Security and Suspicion
Описание книги
In Israel, gates, fences, and walls encircle public spaces while guards scrutinize, inspect, and interrogate. With a population constantly aware of the possibility of suicide bombings, Israel is defined by its culture of security. Security and Suspicion is a closely drawn ethnographic study of the way Israeli Jews experience security in their everyday lives. Observing security concerns through an anthropological lens, Juliana Ochs investigates the relationship between perceptions of danger and the political strategies of the state. Ochs argues that everyday security practices create exceptional states of civilian alertness that perpetuate—rather than mitigate—national fear and ongoing violence. In Israeli cities, customers entering gated urban cafés open their handbags for armed security guards and parents circumnavigate feared neighborhoods to deliver their children safely to school. Suspicious objects appear to be everywhere, as Israelis internalize the state's vigilance for signs of potential suicide bombers. Fear and suspicion not only permeate political rhetoric, writes Ochs, but also condition how people see, the way they move, and the way they relate to Palestinians. Ochs reveals that in Israel everyday practices of security—in the home, on commutes to work, or in cafés and restaurants—are as much a part of conflict as soldiers and military checkpoints. Based on intensive fieldwork in Israel during the second intifada, Security and Suspicion charts a new approach to issues of security while contributing to our appreciation of the subtle dynamics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This book offers a way to understand why security propagates the very fears and suspicions it is supposed to reduce.
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Security and Suspicion
Cynthia Keppley Mahmood, Series Editor
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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.
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