Security and Suspicion. Juliana Ochs
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Hebrew class to arrive. When she did, we moved inside to a seat near the back, which was her preference. After finishing our coffees, I returned home and as I crawled into bed, I heard one ambulance siren, then another, and a third. There is an intifada aphorism that one siren signals a pregnant lady, two signals a heart attack, and three a suicide bombing. A quick check online at the Haʾaretz Web site confirmed that there had been a suicide bombing—at Café Hillel. I immediately called the friend I had just met; even without family in the country, there is the impulse to call. We spoke briefly, our “what if’s felt redundant. My return to Café Hillel the next morning was as much cathartic as analytic.
The woman in the bandana, the photographer, and I stood for nearly an hour without speaking. The photographer snapped a picture every few minutes. I periodically made a note in my notebook. The woman continued to gaze and smoke. We were joined for a few moments by a middle-aged man who wore a yarmulke and carried a small prayer book, with which he prayed quietly to himself before joining us in our staring and then moving on. In this space of death, Jewish ritual was summoned and performed and Jewish objects, such as candles and prayer books, were mobilized. Two religious high school girls dressed in long denim skirts and sneakers approached next, each carrying a pocket prayer book and a cell phone, each object, presumably, a conduit for a different kind of communication. Mobile phones, in fact, dotted the landscape that day. Inside the café, an interior space even without walls, rotating groups of men spoke as much on their phones as with each other. Barking into the speaker, they negotiated with insurance companies and made plans for the rebuilding.3 Several passersby arrived at the scene only to call a friend or relative to tell them they were here, and then moved on. Some took photographs with their cell phones. Others cried into their phones; words were superfluous.
While we stared and as the neighborhood woke up and began to go to work and to school, the bombed site was first cordoned off and then enclosed. Heavy red plastic barriers replaced the red-and-white tape of the night’s temporary cordons. Behind the barrier sat male and female security guards wearing fluorescent yellow vests emblazoned with the name of their security company and the label “Security and Guarding.” By late morning, at least eight of these hired guards stood shaded by two large orange sun umbrellas advertising Straus, the ice-cream company. If the red barrier shielded daily life from a messy public space thrust into conflict, the guards, too, functioned as a kind of border. They buffered the bombed landscape with a human face that provided a security that was both commanding and compassionate.
Figure 3. A newspaper photographer and a high school girl with a prayer book and cell phone look into the shell of the café.
While a range of civilian spaces had been targets of Palestinian bombings during the second intifada, Israeli Jews tended to see cafés as the primary index of Palestinian violence. This was because Israeli aspirations toward cosmopolitanism and secularism were embodied in the country’s café culture, an ethos that selectively obscured the legacy of the Arab coffeehouse in favor of the European café (Stein 2002: 17). Bombed cafés thus stood as emblems of a precarious nation, symbols of the ways Palestinian violence transformed Israeli daily life, assaulted normative consumption, and threatened Jewish nationalism (Stein 2002). Thus when Israelis maintained that morning coffee and al fresco dining lay at the crux of conflict, they did so with little sarcasm. The normalization sought in cafés was as imperative as national order sought through pioneers’ shovels or soldiers’ guns. The idea of the normal has special resonance in Israel, a country where Jewish nationalism aimed to “normalize” the Jewish people and make them into a nation like other nations. During the second intifada, Israeli Jews in their twenties and thirties often conjured a different kind of normal, one that entailed veiling Zionism with a cosmopolitan busyness. The café culture somehow simultaneously signified this post-Zionist normal as well as the nationalist concept of Israel as a normal nation. It was not surprising, then, that the act of rebuilding and returning to a café after a bombing was, for many Israelis during the second intifada, a decisive act of normalization and perseverance.
Everything about the reconstruction of a building destroyed violently amid conflict is contested and fraught with meaning. Who does the rebuilding and where, whether it is rebuilt the same as before, whether there is an overt memorial plaque—all are open to question. Much of the literature on the rebuilding of structures ruined during war or conflict focuses on postconflict settings, contexts in which a victor has often been declared, large-scale relief work has begun, and national narratives have begun to coalesce. Nicholas Saunders’s study of the meaning contained in the landscape of the World War II Western Front, for example, shows that some landscapes of conflict are deliberately maintained in a state of destruction to serve as a testament to past aggression (2001: 42). In contrast, in the case of Israeli establishments destroyed by Palestinian bombings during the second intifada, rebuilding occurred while conflict persisted. This endowed the reconstruction efforts with significance—as modes of retaliation more than forms of memorialization, as symbols of perseverance rather than closure. Rebuilding itself became a form of participation in the conflict, tied up with discourses of violence, notions of nationhood, and strategies of security. The Israeli public expected and the state ensured the expedient renovation of bombed sites. Every café or restaurant destroyed in a suicide bombing during the second intifada was rebuilt, often in the same location. Not only the fact of rebuilding but also the process of rebuilding became routinized, with a protocol shaped by responses to prior bombings and by discourses of perseverance and swift returns to “normal.”
This chapter describes the rebuilding of Café Hillel and shows how discourses of security materialized in particular aesthetics. As the café was remade, its built forms were imbued with the politics of nationhood, and Israeli discourses of security generated their own explanations for the space’s safety and danger.4 Assertions of Israel’s strength and wellbeing sedimented themselves in the café’s walls and windows while its physical spaces and patrons’ movements through them embodied concepts of Israeli sophistication and normality. My focus on the interplay between discourse and fortified architecture follows scholars of material culture who examine translations between cultural knowledge and materiality or, as Victor Buchli explains, “the terms by which discursive empirical reality is materialized and produced” (2002: 16). In describing the rhetoric, actors, and imaginaries involved in Café Hillel’s rebuilding, this chapter introduces the ways security works in everyday life in Israel through personal rationalization, through symbols, and through cynicism, as much as through walls and certainty. Even when security takes the form of senses and signs, it generates Israeli identity and state authority.
The Public Space of a Bombing
Bombs attain a “shadowy, mysterious presence in the life of the city,” as Vyjayanthi Rao states in his ethnographic history of the 1993 bombings in Bombay and, in their immediate aftermath, constitute a particular kind of public sphere (2007: 570). Sites of suicide bombings in Israel also became instantly mythical spaces where the nation viewed itself as under threat but able to endure, spaces where conflict was simultaneously reified and normalized. After its September bombing, Café Hillel reentered the public domain as a national, state, and religious site, a process mediated by artifacts, practices, and discourses of security.5 The site was consecrated by religious practices, whether in the form of ZAKA’s work or individual prayer, and by performances of security. Security introduced feelings of nationalism not through force or formal pronouncement but through subtle inflections of ritual and sociality.
Hired by Café Hillel from a private security company and directed by the Jerusalem police, six security guards lined the inside of Café Hillel’s red barrier on the first morning of rebuilding. I asked one vested worker why there were so many guards. He explained, in a voice suggesting I should have already known, that bombed sites are immediately bolstered following an attack for fear that a second bombing will strike soon after. As I observed in the ensuing hours, however, the guards’ role was not just preemptive; their function was undoubtedly social. The security guards kept the pedestrian public at a safe distance from the site to enable the clean-up crews and insurance appraisers to do their work. More than keeping danger and intrusion from the barricaded area, they worked to prevent the terror and tragedy from seeping