Security and Suspicion. Juliana Ochs
not only with minimized risk but also without perceiving the presence of Palestinians or feeling present in the city. At their weekly family Saturday lunches, the fears Vered and her siblings articulated in anticipation of this trip were enveloped in politicized discourses of threat and separation, and yet a simple family cavalcade enabled them to attain a sense of safety. In Vered’s quest for security, the violence and fear of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict became inextricably bound with the routines and relationships of daily life.
If Israel exists in “a permanent state of emergency,”1 security has become a medium of this unending crisis. Security was a central motif of the second intifada. It was not just that Israel’s defense budget, approximately $10 billion in 2004, was the twelfth highest in the world, or that, in 2002, Israel’s nongovernmental security services market was estimated at $700 million, with over 100,000 workers employed throughout the country (Lagerquist 2002: 1).2 Even beyond this immense industry, security dominated Israelis’ rhetorical framings and daily experiences. The government and media spoke of security measures, security lapses, security zones, and security threats. Military activities were often carried out in the name of Israeli security, from the construction of the separation wall (often called the “security fence”) to the assassination of Palestinian leaders. “Only security will lead to peace,” as Sharon put it.3 In daily life, Israeli Jews described their neighborhoods as desirable or deficient “from the perspective of security,” and malls became places with “good security” (or bad security) even more than they were places to shop. Israelis called the conflict itself “the security situation” (ha-matsav ha-bitḥoni), a naming that avoided direct reference to Palestinians while depicting the conflict as, above all, an effort to protect Israeli citizens from Palestinians.
The origin of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict lies in a very tangible clash: the claim by Jews and Palestinians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the same piece of land. Concrete as the core conflict may be, its intensification and expansion came as the result of the more elusive but no less forceful factors of ideology, identity, and emotion. The intersection of these tangible and intangible aspects of the conflict is at the heart of national security’s complexity. Security is a set of military strategies and political beliefs, but it is also a guiding force for daily experience. In one of the most conflict-ridden regions in modern history, in the clash between Israeli statehood and Palestinian desires for self-determination, between Israeli territorial expansion and Palestinian nationalism, security has become a part of Israeli culture. Security is a national discourse and partisan rallying cry that also assumes social, material, and aesthetic forms in daily life. It is the substance of conflict that manifests itself in everyday gestures, feelings, and intimate relationships.
For centuries, the legitimacy of the modern state has been built on its ability to protect its citizens.4 Security has long rationalized state power and justified its monopoly over lawful violence. With the advent of security studies after the Cold War, scholars have studied national security as a state and military strategy; they have shown how diplomacy can isolate threats, how civil defense can facilitate national resilience, and how states can marshal economic power to compel international cooperation.5 Recent fears of terrorism and the protrusion of national security on a global scale, however, draw our attention to the specifically social effects and underlying cultural character of national security.6 That is, to the ways history can isolate threats, collective memory can facilitate national resilience, and states can marshal social capital to propel fear.
This book addresses the ways national security delineates individual experience as much as it demarcates sovereignty. Traditional political anthropology has tended to depict holistic political systems and organized political institutions, but this book sees security as a politics that is often intangible and fleeting, inconsistent and intimate, taking form in impressions and senses. Likewise, “security” does not refer in this book, as it often does, to state policies of preserving the integrity of the nation-state or to a formal political-military institution of defense. Here, security consists of everyday, routine, and sometimes unconscious engagements (Certeau 1988) with national ideologies of threat and defense. I use the term everyday security to describe the practices of self-protection that become the substance of people’s lives and the discourses of danger and threat that, in contexts of conflict, delineate people’s days. Like anthropological notions of everyday violence (Das et al. 2000, Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 2004), everyday security is a cultural practice and a communal experience that crafts social life and is also an intimate experience that shapes individual subjectivity. Intimacy, involving feelings and practices of closeness and reciprocity, is a crucial domain for the everyday experience of security. If intimacy, as Lauren Berlant (2000) shows, builds public worlds and creates public spaces, then even when national security took the form of intimate signs and gestures, it laid claim to a collective and activated state power.
Observing national security through an anthropological lens, this book weaves together three distinct but interrelated arguments regarding the proliferation of state security in daily life. First, I argue that national discourses of security are reproduced at the level of bodily practice. Based on an ethnographic study of the daily life of Israeli Jews between 2003 and 2005, this book shows how discourses of security permeate individual sensibilities and habits and shape people’s encounters with the state. Government rhetoric on danger, threat, and separation is not simply internalized but generated in visceral, emotive ways. Security takes shape at the intersection of government technologies and everyday sensibilities, of political rationalities and embodied behavior. The cyclical, selfperpetuating nature of security has been a recent theoretical concern to social and political theorists (Bauman 2007) and a longtime source of international military and diplomatic conflict. By describing the ways people embody state discourses of danger and effect senses of threat in their daily lives, I offer one way to understand why fear propagates a willingness to engage in violence in the name of security and why security becomes more likely only to provide senses of comfort than to proscribe violence.
The second argument of this book concerns the ways people see their fear and their desires for security as beyond politics, and thus become ignorant of the structural logics of exclusion that discourses of fear and security serve to reproduce. Israelis’ avoidance of Palestinians and reliance on the country’s military-industrial complex of security were often portrayed as strategies of coping with intense anxiety and fear. The seeming innocuousness of citizens’ craving comfort and desiring bodily safety and the seemingly instinctive virtue of protecting family enabled Israeli Jews, including both those critical of the Israeli occupation and those who supported continued Israeli settlement, to think of themselves as participating in something private and impervious to politics. However, in this context of conflict, desires for comfort and well-being were often nationalism and exclusion in another form. The security that materialized in everyday habits and desires tended to extend, rather than oppose, sovereignty and violence. Everyday ways of talking about danger and threat, together with routines of circumnavigating feared spaces, cultivated the discursive and spatial invisibility of Palestinians to Israelis. People’s desires for security and their engagement with the artifacts and procedures of national security legitimized state security and helped produce and sustain the idea of the nation. Security, in this way, gained momentum and sway even as it produced a pervasive sense of vulnerability. It proliferated the very fears and suspicions it claimed to obviate. Security may stand as the core principle of state activity, but as Israeli fear rationalized fortification and separation and as anxiety perpetuated anticipations of danger, security transcended its position as a state domain, swelling larger than the state to generate and sustain sovereignty.
The third claim of this book is that fantasies about threat and protection were a crucial mode through which Israelis embodied security. Fantasies of security are different from illusions or delusions of threat and different from imaginaries of violence. They are also different from the “psychology of fear” that deals with emotional and cognitive responses to public fear-arousing messages, ranging from heightened anxiety to complacency. Fantasy, according to Yael Navaro-Yashin, describes the elements of the political that survive discursive deconstruction, criticism, and skepticism because of “unconscious psychic attachments” to state power (2002: 4). Fantasy is not opposed to reality but what sits at its very core (Aretxaga 2003: 402). Through fantasy,