Security and Suspicion. Juliana Ochs
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and monitored that of their coworkers. Amid a mid-morning mix-up regarding the placement of the barrier, one guard commanded another: “Don’t yell. Speak quietly,” suggesting their attention to calm. The guards were conscientious about their role in projecting to the many passersby that the situation was under control and that official bodies were efficiently restoring order to the street and to daily life.
In many ways, the post-bombing scene exemplified what Baruch Kimmerling has called an “interrupted system” to describe how Israeli society can fluidly mobilize military and civilian domains during times of intensified conflict without allowing war to transgress the boundaries of ordinary life. Kimmerling focused on the sinuous transitions Israeli society is able to make between a “time of interference” and “routine time,” although at the Café Hillel site, the emergency was so routinized that calamity could have easily been mistaken for routine (1985: 11). An hour after I arrived, workers surrounded the damaged café with a tall metal frame overlaid with light-blue wooden panels, which shielded the building from view. In the coming weeks, this wall, like the security guards, not only enclosed the café as it was rebuilt but enabled the bombed space to become fleetingly a nonplace, an ambivalent space temporarily removed from the realm of the familiar (Augé 1995: 78). As the café underwent restoration and reconstitution, it became a space out of time that pedestrians perceived only partially and in fractions, even as it was a public space fully entrenched in the ongoing political conflict.
The red barricades concealed but also drew attention to the disorder that morning. Bystanders congregated and security guards worked to move the mass of people across the street. By this point, the woman in the white bandana sat on the ground, her teary face in her hands. The photographer, worn out, leaned against a wall. I, emotionally exhausted, was in tears as well. The guard must have noticed the emotion of the three of us who had been there all morning, and when he cordoned off the site, he quietly let us remain behind the barricade. He seemed as attentive to our emotional needs as to the need for social order, or perhaps he recognized that those needs were inseparable. In this way, he acted like the Parisian Metro police that Patricia Paperman describes, who were experts in social emotion, discerning affect “in subtleties of social interaction” (2003: 399). The security that the private café guards provided when they calmly answered questions, when they erected barriers, and when they cordoned off people was a security more sensitive and considerably less tangible than one might expect from armed guards at the site of a Palestinian suicide bombing.
Figure 4. A woman from the neighborhood lights memorial candles.
Artifacts of memorialization immediately filled the site. In the hours after the bombing, almost as soon as bodies had been carried away, people began to fill the concrete railing adjacent to the café with traditional Jewish memorial (yahrtzeit) candles in blue tin holders. When candles blew out in the wind, new visitors rekindled their flames. Over the course of the next day, the entire wall overflowed with candles and discarded matches. Soon, the floor beneath the wall and, later, a table set up specially, was studded with more candles as well as with flowers, small notes, and prayer books left for others to use. The bombing space became not only highly charged but also sacralized. Soon, a large Israeli flag hoisted by neighborhood residents flew from the security guard stand. The blue-and-white flag fluttering in the wind seemed to avow that rebuilding was a national duty.
In the weeks of rebuilding, the assemblage of ad hoc memorial artifacts developed more permanence. The pale-blue wall concealing construction became a backdrop for traditional Jewish Israeli bereavement-announcements mounted by family members. Printed in stark black letters, they publicized the name of the deceased, provided information about the funeral and house of mourning, and sometimes contained an inscription or biblical verse. Large colored photographs and smaller black-and-white newspaper clippings were mounted on the wall. Soon, two small tables were set up to hold large floral wreaths, some with the names of national and international charitable and political organizations, and others with individuals’ names handwritten on ribbons. These stood for days, until they withered and were replaced by new wreaths. Care for these mounted objects was the impromptu duty of the security guards, who hung up photographs given to them by visitors, taped on personal blessings, and kept the candles near the wreaths lit. These guards, employees of a security company contracted by Café Hillel and paid by the hour, were the custodians not only of the café and the crowds but also of a community’s mourning. Their “security” was far reaching, sensitive to emotions, and visibly relational.
Figure 5. A security guard sits inside the red barricade, chatting with a passerby. On the temporary blue wall behind him hang memorial posters and floral wreaths.
The Aesthetics of Security
With workers on ladders still adding final touches, Café Hillel reopened exactly one month after the bombing, the timing linked significantly to the end of shloshim, the traditional thirty-day Jewish mourning period. At a quiet but well-attended memorial ceremony, participants lit candles and a Jerusalem rabbi mounted a mezuzah, an entryway amulet containing passages from scripture. In the café the next morning, a steady trickle of patrons entered, resuming their routine, this time in a distinctively politicized space. As one customer explained to me that day, “You want to show some solidarity. Because you identify yourself with the place, with the losses. Because you’re thinking about what happened there, about all the people that got killed and injured, about the people that you’ve read about in the papers.” For some, sitting in the café now had a valence of patriotic defiance, seen as unwillingness to give in to Palestinian violence and its efforts to disrupt daily life.
As I observed time and again, people who entered the reopened café lingered by the doorway to survey the new space before proceeding to the counter. They scanned the entirety of the space, seeming to look as much from curiosity as from concern. Was the café rebuilt as before? Was it safer now? Many patrons ordered their coffee to take out, something considerably more common after the bombing. People who sat down with their coffee tended to sit along the back wall, a common safety-minded practice of positioning oneself as far as possible from the potential entry-point of a suicide bomber. Israelis sometimes used the term omek estrategi, “strategic depth,” which in military terminology refers to the distance between the front lines and key inner population centers. In specifically Israeli military discourse, there is the idea that Israel must attack Palestinians first to ensure that military activities take place on enemy territory, something that Ariel Sharon long advocated. When the concept was transplanted to civilian urban space, the doorway to a downtown Jerusalem café becomes the buffer zone and the space outside that, enemy territory. There was always a combination of cynical humor and gravity when people used “strategic depth” to describe where they wanted to sit. They recognized the absurdity of their depiction of cafés as war zones, but they still really experienced public spaces as zones of lurking threat and everyday risk calculation. It was as Allen Feldman wrote about the polarity between the observer and the observed: “that relations of domination are spatially marked by the increase of perceptual (and thus social) distance from the body of the Other” (1994: 92).
Perhaps the gawking patrons noticed what I had observed: that the café appeared much the same as it had before the bombing. The newly rebuilt Café Hillel was fronted, as it had been before, with large plate-glass windows lined inside with a long wooden bar and a row of stools. Adjacent to the cashiers’ counter, a glass display case of cakes and sandwiches still greeted patrons upon entering and small round tables still stood in the large indoor space. But what had been a large outdoor seating area was now enclosed like a greenhouse with tall glass windows. The enclosure seemed to stand as a shield against future bombings, yet with its planked wooden floors and a black cloth awning overhead, it retained an outdoor feel and did not revise the atmosphere of the café as a whole. Why was the café rebuilt so similarly to its pre-bombing form? One would have thought that the café’s owners, not to mention its patrons, would want the café to feel more fortified, to be enclosed in brick, perhaps, instead of defenseless glass. But the politics of rebuilding during conflict combined with the psychology