Abstract
Security responses increasingly involve the delegation of security roles from state actors, such as the police and the military, to a plurality of public and private institutions. This article focuses on the emergence of a modular governance logic in security provision, in which urban security is diffused into differing modules – security actors, performances, technologies and practices – which can be enlisted, deployed, instructed, entwined, detached and withdrawn at will. This article identifies three features of urban modular security provision: the heterogeneity of its public and private components, the development of reserved capacities, and the differential multifacetedness of its performances and practices. These are explored through the case study of East Jerusalem, in which a modular security provision emerged where previously undefined and ad-hoc security arrangements became cohesive, normalized and codified through practice and law. In tracing the flows of security authorities, personnel and knowledge produced within a modular security assemblage, this article proposes that the modular assembly of security actors complements policing institutions by providing other informal disciplinary, punitive and statecrafting powers, in a manner which obfuscates controversial state policies and unequally distributes rights and resources.
Keywords
Introduction
The topography of the modern state encompasses a perplexing terrain to navigate, wherein citizens and scholars alike can become disoriented. With state actors becoming intertwined with private actors, we witness a conflation of public and private authorities, capacities and practices that reconfigure the state and its relations with different citizens. Facing simultaneous claims from transnational capital and the wider citizenry, governance is increasingly pursued by interposing additional facets, interfaces and institutions to replace and complement core state authorities and responsibilities.
This is particularly the case in the field of security provision, where security roles, authorities and capacities are not found exclusively with police and military bodies, but are instead increasingly pluralized and privatized into a jigsaw of interconnected public and private security actors. The privatization and pluralization of security provision may lead to what this article proposes is a
In this article I will argue for a conceptualization of modular security as denoting a mode of governance in which security provision is diffused into different nodes – actors, performances, technologies and practices – which can be enlisted, deployed, instructed, entwined, detached and withdrawn at will. State security actors, such as the police, military and gendarmerie, are re-adapting to these reconfigurations in a manner which may reinforce their capacities and authority. Simultaneously, manifold administrative, social, educational and public utility bodies are endowed with security roles and authority, embedding ‘normative’ bureaucratic and public service work within a continuously changing array governed by public security actors. I develop the concept of modular security through a case study of East Jerusalem, where Israeli security provision is increasingly pursued outside the institutions of the police and the criminal justice system, and instead security is sought by and pursued through new pluralized and privatized security modules, which are ‘plugged in’ and ‘plugged out’ of a security assemblage when a security need arises. I posit that the modularization of security is sought by Israeli state security actors, as it enables them to distance themselves from the controversial policies they pursue through the interposition of ostensibly neutral enlisted actors. Through an analysis of data from East Jerusalem security governance, I identify three features of urban modular security provision: heterogeneity of public and private components, the development of reserved security capacities and the differential multifacetedness of its performances and practices. I then conclude by examining the benefits and disadvantages for state actors following the introduction of modular security provision.
From plurality to modularity: Perspectives on a changing security landscape
Public security is rarely pursued in isolation, but is rather often sought in cooperation or synergy between plural actors, policies and technologies. Scholars have extensively explored how state civil security providers in general, and the police in particular, engage and cooperate with other state and non-state actors. Jensen (2010) observed the partnerships formed between Cape Town’s police, municipal government and township community boards in combatting crime and strengthening trust in the police. Dupont (2006) mapped the partnerships formed between American metropolitan police agencies and other public policing stakeholders: private security companies, public transport authorities, airlines and professional associations. Loader (2000) suggests that the policing field has extended to include policing by government (regular police and its supervisory role), through government (public security provision outsourced to private companies), above government (international or supranational policing agencies), beyond government (commercial security) and below government (citizens’ initiatives and vigilantism). Despite these and other notable scholarship, there is a relative lack of literature exploring how security provision is pursued through the pluralization of security to other social, regulatory and administrative public actors, nor a conceptualization of these relations as a new mode of governance.
There is a scholarly consensus that the global security landscape has undergone a transformation in recent decades. While the liberal ideational conception of the state as producing an equal rendering of security has been repeatedly contested following controversial and partisan public security interventions (Graham, 2011; Somers and Wright, 2008), the widespread perception of the state as an actor representing the public good remains significant. In recent years, a growing number of scholars have noted the differential treatment of citizens by public (Neocleous, 2007), private (Goldstein, 2016) and hybrid (Jaffe, 2013) security actors, in a manner that unequally redistributes citizenship rights – access to resources, allocation of responsibilities and participation in political decision-making (Somers and Wright, 2008).
In the contemporary security landscape, security authorities increasingly employ, enlist and instruct additional public and private actors when pursuing (controversial) security provision. The pluralized security landscape lends itself to theoretical exploration, in which scholars approach security through different methodological and epistemological lenses. Diphoorn’s (2015) overview of the main theoretical approaches to pluralized policing – nodal frameworks, security networks and security assemblages – demonstrates the degree to which the scholarly focus has pivoted away from state-centric approaches towards a focus on the pluralized and privatized nature of policing today. This article introduces to the debate a conceptualization of modular security, which adjoins the security assemblage approach in its focus on the relations formed between a plurality of state and non-state security actors, authorities, policies and technologies.
These modular relations in a pluralized security landscape are not a new phenomenon – as Neocleous (2006) noted, policing was understood as a wider effort by myriad actors to order people and capital far before the establishment of modern police departments. This article is an attempt to conceptualize these relations in the context of (perceived) growing security threats through a focus on their modularity: to advance a focus on modular relations between security actors in an effort to shed light on the governance logic, administrative mechanisms and security practices that these entanglements entail. I seek to conceptualize modular security through an illustrative case study where previously undefined and ad-hoc security arrangements became cohesive, normalized and codified through practice and then emerged as a security strategy to overcome security challenges in the context of limited political, legal and operational manoeuvrability.
I explore this coalescing modularity model through an assemblage approach (Deleuze and Guattari, 1998), which highlights the relations – hierarchical, reciprocal and rhizomatic – emerging and dissolving between different nodes in an ever-changing assemblage. An extended reading of policing as an assemblage was suggested by Barry (2014), who examined the changing role of military actors in a customary civil domain, arguing that ‘to police … is a process of assemblage, a decentred gathering of elements necessary for the governance of a particular space’ (Barry, 2014: 147). Schouten (2014), in mapping airport security provision, advocated for a focus on security assemblages, which he views as a form of processual governance wherein controversies emerge as salient moments in which security arrangements are defined and contested. These arrangements are not stable configurations: instead, as Adey and Anderson (2012) suggest, they often take on a life of their own, bringing together diverse (and unexpected) security actors, materialities, technologies and practices. Berndtsson and Stern (2011) explored the emergence of a security assemblage in Stockholm Arlanda airport, encompassing the police, a private security company, the Swedish transport authority and other state institutions; their work highlighs how the relations between public and private actors within the assemblage are negotiated and contested, leading to cooperation, incorporation and controversies. Abrahamsen and Williams (2009) took their inquiry into security assemblages global, observing how transnational security structures and networks are formed. Their approach conceptualizes security assemblages as arrays in which ‘a range of different actors and normativities interact, cooperate and compete’ (Abrahamsen and Williams, 2009: 90); out of the encounter between existing security actors and actants, they posit, new modes of governance can emerge.
In this article I aim to shed a light on these encounters and their results by offering a conceptualization of modular security as a mode of governance. I follow Delanda’s (2006a) assertion that assemblage theory implies particular relations of exteriority – an understanding that assemblages are not organic totalities, but rather arrays whose individual components can be detached out of one assemblage and ‘plugged’ into another (Delanda, 2006b: 253). Correspondingly, one component never represents, defines or delimits an assemblage; when a component is plugged in, or out, the structure of the assemblage can adapt and adopt (Delanda, 2006a: 10–11) – either by enlisting additional components or by an internal re-shuffling. Modular security involves a plurality of actors, materialities, technologies and policies which never remain in a stable stasis: certain modules are sought and ‘plugged in’ while others are discarded and ‘plugged out’, their instructions changed and order re-shuffled, yet the assemblage remains cohesive despite continuous reconfiguration.
While modular security can be explored as an assemblage, not all security assemblages are alike. In this article I seek to focus on security assemblages of a local, territorialized and actively crafted relational design. Scholarship has thus far focused primarily on the de-territorialized forms of security assemblages, often on the transnational scale (Abrahamsen and Williams, 2009; Loader and Walker, 2007). In attending to the increasing modularity of some security arrays today, I emphasize that security is commonly pursued in direct relation to a territorially-delimited locale, following domestic security prioritization and (re)distribution. In adopting Li’s (2007) assertion that assemblages never emerge out of thin air, but always require someone (or something) to bring together diverse elements and to produce relations between them, I emphasize that some nodes within the assemblage (security actors, but also manifold materialities and technologies which are not within the scope of this article) are more centrally positioned through their relations than others. In many cases, state security agencies are found to be paramount to the assembly of security assemblages. Through the prism of modular security, these relations of enlisting and instructing additional actors come to the fore. The process of assembling and leveraging security modules lends itself to theoretical and empirical exploration, in a manner which attends to security assemblages as situated within specific power relations.
In the following chapter I trace the emergence of a modular security provision in Jerusalem, which I situate within the local context of a colonial governance limited by the pledged incorporation of Jerusalem into Israel. I continue to explore the security challenges to which a modular security provision was authored as a response, followed by a methodological discussion and several examples of how modular security is leveraged vis-à-vis the Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem.
Securing the divided city
Jerusalem, a holy city to the three monotheistic religions, has long been a site of both conflict and co-existence. After centuries in which the city’s residents, and their plurality of religious denominations, were largely able to ‘triage conflict through commerce and the civic’ (Sassen, 2017), the last century scarred Jerusalem as a site of violence, suspicion, military occupation and colonial governance (Zureik, 2011). Metropolitan Jerusalem, including Bethlehem and Ramallah, had been envisaged as a part of an international
The Israeli authorities face tremendous difficulties in the governance of occupied East Jerusalem; despite a rhetoric of a ‘united’ Jerusalem, the city continues to be divided between Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian spaces, with a string of visible and invisible boundaries bisecting the city (Pullan et al., 2007). Israel annexed East Jerusalem, but did not annex its residents, who are legally considered a stateless foreign populace, devoid of Israeli citizenship and afforded only a revocable residency permit to inhabit their own city. The Israeli policies of large-scale land expropriation, settlement construction, house demolitions, residency revocation and differentiation in the allocation of public services (Fenster and Shlomo, 2011) contributed to repeated escalations of violence, particularly between the leaderless Palestinian population and Israeli security agents. These tumultuous relations reflect the half-in-half-out approach adopted by Israeli policymakers towards East Jerusalem, in which the city’s formal annexation was followed by a simultaneous mix of exclusionary and inclusionary practices that can be conceptualized as an exceptional – or aberrant – governmentality (Shlomo, 2016).
The Israeli authorities’ largest challenges in East Jerusalem can be located in the realm of security governance, where two contrasting moments can be traced. The first is the colonial moment. The Israeli authorities’ position and aims in East Jerusalem are similar to their aims in the rest of the Occupied Palestinian territories – to contain Palestinian presence and growth (Fenster and Shlomo, 2011), to prevent the establishment of a future Palestinian state and the division of Jerusalem, to Judaize strategic locations within the city, and to enable the prioritized mobility of Israeli citizens (particularly settlers) and foreign tourists throughout the territory. To achieve these aims, the Israeli authorities follow a pattern of transplanting military strategies and technologies from the ‘periphery’ into metropolitan areas (Coaffee, 2003), in this case from the occupied West Bank into East Jerusalem. All the hallmarks of the Israeli occupation can be found in East Jerusalem: the construction of Jewish-Israeli settlements on expropriated Palestinian land, building a separation wall on a route to maximize Jewish-Israeli space and minimize Palestinian presence, quashing Palestinian political and cultural leadership and enhancing the mobility of Jewish-Israeli settlers through the construction of dedicated highways and bypass roads (Pullan et al., 2007).
The second moment is the incorporation moment. Unlike the West Bank, East Jerusalem was annexed to Israel by law, and the Israeli authorities give particular significance to the pledged full incorporation of East Jerusalem into the Israeli legal and bureaucratic fold. While their assertion is far from guaranteeing any sort of equality – the Israeli legislature has already enacted over 50 laws that formally discriminate against Palestinian citizens of Israel (Adalah, 2013) – it did place legal and political limitations on the security interventions of the Israeli authorities in East Jerusalem. The Israeli military, with few exceptions, is not allowed to operate within Jerusalem’s municipal boundaries. Israeli civil law, unlike the West Bank’s military law, constrains police ability to arrest or conduct searches without due process, places a degree of accountability on state actors’ interactions with residents, and provides specific protections for children and other vulnerable populations. The Israeli policy of a ‘united’ and ‘undivided’ Jerusalem requires a continuous claim for sovereignty, including the performances and practices of a legally- and politically-bounded security provision. The Israeli government seeks to showcase a ‘normal’ civilian administration to the scrutinizing gaze of the international community, and a veneer of security to the domestic Israeli audience. The annexation of East Jerusalem thus confronted the Israeli security authorities with a particularly difficult conundrum – how to reconcile the colonial and the incorporation moments, or, in other words, how to govern an occupied territory while remaining nominally within the boundaries of normative civilian rule of law.
In this article I postulate that the Israeli authorities’ response to this inherent conflict was found in the formulation and adoption of a modular security provision, in which security provision was pluralized and privatized to a plethora of actors who were tasked with security roles and adopted security practices, technologies and capacities subject to both formal and informal directives. Walking the tightrope between the wish to forcefully pacify dissent, and the desire to maintain a façade of normalcy, Israeli security authorities sought modularization as a creative balancing act to address their security concerns within the predefined parameters. The case of East Jerusalem is valuable not only for its specific empirics, but also as a case study that can provide a theoretical insight into how security provision, and the citizen-state interfaces associated with it, are transformed in an era of constrained policing capacities and growing security challenges.
In this article I primarily use data from two dozen semi-structured interviews conducted with Palestinian residents of Jerusalem, as well as several Israeli policymakers (four interviews), political activists (six interviews) and former private security guards (six interviews) held during an extensive eleven-month ethnographic fieldwork in 2015 and 2016. The Palestinian resident respondents were reached primarily through a ‘snowball’ sampling, but include a variety in terms of different ages (ranging from 22- to 74-year-old interviewees), gender (fourteen male and ten female), professions, neighbourhoods and socio-economic status. To safeguard my respondents’ anonymity, most interviews were not recorded, and thus all quotations are from my own (translated) notes; some of the respondents’ names and personal details were omitted or altered.
I further use data collected through six participatory transects I conducted with Palestinian residents, using a technique of systematically ‘travelling together’ through a delimited area (Bernard, 2012), in which I’ve asked the respondent for commentary on every house, institution or business we passed along the way. On several occasions, my respondents initiated a walking transect on their own volition, while in other times I’ve prompted them to chart a path for us to explore. In both cases, the data elicited during the transects required the full participation of the respondents, who were often enthused by the prospect of speaking about their neighborhood and the security encounters they’ve previously witnessed therein. During the transect, my respondents would often introduce me to new interlocutors, who I was thereafter able to meet and interview. I’ve additionally used data from participant observation I conducted in Palestinian neighbourhoods (primarily around Jerusalem’s Holy Basin area) in the same period. These observations provided me with valuable insight into the interactions of Palestinian residents and Israeli security agents both in times of turmoil and in their daily lives. Following the ethnographic fieldwork in Jerusalem, I used the data collected to map the different public and private actors within East Jerusalem’s security assemblage. I then complemented my analysis of these relations with additional media sources and parliamentary protocols on the policymaking and implementation of security privatization and pluralization processes in East Jerusalem.
Climbing from above, descending from below: Formulating modular security in Jerusalem
In the summer of 2014, the neighbourhood of Silwan in East Jerusalem erupted in violence. A 16-year-old Palestinian Jerusalemite boy, Mohammed Abu Khdeir, was kidnapped and burned alive by Jewish-Israeli extremists. Then came the holy month of Ramadan; instead of the usual festive meals and family visits, the days and nights were accompanied by television sets blaring news of the ongoing Israeli airstrikes and shelling of the Gaza Strip, where over 1,500 Palestinian civilians were killed (Human Rights Watch, 2015). Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem responded with defiance, in a scale unmatched by their West Bank compatriots: large-scale protests, stone throwing, damaging Jerusalem’s controversial tramline and directing firecrackers at police personnel (Hasson, 2014). A few Palestinian ‘lone wolves’ took to stabbing and car-ramming attacks. In Silwan, a sloped Palestinian urban cluster of over 50,000 residents overlooking Jerusalem’s Old City (Shipler, 2015), tensions were particularly high. Over the preceding years, an increasing number of Jewish-Israeli settlers had moved into Silwan, evicting Palestinian residents from their houses and creating small, but expandable, segregated compounds within the neighbourhood’s dense and dilapidated urban space. With the threat of violence towards Jewish-Israeli settlers and visitors to the nearby holy and archaeological sites growing by the day, the Israeli authorities were faced with a dilemma: how to pacify Silwan without further inflaming East Jerusalem by resorting to fatal violence, drawing international condemnation or restoring direct military rule.
I posit that their answer was to seek to augment their security interventions by drawing together – or assembling – a plurality of state and non-state civil actors, which were subsequently instructed, entwined, detached and withdrawn as part of a modular security provision. Meir Eliahu, Silwan’s border police commander, aptly illustrated this modularity and its employment by security agencies in an interview he offered to a popular television channel.
‘What we have here is a widespread joint policing activity of all different authorities’ he said, ‘including enforcement agencies which are
With each actor offering – temporary or permanently – its own technologies, authorities and capacities as security modules, the Israeli efforts to subdue Silwan’s dissent can elucidate how a modular security provision is sought, assembled, operated and performed. But how are these actors drawn together into an assembly of pluralized security? Who, and how, instructs, entwines, detaches and withdraws these modules and their differing capacities?
In Jerusalem, a major part of these interactions can be found in the practice of punitive blacklisting, which has grown in scope in recent years. In a 2015 exposé (Hasson, 2015), Israeli newspaper We developed a few very interesting models … Cooperation between the General Intelligence Agency, the Police and the Municipality’s enforcement agencies. We sat down together and developed these models which exist nowhere else, and I need say no more…. Suddenly the bad residents understand that the public system can work together, and suddenly it’s not so cosy being a villain, it’s not so nice being on the other side. (Hasson, 2016a)
According to Barkat, the Israeli district police and General Intelligence Service (Shin Bet) compile lists of young troublemakers (often under the age of criminal liability) who were involved in opposition to Israeli policies in East Jerusalem (Hasson, 2015). These blacklists are subsequently used by a myriad of state actors to punish and deter Palestinian Jerusalemites and their families from resisting Israeli rule. In lieu of pursuing convictions through the criminal justice system, the Israeli security authorities assemble heterogeneous public bodies – social, administrative or regulatory authorities – to make use of their authority and capacities in order to discipline those residents who challenge the Israeli administration of the city. I postulate that such modular security is developed through an intentional, albeit fuzzily effectuated, process: some actors are officially tasked with security roles, while other public actors offer, or are expected to offer, their capacities or know-how of their own volition. Despite the opacity of such interactions, Jerusalem’s modular security provision is both understood and acknowledged as a deliberate, punitive and large-scale security intervention by many of its target audience, the Palestinian residents of the city. In the following pages, through ethnographic data gathered in Silwan and other Palestinian locales in Jerusalem, I will elaborate on three features of modular security provision – heterogeneity, the development of reserved capacities, and multifacetedness, followed by a discussion on the merits and limitations to the adoption of modular security provisions
Plural security: Assorting heterogeneity
With East Jerusalem’s annexation to Israel, authority over security and law enforcement was transferred from the military to civil authorities. The largest Israeli security actor in East Jerusalem is the Israeli police, which operates both visibly and undercover throughout the city. Few of the policemen are Palestinian Jerusalemites, and those few are often in junior positions; the top brass is composed entirely of Jewish-Israeli station commanders. The border police, a gendarmerie corps of military recruits within the police structure, plays a particularly visible role in East Jerusalem (Dumper, 2013). The district police regularly demands – and receives – additional funding for the recruitment of extra personnel and the deployment of new technologies 1 , yet they face a perennial difficulty in finding willing recruits to the police ranks in East Jerusalem (Kubovich et al., 2015). Despite a growing budget, the Israeli police complain of legal and political constraints in dealing with Palestinian resistance in East Jerusalem. One way they sought to overcome these hurdles was by seeking amendments to Israeli law to further deter Palestinian protestors, for example by demanding harsher prison sentences – of up to 20 years – for cases of stone throwing (Shuttleworth, 2014). Another way was to hasten and extend the diffusion of security roles towards a heterogeneous plurality of public and private actors. I approach this transformation as the concurrent processes of security privatization and security pluralization; the former applies to the outsourcing of security roles and authority to private enterprises, while the latter attends to the delegation of additional state actors – not habitually associated with security provision – with security, policing or punitive roles and responsibilities.
Private Security Companies (PSCs) were awarded with several state contracts in and around Jerusalem, in line with what Seidman (2014) explains as the ‘managerial’ logic of the partial privatization of Israeli military and public security functions. Private security guards are now stationed at the checkpoints between East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank, at Jewish-Israeli settlement compounds throughout Palestinian East Jerusalem, as well as in positions guarding governmental institutions, transport infrastructure and commercial enterprises 2 . These PSCs work, in varying degree, in cooperation with the Israeli police, border police and other state authorities (Volinz, 2018). Their operations are (at least nominally) subjected to the provision of Israeli law on private security, and limited police regulation and oversight (ACRI, 2010). Offering flexibility to state authorities and precarity to their temporary employees, PSCs can be contracted, instructed and dismissed on short notice, offering a modular solution to institutions considered otherwise maladaptive.
Security pluralization, which I use here to refer to the distribution of security roles to additional state actors, is a growing phenomenon in East Jerusalem. Instead of governing (in)security through the traditional institutions of police and the criminal tribunals, Israeli state security actors pursue security objectives through the delegation of security roles, objectives and obligations to other social, administrative and regulatory state bodies.
To illustrate the impact of pluralized security on the Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem, and their perspective on the modular array that pursues security interventions in their neighbourhoods, I suggest we turn our gaze again to Silwan. Hussam, a Palestinian man in his fifties and one of my main interlocutors in the neighbourhood, was working part time at his cousin’s grocery shop in one of Silwan’s sloped and congested roads; sitting at the entrance of the shop, or looking through his house’s wide windows, Hussam had a prime location to observe the goings-on, particularly around the Jewish-Israeli settlement compound and national park site established near his home. It was he who succinctly described to me, sitting on a small, shaky, wooden stool on the narrow pavement, the near-cohesion with which state and non-state actors take part in (partisan) security provision aimed at safeguarding Israeli interests against Palestinian challengers:
With the settlers and their private security guards around, there is no way you can complain or argue with them. If you do, the security guards would come to take photos of you. The next day the municipal inspectors would come to give you a fine or a demolition order – and the day after the National Parks Authority will send their inspectors to find a way to punish you a bit more. They’re all one team, working together, conspiring together… When one hand doesn’t do the trick, they use the other one. One time it’s the municipality, the other time it’s Magav [Israeli Border Police], then it’s the police and then it’s the National Parks Authority… the Antiquities Authority, undercover informants, the National Insurance Institute, they all come together. (Interview 1)
While Hussam’s comments reflect the monolithic perception of the Israeli occupation in East Jerusalem – how Palestinian Jerusalemites often approach nearly all Israeli institutions as part of a single machination against them – they also aptly portray the extent to which security interventions are pluralized and privatized. Whether they operate in the same physical operations, or assume different roles and responsibilities within a shared security policy envisioned in the police and intelligence headquarters, Hussam’s insistence that ‘they all come together’ hints to the transformation of security provision – that the line between civil and security authority, and between public and private actors, became blurred in the alleys of Silwan. In an interview, Hussam spoke to me about the impact the joint visible operations between the police and other public authorities are having on his children:
Magav and the police are terrorizing the neighbourhood at day and at night. Not only when they come to arrest someone, or search some house, but every time they go into the neighbourhood with some inspectors from the municipality or the National Parks Authority… the children they hear the walkie-talkies, beep beep and the sound of Hebrew in their backyards and they start crying. (Interview 1)
Modular security encompasses heterogeneous public (and private) agencies, as their joint whole is of greater efficacy than the sum of its parts. By leveraging their separate legal authorities and extra-legal practices, the assembled modular security array can pursue security through a secondary track, no longer limited by the confines of the police and the criminal justice system, but instead through an informal disciplinary, punitive and dispossessing provision. In the next section I unpack the roles different pluralized security actors assume in East Jerusalem, and the capacities, authorities, technologies and knowledge they offer within a modular security provision.
Calling in the reserves: Enlisting capacities
The Israeli (nominally civil) administration of occupied East Jerusalem requires an extension of security actors’ authority and capacity aimed at quelling dissent, enlarging the Israeli-Jewish presence and projecting an image of normalcy to domestic and international audiences. This extension was obtained by enlisting other public and private actors to complement the policies and operations of traditional security actors. While some of these relations continuously grant the police and other security actors additional capacities – such as access to private information or the vetoing of state employees – I suggest that a significant contribution of modular security provision is visible in the reserved capacities offered to security actors by additional state actors.
When the need arises, security can be pursued through the capacities assured in advance by a plurality of actors, complementing the traditional norms of policing and criminal justice with extra-legal measures. Once the capacities – whether legal, technological or punitive – are initially enlisted, they’re maintained as a reserve capacity by state security actors, and can be recalled at a later date. In adopting Crawford’s (2013) assertion of pluralized policing producing an ‘extended policing family’, I seek to turn our gaze into the often-overlooked members of this family: the security roles undertaken by social, regulatory and administrative public actors. In the following pages I list and analyse several of these actors present in East Jerusalem, and the capacities they offer within a modular security provision.
Jerusalem Municipality, the largest Israeli municipal body, has had its share of difficulties in navigating the annexation of East Jerusalem, the consolidation and integration of municipal services and the local and international resistance to its interventions in Palestinian residents’ lives (Shlomo, 2016). While Jerusalem’s municipality has always been involved in ‘national’ security projects, such as settlement construction and the development of the city’s differentiated mobility regime, in recent years the municipality’s legal, bureaucratic and technological capacities were further deployed in the service of the state security authorities. In an interview conducted in late 2015, a former prominent municipal politician described the municipality’s integration into the modular security model:
With Mayor Barkat [Jerusalem’s right-wing mayor since 2008] you can really see how he got there; he began his first term with a sort of ‘businessman’ attitude to East Jerusalem, planning on buying favours with the residents with a few projects and some photo-ops. The Jerusalem District police force were warning him for years, telling him that the police must act to restore deterrence among the Palestinian residents. In the summer of 2014 [during the Israeli attack on Gaza], when all hell broke loose, Barkat just gave up and agreed, in practice at least, to transfer East Jerusalem to the full command of the police…. Since then the municipality began to dance to the tune of the police and the General Intelligence Service [Shin Bet], and that goes down to the smallest practices of everyday lives: demolition orders, vetting school teachers, determining school hours, and especially the collective punishment in the form of handing out absurd fines. (Interview 2)
Israeli municipalities possess formidable capacities when it comes to legal authority, manpower, technology and legitimacy. Municipalities are in charge of urban planning, construction permits and enforcement; in East Jerusalem, where many Palestinian homes are built illegally due to the near-impossibility of securing a building permit (Braverman, 2007), the selective enforcement of construction laws provides the Jerusalem municipality with wide leeway to deter and discipline Palestinian families and communities through house demolitions and the issuing of administrative fines. Similarly, Jerusalem municipality’s legal authority to assess and collect municipal taxes, as well as its authority to award or revoke business licenses, can threaten Palestinian Jerusalemites’ lives with the spectre of property repossession and the loss of livelihood by municipal order. Jerusalem municipality offers these capacities to state security agencies, providing for a collective and individual leverage against Palestinian Jerusalemites in times of escalation and violence, and a deterrence to ‘toe the line’ in other times.
The Gihon company, Jerusalem’s wastewater and water corporation, is an independent public utility company, established by but separate from the Jerusalem municipality (Hagihon, 2018). The company’s legal mandate guarantees the distribution of running water to all residents of the city, and allows the company to enforce payments and combat illegal connections 3 . Security actors, such as the police and the Israeli army (in the case of Jerusalem’s periphery) may delegate the water company with security roles – either punitive or as cover for armed incursion into Palestinian neighbourhoods. Measures may include issuing fines, repossessing property or lowering water pressure to informal Palestinian localities (Kushner, 2016). Palestinian residents report that the Gihon inspectors often enter Palestinian neighbourhoods accompanied by Israeli border policemen and municipal inspectors in what the Israeli authorities define as ‘joint operations’, aimed at both (selective) enforcement and ostensibly improving local residents’ quality of life.
The Israeli National Parks Authority (NPA) is tasked with the administration and protection of Israel’s listed national parks. In East Jerusalem, national parks were declared in different parts of the city, particularly around the Old City, after 1967; within these territorially delimited locales, the NPA possesses significant regulatory and administrative capacities. The preservation of national parks’ natural and cultural heritage entails strict limitations on construction, landscape design and services provision: the NPA can halt unauthorized construction, oppose or promote neighbourhood master plans, issue fines in cases of violations by residents or visitors and limit the development of public services such as roads and water. In East Jerusalem, where national parks were declared by the Israeli government in dense Palestinian urbanities around Jerusalem’s Old City, the NPA’s programs condemn several neighbourhoods to mass-scale house demolitions (Emek Shaveh, 2014) and others to stricter regulations. The NPA makes use of its enhanced legal capacities either through spatial interventions as part of the large-scale, state-led project of consolidating Israeli rule in East Jerusalem, or as a punitive measure intended to pacify Palestinian individuals and communities. In the latter case, the NPA’s toolbox of administrative fines for construction, demolition of agricultural infrastructure and the de-facto expropriation of land can be harnessed by state security providers as a module aimed at both enforcement and pacification.
The National Insurance Institution (NII) is the Israeli state authority charged with the mandatory social and health insurance of Israeli citizens and residents; insurance under the government scheme allows free access to the public healthcare system, as well as benefits for unemployment, disability and other social entitlements. Each of the NII regional offices contains an investigation unit, normally tasked with detecting cases of fraud or abuse of the public insurance system. In East Jerusalem, the authority to investigate residents is used extensively, as the NII may revoke entitlements of Palestinian Jerusalemites who reside outside of Israel (e.g. in the West Bank, often in Jerusalem’s periphery). The revocation of entitlements often leads to the revocation of residency by the Ministry of the Interior – hence the forceful deportation of Jerusalemites from their own home city.
The NII’s authority and capacity to conduct investigations, deny insurance claims and initiate the revocation of residency can be used to leverage individual residents and communities; the fear of losing one’s health insurance, social benefits or ID card allows the NII an extensive reach into residents’ lives and the privacy of their homes, even more so than the police force. The NII’s investigators and policies in East Jerusalem constitute a valuable module through which security interventions can be pursued, either in times of escalation or in the daily administration of East Jerusalem by the Israeli authorities.
The bodies listed above are the prominent pluralized security authorities involved in the modular security provision in East Jerusalem, yet the list is not exhaustive: other actors, such as the Israeli Tax Authority and the Antiquities Authority also offer their capacities to the Israeli security provision in East Jerusalem. The Palestinian neighbourhood of Issawiya in East Jerusalem, built on the lower slopes of Mount Scopus and home to over 13,000 people, provides an example for the interactions between pluralized security actors and urban residents designated a threat.
Within a strikingly near distance to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the neighbourhood today is entirely surrounded by the presence of Israeli institutions – the Hebrew University, a large hospital, a Jewish-Israeli settlement, the separation wall and a multi-lane highway facilitating access to the settlement bloc east of the city. Issawyia is considered a ‘challenging’ neighbourhood for the Israeli authorities. Israeli security agents enter the neighbourhood only as part of an armoured incursion led by the Israeli border guards’ corps, fearing stone-throwing, attacks by Molotov cocktails or fireworks by local youth. Police interventions in the neighbourhood, including arrests and house demolitions, are often followed by weeks of violence and collective punishment by a plethora of Israeli actors.
Issawyia’s main street is a winding road where cars compete for space with rubbish piles, truant children and speeding buses on the narrow asphalt. In early 2015 I conducted a participatory transect with Majed, a community activist and former political prisoner, across the length of the street. Majed pointed at every business, recalling the October day when policemen and municipal inspectors jointly raided the neighbourhood, in what is widely believed by the residents to be part of a collective punishment following a violent escalation the week before.
This grocery? They got a large fine for having a sign outside their window. This hardware store? It was fined for displaying pipes for sale outside. The greengrocer was arguing with the municipal workers, who then fined him for littering the street. Every car parked anywhere in the neighbourhood received a parking ticket. I’m telling you, they invented names for the streets only so they could process our fines. (Interview 3)
This form of collective punitive measure, described by Majed, in which different public agencies descend upon an entire neighbourhood in an enforcement campaign following prior occasions of violence, may shed light on how modular security capacities are sought, entwined, detached and withdrawn. The near-cohesion with which public security actors, the police and the General Intelligence Service (Shin Bet), and other municipal, administrative and regulatory state bodies pursue security objectives is best illustrated by the presence of militarized border policemen securing the way for municipal and other enforcement agencies to indiscriminately mete out disciplinary measures.
Yet the Israeli security interventions in Issawyia, as in the rest of East Jerusalem, often take other, subtler, forms. Such is the practice of punitive blacklisting, described previously, which affected dozens of local youth and their families. Majed has witnessed the effects of blacklisting in Issawyia. ‘We’ve seen it again and again over the past year’, he said.
They [the Israeli authorities] blame some children for causing trouble, and then they go after the extended family – parents, grandparents, brothers or sisters…. They punish not with Magav [border police] but with going after them in other ways. The municipality issues a fine for construction or all different permits and licenses, the NII will cancel their allowances or summon them to special committees, the Gihon can disconnect their water and the IRS can go after them, claiming they didn’t report their income. They want to pressure the family to force their kids to stop their involvement [in the uprising against the Israeli rule], and many times their way works. (Interview 3)
In listing the variety of pluralized security actors, and in examining the case of Issawyia, I suggest that the development of reserved capacities is an essential part of every modular security provision. Security actors seek to mitigate risks by drawing together an assembly of actors, each with its own capacities, to be instructed, entwined with one another, detached and finally withdrawn if and when the need arises. Reserved capacities extend the reach and efficacy of state security actors through additional legal authority, public legitimacy, technologies, information and manpower that can be called for in times of escalation or enhanced risk. Such instruments – or modules – can be used either to target large (urban) communities, or to leverage individuals through novel forms of punitive measures. As such, reserved capacities may constitute an important ‘boost’ to traditional forms of policing, simultaneously illustrating the weakness of state police actors in an expanding policing field (Loader, 2000) and the creative ways through which they might pursue security despite their constrained authority and capacities.
The multiple facets of (in)security provision
Security is sought in the face of a looming threat: the threat of (unsanctioned) violence, of crime, or of societal and political change. Security providers, as an inherent part of their work, identify who needs to be protected and from whom (or what) protection is needed. As such, security providers, whether public or private, differentiate between those who are awarded security and those who constitute a threat; their policies, practices and structure reflect their multifacetedness, the plurality with which they unequally distribute (in)security. In this section I suggest turning attention towards the multifacetedness of social, administrative and regulatory public actors tasked with security roles. I propose that in taking part in a modular security provision, these public authorities and institutions perform, offer and emphasize different elements of their work to different audiences. In other words, public authorities tasked by state security actors with security roles undergo a reconfiguration to adopt and embody the security norms of differentiation and discrimination between those who need to be reassured and those designated a (potential) threat.
One such example can be found in the directives and practices of Jerusalem’s Combined Municipal Policing (CMP) units. The CMP programme was established in municipalities throughout Israel over the last two decades, in an attempt to consolidate police and municipal authority (Shadmi, 2012); a policeman appointed by the Israeli Ministry of Public Security conducts patrols jointly with a municipality inspector on the payroll of the city hall, with the official aim of tackling ‘quality of life’ issues (McGahern, 2016). The CMP program is a part of ‘City Without Violence’, a state initiative that maps and combats petty urban crimes such as youth brawls, vandalism and noise pollution (CWV, 2017). The Jerusalem municipality joined the program recently, following the 2014 violent escalations in East Jerusalem, ordering 50 CMP patrol cars in order to ‘restore security to the residents … and restore the city to its routine’ (Jerusalem Municipality, 2014). In exploring the multifacetedness of the CMP operations in Jerusalem, I observe their practices and interactions with two distinct groups of Jerusalemites: Jewish-Israeli citizens and Palestinian residents. I propose that the CMP programme in Jerusalem was established as a security module for two distinct audience groups, with different directives, policies and practices, as envisaged by state security actors.
CMP patrols are primarily intended to combat localized problems: noise complaints, youth brawls or under-age drinking in public spaces. These are the kind of issues that are often reported both to the police and to the municipal hotline; by joining forces (and resources), both actors are able to share the burden of providing the public with quality-of-life policing and enforcement. To the residents of the Jewish-Israeli neighbourhoods of Jerusalem, CMP is presented as an instrument to ‘increase the sense of security and the quality of life’ for residents (Israel Police, 2015) – to reassure residents by deploying further security agents to the streets, while at the same time attending to the mundane complaints of citizens to their elected municipality. Israeli citizens most often encounter the CMP patrols as they cruise around the outlying Jewish-Israeli neighbourhoods of Jerusalem, both during the day and at night. Their interaction with residents often follows either a complaint to the police or the municipal hotline, or preventative interventions in public spaces against the unwanted presence of ‘unsocial’ elements. The ubiquitous presence of CMP units contributes to the (re)production of a certain social and political order: facilitating the mobility of some people and forms of capital while marginalizing others (homeless residents, migrant labourers or loitering youth) (Shadmi, 2012).
To the Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem, the presence of CMP patrols represents an entirely different matter. Palestinian East Jerusalemites suffer from an acute deficit, in stark contrast with their Jewish-Israeli neighbours, in the provision of public services: roads, grid infrastructure, educational facilities and healthcare services (Nuseibeh, 2015). Yet despite the lack of investment from national and municipal authorities, CMPs in East Jerusalem were introduced not as an answer to residents’ quality-of-life problems, but rather as a reply to the security challenges posed during the violent escalations in East Jerusalem in 2014 (Jerusalem Municipality, 2014). CMP was adopted as an alternative law enforcement instrument which harnesses the authority and capacities of both the ‘regular’ police and the municipal inspectors to secure Israeli rule in East Jerusalem. Palestinian Jerusalemites are most likely to encounter CMP units in one of the CMP raids on East Jerusalem’s main commercial streets, particularly in and around Jerusalem’s Old City, where the patrolmen issue numerous fines to merchants and shoppers. Municipal inspectors cite violations of business, signposting or parking regulations, while the policemen stop and frisk passers-by and search for deportable West Bank Palestinian residents.
Such a degree of intervention in the daily affairs of Palestinian Jerusalemites by the municipal authorities is almost unprecedented. Considering that the Israeli authorities have turned a ‘blind eye’ to a plurality of phenomena incompatible with Israeli administrative norms for the past decades (Shlomo, 2016), I suggest that the municipal fines are issued not out of a sudden interest in conforming East Jerusalem’s cityscape to Israeli administration, but as a security deterrent. The CMP raids usually follow violent incidents or protests; in one instance, in September 2016, the entire commercial hub of Damascus Gate and its surroundings were shut down following an attack on policemen in the vicinity. CMP units enforced the closure and fined businesses that defied the order by re-opening their stores (Hasson, 2016b). In Palestinian East Jerusalem, the display of interchanging blue-and-orange flashing lights represents not the aspirations for a better quality of life, nor the prospect of a ‘City Without Violence’, but rather a punitive enforcement wing aimed at performing sovereignty and stifling dissent in contested areas.
The unequal distribution of (in)security by the CMP units, which are a quality-of-life measure for Israeli-Jewish citizens and a modular part of the occupying security force for Palestinian residents, demonstrates the multifacetedness entailed by the introduction of a modular security provision. The public authorities and institutions which are tasked with new security roles are not left unchanged. Their differential conduct towards different citizens and residents disrupts and bisects their routine operations. On the one hand, their authority and capacities are mobilized as a module to a (controversial) security intervention. On the other hand, these same authorities and institutions seek to maintain their public image and preserve their legitimacy as an impartial civil body. The reconfiguration of public authorities into a modular security provision precipitates the development of multiple facets of performances and practices towards different audiences.
Concluding remarks
In this article I have argued for a conceptualization of modular security provision as a configuration in which public security actors can summon, deploy, instruct, entwine, detach and withdraw other modules – public and private actors, authority, capacities and technology – at will. While examining the contours of the relations formed in such a modular array, I identified three features of urban modular security provision: heterogeneity, the development of reserved capacities and multifacetedness. Using data from ethnographic research conducted in East Jerusalem, I explored a case in which the constraints placed on state security authorities led to the mobilization of additional public and private actors, in order to pursue security indirectly through the legal, administrative and labour capacities these additional actors offer.
I previously noted the security conundrum faced by Israeli policymakers, who seek to colonialize and incorporate East Jerusalem while maintaining a façade of normative governance to domestic and international audiences. Have they indeed found their solution in adopting a modular security provision?
By seeking modularization, Israeli Security authorities are able to pursue security through ‘neutral’ third parties, in a manner which obfuscates security policy and distances police and national authorities from their controversial instruments. The ‘plugging-in’ of additional modules contributes to a depoliticization of controversial policy, an inherent element of assemblages that Li (2007) named ‘anti-politics’; political issues are rendered technical, considered to be a matter for professionals and outside the sphere of public discussion. Within a modular security provision, the relations formed between security actors and other ‘nodes’ are not acknowledged as a political issue, but are presented instead as a technical expert decision that does not require public scrutiny. Modularity thus enables the emergence of a depoliticized, yet highly political, form of security governance through which partisan security can be pursued with lessened political opposition. In East Jerusalem, the Israeli security authorities, in developing a modular security provision, were largely able to evade both political and legal accountability to the punitive policies adopted during the violent escalations of 2014–2015.
However, in adopting a modular security provision, several additional risks and pitfalls were brought to the fore. The delegation of security roles to social, administrative and regulatory state bodies did not only (differentially) affect citizens and residents, but has also led to the transformation of these same enlisted state bodies. The National Parks Authority re-directed its enforcement efforts towards the policing of dense urban locales; the National Insurance Institute reconfigured a major part of its investigations department unit to pursue residency revocation instead of investigating cases of fraud; and the Jerusalem Municipality redirected quality-of-life patrol units away from preventing youth brawls, towards enforcing collective punitive measures. In other words, when state bodies adapt to their new security roles, their structure and policies reflect this change. Having embodied the security logic of differentiation between those deserving of security and those deemed as threats, their performances and practices become multifaceted, presenting a different facet to different audiences. With time, these differentiating performances might prove unsustainable, as they may contribute to the erosion of civil state bodies’ legitimacy, or bring about legal and political challenges which were previously limited to the security authorities.
In this article I attempted to map and trace the relations formed between public security actors and other state and non-state actors within a modular security provision. I noted the modularity and near-cohesion with which they operate, and continued to suggest that the emergence of a mode of governance in which privatized and pluralized security actors are enlisted to overcome the constraints and challenges posed to state security actors is worth exploring and conceptualizing. In observing how a modular security formation is crafted to engender its own knowledge production, codes of communication and enhanced capacities, I suggest that the shift towards a modular security governance logic adversely affects the relations between the state and its citizens, and increasingly replaces a nominal equality with a differentiated distribution of (in)security.
Footnotes
Funding
The research on which this work is based was made possible with funding from the SECURCIT project of the European Research Council.