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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 riots by the Arab majority in 1920 and 1921 and from 1936 to 1939. Violence and defense were often 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 Israeli citizenship.⁹

Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation galvanized. The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), formed in 1964, became stronger, and Fatah became the dominant force of the Palestinian national movement (Baumgarten 2005: 30; Kurz 2005). Largely under Fatah’s leadership, Palestinian militants carried out bombings and hijackings against Israeli civilians, such as in July 1969 when two members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine commandeered an El Al airplane. Hashmira guards were part of Israel’s arsenal against Palestinian resistance. When Israel stationed Hashmira guards at seaports and at the Lod Airport (renamed Ben Gurion International Airport in 1973), the private guards served not only as an overt response to Palestinian hijackings but as a covert and broader effort to assert Israeli territorial control. During this period, military and civilian security came to assume, according to Oren Barak and Gabriel Sheffer, “a hegemonic position in the country” (2007: 15).

The Labor governments of the late 1960s and early 1970s were not committed to a single vision for settlement in the newly annexed territories. Conflicting government guidelines and competing proposals by government officials reflected a range of territorial ambitions and settlement ideologies (Weizman 2007: 90–92). However, when the right-wing Likud Party led by Menachem Begin came to power in 1977 amid the growth of religious nationalism together with the expansion of business corporations and the amplification of Mizrahi voices (Ram 2004), Jewish settlement in the West Bank became an organized state project. The Likud government regarded settlements as a human border of defense, a precaution against future invasion, and a way to expand Jewish territory into Palestinian areas. At the same time, the messianic civilian settler movement that organized in 1968 and formalized as Gush Emunim in 1974 was determined to establish Jewish presence throughout the Land of Israel, thereby making Israeli withdrawal from the newly captured territories impossible (Dowty 2005: 117). As these religious Jewish settlers established their own residential outposts, the state created an infrastructure of Israeli-built roads and bridges that began to crisscross the West Bank, circumventing Palestinian spaces while interconnecting Jewish settlements. Scholars debate the extent of the change in government policy toward the settlements during this period, but the demographic shift is undeniable. The government sent thousands of Jewish settlers into recently annexed and heavily populated Palestinian land such that, in the first four years of Likud’s leadership, the number of Jewish settlers in the West Bank quadrupled, growing from about 4,000 to more than 16,000 (Weizman 2007: 92).

As settlements grew, so did the Israeli security lexicon, with terms such as surveillance, security needs, and security principles entering political rhetoric in the late 1970s.¹⁰ The Israeli concept of a “security zone” came to the fore after the 1982 war in southern Lebanon. (When Israel withdrew its troops from Lebanon in 1985, it left a residual contingent of IDF units to patrol a “security zone” that Israel considered a necessary deterrent against attacks or infiltration into the north of Israel.¹¹) Hashmira embodied the growing vocabulary of security. In 1971, Hashmira created a new division called Hashmira Security Technologies, expanding its electronics division from fire- and smoke-detection systems and patrol and monitoring services into electronic surveillance systems, and later magnometric gates and closed-circuit televisions. The division grew in the years after the October 1973 war with Egypt and Syria (called the Yom Kippur War or the Ramadan War). When the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty stipulated Israel’s military and civilian withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula, Hashmira guards began to work at Taba (an Egyptian town), Rafah (split between Gaza and Egypt), and Nitsana (in Israel), Israel’s international border stations under the jurisdiction of the Israel Airports Authority (established as a public corporation in 1977).

In December 1987, Palestinian nonviolent and violent resistance against Israel’s occupation swelled into the first Palestinian intifada. Demonstrations and attacks directed at Israeli soldiers and civilians using Molotov cocktails, hand grenades, and stones protested Israel’s interrogation methods, house demolitions, extrajudicial killings, and mass detentions. Over the course of the six-year conflict, Israel increased its social and spatial regulation of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.¹² It issued Palestinian identity cards, extended Palestinian curfews and border closures, and confiscated Palestinian land for what the state called “buffer zones” around Jewish settlements. The first intifada sparked the genesis of Islamic militant groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad, but it also cemented Palestinian identity and global support for Palestinian self-determination.

The conflict led to mainstream Israeli and Palestinian championing of a two-state solution to the conflict and the willingness to take risks for peace. The Oslo Accords, signed by PLO leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in September 1993, were one such risk. For the first time, two figureheads of the conflict established mutual recognition and openly negotiated a comprehensive peace treaty. The Accords outlined Israeli withdrawal from parts of the West Bank and Gaza and provision for the creation of a Palestinian National Authority, which kindled optimism among Israelis and Palestinians. The early 1990s, as a result, were a period of relative moderation and broadmindedness, not least because support for the peace process led to foreign investment in the Israeli and Palestinian economies. Economic deregulation led to a rise in private consumption, to a new ethics of personal responsibility, and, in turn, to a new economy of security.¹³ The Hashmira Company expanded dramatically in this period. In 1993, the security company began to be publicly traded on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange and, by 1999, Hashmira’s revenue reached $137 million.

Despite an ethos of peace, violence eventually prevailed. Beginning in 1994, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, who opposed Israel’s very existence, claimed responsibility for a series of suicide bombings against Israeli soldiers, settlers, and civilian centers. The Israeli government attempted to limit attacks through measures such as building a wall around the Gaza Strip, which was erected under Rabin’s leadership beginning in 1994 (Weizman 2007: 143). Israelis’ fears of Palestinian terror and the state’s focus on counterterrorism grew in tandem. Benjamin Netanyahu, who ran for prime minister in 1996 on a platform of “security and peace” (Ram 2008: 172), promised to restore a sense of “personal security” to Israeli citizens by subduing what he called Palestinian terrorism. A spate of Palestinian bombings in 1996 and 1997 in places such as the the Central Bus Station in Jerusalem, Jerusalem’s Maḥane Yehuda market, and outside Dizengoff Center in Tel Aviv, reinforced Israeli support for Netanyahu’s right-wing government and its militaristic approach. It is no coincidence that, as a more conscious culture of security developed, Israeli scholars began to analyze and classify the culture of security. In 1995, political scientist Asher Arian wrote about security as a “pervasive preoccupation” and as tantamount to a religion (1995: 164). Sociologist Baruch Kimmerling described the “civil religion of security” in Israel (2001: 212), and geographer Maoz Azaryahu described Israeli security as “a tenet of collective faith” (2000: 103). Daniel Bar-Tal, Dan Jacobson, and Tali Freund (1995) studied the “security feelings” of Jewish settlers.

During the second intifada, Hashmira’s guards epitomized the nation’s reliance on emblems of security. At least one hundred Hashmira guards worked alongside Israeli soldiers in Jewish settlements and at West Bank checkpoints in the early 2000s. According to a 2002 report in the Guardian, along with other security companies operating in the West Bank, Hashmira benefited from subsidies that the government issued to settlements to fund their security operations (Lagerquist and Steele 2002). Hashmira’s guards, many of them settlers themselves, “routinely prevent[ed] Palestinian villagers from cultivating their own fields, traveling to schools, hospitals and shops in nearby towns, and receiving emergency medical assistance.” In Qedumim, for example, a Jewish settlement established in 1976 alongside the Palestinian village of Kafr Qaddum, Hashmira guards carrying submachine guns worked in conjunction with the IDF to prevent a Palestinian minibus from driving through the settlement. Whether acting as a private army or as a paid extension of the IDF, Hashmira’s “private” guards buttressed Israel’s military occupation. The assimilation of privately employed security guards into the engine of Israeli occupation blurred the private and public, state and civilian faces of security.

When the Danish security conglomerate and private prison contractor Group 4 Falck acquired a 50 percent stake in Hashmira in 2002, Hashmira’s work in the occupied territories was opened to new scrutiny.¹⁴ Following international criticism in the fall of 2002 that Hashmira guards were working in settlements the UN considers illegal, Group 4 Falck (which had since been renamed G4S and fully acquired Hashmira) removed Hashmira guards from the West Bank. Even when Hashmira guards ceased to work as settlement soldiers, however, the company continued to uphold Israeli military experience as the source and model for Hashmira’s professionalism and proficiency. All guards, the company claimed on its Web site in 2006, were veterans of IDF “combat units” and “senior security forces.” The company not only invoked the IDF to bolster its guards’ authority but also depicted its divisions as akin to military units. Their Elite Professional Units, for example, provided “security services at restricted and sensitive installations” such as the port of Haifa and Israel Railway trains. The company lauded its “fleet of operational vehicles” and its “logistic command and control network.” In the company newsletter and in statements by its current president Yigal Shermister, terms such as missions, recruitment, risk factors, and enemy population evoke government concepts of counterterrorism.

As the history of Hashmira lays bare, despite the normative distinction between public and private that is implied in the term “private security company” (Neocleous 2007), security in Israel has long been a collaboration between government and civilian institutions, an enterprise elemental to state sovereignty yet still assumed by civilian bodies.¹⁵ It is a domain of state authority even as it is enacted and molded by organizations that predate the state. The alliance between civilian and military bodies is often obscured or normalized. This is exemplified, for example, by the Hashmira Company’s Shopping Mall Units, which provide security services and entrance inspections at shopping centers around the country, including the Azrieli Mall in Tel Aviv and the Malha Mall in Jerusalem. The army rhetoric used gives imagined authority to the guards work and militarizes the civilian space, while the pedestrian title of the unit normalizes the guards’ state-like surveillance. “Security,” as Ben-Gurion said in 1948 and as has remained germane since, “is involved in all branches of life” (Ben-Eliezer 1998: 207).

Fieldwork in Security

Hashmira’s vacillation between state and civilian domains not only characterizes contemporary security but also informs the ethnographic study of security. Just as a history of Israeli security cannot assume that actions in the name of national security are always carried out by the state in a formal or bounded sense, so too must a study of Israeli security look beyond prescribed state institutions of security. In a country where self-defense is a locus of national identity in addition to a strategy for state-building, Israeli citizens do not easily enact and make sense of national discourses of security. Israelis constantly negotiate and generate discourses of fear, threat, and safety with their minds and bodies, as individuals and in relationship with others. In what follows, I describe the fieldwork I conducted in Israel between July 2003 and August 2004, and again in the summer of 2005. My research focused on everyday security in two rather different Israeli cities—Jerusalem and Arad—whose residents’ fears, imaginaries of danger, and engagement with national discourses of security were ultimately more similar than the cities’ diverse histories and national symbolism would suggest.

As the capital of the country and the most divisive piece of land in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Jerusalem is the most natural place in the country to study security.¹⁶ Jerusalem, the heart of Israeli civic ritual and religious pilgrimage, is also the heart of Israeli security, the Israeli city most palpably saturated by security guards, Israeli soldiers, border police, and municipal police. Israeli Jews and Palestinians both claim Jerusalem as their national capital, and both lay claim to land in East and West Jerusalem. In many respects, the line between East and West Jerusalem, between the Israeli state and a prospective Palestinian state, is a palpable ethnic, religious, cultural, and economic border. And yet with Palestinian-populated towns in West Jerusalem and Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem, it is impossible to call East Jerusalem a strictly Palestinian city or West Jerusalem a Jewish one. In fact, the Jewish population within the municipal borders of Jerusalem makes up approximately threequarters of all Jewish settlers in the occupied Palestinian territories (Weizman 2007: 26; Savitch and Garb 2006: 156). A city where contemporary barriers and borders overlay and intersect with ancient fortification, it is the place in which, more than any other Israeli city, Israeli Jews are fretful and fearful about the integration or mere presence of Palestinians.

Arad, a small city 60 miles south of Jerusalem, served as a second field site, a place where I could study how fear and desires for security affect daily life even when political tensions did not so overtly dominate life. Arad was established in 1961 by a team of Israeli architects, economists, demographers, and politicians driven by a nationalist devotion to settlement and determined to create a successful and economically viable development town in the desert. After its population swelled with a surge of Russian Jewish immigration in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Arad was designated a city in 1995. By 2003, its population had grown to 28,000 due to the influx of Ethiopian and Argentinean immigrants whom the state settled there, a size comparable to many of Israel’s other small cities and large settlements. Although Arad was a place where, as many of its residents told me, “nothing happens,” it experienced many of the problems common to other Jewish cities and towns at the time, such as the recession of 2003 and the recurring emotional and economic reverberations from Palestinian suicide bombings elsewhere in the country. The city lacked Jerusalem’s internationally contested borders but sat ten miles from Palestinian towns in the West Bank and abutted several Bedouin villages. Jewish residents’ talk of the “Palestinian threat” often focused on their anxieties about these neighboring Palestinians. As I realized over the course of my fieldwork, despite geopolitical differences between Arad and Jerusalem, people in both cities conveyed a similar range of political affect. This book draws on insight from interviews and life in both Jerusalem and Arad.

I began my fieldwork in Jerusalem by living in an apartment on a street in Talbiyya, a Jewish neighborhood that was home from the 1920s until 1948 to affluent Palestinian Christians (Bisharat 2007: 88). I lived on Hovevei Zion Street, literally translated “lovers of Zion” and referring to the Zionist organization formed in Eastern Europe in the 1880s that assembled some of the earliest Jewish settlers of Palestine.¹⁷ It was not uncommon for Jewish residents of this neighborhood to volunteer in Israel’s Civil Guard (Ha-Mishmar ha-Ezraḥi), a branch of the Israel Police and the largest volunteer organization in the country. The Civil Guard was founded in 1974 as a civilian apparatus to monitor Palestinian “terrorist activity” in towns near the Lebanon border and soon became a division of the Israel police.¹⁸ In the fall of 2004, I too became a volunteer in the organization. Presenting my U.S. passport, my student visa, and the phone number of the police station in my hometown in Virginia gave me the “security clearance” necessary to volunteer. Authorization is generally granted only to permanent residents but exceptions are often made for Jews visiting from foreign countries. In my case, approval was facilitated by the head of my local base, who was sympathetic to my desire to conduct graduate research. Once clearance was granted and I sat through a training session, I was allowed to don a yellow reflective vest on weekly pedestrian patrols of downtown Jerusalem, the crackling reports from the police radios we carried mingling with fellow volunteers’ reinforcement or dismissal of reported threats.

Living alone for this early phase of fieldwork, I quickly sensed my distance from the essence of the daily life I had come to study. After all, family networks, parental responsibility, and intimate relations were the units through which Israelis tended to express their fears of Palestinians and anxieties about ongoing violence. Alertness, for example, was seen as a trait of good parenting. Mothers and fathers discussed whether it was safe for their child to take a particular bus, walk a certain route, or go on a school field trip. Fear and violence also set family networks in motion, particularly cell phone networks. In many families, after a Palestinian suicide bombing, it was the formal or default task of one individual to make a round of cell-phone calls. The calls were streamlined and rote: “Are you okay? Okay, bye” sufficed. One family I saw regularly announced several weeks after meeting them that I would be part of their family list of post-attack phone calls. I took this as a sign of my integration. Israelis saw such calls less as an obsessed concern with death than as a “binding force,”¹⁹ a sign of friendship. One woman in her late twenties even broke up a relationship with a man who didn’t call her after suicide bombings. Israelis mocked these cellular chains but still clung to them. At a bar in Arad, one soldier home for the weekend recounted to a group of friends that, once, he was sitting with friends when a Palestinian suicide bombing occurred nearby. The phones of these friends began to ring as their parents checked in, but his phone stayed silent. He later asked his parents why they did not call and they said they knew he doesn’t take the bus that was blown up. Everyone hearing this story laughed. With a facial expression that said, “What, they don’t care about me?!” he divulged his mild offense at his parents’ lack of overprotection.

To make family life and space a more important focus of my research, I divided my time between the homes of four families I met through my small social network, three in Jerusalem and one in Arad. Israeli Jews are a heterogeneous group in terms of country of origin, date of immigration, religious observance, and political belief. While the families I lived with are not statistically representative of Israeli society, they do represent a demographic range within the country, encompassing the observant and secular, high-school-educated and Ph.D.s, Ashkenazi (Jews descended from Jewish communities in Eastern Europe) and Mizrahi (Jews from the Middle East and Central Asia).²⁰ All these families had at least three generations who had lived in Israel and, by and large, served in the IDF (unlike, for example, ultra-Orthodox Israelis or recent immigrants above drafting age), enabling me to consider how military knowledge extends into daily civilian life and how experiences of this period of violence compare with earlier periods. My intent when I refer to Israelis or Israeli Jews is neither to generalize or homogenize them nor to eclipse formal and informal acts of true political dissent and critique. Rather, my aim is to discern, through their daily lives, some larger patterns of seeing, experiencing, and speaking about political life. The insights and experiences of these families—as family units and as individuals—reverberate through this book, alongside a range of other voices. I introduce these families here, with their names and identifying details changed.

Shlomit and Ilan Maimon lived in Ramat Eshkol, a neighborhood built in East Jerusalem after 1967. Their three-story attached stone home was recently renovated, with space for children and grandchildren, always coming and going. Shlomit’s father came to Palestine from Germany in 1933 at age fifteen, and her mother came from Germany in 1939 at seventeen with the Youth Aliya.²¹ Both were founding members of a religious kibbutz in the north of Israel, where they met before moving to Katamon in Jerusalem in 1948 and then, in 1972, to the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City. Ilan’s family came to Palestine in the late nineteenth century from Russia and settled in Safed and then moved to Haifa in the 1920s, where Ilan was born. Shlomit, sixty when I began my fieldwork, was a paralegal and Ilan, sixty-four, was a professor of physics at Hebrew University. They considered themselves dati (religious), which meant that they abided by Jewish dietary laws, were Sabbath observant, and observed the festivals of the Jewish calendar. They had three daughters, one son, and five grandchildren. All their children served in the IDF and received college degrees. Two daughters lived with their families in Jerusalem, the other lived in a Jewish settlement outside Jerusalem, and their son lived in Haifa. Shlomit and Ilan watched their grandchildren at least once a week after school, and frequently hosted their children on the Sabbath.

Closer in age to the Maimons’ children, Noa and Gil Shahar lived at the westernmost edge of Jerusalem in Motza, a quiet neighborhood more affordable than those closer to the city center but still within the Green Line. This was important to Noa and Gil, who considered themselves left-wing Israelis lapsed in their Zionism and attuned to their government’s repression of Palestinians. The area they lived in was not without its own complicated history. In the 1890s, Motza became the first Jewish village outside Jerusalem when it was established on farmland purchased from the nearby Palestinian village Qalunya. In 1948, Qalunya villagers attacked upper Motza, and the Palmach, the military branch of the Haganah, destroyed the village, from which many residents had fled following the massacre at the nearby village of Deir Yassin (Benvenisti 2000: 113–14; Segev 1999: 324). Noa and Gil lived in a small house dating, they believed, from the late Ottoman era, on top of a steep hill. Gil’s parents emigrated from Afghanistan as children in the early 1950s. Noa’s father came to Israel from Syria with his parents in 1964, and her mother emigrated from Poland in 1949. In their early thirties and with an infant son, Noa and Gil were, in a number of ways, representative of the middle-class, secular couples that lived in their neighborhood. Gil commuted to work at an office in Tel Aviv for the Israel Airports Authority, a government-owned corporation, and Noa taught math at a high school in Jerusalem. They had recently purchased an apartment in Modiʾin, a rapidly growing Israeli city between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. They would move there in 2005, following a larger trend of young Jerusalemites leaving the city for peripheral suburbs and settlements, attracted to easier access to jobs in Tel Aviv and more affordable real estate, and repelled by the increasingly ultra-Orthodox population of Jerusalem. After 2000, security became an additional impetus.

Unlike the Maimon and Shahar families, I met Sheri and Yinon Kashani, twenty-two and twenty-four respectively, through my volunteer work for a Jerusalem-based nonprofit organization called ATZUM. Established in 2002, ATZUM was one of a new genre of nonprofit organizations that began to proliferate in Israel shortly after the beginning of the second intifada. Privately funded, these “terror victims’ funds” saw themselves as supplements to or substitutes for government welfare services and offered financial and psychosocial support to individuals and families affected by Palestinian suicide bombings (Ochs 2006). In April 2002, Sheri’s mother had been one of seven killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber (al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades claimed responsibility for the attack) who detonated a bomb at a bus stop on Jaffa Road near the outdoor market Maḥane Yehuda. This made Sheri and her family “terror victims” to the Israeli government, and a social worker for Bituaḥ Leumi, Israel’s National Insurance, eventually referred them to ATZUM. The two institutions helped Sheri and her husband secure money and loans to purchase a two-bedroom basement apartment in Pisgat Zeʾev, a Jewish settlement within the Jerusalem municipality, where they lived with their two daughters, aged two and four. Sheri worked as a receptionist at an ophthalmology office in Jerusalem and Yinon worked for a Jerusalem-based security company installing home security systems in Jerusalem and in Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Both Sheri and Yinon’s parents were Iranian Jews who emigrated from Iran in the early 1980s in the wake of the 1979 Revolution. Their families were traditionally observant, although Sheri and Yinon, who were both born in Israel, had themselves become even more so over the course of their years in religious state schools and the religious Zionist youth movement Bʾnei Akiva.

In Arad, I lived with Naomi and Arieh Bergmann, who had moved to the city as a newly married couple in 1978. They first lived in an apartment and then moved into a home their parents had purchased for them, a villa, as they called it in Hebrew, with three bedrooms and a small yard overlooking the desert. Naomi was a social worker for the local school system and Arieh worked as a mechanic for the city. Arieh, born in Poland, escaped in 1943 and moved to Israel in 1947. Naomi’s father was born in Hungary in 1919 and in 1935 fled through Prague to Israel with the Zionist youth organization Ha-Shomer Ha-Tsaʾir, or the Youth Guard, and with the help of Haganah. Naomi’s mother, also from Hungary, survived the Holocaust and fled to Israel soon after the war. Naomi and Arieh had two sons; the older son generally lived in Tel Aviv but was traveling with his girlfriend for a year in Australia and the younger was still in the army. Both had grown up in Arad. As residents of Arad for nearly all their adult lives, Naomi and Arieh had a large circle of friends in the city, but they often spoke of leaving, now that their sons were grown, for a more cosmopolitan place.

Even though none of the families I lived with called themselves Jewish settlers, two families lived in what the United Nations considers Jewish settlements. The Maimons’ neighborhood of Ramat Eshkol was the first Jewish housing project built on land Israel took from Jordan during the 1967 war. The Kashanis’ neighborhood of Pisgat Zeʾev was also built east of the Green Line on land de facto annexed in 1967. The government calls it a Jewish neighborhood, part of the Jerusalem municipality, but the United Nations, which did not recognize the 1967 annexation, considers it an illegal settlement. The government started construction there in 1982 to create so-called Jewish continuity between Jerusalem and Neve Yaʾakov, a more northern settlement where Jews have lived since the 1920s. Both Ramat Eshkol and Pisgat Zeʾev are part of the Jerusalem municipality, but neither is legal under the international law of the Fourth Geneva Convention.²² Israeli Jews generally refer to Ramat Eshkol as a neighborhood of Jerusalem and Sheri called Pisgat Zeʾev, a suburb of Jerusalem. The reference to settlements outside the 1949 borders as Israeli neighborhoods or suburbs rather than settlements (yeshuvim) is a means of naturalizing the settlements as legitimate Israeli spaces (Weizman 2007: 8).²³ Noa and Gil Shahar were the only of my informant families to regularly use the term shtaḅim to refer to settlements in the occupied territories. Most others not only tried to dodge the contentiousness of their residential space but also rarely mentioned their proximity to Palestinian towns.

The families I lived with resided within a few miles of Palestinian homes, close enough to glimpse everyday activity, and yet personal interaction was scarce.²⁴ In Arad, for example, the only contact Naomi Bergmann had with Palestinians was with the Israeli Bedouin she hired for small construction jobs. “Last month,” she told me once, “we had an encounter with Arabs because the builders of the porch were Arab…. They worked well … I gave them water and coffee and cold drinks. But all the time the house was closed.” Naomi’s contact with “Arabs” was a strict business agreement and her description made clear that she was the one to set its terms: She offered them coffee, and she maintained social and physical borders by keeping the house closed to them—as much an expression of her desire for control as it was of her mistrust. The Maimons lived across the valley from Shuʾafat, a Palestinian neighborhood in Jerusalem that Israel occupied after 1967. Residents of Shuʾafat, some holding Israeli citizenship and others only permanent residency status, frequented the supermarket, bank, and post office down the street from the Maimons. From the Maimons’ living room, the family could see Shuʾafat’s minarets and hear its multiple muezzin and made periodic comments, excitedly or with irritation, about wedding noises drifting across the valley. And yet aside from these passing comments, Palestinian inhabitants of Shuʾafat never came closer to the Maimons’ lives than a view from their window. It was similar for the Kashanis, who lived not far east of Shuʾafat and adjacent to ‘Anata, a Palestinian town in the West Bank. Their daughters’ playground sat almost directly beneath a row of ‘Anata homes, and their young girls possessed a banal acquaintance with these neighbors’ daily life. Once, while walking to the park, we heard the muezzin from ‘Anata; Sheri’s five-year-old daughter Nava said to me matter-of-factly, “The Arabs are praying.” When we heard fireworks from ‘Anata, three-year-old Hadar said, “The Arabs are getting married.” To the young girls, Palestinians were their prayers and marriages. To the parents, their Palestinian neighbors were largely a source of irritation and a symbol of danger, even as they were effectively excluded from their line of sight. Signs of security, such as fences and walls, as we will see in the next chapter, were more blatant components of Israeli Jews’ field of vision than the Palestinian population.