Security and Suspicion. Juliana Ochs
guard services and technologiyot miggun, or “technologies of protection,” which ranged from intrusion detection systems to bulletproof briefcases to the “Magshoe,” an automatic metal detector for shoes. Security was bought and sold, developed, invented, implemented, and circulated. Not unlike other ways of establishing “observable empirical” so-called facts on the ground, material technologies of security were thought to give “credible form to a Jewish nation” (Abu El-Haj 2001: 129).
Security was ubiquitous, but it was also itinerant. Fortification was portable and ephemeral, fickle and unpredictable. Open spaces were suddenly barricaded and established gates suddenly disappeared. The Tel Aviv police set up roadblocks within the city during a suicide-bombing alert only to remove them hours later. The Jerusalem police enclosed a summer street festival with armed guards and fences one night and left it unenclosed the next. In its portability, security also transcended military, state, and civilian domains. Soldiers moved fluidly from military service to security-guard jobs, and private architecture firms worked together with local police departments to rebuild bombed cafés. However capricious, impromptu, or temporary, forms of security still splintered the nation and overlay public space with political gravity.
On a different scale, security materialized in everyday artifacts and took the form of minute and nearly indiscernible details. There were security surcharges added to restaurant bills, noted in fine print at the bottom of small slips of paper. Barely conspicuous to begin with, they became so commonplace that they were often overlooked. Small notes were sometimes added as a courtesy in the corner of wedding invitations—“security will be provided”—which calmed some guests and often receded into nuptial chaos. Though subtle and fleeting, these signs of security delineated experiences of security as powerfully as looming artifacts like walls, gates, and guards. In addition to tangible forms of surveillance, national discourses of threat and practices of alertness manifest themselves in intimate practices and personal relationships. There were grandfathers, for example, who assumed new roles as chauffeurs for their grandchildren so that they would not have to ride the city buses, which were susceptible to Palestinian suicide bombings. There was the high-school girl on the Jerusalem bus who whispered to her friends, “My parents would kill me if I got killed!” Having been forbidden by her parents from riding public buses, she enlisted her classmates to look out for passengers who appeared “suspicious.” Her alertness was a reaction to fear, yet it was also a mode of bonding with her peers and a response to parental discipline. The gaze of her parents appeared to be more significant than her own gaze for Palestinians.
Fences and finer-grained practices of fortification placated some Israeli fear, but they also corroborated anxiety and anger toward Palestinians. Rather than truly soothing its citizens’ anxiety about Palestinian threats, state institutions transvalued fear and validated it, transforming emotions of suspicion into traits of good citizenship. People developed exceptional states of alertness and hypervigilance to supposed signs of danger and to signs of security itself. Walls and guards affirmed the sense of disorder they purported to prevent, eliciting the very vulnerabilities they claimed to temper. It was a self-fulfilling process, a phenomenon that anthropologists of violence have studied in contexts in which those identified as the state and those perceived as terroristic come to mirror each other; where acts called counterterrorism create the very reality they contest.13 The second intifada was a time of fierce interaction between security and fear, one fueling the other without resolution.
People often speak of a cycle of violence and security, but security was very often tantamount to violence. Security was violence in other terms, “the logos of war expressed as a logos of peace” (Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero 2008: 275). Simultaneously a form of biopolitical and sovereign control, security was depicted in state discourses as a way of managing a population through its protection rather than through its death, a way of regulating people’s lives through techniques and technologies rather than through juridical power.14 However, when the state used its military and legal power to preserve its territory and population through the subjugation of Palestinians, security became indistinguishable from sovereignty. Palestinians were “disciplined” or subjugated by the violence and suppression of Israeli security, while Israeli Jews were “disciplined” to be a panoptical population that, in turn, scrutinized Palestinians. Israel thus exemplified the contradictory nature of the modern state, promising safety while coercing and controlling (Edkins 2003: 6).
In their pledge to protect Israelis against “threat,” Israeli state officials conceived of national security broadly as any response to whatever infringed on the survival and certainty of the state (Hajjar 2005: 31–32). State discourse invoked “security” in all-encompassing and self-validating ways to identify all military acts, all practices of occupation, all forms of state violence, and all expansions of Jewish settlement. Public policy on Israel has tended to echo the state’s own discourse, using phrases such as security risks, security facilities, security needs, security assets, security techniques, natural security, effective security, security guarantees, and security implications. The connotations of and referents for these terms, however, are ambiguous. Are “security risks” hazards to human safety or dangers shaped by “security” itself? Does the idea of “security needs” leave any room for discussion as to the necessity of military action? For whom is “effective security” effective? Do “security implications” implicate state sovereignty or human rights? I hope this book will offer new ways to think about the security terminology that is often used without explication. To set my own use of the term “security” apart from its applications in Israeli political rhetoric and to try to move away from the state’s own analytical categories and perspectives (Blom Hansen and Stepputat 2001: 5), readers should imagine quotation marks around all my uses of the term in this book. This is not to suggest that security is unreal, but rather that its meaning is always contextual and in flux.
As an ethnography of embodied practice, this book does not search for understanding solely in people’s minds and speech, but rather it locates knowledge within the quotidian, the personal, and the plural practices that constantly make and renovate people’s lives (Mol 2002: 32). For all the talking with, interviewing, and living with my informants, I only fully gleaned how security circumscribes the lives of Israeli Jews when I attended to people’s “movement, gesticulating, walking,” the focus of Michel de Certeau’s study of the practices of everyday life (1988: 130). For de Certeau, the world in which people live is not a discursive circumstance that precedes the subject but rather is the product of subjects’ practiced interaction with it. People both actualize a matrix of fixed possibilities and interdictions and also invent possibilities by either transforming or abandoning certain spatial signifiers. Everyday practices do not necessarily order the world in purposeful, self-defined, or strategic ways, but the minutiae of daily life, be it walking or cooking, contains the substance of subjectivity and of cultural logic. In Israel, everyday practices of security in daily life were thus not ancillary to military expressions of power and sovereignty but rather part of the same reality. People encountered national security not only in West Bank checkpoints, Palestinian refugee camps, or the hallways of the Knesset but also in homes, cafés, and magazines, spaces of consumption and intimacy where security had particular resonance precisely because of its seeming innocuousness. State power and political belief materialized in individuals’ use and interaction with (and, equally, avoidance of) particular streets, corners, and barricaded spaces. These everyday practices also implicated a politics of exclusion and separation.
Attention to everyday manifestations of security requires a phenomenological lens, for security is an embodied phenomenon, carried in physical bodies as well as in their dispositions and routines. In the cultural phenomenology of Thomas Csordas (1999), one of the most sustained applications of phenomenology in anthropology, Csordas draws on Maurice Merleau-Ponty, according to whom people are their bodies and bodies exist in a reciprocal relationship with the environment around them. Csordas also draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s (1977) concept of habitus, wherein social life is generated and regulated by an embodied, socially conditioned system of dispositions. Csordas thus studies embodiment not as a process of inscription but rather as itself the “existential condition” of cultural life (1999: 143).15 In daily life in Israel, security involved perception, imagination, and intersubjective experience. Security constituted gesture, movement, and “the phenomenon of habit” (Merleau-Ponty 2005