Routinergency: Domestic securitization in contemporary Israel

Abstract

The Israeli law obliges the construction of bomb shelters as integrated rooms within every residential unit throughout the country. Based on 12 months of fieldwork and extensive interviews with both Jewish–Israeli and Arab–Palestinian citizens of Israel, we argue that the mundane presence and use of these everyday-cum-security spaces has produced a new civilian sensibility towards securitization, which we call ‘ routinergency’: the naturalization of security emergency as intrinsic to the flow of routine life. We demonstrate that while the privatization of domestic securitization affords reliable protection to every citizen, routinergency also excludes Arab–Palestinians from the ethnonational boundaries that still inform the constitution of collective identities in Israel. Yet, as embodied practice, routinergency also enables access to a universal form of citizenship in Israel, which is premised on socioeconomic criticism of Zionist discourse. We use the topological metaphor of a Mobius strip to discuss how mamad rooms accentuate the contemporary tension in Israel between these ethnonational and neoliberal vectors of citizenship.

Encapsulation: Governing actual uncertainty in the coronavirus pandemic

“…Such measures included the writing of extensive plans and the development of nationwide preparedness exercises, but public health emergencies are just one class of potential events addressed by the country's extensive emergency preparedness apparatus, with Israel's annual Turning Point exercises forming the largest scenario‐based exercises of their kind, involving government ministries, local municipalities, essential infrastructure units and all citizens (Samimian‐Darash, 2016: 359) 3 2019), it has been argued, it is possible to discern a routinisation of emergency, or ‘routinergency’, which has been described as ‘an embodied sensibility towards systematic crisis in the fabric of civilian routine that is constructed top‐down through diverse securitization policies’ (Shapiro & Bird‐David, 2017: 650). This state of routinised emergency and its attendant forms of preparedness have been shaped by a history of domestic and regional conflict, instability and security tensions 4 .…”

A strange sky: Security atmospheres and the technological management of geopolitical conflict in the case of Israel's Iron Dome

“…To make Iron Dome's atmospheric power apparent, it must be located as part of the everyday ‘securityscape’ (Azaryahu, 2000, p. 103) of the Gaza–Western Negev envelope. Enmeshed with this is the ‘spatio‐temporal configuration’ of ‘routinergency’, in which ‘“emergency” and “routine” essentially overlap’ in a way that ‘naturalizes the purported indispensability of tangible protection’ (Shapiro & Bird‐David, 2017, p. 639, 642). This section will explore how the Western Negev's ubiquitous security infrastructures, discourses and practices reinforce the disposition of ‘routinergency’ as an ontological condition that can — and must — be accepted and coped with.…”

Taking the soldier home: Sustaining the domestic presence of absent fallen soldiers in Israel

“…However, in our observations, we noted that the few families that did display military paraphernalia did not interact with these objects when presenting them to us. One might ask whether the absence of objects or absence of interaction with military/nationalistic paraphernalia in the room signifies resistance to public national-military commemoration and/or privatization and the decline of republicanism (Laron, 2005;Shapiro and Bird-David 2016)? Rinat insists on apolitical and non-resistant framing of materiality and interaction: "Military objects don't represent militarism for us-they're not political, they're like any object the family member used in their lives, that's why they're in the room."…”

“…However, in our observations, we noted that the few families that did display military paraphernalia did not interact with these objects when presenting them to us. One might ask whether the absence of objects or absence of interaction with military/nationalistic paraphernalia in the room signifies resistance to public national-military commemoration and/or privatization and the decline of republicanism (Laron, 2005; Shapiro and Bird-David 2016)?…”