Security and Suspicion. Juliana Ochs
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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.
Chapter 2
Senses of Security: Rebuilding Café Hillel
At 7:30 on a September morning in 2003, a middle-aged man wearing red shorts and sport sandals stood across the street from the popular Café Hillel in the German Colony, an upscale Jewish neighborhood in West Jerusalem. His head turned downward, he was reading the cover article of the daily newspaper Maʾariv, which described the previous night’s suicide bombing of this very café by a Palestinian militant. The article’s large color photograph reflected the shattered storefront he now stood opposite. In the image and before him, the café’s sign had been swept off and a blown-out roof left only a dangling black awning. Beside the man, two middle-aged women each holding a dog on a leash stood quietly facing the shell of the café from across the narrow but busy city street as they scrutinized the remains. These women soon joined three others leaning against a stone wall. As they gazed in horror, concern, and curiosity, the bystanders’ very scrutiny of the scene became part of the spectacle of the bombing.
The five women debated the order of the previous night’s events, exchanging hearsay and speaking as secondhand witnesses. “I heard that the bomber tried to get into Pizza Meter next door,” said one, “but the security guard blocked his entry, so he moved on to Café Hillel.” A second added what she had learned: “The security guard at Café Hillel tried to prevent the bomber from entering the café but was killed in the explosion.” A third woman reminded the others that the street is called Emek Refaʾim, “Valley of Ghosts.” The street’s biblical name, she implied, had augured the calamity. A mother in the group focused on the seemingly mundane details that undergirded disaster: “It was a loud explosion, but it wasn’t very big. See, the bottles on the [café’s] bar are still standing! My kids did not even wake up. Did yours?” She saw her children’s unbroken slumber as an indication of the bombing’s relatively diminutive scale, her minimization of the explosion exemplifying what Stanley Cohen calls, in his study of indifference and denial, a “dulled routinization” (Cohen 2001: 82). Reacting as if nothing had changed, or unconsciously protecting her own emotions, she readily normalized the disaster. These women were able to place the ordinary things of life, such as dogs and children, alongside a newly disjointed reality without deflating daily life itself, maintaining seemingly “orderly surfaces that deny fragmentation” (Mertz 2002: 378 n. 26).
Figure 1. Onlookers across the street from Café Hillel the morning after the bombing.
Able to speak of the attack with facility and ease, the bystanders became, as Allen Feldman did when he studied the militarized Belfast of the 1980s, “ensnared by a dialogical nexus where acts of violence had an everyday coherence and banality” (2003: 59). With numerous Palestinian suicide bombings in recent years and with marked investments of state resources and emotional energy into vigilance for Palestinian violence, when a bombing did occur, people found themselves making sense even of a sudden and dire tragedy. In the logic of daily security, bombings seemed to corroborate suspicion and substantiate hyperalertness.
Only hours before this morning assembly, the café had been a scene of chaos. At 11:30 P.M. on September 9, 2003, a Palestinian militant linked to the East Jerusalem-based Hamas group exploded himself at the entrance to Café Hillel. The large Starbucks-like café, with bold, eyecatching menu boards, trendy baristas, and vegetarian sandwiches, had opened that summer, the third branch of a successful Jerusalem chain. The bombing struck to the core of Israeli fury and fear, not only because of the ten deaths and many injuries but also because it targeted a residential area away from the city center that people saw as impervious to bombings. The suicide bombing, attributed to Hamas, came during a crumbling of the peace process. Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas had resigned amid a power struggle with Yasser Arafat, creating an upsurge of Palestinian violence, and Israel’s hunt for Hamas leaders entailed numerous deaths, injuries, and intensified restrictions on Palestinian movement.
During the night, as soon as those killed and wounded in the bombing had been removed from the site, and even before the last ambulance siren faded, ultra-Orthodox volunteers from ZAKA, with heavy beards, large black yarmulkes, and orange fluorescent vests, searched for and removed remaining body parts strewn throughout the site. The male-only civilian organization ensured that Jewish death rites were observed by collecting and later identifying and matching every scattered piece of flesh and drop of blood.1 Working alongside this civic religious presence were the municipal cleaning crews, who swept the window shards, hauled off splintered tables, and mopped puddles of blood. By morning, the remaining shell of the café was emptied of the fragments of disaster. Only small shards from the large glass windows that had formed the walls of the building were scattered amid the intermingled groups of rescue workers, municipal police, injured individuals, and onlookers. By the time the sun rose, the floors were clean and the tables were stacked. A peculiar kind of calm seemed to settle over the space, like the “uncanny silence” that Thomas Blom Hansen observed amid the Bombay riots (2001: 12). Though in ruins, the bombed Café Hillel was sanitized, as if a quick cleaning could prevent the bombing from becoming permanently etched into the civilian psyche.
By late morning, Emek Refaʾim Street was lined with state and civilian personnel, each group “overcoming threats to disorder” in its own way (Mehta and Chatterji 2001: 234). Television vans with cameras and journalists with microphones had been stationed since daybreak. Bulldozers carried wreckage and police directed the mounting traffic. Three tall soldiers in gray uniforms and two city police officers leaned on a parked police car, looking silently upward toward the café. Nearby, twelve male and female magavnikim, or “Border Police,” the Israeli border gendarmerie, stood between two heavy military jeeps. They wore olive-green uniforms, rifles slung over their shoulders. The role of this military presence at the café that morning was unclear: they were neither clearing the area nor inspecting passersby, but their uniforms and conspicuous weaponry nonetheless invoked the power of state sovereignty. Although the nature of the state’s authority was indistinct, performances of law and order still reified state power. As Jean and John Comaroff write in their reflection on images and perceptions of lawlessness in postcolonial South Africa, “So it is with the spectacle of policing, the staging of which strives to make actual, both to its subjects and to itself, the authorized face, and force, of the state—of a state, that is, whose legitimacy is far from unequivocal” (2004: 805). Indeed, even the quiet presence of the Israeli authorities simultaneously displayed and normalized the bombing. With a relaxed posture and muted conversation, they conveyed with uncanny reassurance that this had happened many times before and that they knew what to do. Despite its seeming passivity, the military presence enacted what Don Handelman calls in a description of Israeli emergency response the “state-owned and state-sponsored ways of remaking order from chaos” (2004: 12).2
Figure 2. Near the café, Israeli Border Police cluster around their jeeps.
And yet, attempts to reclaim order at this bomb scene and even efforts to embody the state were hardly the sole task of the state. Intimate practices also permeated the site that morning. Standing next to me and staring into the bombed space was a young woman wearing a white bandana and smoking a cigarette. Next to her was a male newspaper photographer, seemingly distracted in quiet solemnity. I was tied to the site in my own way. I had been at Café Hillel the night before, sitting at a small table by the