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Introduction: The Practice of Everyday Security

It was early February 2004, and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had recently announced plans to remove all Israeli settlers from Gaza. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) launched armored raids in the Gaza Strip, killing numerous Hamas militants. A Palestinian police officer from Bethlehem killed eight Israelis in a suicide bombing of a Jerusalem bus, for which al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades claimed responsibility. Israelis and Palestinians were in the midst of a war for territory, sovereignty, and security fought through air strikes and gunfire, Qassam rockets and suicide bombs, curfews and land seizures. But in Holon, an industrial city outside Tel Aviv, in the home of Vered Malka, the war assumed a more intimate form.

The marriage of Vered’s niece Ronit in Jerusalem was only a week away, and Vered was dreading the trip. Vered, who immigrated to Israel from Egypt in 1956 and settled in Holon soon after, lived in a small attached house in close proximity to her nine siblings. All were terrified of this journey to Jerusalem, a drive of under an hour. It was not the navigation itself that made Vered uneasy, for she was a taxi driver who spent her days driving the streets of Tel Aviv and Jaffa. “What do you mean, why am I afraid? From the terrorists, from the rocks they throw, from the hijacking, from it all. I never felt good in Jerusalem.” To Vered and her family, Jerusalem had been off limits since the start of the second intifada in 2000. Jerusalem, to them, was a place of violence and danger, a place of bombings and precarious borders, and a place of Palestinians. Vered’s young granddaughters had never been to Israel’s capital, but Vered and her siblings were committed to attending the celebration and decided to put aside their fears, or at least to find a way around them. “I can’t not go,” Vered said. On the Friday afternoon of the wedding, wearing dresses and suits, energized but focused, the siblings and their spouses piled into four cars and drove from Holon to Jerusalem convoy-style, one car in front of the other, straight to Beit Shmuel, an event space overlooking the Old City of Jerusalem. “We went there and we returned, all together.”

Security for Vered was not about constructing walls or exchanging hostages, but rather about relying on familiarity to generate a sense of control and protection. Driving in procession kept Vered’s family members off and at a remove from buses, a common target of Palestinian suicide bombings and, even beyond that, surrounded each individual car with a familial buffer. The resultant protection was mobile and transient, shifting through space and time as they drove. Surrounded by familiar vehicles, the family found a way to travel to Jerusalem not only with minimized risk but also without perceiving the presence of Palestinians or feeling present in the city. At their weekly family Saturday lunches, the fears Vered and her siblings articulated in anticipation of this trip were enveloped in politicized discourses of threat and separation, and yet a simple family cavalcade enabled them to attain a sense of safety. In Vered’s quest for security, the violence and fear of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict became inextricably bound with the routines and relationships of daily life.

If Israel exists in “a permanent state of emergency,”¹ security has become a medium of this unending crisis. Security was a central motif of the second intifada. It was not just that Israel’s defense budget, approximately $10 billion in 2004, was the twelfth highest in the world, or that, in 2002, Israel’s nongovernmental security services market was estimated at $700 million, with over 100,000 workers employed throughout the country (Lagerquist 2002: 1).² Even beyond this immense industry, security dominated Israelis’ rhetorical framings and daily experiences. The government and media spoke of security measures, security lapses, security zones, and security threats. Military activities were often carried out in the name of Israeli security, from the construction of the separation wall (often called the “security fence”) to the assassination of Palestinian leaders. “Only security will lead to peace,” as Sharon put it.³ In daily life, Israeli Jews described their neighborhoods as desirable or deficient “from the perspective of security,” and malls became places with “good security” (or bad security) even more than they were places to shop. Israelis called the conflict itself “the security situation” (ha-matsav ha-bitḥoni), a naming that avoided direct reference to Palestinians while depicting the conflict as, above all, an effort to protect Israeli citizens from Palestinians.

The origin of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict lies in a very tangible clash: the claim by Jews and Palestinians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the same piece of land. Concrete as the core conflict may be, its intensification and expansion came as the result of the more elusive but no less forceful factors of ideology, identity, and emotion. The intersection of these tangible and intangible aspects of the conflict is at the heart of national security’s complexity. Security is a set of military strategies and political beliefs, but it is also a guiding force for daily experience. In one of the most conflict-ridden regions in modern history, in the clash between Israeli statehood and Palestinian desires for self-determination, between Israeli territorial expansion and Palestinian nationalism, security has become a part of Israeli culture. Security is a national discourse and partisan rallying cry that also assumes social, material, and aesthetic forms in daily life. It is the substance of conflict that manifests itself in everyday gestures, feelings, and intimate relationships.

For centuries, the legitimacy of the modern state has been built on its ability to protect its citizens.⁴ Security has long rationalized state power and justified its monopoly over lawful violence. With the advent of security studies after the Cold War, scholars have studied national security as a state and military strategy; they have shown how diplomacy can isolate threats, how civil defense can facilitate national resilience, and how states can marshal economic power to compel international cooperation.⁵ Recent fears of terrorism and the protrusion of national security on a global scale, however, draw our attention to the specifically social effects and underlying cultural character of national security.⁶ That is, to the ways history can isolate threats, collective memory can facilitate national resilience, and states can marshal social capital to propel fear.

This book addresses the ways national security delineates individual experience as much as it demarcates sovereignty. Traditional political anthropology has tended to depict holistic political systems and organized political institutions, but this book sees security as a politics that is often intangible and fleeting, inconsistent and intimate, taking form in impressions and senses. Likewise, “security” does not refer in this book, as it often does, to state policies of preserving the integrity of the nation-state or to a formal political-military institution of defense. Here, security consists of everyday, routine, and sometimes unconscious engagements (Certeau 1988) with national ideologies of threat and defense. I use the term everyday security to describe the practices of self-protection that become the substance of people’s lives and the discourses of danger and threat that, in contexts of conflict, delineate people’s days. Like anthropological notions of everyday violence (Das et al. 2000, Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 2004), everyday security is a cultural practice and a communal experience that crafts social life and is also an intimate experience that shapes individual subjectivity. Intimacy, involving feelings and practices of closeness and reciprocity, is a crucial domain for the everyday experience of security. If intimacy, as Lauren Berlant (2000) shows, builds public worlds and creates public spaces, then even when national security took the form of intimate signs and gestures, it laid claim to a collective and activated state power.

Observing national security through an anthropological lens, this book weaves together three distinct but interrelated arguments regarding the proliferation of state security in daily life. First, I argue that national discourses of security are reproduced at the level of bodily practice. Based on an ethnographic study of the daily life of Israeli Jews between 2003 and 2005, this book shows how discourses of security permeate individual sensibilities and habits and shape people’s encounters with the state. Government rhetoric on danger, threat, and separation is not simply internalized but generated in visceral, emotive ways. Security takes shape at the intersection of government technologies and everyday sensibilities, of political rationalities and embodied behavior. The cyclical, selfperpetuating nature of security has been a recent theoretical concern to social and political theorists (Bauman 2007) and a longtime source of international military and diplomatic conflict. By describing the ways people embody state discourses of danger and effect senses of threat in their daily lives, I offer one way to understand why fear propagates a willingness to engage in violence in the name of security and why security becomes more likely only to provide senses of comfort than to proscribe violence.

The second argument of this book concerns the ways people see their fear and their desires for security as beyond politics, and thus become ignorant of the structural logics of exclusion that discourses of fear and security serve to reproduce. Israelis’ avoidance of Palestinians and reliance on the country’s military-industrial complex of security were often portrayed as strategies of coping with intense anxiety and fear. The seeming innocuousness of citizens’ craving comfort and desiring bodily safety and the seemingly instinctive virtue of protecting family enabled Israeli Jews, including both those critical of the Israeli occupation and those who supported continued Israeli settlement, to think of themselves as participating in something private and impervious to politics. However, in this context of conflict, desires for comfort and well-being were often nationalism and exclusion in another form. The security that materialized in everyday habits and desires tended to extend, rather than oppose, sovereignty and violence. Everyday ways of talking about danger and threat, together with routines of circumnavigating feared spaces, cultivated the discursive and spatial invisibility of Palestinians to Israelis. People’s desires for security and their engagement with the artifacts and procedures of national security legitimized state security and helped produce and sustain the idea of the nation. Security, in this way, gained momentum and sway even as it produced a pervasive sense of vulnerability. It proliferated the very fears and suspicions it claimed to obviate. Security may stand as the core principle of state activity, but as Israeli fear rationalized fortification and separation and as anxiety perpetuated anticipations of danger, security transcended its position as a state domain, swelling larger than the state to generate and sustain sovereignty.

The third claim of this book is that fantasies about threat and protection were a crucial mode through which Israelis embodied security. Fantasies of security are different from illusions or delusions of threat and different from imaginaries of violence. They are also different from the “psychology of fear” that deals with emotional and cognitive responses to public fear-arousing messages, ranging from heightened anxiety to complacency. Fantasy, according to Yael Navaro-Yashin, describes the elements of the political that survive discursive deconstruction, criticism, and skepticism because of “unconscious psychic attachments” to state power (2002: 4). Fantasy is not opposed to reality but what sits at its very core (Aretxaga 2003: 402). Through fantasy, Israelis embodied national security even through practices that questioned, mocked, or ignored official registers. When I speak of fantasies of security, and likewise when I talk about imaginaries of danger or threat, this is not to disregard the very real danger that Palestinian aggression posed to Israel and the very real fears that Israelis held. Rather, I refer to the attachments that people develop to their anxieties and to state presentations of violence. Fantasy was a rubric through which people absorbed and resisted national discourses, and through which they personalized the effects of those discourses.

I carried out the fieldwork on which this book is based during a particularly severe period of violence during the second intifada, also called the al-Aqsa intifada. Intifada means “shaking off” in Arabic and is often translated as “uprising.”⁷ The concerns that undergirded this uprising had been present throughout decades of hostility, attack, confiscation, and occupation. At least since the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, Jewish nationalism and territorial control stood at odds with Palestinian desires for self-determination and national liberation. Since 1967, the status and future of the occupied territories and East Jerusalem, the question of a Palestinian state, the future of Palestinian refugees, and the fate of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories have fueled diplomatic dispute and military aggression. While Israel persistently supported Jewish settlement in Palestinian territory and restricted Palestinian life and livelihood, Palestinians did not recognize the right of the State of Israel to exist as a Jewish state. The Palestinian revolt that broke out in September 2000 was thus less inexplicable or abrupt than the media reported, a shift more in scale than in kind.

Once symbolically instigated by Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount on September 28, 2000, the uprising escalated into an armed military conflict. The militarization on both sides far surpassed that of the first intifada. Palestinian society now had a political structure in place, with a parliament and an armed security apparatus, and political solidarity was fortified both by a religious framework and by the growing power of media.⁸ Unlike earlier forms of Palestinian resistance, this time the militant wing of Fatah had a substantial supply of small arms to fire on Israeli troops and Qassam rockets (named after the military wing of Hamas) to fire into Israeli residential areas. Militant groups including Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades waged a high-intensity campaign against Israel, in which stone throwing youth were joined by combatants, who referred to themselves as “revolutionaries, martyrs, nationalists, or freedom fighters” to underscore their right to self-determination (Hage 2003: 72).⁹ Palestinian combatants carried out a record number of suicide bombings against Israeli civilian targets in public spaces such as city buses and cafés.

In March 2002, in the largest military operation in the West Bank since 1967, Israel launched Operation Defensive Shield (Mivtsa Ḥomat Magen), seeking to dismantle the infrastructure of the Palestinian Authority. With the stated aim of catching Palestinian militants, confiscating their weapons, and destroying weapons facilities, the IDF attacked Palestinian Authority installations, carried out assassinations of political and religious leaders, and imposed a series of collective punishments on the Palestinian civilian population. Sharon directed the IDF to avoid harming the civilian population (Sharon 2002), but, in reality, Israel targeted Palestinian militants and civilians alike by demolishing homes, destroying local infrastructure, and paralyzing movement and economic production.

Scholars of international relations often speak of the second intifada as “a low-intensity conflict,”¹⁰ a euphemistic term that called attention to Israel’s use of intelligence information to carry out assassinations of Palestinian leaders while obscuring the deadly nature of Israeli hostility (Pappe 2006). The popularity of the term in Israeli military discourse and the desire on behalf of Israeli political leaders to depict the conflict as “low-intensity” reflects the country’s particular efforts in this period to veil and normalize violence. The government worked to keep IDF operations, including the Shin Bet’s interrogation of Palestinians (categorized as torture by Israeli human rights groups), largely invisible to the public (B’Tselem 2007).

Despite claims of restraint and normalization, violence reverberated. When I began my fieldwork in Jerusalem in the summer of 2003, Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and leader of Fatah, had just appointed Mahmoud Abbas as Palestinian prime minister; the U.S. government had begun to promote a “roadmap” for Israeli peace and a Palestinian state; and Hamas and Islamic Jihad had recently declared a hudna, a temporary armistice on attacks against Israel. Violence decreased but only for forty-five days. In August, Israel’s Special Police Unit killed four Palestinians and the Hamas leader Abdullah Qawasmeh during a gun and tank raid on Askar. Hamas responded with two suicide bombings, including one of a Jerusalem bus that killed over twenty Israelis, and Fatah with a third. The IDF captured or killed the plotters of the Jerusalem suicide bombings; enforced strict curfews in Nablus, Jenin, and Tulkarem; and demolished dozens of Palestinian shops. With each act, Israeli and Palestinian politicians sanctioned their own violence by presenting it as reprisal, such that every military action was rendered a reciprocal reaction. Sharon, Arafat, and the subsequent Palestinian prime minister Ahmed Qurei acted as if the threat of violence would accelerate diplomatic negotiations and dissuade opposing hostility, but this posture only exacerbated the conflict. The hudna soon ended.

During the second intifada, talk of terror and terrorist threat ricocheted around the world, their political force and emotional substance gaining momentum as governments unified against a shared and supposedly shadowy enemy. The events of September 11, 2001 and the subsequent U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, caused Israeli and American discourses of terror and counterterrorism to mingle and reinforce each other. A widespread demonization of and intense xenophobia toward Arabs seemed to give international sanction to long-standing Israeli fears. Still, terror was spoken of in Israel with specific connotations. In Hebrew, the English loanword terror referred broadly to violence against civilians but specifically connoted Palestinian militancy. In the words of Israel’s Home Front Command (Pikud ha-Oref), founded as a unit of the IDF in February 1992 following the Gulf War and responsible for civilian defense, terror “casts a threat and spreads fear in a calculated manner through the helpless civilian population.” Always ethnically inflected, the discourse of terror depicted Palestinian military actions as illegitimate, unpredictable, and lacking a motive beyond terrorizing (Hajjar 2005: 42). It generally did so, however, without explicit reference to Palestinians, whom Israelis visualized but whose agency was concealed by generic terms like “terror” and “suicide bombings.” Like the terms terrorism and terror, reference to terror functioned simultaneously to describe and delegitimize violence committed by non-state political bodies. When I use the term terror in this book, I refer to the Israeli discourse of terror rather than to any specific political acts it might designate.

The term piguʿa (pl. piguʿim) described terrorist attacks in general, but it came during this period to refer almost exclusively to Palestinian suicide bombings. (Similarly, while piguʿa yeri literally means a shooting, the term came to connote almost exclusively a Palestinian shooting.) Israelis saw suicide bombings (piguʿa hitʾabdut) as the most emblematic form of Palestinian terror. Influenced by politicians and IDF spokespeople, Israeli Jews saw Palestinian suicide bombers as lacking strategy and system, as aiming to destroy Israel’s modernity and openness, as incoherent and invasive. “The confrontation with terror wrought by suicide strikers is like the fight against viruses,” said one reserve colonel (Barzilai 2004). If most Palestinians saw the second intifada as a renewed effort to resist Israeli occupation, Israeli Jews tended to see the intifada foremost as a military campaign against suicide bombings.

Whether Palestinian bombings triggered Israelis’ feelings of vulnerability or vice versa, Israeli society quickly became increasingly conservative in its views toward Palestinians and toward national security. Sharon, already the chairman of the center-right Likud Party, was easily elected prime minister in 2001 by promising greater force against Palestinians and greater security for Israelis. Political views once considered hawkish became centrist and, by the 2003 election, despite the deteriorating economic situation and increasing violence, voters strongly supported Sharon’s reelection. In this climate, post-Zionist debates about Israel’s democratic character, about its dispossession of the Palestinians, or about citizenship rather than religion as the determinant of rights, debates that had thrived in academic and popular arenas in the 1990s, lost their context as well as their conditions for possibility. Post-Zionism had entered a “deep freeze,” as a headline in Haʾaretz declared in April 2004 (Shehori 2004). “Palestinian terrorism is pushing us back into the Zionist womb,” journalist Tom Segev stated. There were certainly Israelis who described themselves as post-Zionists. As one woman in her mid-thirties who lived outside Jerusalem put it, “Post-Zionism is about our right to live here without any religious reasons and without a real narrative, a Zionist narrative, without any context. Just that we live here and this is our normal life, and we don’t need to find reasons or to justify ourselves.” Yet this woman and indeed nearly all the Israeli Jews I interviewed for this book considered themselves to be Zionists—even those who also called themselves post-Zionists, even those who were applying for European citizenship should the situation become untenable for them in Israel. Zionism was a multivalent concept, but its comfortable use during the second intifada reflected a greater concern for Jewish nationalism than for Israeli democracy.

Fear, specifically “fear of terror” (paḥad mi-terror), was spoken about as a social force that propelled government action and shaped everyday behavior. People spoke about living in constant fear, and newspapers reported on the large percentages of Israelis who were afraid they would be harmed in a suicide bombing. Israelis were deeply afraid for their own lives and for the existence of the State of Israel. As much as people looked toward the state for protection, they also disparaged their government for its inability to protect its citizens. To the right of the political spectrum, there was a need for greater state presence. To the left, the state was focused on goals other than protection of its citizens. Both the right and the left expressed a sense of abandonment by the state. As one young mother said to me: “What do I need a state for? They need to create order for me and for my family. If the government can’t protect us, then the state is not functioning.” The media griped that there was no umbrella institution to collect data on and respond to terrorism and that more money was going to security guards than to developing substantive protective technologies. As the director of the Shin Bet stated in 2003, “We have to say honestly, the defense establishment and, within it, the General Security Service have not provided the people of Israel the protective ‘suit’ they deserve” (O’Sullivan 2003).

The discourse of terror may have expressed profound fear, but the designation of something as terror was also a political tactic that delegitimized suicide bombings as a mode of political struggle by decoupling this form of resistance from a larger Palestinian nationalist effort. Israeli discourses of terror cloaked military operations in a veil of necessity and depicted state violence as a routine military response. Joseba Zulaika and William Douglass described a similar phenomenon in one of the first ethnographic studies to appraise representations of modern terrorism: “Once something that is called ‘terrorism’—no matter how loosely it is defined—becomes established in the public mind, ‘counterterrorism’ is seemingly the only prudent course of action” (1996: ix).¹¹ In Israel, state officials presented the IDF killing of Palestinian militants as “reprisals” and the closure of Palestinian towns as “operational activities.” Government rhetoric classified air strikes against Palestinian houses, restrictions of Palestinian movement through checkpoints, and the erection of barriers outside a book fair in Jerusalem as forms of “security,” because all responded to “Palestinian threat,” or, more accurately, to Israeli anticipation of Palestinian violence. Even left-wing media sources presented the IDF’s collective punishments of Palestinians as necessary reactions to Palestinian “terror” and tended to conceal that Palestinian violence was often a reaction to Israeli force (Korn 2004). When something was designated as terror, it was as if it already necessitated and legitimated a “security” response.

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.

National discourse in this period depicted the nation as fighting less for expanded settlement than for personal security, that is, for the safety of people’s bodies and minds as they moved through their day. Security had not always instantly implied personal bodily safety. In the first half of the 1990s, for example, early proponents of a barrier between Israel and the West Bank defended the barrier in terms of economic security, as something that would keep Palestinians from stealing Israeli cars and Israeli jobs. By 2002, however, both support for and criticism of the barrier depicted it as a wall against fear, something that could calm national hysteria and provide Israeli Jews with a sense of security, hope for peace, and calm. Israelis perceived IDF operations, likewise, as battles for the quality of their daily lives. We might view the nation’s focus on personal security as evidence of the success of Palestinian violence in making Israelis afraid even in their homes and on their streets. The frequency and severity of Palestinian suicide bombings led Israelis to feel uncomfortable in spaces and activities they most took for granted. But although Palestinian violence assaulted Israeli civilian realms, the Israeli government also harnessed the nature of this violence to remind Israelis that they were under personal threat and to portray “national security” as a necessary protection of daily life. As much as the penetration of terror into urban life made the conflict’s violence personal, Israeli reactions to Palestinian violence made “security” itself more familiar and indeed palatable to Israelis. It removed security from a realm of critique and questioning.

As a political discourse in Israel, security was both confining and productive. It not only constrained movement and people but also constituted knowledge, spaces, persons, and relationships (Foucault 1980, 1994a). It produced its own regime of truth and authority, and it materialized across the landscape. Security was, indeed, everywhere. Layers of mesh fencing surrounded school playgrounds and portable police barriers enclosed pedestrian malls, arranged in a somewhat different configuration each day. State-employed armed guards regularly jumped on and off city buses, scanning them for signs of suspicious activity. Guards, gates, closed circuit televisions, and hand-held metal detector wands accumulated in the landscape, and new traffic patterns and constant bag inspections created and constricted everyday routine. In response to bombings or to senses of threat, spaces of public consumption turned into checkpoint-like spaces. Walls and blockades zigzagged in and out of city spaces as if every building or road was a border. Long lines of cars snaked through the parking lots of shopping malls, as security guards checked trunks for explosives. Gates and walls turned cafés into fortresses and, with their railings and barriers, restaurants appeared to have the political weight of state lines. Outdoor public events were gated or moved indoors, and open-air pedestrian malls provoked plans for enclosure.

Security generated new forms of consumption: literally, new modes of eating behind walls and at home, and also a new consumer culture of security services. Israel’s Yellow Pages contained listings for over 375 security companies. They offered guard services and technologiyot miggun, or “technologies of protection,” which ranged from intrusion detection systems to bulletproof briefcases to the “Magshoe,” an automatic metal detector for shoes. Security was bought and sold, developed, invented, implemented, and circulated. Not unlike other ways of establishing “observable empirical” so-called facts on the ground, material technologies of security were thought to give “credible form to a Jewish nation” (Abu El-Haj 2001: 129).

Security was ubiquitous, but it was also itinerant. Fortification was portable and ephemeral, fickle and unpredictable. Open spaces were suddenly barricaded and established gates suddenly disappeared. The Tel Aviv police set up roadblocks within the city during a suicide-bombing alert only to remove them hours later. The Jerusalem police enclosed a summer street festival with armed guards and fences one night and left it unenclosed the next. In its portability, security also transcended military, state, and civilian domains. Soldiers moved fluidly from military service to security-guard jobs, and private architecture firms worked together with local police departments to rebuild bombed cafés. However capricious, impromptu, or temporary, forms of security still splintered the nation and overlay public space with political gravity.

On a different scale, security materialized in everyday artifacts and took the form of minute and nearly indiscernible details. There were security surcharges added to restaurant bills, noted in fine print at the bottom of small slips of paper. Barely conspicuous to begin with, they became so commonplace that they were often overlooked. Small notes were sometimes added as a courtesy in the corner of wedding invitations—“security will be provided”—which calmed some guests and often receded into nuptial chaos. Though subtle and fleeting, these signs of security delineated experiences of security as powerfully as looming artifacts like walls, gates, and guards. In addition to tangible forms of surveillance, national discourses of threat and practices of alertness manifest themselves in intimate practices and personal relationships. There were grandfathers, for example, who assumed new roles as chauffeurs for their grandchildren so that they would not have to ride the city buses, which were susceptible to Palestinian suicide bombings. There was the high-school girl on the Jerusalem bus who whispered to her friends, “My parents would kill me if I got killed!” Having been forbidden by her parents from riding public buses, she enlisted her classmates to look out for passengers who appeared “suspicious.” Her alertness was a reaction to fear, yet it was also a mode of bonding with her peers and a response to parental discipline. The gaze of her parents appeared to be more significant than her own gaze for Palestinians.

Fences and finer-grained practices of fortification placated some Israeli fear, but they also corroborated anxiety and anger toward Palestinians. Rather than truly soothing its citizens’ anxiety about Palestinian threats, state institutions transvalued fear and validated it, transforming emotions of suspicion into traits of good citizenship. People developed exceptional states of alertness and hypervigilance to supposed signs of danger and to signs of security itself. Walls and guards affirmed the sense of disorder they purported to prevent, eliciting the very vulnerabilities they claimed to temper. It was a self-fulfilling process, a phenomenon that anthropologists of violence have studied in contexts in which those identified as the state and those perceived as terroristic come to mirror each other; where acts called counterterrorism create the very reality they contest.¹³ The second intifada was a time of fierce interaction between security and fear, one fueling the other without resolution.

People often speak of a cycle of violence and security, but security was very often tantamount to violence. Security was violence in other terms, “the logos of war expressed as a logos of peace” (Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero 2008: 275). Simultaneously a form of biopolitical and sovereign control, security was depicted in state discourses as a way of managing a population through its protection rather than through its death, a way of regulating people’s lives through techniques and technologies rather than through juridical power.¹⁴ However, when the state used its military and legal power to preserve its territory and population through the subjugation of Palestinians, security became indistinguishable from sovereignty. Palestinians were “disciplined” or subjugated by the violence and suppression of Israeli security, while Israeli Jews were “disciplined” to be a panoptical population that, in turn, scrutinized Palestinians. Israel thus exemplified the contradictory nature of the modern state, promising safety while coercing and controlling (Edkins 2003: 6).

In their pledge to protect Israelis against “threat,” Israeli state officials conceived of national security broadly as any response to whatever infringed on the survival and certainty of the state (Hajjar 2005: 31–32). State discourse invoked “security” in all-encompassing and self-validating ways to identify all military acts, all practices of occupation, all forms of state violence, and all expansions of Jewish settlement. Public policy on Israel has tended to echo the state’s own discourse, using phrases such as security risks, security facilities, security needs, security assets, security techniques, natural security, effective security, security guarantees, and security implications. The connotations of and referents for these terms, however, are ambiguous. Are “security risks” hazards to human safety or dangers shaped by “security” itself? Does the idea of “security needs” leave any room for discussion as to the necessity of military action? For whom is “effective security” effective? Do “security implications” implicate state sovereignty or human rights? I hope this book will offer new ways to think about the security terminology that is often used without explication. To set my own use of the term “security” apart from its applications in Israeli political rhetoric and to try to move away from the state’s own analytical categories and perspectives (Blom Hansen and Stepputat 2001: 5), readers should imagine quotation marks around all my uses of the term in this book. This is not to suggest that security is unreal, but rather that its meaning is always contextual and in flux.

As an ethnography of embodied practice, this book does not search for understanding solely in people’s minds and speech, but rather it locates knowledge within the quotidian, the personal, and the plural practices that constantly make and renovate people’s lives (Mol 2002: 32). For all the talking with, interviewing, and living with my informants, I only fully gleaned how security circumscribes the lives of Israeli Jews when I attended to people’s “movement, gesticulating, walking,” the focus of Michel de Certeau’s study of the practices of everyday life (1988: 130). For de Certeau, the world in which people live is not a discursive circumstance that precedes the subject but rather is the product of subjects’ practiced interaction with it. People both actualize a matrix of fixed possibilities and interdictions and also invent possibilities by either transforming or abandoning certain spatial signifiers. Everyday practices do not necessarily order the world in purposeful, self-defined, or strategic ways, but the minutiae of daily life, be it walking or cooking, contains the substance of subjectivity and of cultural logic. In Israel, everyday practices of security in 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 violence. The idea of coping, we see, can function like other practices 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.