Security and Suspicion. Juliana Ochs
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an initial payroll of just two guards, Hashmira started small but grew steadily over the coming decades.
By 1939, Hashmira had a force of seven guards who wore badges with the company’s emblem—two intersecting keys and a large, radiant eye beneath the words “The independent police in the Land of Israel.” Armed with clubs, flashlights, and whistles, they guarded Jewish settlements in the Tel Aviv area. The company helped to police the nation-information in ways not unlike Jewish paramilitary organizations, such as the Haganah, which acted in state-like ways for the growing Jewish community. Jewish settlers formed the Haganah, meaning “defense,” after the Arab riots of 1920 and expanded it further after the 1929 riots.7 Although officially outlawed by the British Mandatory Authorities, the Haganah provided its members with arms training, engaged in armed violence against Palestinians, and established central arms depots. By the time of the 1936 Arab Revolt, it was a full-fledged army.
When Haganah’s soldiers and Hashmira’s guards fashioned themselves as sentinels of Jewish settlements, they were not only laying claim to the idea of a Jewish biblical homeland but also embodying the political aspirations for Jewish power that began in Europe in the late nineteenth century. Jewish settlers’ turn to defense in this period may have been spurred by Palestinian retaliation, as Almog (2000) and Ezrahi (1997) have shown, but the inclination to self-protect lay at the foundation of Jewish nationalist thought. Self-defense, according to early Jewish nationalist discourses, would enable the Jewish people to become a “normal” nation (Shapira 1992: 25–26). The desire to reverse the vulnerability of Eastern European Jews was particularly characteristic of Labor or Socialist Zionism, the dominant strand of left-wing Zionism, but revisionist Zionist thought and, by the 1930s, religious Zionism, also espoused a radical shift from a place of political weakness to one of sovereign strength. The “new Jew” was expected not only to settle the land but also to defend it from native Arabs (Almog 2000). Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Jewish settlers in Palestine, as Yael Zerubavel suggests, transposed the biblical conception of God as sentinel—“the guardian of Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps” (Psalm 121:4)—onto the new Jewish guards (1995: 24). From the 1930s onward, the idea of self-protection became almost an end unto itself. According to Uri Ben-Eliezer, “military practices gradually became institutionalized and habitual … until finally the idea of implementing a military solution to Israel’s national problems was not only enshrined as a value in its own right but was also considered legitimate, desirable, and indeed, the best option” (1998: x). Jewish settlers crafted self-defense as a condition of possibility for Jewish national identity and, eventually, for the legitimacy of the nation-state.
On the eve of statehood, Hashmira employed 150 guards and Shermister, now working with his son Kadish, opened a new branch in Jerusalem. After the British government withdrew from Palestine, Jewish leadership led by David Ben-Gurion declared Israel’s independence in May 1948. However, when Palestinian representatives and the Arab League rejected the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan (UN General Assembly Resolution 181) to divide Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state and create Jerusalem as an international city, the armies of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Iraq attacked Israel. This was the start of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, known to Israelis as the War of Independence and to Palestinians as al-Naqba (the Catastrophe). During the war, twenty Hashmira guards from the Jerusalem branch worked alongside the newly formed IDF to stand watch over ration warehouses in Jerusalem, a response to the blockade by Palestinian Arabs of food and water to the Jewish community of Jerusalem.
A year of fighting ended with the 1949 Armistice Agreement, which established the Green Line as the critical border between Israel and a theoretical Palestinian state. Jordan annexed what became known as the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and Egypt took control of the Gaza Strip. The fate of an estimated 600,000–760,000 Palestinian Arabs who were expelled or fled the country has been one of the chief sources of controversy in the Middle East ever since (Morris 1987). Soon after the Galilee and the Negev, captured during the war, came under Israeli control, Hashmira opened new offices, as if in place of the displaced Palestinian residents.8 Kadish Shermister established new branches in Jewish cities such as Haifa and Hadera, which the state was filling with Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and Yemen. A Hashmira office opened in Acre, an Arab city with a Palestinian population that Israel largely displaced when it captured the port city in 1948 (Pappe 2007: 100), and in development towns such as Kiryat Shmona, which Israel established in 1949 on the site of al-Khalisa, a Bedouin town (Khalidi and Elmusa 1992: 462–63).
Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion declared during the war: “I have to admit that I am not capable of seeing anything now other than through the prism of security…. Security is involved in all branches of life” (Ben-Eliezer 1998: 207). To the first prime minister, security meant not only military strength but also economic independence and a modern, densely settled landscape. In the early years of the state, the work of Hashmira was part of this broad vision of security. After Israel’s invasion of the Sinai Peninsula in 1956, for example, when Israeli civilians and the military clashed with Palestinian militants, or fedayeen, primarily from the Egyptian-occupied Gaza Strip, Hashmira police worked alongside the IDF’s infantry units and paratroopers to guard Jews from fedayeen attacks along the Lebanese, Jordanian, and Syrian borders. Security, in Uri Ben-Eliezer’s words, “was no longer a pure state-bureaucratic project but the people’s enterprise” (1998: 214).
The 1967 war “turned the Arab-Israeli conflict upside down. It marked the final stage in the reversal of power relationships” (Dowty 2005: 110). When Israel seized Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, the Golan Heights from Syria, and the West Bank including East Jerusalem from Jordan, Hashmira guards assumed position in the newly annexed Golan Heights and Sharm-El-Sheikh in the Sinai Peninsula to assist the government in establishing Jewish settlements outside the Green Line. If the decades between 1948 and 1967 were a period of interstate conflict between Israel and its neighboring countries, Israel’s 1967 war with Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, which Palestinians call al-Naksah (the Setback), initiated Israel’s direct negotiation with Palestinians. Roughly one million Palestinians clung tenuously to two small tracts of land now under Israeli military occupation. Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza subjected the majority of the Palestinians living there to Israeli military administration without Israeli citizenship.9
Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation galvanized. The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), formed in 1964, became stronger, and Fatah became the dominant force of the Palestinian national movement (Baumgarten 2005: 30; Kurz 2005). Largely under Fatah’s leadership, Palestinian militants carried out bombings and hijackings against Israeli civilians, such as in July 1969 when two members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine commandeered an El Al airplane. Hashmira guards were part of Israel’s arsenal against Palestinian resistance. When Israel stationed Hashmira guards at seaports and at the Lod Airport (renamed Ben Gurion International Airport in 1973), the private guards served not only as an overt response to Palestinian hijackings but as a covert and broader effort to assert Israeli territorial control. During this period, military and civilian security came to assume, according to Oren Barak and Gabriel Sheffer, “a hegemonic position in the country” (2007: 15).
The Labor governments of the late 1960s and early 1970s were not committed to a single vision for settlement in the newly annexed territories. Conflicting government guidelines and competing proposals by government officials reflected a range of territorial ambitions and settlement ideologies (Weizman 2007: 90–92). However, when the right-wing Likud Party led by Menachem Begin came to power in 1977 amid the growth of religious nationalism together with the expansion of business corporations and the amplification of Mizrahi voices (Ram 2004), Jewish settlement in the West Bank became an organized state project. The Likud government regarded settlements as a human border of defense, a precaution against future invasion, and a way to expand Jewish territory into Palestinian areas. At the same time, the messianic civilian settler movement that organized in 1968 and formalized as Gush Emunim in 1974 was determined to establish Jewish presence throughout the Land of Israel, thereby making Israeli withdrawal from the newly captured territories impossible (Dowty 2005: 117). As these religious Jewish settlers established their own residential outposts, the state created an infrastructure of Israeli-built roads and bridges that began to crisscross the West Bank, circumventing Palestinian