim and moshavim, the collective agricultural communities founded in ideals of socialism and Zionism, less as pastoral cooperatives than as paramilitary outposts (Troen 2003: 3–4; Kimmerling 2001: 209). They also constructed ḥoma U-Migdal (literally stockade and watchtower) settlements with central towers, trenches, and high walls that were intended to shield Jews from Palestinian resistance riots and also from British opposition (Weizman 2007: 100; Rotbard 2003). “This form,” according to Anita Shapira, “was designed to permit colonization in frontier areas while safeguarding the settlement from attack” (1992: 237). As pre-state forms of architectural security, these outposts carved out space from Palestinian land and, as Ilan Troen argues, functioned as unilateral borders in calculated places (2003: 76).
Moshe Shermister, formerly a Jewish member of the British colonial police, capitalized on Jewish settlers’ desires for protection from local Palestinians. On July 30, 1937, Shermister incorporated a new company under the British Mandate of Palestine.5 Hashmira Company, LTD, which might be translated “The Guardian,” set out as an association of independent and private Jewish police to guard the growing Jewish community in Palestine.6 Shermister opened his first office in Tel Aviv and announced his company in a local notice:
We are delighted to inform you that our company has received the permission of the [British] Mandate to begin operations. We hereby undertake to guard banks, offices, stores, storage areas, apartments, factories, etc., in accordance with the company’s fees. The company’s management were officers in the police force of the Land of Israel, and the guards also served in the police and are experienced professionals in the field.
With an initial payroll of just two guards, Hashmira started small but grew steadily over the coming decades.
By 1939, Hashmira had a force of seven guards who wore badges with the company’s emblem—two intersecting keys and a large, radiant eye beneath the words “The independent police in the Land of Israel.” Armed with clubs, flashlights, and whistles, they guarded Jewish settlements in the Tel Aviv area. The company helped to police the nation-information in ways not unlike Jewish paramilitary organizations, such as the Haganah, which acted in state-like ways for the growing Jewish community. Jewish settlers formed the Haganah, meaning “defense,” after the Arab riots of 1920 and expanded it further after the 1929 riots.7 Although officially outlawed by the British Mandatory Authorities, the Haganah provided its members with arms training, engaged in armed violence against Palestinians, and established central arms depots. By the time of the 1936 Arab Revolt, it was a full-fledged army.
When Haganah’s soldiers and Hashmira’s guards fashioned themselves as sentinels of Jewish settlements, they were not only laying claim to the idea of a Jewish biblical homeland but also embodying the political aspirations for Jewish power that began in Europe in the late nineteenth century. Jewish settlers’ turn to defense in this period may have been spurred by Palestinian retaliation, as Almog (2000) and Ezrahi (1997) have shown, but the inclination to self-protect lay at the foundation of Jewish nationalist thought. Self-defense, according to early Jewish nationalist discourses, would enable the Jewish people to become a “normal” nation (Shapira 1992: 25–26). The desire to reverse the vulnerability of Eastern European Jews was particularly characteristic of Labor or Socialist Zionism, the dominant strand of left-wing Zionism, but revisionist Zionist thought and, by the 1930s, religious Zionism, also espoused a radical shift from a place of political weakness to one of sovereign strength. The “new Jew” was expected not only to settle the land but also to defend it from native Arabs (Almog 2000). Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Jewish settlers in Palestine, as Yael Zerubavel suggests, transposed the biblical conception of God as sentinel—“the guardian of Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps” (Psalm 121:4)—onto the new Jewish guards (1995: 24). From the 1930s onward, the idea of self-protection became almost an end unto itself. According to Uri Ben-Eliezer, “military practices gradually became institutionalized and habitual … until finally the idea of implementing a military solution to Israel’s national problems was not only enshrined as a value in its own right but was also considered legitimate, desirable, and indeed, the best option” (1998: x). Jewish settlers crafted self-defense as a condition of possibility for Jewish national identity and, eventually, for the legitimacy of the nation-state.
On the eve of statehood, Hashmira employed 150 guards and Shermister, now working with his son Kadish, opened a new branch in Jerusalem. After the British government withdrew from Palestine, Jewish leadership led by David Ben-Gurion declared Israel’s independence in May 1948. However, when Palestinian representatives and the Arab League rejected the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan (UN General Assembly Resolution 181) to divide Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state and create Jerusalem as an international city, the armies of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Iraq attacked Israel. This was the start of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, known to Israelis as the War of Independence and to Palestinians as al-Naqba (the Catastrophe). During the war, twenty Hashmira guards from the Jerusalem branch worked alongside the newly formed IDF to stand watch over ration warehouses in Jerusalem, a response to the blockade by Palestinian Arabs of food and water to the Jewish community of Jerusalem.
A year of fighting ended with the 1949 Armistice Agreement, which established the Green Line as the critical border between Israel and a theoretical Palestinian state. Jordan annexed what became known as the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and Egypt took control of the Gaza Strip. The fate of an estimated 600,000–760,000 Palestinian Arabs who were expelled or fled the country has been one of the chief sources of controversy in the Middle East ever since (Morris 1987). Soon after the Galilee and the Negev, captured during the war, came under Israeli control, Hashmira opened new offices, as if in place of the displaced Palestinian residents.8 Kadish Shermister established new branches in Jewish cities such as Haifa and Hadera, which the state was filling with Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and Yemen. A Hashmira office opened in Acre, an Arab city with a Palestinian population that Israel largely displaced when it captured the port city in 1948 (Pappe 2007: 100), and in development towns such as Kiryat Shmona, which Israel established in 1949 on the site of al-Khalisa, a Bedouin town (Khalidi and Elmusa 1992: 462–63).
Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion declared during the war: “I have to admit that I am not capable of seeing anything now other than through the prism of security…. Security is involved in all branches of life” (Ben-Eliezer 1998: 207). To the first prime minister, security meant not only military strength but also economic independence and a modern, densely settled landscape. In the early years of the state, the work of Hashmira was part of this broad vision of security. After Israel’s invasion of the Sinai Peninsula in 1956, for example, when Israeli civilians and the military clashed with Palestinian militants, or fedayeen, primarily from the Egyptian-occupied Gaza Strip, Hashmira police worked alongside the IDF’s infantry units and paratroopers to guard Jews from fedayeen attacks along the Lebanese, Jordanian, and Syrian borders. Security, in Uri Ben-Eliezer’s words, “was no longer a pure state-bureaucratic project but the people’s enterprise” (1998: 214).
The 1967 war “turned the Arab-Israeli conflict upside down. It marked the final stage in the reversal of power relationships” (Dowty 2005: 110). When Israel seized Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, the Golan Heights from Syria, and the West Bank including East Jerusalem from Jordan, Hashmira guards assumed position in the newly annexed Golan Heights and Sharm-El-Sheikh in the Sinai Peninsula to assist the government in establishing Jewish settlements outside the Green Line. If the decades between 1948 and 1967 were a period of interstate conflict between Israel and its neighboring countries, Israel’s 1967 war with Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, which Palestinians call al-Naksah (the Setback), initiated Israel’s direct negotiation with Palestinians. Roughly one million Palestinians clung tenuously to two small tracts of land now under Israeli military occupation. Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza subjected the majority of the Palestinians living there to Israeli military administration without
