Security and Suspicion. Juliana Ochs
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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