In this everyday life saturated with security, Israeli Jews generally remained aware of security’s inefficacies and contradictions, whether questioning the ability of the separation wall to thwart Palestinian suicide bombings or cynically implying that the state pantomimes superficial protection. Even those apparently critical of Israeli violence against Palestinians, however, still craved not just national security but also everyday security. People tended to see their desire for well-being as outside politics: they did not, for example, want the separation wall to define Israeli borders, but they did want it to keep their children safe. This, regrettably, was the politics of security at its most powerful. People experienced their daily engagement with security as benign, nonviolent, and politically inconsequential, and yet it was firmly woven into a larger Israeli political fabric of occupation and exclusion. This is not to say that desires for protection inevitably reproduced the conditions of state policy or that experiences of fear necessarily led to the proliferation of state discourse.19 The affective side of security, that is, the role of emotion, intimacy, and the body in reproducing state notions of safety and threat, suggests that critiques of state discourses of security can truly reverberate only when they are sensitive to the multiple guises that state security assumes in the form of escape, fantasy, and desire for the normal.
Vered’s wedding convoy that opened this Introduction was an ephemeral domain of security in which vision coexisted with blindness, the familiar with the foreboding, and fantasy with materiality. So too does everyday security thrive in the junctures of these seeming incommensurabilities. Actions taken in the name of security by the State of Israel or by individuals, in their seemingly innocuous desire for comfort and often-subconscious everyday practices of suspicion and exclusion, did not resolve the binaries of safety and danger, private and state, self and other, or peace and violence. Rather, security held these binaries in tension, becoming an end unto itself, creating its own authority, its own truths. Ultimately, the illusion of normalization that security provided in moments like the drive to the wedding in Jerusalem precluded ardent efforts to get out of conflict. Providing comfort in its very enactment, security prompted only resistance to meaningful resolution to conflict.
Chapter 1
A Genealogy of Israeli Security
With intrusion-detection systems and metal-detection archways, Elite Professional Units and Shopping Mall Units, Hashmira Security Technologies Ltd. is Israel’s largest security company and the largest private employer in the country. Its employees, veterans of IDF combat units, guard Israeli ports and military defense-related institutions across the country. The company provides monitoring technologies to the Israeli prison system and to Israel Railways and calls its “Moked 99” unit Israel’s largest private police force. With earnings that grew from $60 million in 1995 to $185 million in 2003, Hashmira’s revenue and scope reflect the expansion of Israel’s security industry in the 1990s, itself tied to the global proliferation of security corporations working within and across national borders.1 The second intifada further bolstered Israel’s military industrial complex, and, with it, Hashmira’s earnings.2 Recent expansion notwithstanding, Hashmira’s roots are deeper than this period of Israeli and Palestinian violence. Hashmira was founded more than a decade before the State of Israel, a company spurred by Jewish settlers’ desires to lay claim to land and prevail over the protests of native Palestinian inhabitants. In many ways, to tell the history of Hashmira is to tell a history of security and defense in the State of Israel. The growth of the company delineates the details of Jewish settlement, Israeli land seizure, and state panopticism. In order to contextualize the ethnographic chapters that follow, this chapter structures a brief genealogy of Israeli security as a state preoccupation and national culture around a chronology of the Hashmira security company. My focus is the history of Israeli state security, but I use the security company as a lens to show how an economy of security has been integral to Israel’s history and to demonstrate that security is a discourse and set of practices generated jointly by civilians and the state.3 Security, as this history intimates, is a technology of nationalism rather than its fate.4
Histories of Israeli defense frequently depict Israeli practices of security as inevitable outcomes of historical circumstance. Even scholarship critical of Israel’s relations with Palestinians and neighboring Arab countries renders Israeli defense an unavoidable reaction to Palestinian hostility toward Jewish settlement. Scholars portray Jews in Palestine as “forced to defend themselves” and present force as something to which Jewish settlers need to “resort” (Shapira 1992: 367, 122). Studies of Israeli politics that present the “threat of annihilation” (Shalit 1994) as a purely material reality describe security as an inexorable, inescapable response to danger. These ideas about the inevitability and necessity of force can risk corroborating and naturalizing actions in the name of national security. This chapter’s genealogy frames Israeli security not only as an outcome of long-standing conflict with Palestinians but also as a set of institutions and dispositions grounded in the Jewish nationalist aspiration to create Israel as a “normal” nation with desires for territorial expansion. It recognizes that Israeli discourses of “security” generate their own logic and sources of justification that are independent of “real” threats, and that defense is not an inevitable reaction but a condition of possibility for Israeli statehood and national identity. In studying security in contemporary Israeli life, as in historicizing security, national discourses of defense and threat can all too easily attract attention to the domains of political life, such as military institutions, that themselves presume the presence of threat and the necessity of defense. The second half of this chapter outlines the fieldwork in everyday life that informs this book’s focus on agents other than “threat”—such as family and fear—that perpetuate desires for security.
National Security Before the Nation-State
Although Jewish immigration to Palestine grew steadily beginning with the First Aliyah from Europe and Yemen to Palestine in 1881, it was not until the mid-1930s that large-scale conflict between Jews and Arabs in Palestine began to take shape (Dowty 2005: 77). During the period of British rule (1920–48), the Jewish community in Palestine swelled from one-sixth to nearly one-third of the population of Palestine, sparking riots by the Arab majority in 1920 and 1921 and from 1936 to 1939. Violence and defense were often blurred and cyclical, with settlement spurring uprising and uprising spurring enclosure. Fortification and defense became an increasing focus of Jews’ settlement project. Jewish settlers began to conceive of their existing kibbutzim and moshavim, the collective agricultural communities founded in ideals of socialism and Zionism, less as pastoral cooperatives than as paramilitary outposts (Troen 2003: 3–4; Kimmerling 2001: 209). They also constructed ḥoma U-Migdal (literally stockade and watchtower) settlements with central towers, trenches, and high walls that were intended to shield Jews from Palestinian resistance riots and also from British opposition (Weizman 2007: 100; Rotbard 2003). “This form,” according to Anita Shapira, “was designed to permit colonization in frontier areas while safeguarding the settlement from attack” (1992: 237). As pre-state forms of architectural security, these outposts carved out space from Palestinian land and, as Ilan Troen argues, functioned as unilateral borders in calculated places (2003: 76).
Moshe Shermister, formerly a Jewish member of the British colonial police, capitalized on Jewish settlers’ desires for protection from local Palestinians. On July 30, 1937, Shermister incorporated a new company under the British Mandate of Palestine.5 Hashmira Company, LTD, which might be translated “The Guardian,” set out as an association of independent and private Jewish police to guard the growing Jewish community in Palestine.6 Shermister opened his first office in Tel Aviv and announced his company in a local notice:
We are delighted to inform you that our company has received the permission of the [British] Mandate to begin operations. We hereby undertake to guard banks, offices, stores, storage areas, apartments, factories, etc., in accordance with the company’s fees. The company’s management were officers in the police force of the Land of Israel, and the guards also served in the police and are experienced