Security and Suspicion. Juliana Ochs
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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