I carried out the fieldwork on which this book is based during a particularly severe period of violence during the second intifada, also called the al-Aqsa intifada. Intifada means “shaking off” in Arabic and is often translated as “uprising.”7 The concerns that undergirded this uprising had been present throughout decades of hostility, attack, confiscation, and occupation. At least since the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, Jewish nationalism and territorial control stood at odds with Palestinian desires for self-determination and national liberation. Since 1967, the status and future of the occupied territories and East Jerusalem, the question of a Palestinian state, the future of Palestinian refugees, and the fate of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories have fueled diplomatic dispute and military aggression. While Israel persistently supported Jewish settlement in Palestinian territory and restricted Palestinian life and livelihood, Palestinians did not recognize the right of the State of Israel to exist as a Jewish state. The Palestinian revolt that broke out in September 2000 was thus less inexplicable or abrupt than the media reported, a shift more in scale than in kind.
Once symbolically instigated by Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount on September 28, 2000, the uprising escalated into an armed military conflict. The militarization on both sides far surpassed that of the first intifada. Palestinian society now had a political structure in place, with a parliament and an armed security apparatus, and political solidarity was fortified both by a religious framework and by the growing power of media.8 Unlike earlier forms of Palestinian resistance, this time the militant wing of Fatah had a substantial supply of small arms to fire on Israeli troops and Qassam rockets (named after the military wing of Hamas) to fire into Israeli residential areas. Militant groups including Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades waged a high-intensity campaign against Israel, in which stone throwing youth were joined by combatants, who referred to themselves as “revolutionaries, martyrs, nationalists, or freedom fighters” to underscore their right to self-determination (Hage 2003: 72).9 Palestinian combatants carried out a record number of suicide bombings against Israeli civilian targets in public spaces such as city buses and cafés.
In March 2002, in the largest military operation in the West Bank since 1967, Israel launched Operation Defensive Shield (Mivtsa Ḥomat Magen), seeking to dismantle the infrastructure of the Palestinian Authority. With the stated aim of catching Palestinian militants, confiscating their weapons, and destroying weapons facilities, the IDF attacked Palestinian Authority installations, carried out assassinations of political and religious leaders, and imposed a series of collective punishments on the Palestinian civilian population. Sharon directed the IDF to avoid harming the civilian population (Sharon 2002), but, in reality, Israel targeted Palestinian militants and civilians alike by demolishing homes, destroying local infrastructure, and paralyzing movement and economic production.
Scholars of international relations often speak of the second intifada as “a low-intensity conflict,”10 a euphemistic term that called attention to Israel’s use of intelligence information to carry out assassinations of Palestinian leaders while obscuring the deadly nature of Israeli hostility (Pappe 2006). The popularity of the term in Israeli military discourse and the desire on behalf of Israeli political leaders to depict the conflict as “low-intensity” reflects the country’s particular efforts in this period to veil and normalize violence. The government worked to keep IDF operations, including the Shin Bet’s interrogation of Palestinians (categorized as torture by Israeli human rights groups), largely invisible to the public (B’Tselem 2007).
Despite claims of restraint and normalization, violence reverberated. When I began my fieldwork in Jerusalem in the summer of 2003, Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and leader of Fatah, had just appointed Mahmoud Abbas as Palestinian prime minister; the U.S. government had begun to promote a “roadmap” for Israeli peace and a Palestinian state; and Hamas and Islamic Jihad had recently declared a hudna, a temporary armistice on attacks against Israel. Violence decreased but only for forty-five days. In August, Israel’s Special Police Unit killed four Palestinians and the Hamas leader Abdullah Qawasmeh during a gun and tank raid on Askar. Hamas responded with two suicide bombings, including one of a Jerusalem bus that killed over twenty Israelis, and Fatah with a third. The IDF captured or killed the plotters of the Jerusalem suicide bombings; enforced strict curfews in Nablus, Jenin, and Tulkarem; and demolished dozens of Palestinian shops. With each act, Israeli and Palestinian politicians sanctioned their own violence by presenting it as reprisal, such that every military action was rendered a reciprocal reaction. Sharon, Arafat, and the subsequent Palestinian prime minister Ahmed Qurei acted as if the threat of violence would accelerate diplomatic negotiations and dissuade opposing hostility, but this posture only exacerbated the conflict. The hudna soon ended.
During the second intifada, talk of terror and terrorist threat ricocheted around the world, their political force and emotional substance gaining momentum as governments unified against a shared and supposedly shadowy enemy. The events of September 11, 2001 and the subsequent U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, caused Israeli and American discourses of terror and counterterrorism to mingle and reinforce each other. A widespread demonization of and intense xenophobia toward Arabs seemed to give international sanction to long-standing Israeli fears. Still, terror was spoken of in Israel with specific connotations. In Hebrew, the English loanword terror referred broadly to violence against civilians but specifically connoted Palestinian militancy. In the words of Israel’s Home Front Command (Pikud ha-Oref), founded as a unit of the IDF in February 1992 following the Gulf War and responsible for civilian defense, terror “casts a threat and spreads fear in a calculated manner through the helpless civilian population.” Always ethnically inflected, the discourse of terror depicted Palestinian military actions as illegitimate, unpredictable, and lacking a motive beyond terrorizing (Hajjar 2005: 42). It generally did so, however, without explicit reference to Palestinians, whom Israelis visualized but whose agency was concealed by generic terms like “terror” and “suicide bombings.” Like the terms terrorism and terror, reference to terror functioned simultaneously to describe and delegitimize violence committed by non-state political bodies. When I use the term terror in this book, I refer to the Israeli discourse of terror rather than to any specific political acts it might designate.
The term piguʿa (pl. piguʿim) described terrorist attacks in general, but it came during this period to refer almost exclusively to Palestinian suicide bombings. (Similarly, while piguʿa yeri literally means a shooting, the term came to connote almost exclusively a Palestinian shooting.) Israelis saw suicide bombings (piguʿa hitʾabdut) as the most emblematic form of Palestinian terror. Influenced by politicians and IDF spokespeople, Israeli Jews saw Palestinian suicide bombers as lacking strategy and system, as aiming to destroy Israel’s modernity and openness, as incoherent and invasive. “The confrontation with terror wrought by suicide strikers is like the fight against viruses,” said one reserve colonel (Barzilai 2004). If most Palestinians saw the second intifada as a renewed effort to resist Israeli occupation, Israeli Jews tended to see the intifada foremost as a military campaign against suicide bombings.
Whether Palestinian bombings triggered Israelis’ feelings of vulnerability or vice versa, Israeli society quickly became increasingly conservative in its views toward Palestinians and toward national security. Sharon, already the chairman of the center-right Likud Party, was easily elected prime minister in 2001 by promising greater force against Palestinians and greater security for Israelis. Political views once considered hawkish became centrist and, by the 2003 election, despite the deteriorating economic situation and increasing violence, voters strongly supported Sharon’s reelection. In this climate, post-Zionist debates about Israel’s democratic character, about its dispossession of the Palestinians, or about citizenship rather than religion as the determinant of rights, debates that had thrived in academic