Feminist Semiotics of “Safe”: Intimate Violence in the Time of Pandemic

Abstract

This article explores the discursive politics of intimate partner violence during the first COVID-19 lockdown in Israel. It asks how, despite greater awareness and recognition, intimate violence disappeared from the mindset of those managing the pandemic, even as it soars. The analysis traces the conditions that enable the dialectic of presence–disappearance, by reading the ideological prescriptions in policy papers, parliamentary debates, court appeals, and media debates. I argue that disregard of intimate violence is made possible by the idealization of home and family as spaces of security and protection, coupled with the mobilization of militaristic measures and discourses.

Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic affects everyone, everywhere. But it affects different groups of people differently. […] [T]he pandemic is having devastating social and economic consequences for women and girls. […] COVID-19 could reverse the limited progress that has been made on gender equality and women's rights […]. The pandemic has also led to a horrifying increase in violence against women. Nearly one in five women worldwide [is experiencing violence]. Many of these women are now trapped at home with their abusers, struggling to access services that are suffering from cuts and restrictions. […] I urge governments to put women and girls at the centre of their efforts to recover from COVID-19. That starts with women as leaders, with equal representation and decision-making power. (Statement by the UN Secretary-General António Guterres, April 9, 2020) ¹

On March 15, 2020, approximately three weeks after the first case of COVID-19 had been detected in Israel, the Ministry of Health issued orders restricting people's movement in public. In a bid to maintain social distancing, that grew progressively more onerous, through increased enforcement and threats of fines, the public space quickly and effectively began to fade. From that moment until the end of April 2020, when movement restrictions of the first lockdown began to ease, the working premise of the Ministry of Health and the National Security Council (NSC), the official institutions in charge of managing the “event,” as the COVID-19 crisis was referred to, was that home is safest, that everyone has a home to stay in, and that reducing human contact to first-degree and co-habiting family members was the best way to preserve the public's health. Home and family thus formed the ideological framework that was supposed to ensure the safety of Israeli residents in the face of what was defined as a national security threat, and presented in militaristic, war-like terms. ²

And war it was, indeed. Amidst the movement restrictions and lockdown, reports began to appear in the local and global media about a dramatic rise in complaints of domestic violence, usually perpetrated by men against their spouses and children. The emergency lines for violence prevention, rape crisis centers, and various women organizations, as well as welfare services and law enforcement authorities, all reported a spike in appeals for help. This spike, witnessed throughout the first lockdown both in Israel, and around the world, coincided with growing evidence of the association between domestic violence and extended periods of close cohabitation, such as during holidays (e.g., Boutilier et al., 2017). While there is no single risk factor for violence against women, lockdowns appear to have produced a fertile ground for it, both in families where it had already existed, and in those where it had never happened before, making it even harder for victims to appeal for help, given the perpetrator's constant presence.

The purpose of this article is to decipher the concept of intimate violence in its current context, insofar as the phenomenon now appears to be recognized institutionally and socially, thanks to feminist efforts, both in terms of its explicit addressing in policymaking, and in the regular monitoring by civil society organizations, research institutes, and state authorities. While the governance of domestic violence has never resulted in the eradication of the problem, Israeli governments have responded to it, albeit infrequently and ambivalently (Adelman, 2017). In light of this, the question is how, despite such greater awareness, intimate violence vanished so completely from the mindset of the managers of the COVID-19 crisis, even while in reality it soared. My analysis seeks to trace the conditions that enable the dialectic of presence–disappearance, by reading the ideological prescriptions that equate home with safety.

As Gal (2002) notes, these categories, Safety, Home, Family, do not simply describe the social world in any direct way; they are rather tools for arguments about, and in that world. Hence, to understand the persistence of their current ideological content, despite dramatic empirical evidence to the contrary, we need an account of how they operate as forms of ideological communication (Gal, 2002). To that end, I examine policymaking and public discourse during the first weeks of the pandemic, from the start of the first lockdown (March 15, 2020) to the easing and removal of restrictions (May 4, 2020). ³ Reviewing policy papers, parliamentary debates, court appeals, data presented by civil society and state institutions, and media debate, I argue that intimate violence in its pandemic guise was made possible by the idealization of home and family as spaces of security and protection, coupled with a mobilization of militaristic measures and discourses that normalize the logic of masculinist protection (Young, 2003). Two, mutually constitutive, organizing principles serve me in contextualizing intimate violence in times of pandemic: space and security. In the following sections, I review feminist conceptualization of violence against women (section 1); and use feminist renditions of space (section 2) and security (section 3), to decipher how hegemonic notions of “safe” are constructed, construed, and produce a fertile ground for disregarding intimate violence.

Intimate Violence

Second Wave feminists have perceived violence against women as a social mechanism, a product of patriarchal power relations that reflects and reproduces the inferiority of women in both the private and the public spheres, through a culture of fear and acute awareness that violence might break out at any time (Brownmiller, 1975). Feminist analysis has shown how hegemonic discourses reduce violence against women to individual unfortunate and private experiences that occur between a perpetrator and their victim, and is accordingly often ignored, or even implicitly or blatantly encouraged (Dobash & Dobash, 1979; MacKinnon, 1979).

Various terms are used to describe violence against women, such as battered women, or domestic violence. But these terms reduce the expressions of violence to a single form (“battered”), and pertain to a variety of potential attackers (any family member) (WHO & PAHO, 2012). In this article, I use the term intimate partner violence (hereinafter, intimate violence) to focus on the couple, and on a range of violent and controlling behaviors that might coexist, or be perpetrated by a current or former partner, in the context of marriage, cohabitation or any other formal or informal union (WHO, 2021). While recognizing that women may also perpetrate violence against their partners, and that intimate partner violence also occurs in same-sex relationships, worldwide data shows that intimate violence is most commonly perpetrated by men against women. This is also the case in Israel, where 69% of domestic violence police investigation files have been opened after a complaint by a woman, and only 10% following a complaint by a man (in all other instances the complaints were mutual—see Yachimovich-Cohen, 2018). WHO's latest report estimates that globally, 27% of ever-married or partnered women of reproductive age (15–49 years) have experienced physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence at least once in their lifetime (2021).

The attempt to gauge the scope of the phenomenon has yielded only partial results: in Israel there is no precise data on the extent of intimate violence, but the prevailing assessment is that the number of women victims in reality is greater than the number of cases reported to authorities, since most women refrain from filing a complaint or reaching out for help. However, even this partial assessment paints a horrific reality. According to data from the Israel Police Statistical Abstract, since the break of COVID-19, in 2020 alone, some 20,326 cases were opened for physical violence offenses or threats between intimate partners, a rise of 13% over previous years, 87% of which involved violence by men against their spouses (Kapital, 2021). The number of calls to the Domestic Violence Hotline (118) during 2020 rose by 265% compared with 2019 (Kapital, 2021). Sampling by the Ministry of Welfare and Social Affaires indicates an increase of 25% in the number of calls to domestic violence prevention centers during the first year of the pandemic (Avgar, 2021). These estimates are borne out by civil society data, such as the WIZO Violence Index 2019–2020, that found a dramatic increase in the number of referrals to help centers in the course of 2020, coupled with a drop in the number of actual clients treated by prevention and treatment of domestic violence services, and a continuing paralysis of those systems (WIZO, n.d.). ⁴ It is nothing less than an epidemic, but one with no end in sight or vaccination, an epidemic of no public interest, or state-sponsored efforts to eradicate it (Sachs, 2020).

While men are usually perceived as the instigators of intimate violence, feminist analysis points to social institutions and public policy as the being responsible for cultivating the conditions that enable intimate violence to persist and flourish, by focusing on criminalizing the perpetrator through the law-enforcement system, coupled with treatment and rehabilitation of the individual victim through the welfare system (Shadmi, 2003). This increasingly professionalized discourse, which is modeled after social service agencies, shifts the attention from promoting broader social change, and depoliticizes the structural critique, thus failing to address systemic issues (Mehrotra et al., 2016).

As various scholars have argued, the growing reliance and cooption of feminist struggles with regard to the law enforcement system and the neoliberal state, ignores the oppressive aspects of the crime-centered approach to minority populations in terms of race, nationality, class and gender, who are already subjected to heightened criminalization (Bernstein, 2012; Halley et al., 2018; Kim, 2018). For example, the right to self-defense does not apply to women, indigenous people, or racial minorities, and enforcement often reflects gender and racial bias, thereby failing to ensure the victims’ safety (Murphy, 2018). ⁵ The absence of an intersectional perspective in the law enforcement system is also reflected in the over-representation of Palestinian women in intimate violence statistics, who account for 19% of all women in Israel aged eighteen or above, yet comprise 58% of all murdered women in Israel, and 73% of all complaints filed with the police. In addition, their representation among unsolved murder cases stands at 84%. The State Comptroller has also noted the over-representation of Palestinian women in shelters (40%) and the merely partial solutions proposed by the state (Batshon, 2021).

While this article does not explore the feminist response to intimate violence during COVID-19 per se, it does explore the myriad ways in which intimate violence vanished in COVID-19-related policymaking, despite existing governmental infrastructures that were developed and promoted by feminists. For instance, section 6c1 of the Women's Equal Rights Law, requires the inclusion of women of various sectors of Israeli society in public committees and national policymaking teams appointed by the government. This piece of legislation has been blatantly disregarded, and consequently gender perspectives are almost entirely absent in pandemic-related decision-making. Hence to some extent, my argument problematizes the achievements of governance feminism, and the long-term effects of the efforts made by feminists to be incorporated in state, state-like, and state-affiliated power (Halley et al., 2018).

Space

Feminist critique highlights the prevailing gendered division between public and private that naturalizes the location of men in the public sphere, and women in the private sphere. Normative perceptions associate all things feminine to domesticity, intimacy, and personal life, whereas the public sphere is understood to reflect a common good, that rules out “private interests” and “private issues” (Fraser, 1990; Yuval-Davis, 1997). In this ideological context, home embeds and embodies gendered assumptions, and idealizes heteronormative family relations (Blunt & Dowling, 2006). While the term home does not bear a single or universal meaning, and is experienced along complicated and intersecting race and class trajectories, much of the explanation for the oppression of women has been linked to the myriad ways in which the home reproduces cultural classification between private and public (Blumen et al., 2013; Fenster, 1999). This private–public distinction serves to construe intimate violence as a private-domestic or personal-familial matter, and as one that is excluded from public debate and public security (Fraser, 1990, p. 73, 1999, p. 13).

The spatial implications of gendered power relations are reflected in the personification of home as a woman, echoing notions of belonging, identity and personal security, while it is experienced by many women as a place of conflict and (unpaid or low-wage) work (Massey, 1994). Indeed, some of the most brutal and cruel cases of women rights abuse involve home confinement, and a lack of freedom of movement, that is enforced either physically, psychologically, or legally (Brickell, 2012; Fenster, 1999). In this regard, leaving home and using the public space might be experienced as emancipatory and promoting safety (Fenster, 2005). Equating the home with intimacy, belonging, and protection, neutralizes social criticism, and encourages a distorted perception of intimate violence as a deviation or exception to the norm (Kotef, 2010). Hence, exposing this spatial ideological mechanism is critical, precisely because the ideal of the home functions not only as a representation of intimacy and security, but also as a prescription, one that contributes to the expunging of intimate violence from the public consciousness, and presenting it as implausible (Brickell, 2012; Price, 2002).

Although this spatial logic marks the home as a space that is beyond the reach of the political, its jurisdiction and legitimate intervention (Kotef, 2010), the home has been mobilized in ways that are intrinsic to the nation (Blunt & Dowling, 2006). Often employed by governments as a bounded and clearly demarcated space of safety, the home is an intensely political concept, not only in terms of its internal relationships, but also through its interfaces with national institutions (Blunt & Dowling, 2006; Bowlby et al., 1997). This is evident in the lockdown policy, that echoes idealized notions of home, while ignoring the actual concerns and lived experiences of women with regard to their personal safety. Thus, being excluded from decision-making in the home underscores the exclusion of women in the private domain, as much as in the public one (Fenster, 2005).

Moreover, in the context of the pandemic, staying at home has been ascribed a moral meaning, insofar as reducing social contact, and maintaining isolation of the family “bubble” has been equated with consideration for the other (Strong, 2021). Not surprisingly, public spaces of belonging were among the first to disappear once lockdown was imposed, and country after country confined women to their homes, while curtailing their access to help, care, agency, and support, despite the ever-growing flow of complaints about intimate violence. In Israel itself, as early as March 2020, the police reported a sharp increase in the number of sexual offenses within the family and in the number of cases opened for domestic violence, compared with the same period the previous year (Breiner, 2020). The police attributed this rise to the prolonged stay at home, and to the fact that the probation service for adults had been obliged to operate at limited capacity due to a 60% drop in probation service employees, which meant the suspension of operations of some groups, and of treatment workshops for violent men. In other words, despite the local and global information that was available to policymakers, the services and frameworks for victim care or perpetrator treatment were deemed to be “non-essential” services. By the end of March, the media reported that shelters for survivors of domestic violence were running short of space and were expected to reach maximum capacity within days (Yaron, 2020a).

At the same time, a report by the Knesset Research and Information Center stated that confinement of people to their homes heightens the risk of violence against women and children (Lotan, 2020). In addition, it noted that—

(T)he rules of social distancing and restricted economic activity make it more difficult to identify women and family at risk, and to provide treatment and help to violence victims, due to the constant presence of violent elements in the home.

At the end of April 2020, about 6 weeks after movement restrictions had been imposed on Israeli residents, police reported a fourfold increase in domestic violence complaints in the second half of April 2020 (Yaron, 2020b). It was only on May 3, 2020, and after considerable delay, that a new shelter for domestic violence victims in need of quarantine was opened (The Special Committee on Welfare and Labor Affairs, 2020), and that it was decided that violent men who had been removed from their homes be put up in hotels (Yaron, 2020c). Prior to that point, the prevailing debate, at least in professional circles, was about the number of vacancies in shelters, and the need to open additional shelters that women and children could be transferred to. Public health was perceived through the narrow lens of “bending the curve” of virus infection rates; the other curve, that of a precipitous rise in domestic violence, was completely ignored by the NSC.

It is important to note that the rise in violence against women and children during the pandemic has been a global phenomenon: in early April 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported an increase in domestic violence due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and warned that women with disabilities, elderly women, refugees, displaced women, and women living in conflict areas are even more vulnerable (WHO, 2020). In late May, 2020, UN Women launched the Shadow Pandemic public awareness campaign, focusing on the global rise in domestic violence (United Nations Women, 2020). Already during the early stages of the lockdowns, aid organizations in various countries in the global north and south reported women having difficulties seeking help when the attacker is near them. ⁶ Thus, in France and Spain women were encouraged to turn to pharmacies with certain code words. In the UK, an organization dealing with domestic violence reported a 25% increase in appeals to emergency hotlines, and in France a 36% increase in police intervention in cases of domestic violence was reported (Kottasová & Donato, 2020). ⁷ These figures are not surprising, as studies have found that violence against women worsens during states of emergency and in life-threatening events, such as in the wake of the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the earthquake in Haiti and the ensuing epidemic of 2010 (Rivkin et al., 2020).

The escalated intimate violence is therefore no mystery, nor is the fact that the home is the main site where it occurs. Self-isolation at home is no guarantee of security or health, indeed, for many women it means a life in hell, thanks to institutional neglect and acquired myopia (Hasson, 2020). This myopia is reflected in the NSC's refusal to include women of various groups of Israeli society in the team of experts appointed to establish government policy for addressing the COVID-19 crisis. Despite section 6c1 of the Women's Equal Rights Law, which mandates women from various groups in the Israeli society to be included in public committees and national policymaking teams appointed by the government, the government has overlooked this obligation. ⁸ Women's perspectives have also been disregarded by omitting the Mayoral Advisors on the Status of Women in Israel from the list of essential municipal workers. These advisors were appointed for their crucial role in gender-mainstreaming municipal policy, and yet their perspective was thought to be redundant, despite the rise in intimate violence and the economic impact of the pandemic on women. ⁹

Perhaps one of the more striking manifestations of the main tenet of the COVID-19 policymaking is found in the Ministry of Health's guidelines, dated March 18, 2022, on the elective activities in hospitals during the first lockdown (Guidelines for Elective Activities in Public Hospitals 18.3.2020, 2020). These guidelines substantially restricted many services, leaving only urgent medical care in life-threatening conditions, as well as oncological, dialysis, cardio-vascular, and psychiatric care, including in-vitro fertilization, but not abortions, literally putting women in their place. A day later, an updated guideline added pregnancy genetic screening, and limited the scope of fertilization services, but still no mention of abortions (Guidelines for Elective Activities in Public Hospitals 19.3.2020, 2020). On March, 22, 2020, in reply to an urgent appeal by feminist organizations, the head of the Ministry's Medical Directorate referred the applicants to the Exception Committees operating at public hospitals, stating that in many (though not all) of them, the Abortions Committees continue to operate, in practice, leaving the matter to the discretion of each hospital.

As Gal maintains, the public–private distinction is ideological, and therefore not easily undone. Even historical changes in the “content” of what is legally or conventionally considered public or private does not necessarily undermine normative discourse and practices. To further understand the pattern and conceptual subtlety of this ideological distinction, and what social actors actually do with it (Gal, 2002, p. 79), I turn to the security-militaristic articulation of the pandemic as a “war.”

Security

Various studies have shown that militarism bears material and discursive facets that foster or exacerbate violence against women, reinforce prevailing gendered division, and correlate with higher gender inequality in terms of health, education, political representation, and labor force participation (Bradley, 2018; Elveren & Moghadam, 2022; Enloe, 2014; Sharoni, 2016). In the field of security studies in particular, feminist approaches challenge mainstream distinctions between state, military and society; underlining the downplaying or disregard of non-military threats such as domestic politics, global warming and non-state actors; and highlighting the neglect of women's pervasive insecurities (Adelman, 2017; Hudson, 2016; Pain, 2014). Gender perspectives of security aim to expand the notion of national security beyond the survival of the state, by demonstrating how militarism reflects and reinforces dominant understandings of masculinity and femininity, and by revealing its reach and material effects (Khalid, 2015). Thus, feminist critiques problematize institutional practices and the state's response to human security, and articulate security and insecurity from the relational and power positions of various identities, thereby raising awareness of insecurities that do not entail a response from state-based security mechanisms (Hoogensen & Stuvoy, 2006; Hudson, 2016).

In the Israeli context, the boundaries between the military and the society are fragmented, and public experience is dominated by soldiering, military professionals and para-militarist groups (such as youth movements) (Kimmerling, 1993). While the military pervades all social and state networks, such as bureaucracy, economy, education and culture, its main manifestation is a latent mindset of institutional and mental orientation of permanent war preparation, to the point where it has become an integral part of the social routine and transcends partisan party allegiances. The conveyors of this civilian militarism are the civil government, civil elites, and most of the members of the collective, who systematically internalize the self-evident militaristic reality (Kimmerling, 1993, p. 206). Feminist analysis of Israeli militarism demonstrates the effect of the armed conflict on women (e.g., Levinas & Berkovitch, 2020; Sa’ar et al., 2011; Sachs et al., 2007), study the supportive role and participation of women in military and militaristic discourse (e.g., Aharoni et al., 2022; Harel-Shalev & Daphna-Tekoah, 2020; Lomsky-Feder & Sasson-Levy, 2018), and the intersection of militaristic violence and intimate violence (e.g., Abdulhadi, 2019; Adelman, 2017; Sela-Shayovitz, 2010).

Accordingly, in terms of gender relations, role definition and spatial division, safety is intertwined with, and understood through, the discourse of waging war, where the “manly man” (on behalf of the state) is expected to serve as the protector (Young, 2003). Dubbed the logic of masculine protection by Iris Marion Young, this discourse places those who are protected, paradigmatically women and children, in a subordinate position of dependence and obedience. To the extent that citizens of a democratic state allow their leaders to adopt a stance of protectors toward them, these citizens come to occupy a subordinate status like that of women in the patriarchal household (2). The appeal to surrender to such a patriarchal authoritarianism in times of national emergency is the result of a discourse that associates the role of protector with chivalrous masculinity and care (4). In other words, masculine protection is needed to make a home a haven. Hence, argues Young, there is something to learn about public life, specifically about the relationship of a state to its citizens, when state officials successfully mobilize fear and militaristic discourse (7).

With this in mind, it is worth revisiting the first lockdown, and the authority entrusted with managing the COVID-19 pandemic in Israel, namely the National Security Council (NSC), whose defined purpose, according to its webpage, is to serve as:

Prime Minister's political security headquarters, [… charged with integrating] the views and positions of various governmental and security bodies, such as: the Ministries of Defense, Foreign Affairs, Finance, Justice, Public Security and others, alongside the intelligence community and security services. ¹⁰

This scope of authority was clearly not appreciated by the Knesset Special Committee on the Novel Coronavirus, which, in its interim report of April 7, 2020, questioned the NSC's capacity to deal with the COVID-19 crisis:

In the latter half of February, the Prime Minister decided that the office to manage the pandemic would be the National Security Council (NSC). This decision was not preceded by a legal discussion about the NSC's authority to coordinate and lead a crisis of this sort. […] The head of the NSC described things as follows:

Why is the NSC present at this event? Not only because the event [requires] inter-ministry [management], but first and foremost because a quick decision is required here, in most instances […] We have entered an event with very, very unconventional elements of uncertainty, [and] had to formulate how it is to be managed on the fly. As the Prime Minister has said: […] “We will make quick decisions—and then we will fix the mistake.” (The Special Committee on Dealing with the Corona Virus: Interim Conclusions, 2020, p. 25)

The word event (short for “security event”) requires “quick” and “on the fly” decisions, that bypass the executive branch of government, that is, government ministries, professional bureaucracy, service providers, in short, those familiar with the various needs of the population, and with the effects of the pandemic on it. The Knesset committee was also unconvinced of the superiority of the NSC's organizational abilities over a taskforce comprising representatives of the various sectors affected by the pandemic. Moreover, it pointed to the absence of representatives of the Arab and ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities, two communities that were severely impacted by the pandemic. The committee also rejected the premise that speed is of the essence in dealing with the crisis, especially given that the NSC was considerably delayed in its decisions (The Special Committee on Dealing with the Corona Virus: Interim Conclusions, 2020, pp. 26–27). However, even the committee's report fails to mention the absence of women, or any other vulnerable group such as LGBTQs, migrant women, and women without civil status (see Al-Ali, 2020). As data from Israel (Gross, 2021; Hasson & Ben-Eliyahu, 2020) and beyond (Jessen et al., 2021; Power, 2020; Wenham et al., 2020) shows, women suffered from growing intimate violence, closure of sexual and reproductive services, layoffs and forced unpaid holidays, in addition to being those performing most of the unpaid care work at home during lockdown.

In other words, although the pandemic is a medical-civilian crisis, its management has not been entrusted to health and education experts, but to the officers of the NSC, including officers from a classified military intelligence unit, whose usual job is to gather intelligence about the enemy by advanced technological means (Sion, 2020). Some discussions that have taken place at the NSC have dealt with possible civilian uprisings against the authorities, and the question of how “to prevent, in advance, risks that could lead to widespread social unrest, and protests against the government and government institutions in a way that endangers Israeli democracy and society” (Sion, 2020). In other words, according to the NSC, the main democratic concern during a health crisis is not about sustaining free speech and a lively public sphere, or the participation of various groups in decision-making, but rather about civilian surveillance, combat methodologies, and national security mechanisms. According to this view, the citizens of the country are no less the “event” than the pandemic, and are perceived as a potential threat. Indeed, in the first days after the lockdown, on March 14, 2020, the Israeli parliament passed two emergency regulations to authorize the Israel Security Agency to track the geolocations of citizens, in a bid to slow the spread of the virus, making Israel the only country in the world to use its internal security agency to deal with a purely civil-medical crisis through mass surveillance (Marciano, 2021). While the perception that the military's move into the medical-civilian sphere promotes national security precedes the COVID-19 crisis, and the medical arena has served to legitimize processes of securitization of medical services in Israel in the past (Eyal & Samimian-Darash, 2019), the pandemic constitutes a turning point for Israel, both in its formation as a surveillance society and in revalidating its security-oriented, militaristic tendencies (Marciano, 2021, p. 86).

Placing the management of the pandemic in the hands of the NSC is just one instance of the militaristic mindset that has prevailed. The “event” rhetoric has featured prominently in interviews with the spokesman for the Ministry of Health (Gontarz, 2020), the director general of the Ministry of Health (Maariv Online, 2020), and even on the Bank of Israel website. In his first address on the crisis on March 14, 2020, Prime Minister Netanyahu used expressions such as: “battle for health,” “war with an invisible enemy,” and promoted civilian surveillance by means normally used in “fighting terror,” as “an effective tool for locating the enemy” (Noy, 2020). ¹¹ A few days after the speech, reports appeared in the media that the Prime Minister had ordered the opening of the emergency underground bunker, to serve as the National Crisis Management center of operations (Maariv Reporters, 2020). The news item stated that: “The Center was originally intended for conducting wars, and now it has been decided to use it to manage the COVID-19 crisis in Israel,” and that it is “another tool for managing, controlling, oversight, and monitoring.” The Defense Minister declared that the “war on COVID-19 is only through the Ministry of Defense” (German, 2020), and for several days there was a debate about whether soldiers accompanying police officers on COVID-19 social distancing enforcement missions in public places, should carry weapons (Zeitun, 2020). In addition, at the end of March the Israel's Institute for National Security Studies published a report under the heading Contagion, War, and Strategy: Lessons from Military Campaigns for Coping with Coronavirus (Orion, 2020), that began by noting that there are differences between a pandemic and a war, but goes on to note that “despite the significant differences between the two situations, fighting a pandemic shares some common traits with warring against humans,” which turns COVID-19 crisis into an opportunity:

The cumulative experience of the Israeli defense establishment offers lessons and insights—in terms of intelligence, strategic and operational planning, home front protection, forces buildup, and decision-making processes—that are relevant to management of the coronavirus crisis, to the efforts to limit its costs, and perhaps even to the discovery of ways to extract and benefit from latent opportunities (Orion, 2020).

As Yagil Levy asserts, “enemizing” the population, namely, merging enemy-oriented with people-oriented attitudes, reflects how the deployment of the military was privileged over other options (Levy, 2022).

The “securitization” of the COVID-19 crisis has also been evident in the blocking of access to the raw epidemiological data collected by the Ministry of Health. The information in question is not confidential or private, but rather a database that in other countries is available to researchers and decision-makers. However, the prevailing feeling in the health system, it has been claimed, is that with regard to the COVID-19 crisis, the Ministry of Health “has adopted a security approach” to the information, as if it were matters of national security, and should be kept under lock and key (Efrati, 2020). As Levy (2022) points out, the securitization of the COVID-19 crisis legitimizes the use of militaristic discourse and practices, and reinforces their use during national emergencies.

The response to COVID-19 crisis has witnessed the mobilization of various levels of military capacity, especially in countries where the pandemic has been framed as a national security threat rather than as a public health issue (Gibson-Fall, 2021; Hoffman, 2020). This securitized discourse is played into gender-based vulnerabilities (Gibson-Fall, 2021), and is enabled by the logic of masculinist protection that excludes gendered perspectives from the definition of safety.

The Uncanny of “Safe”

In a thought-provoking article that explores HIV pandemic as a vantage point for examining current spatial ethics of proximity (namely, the collective imperative to maintain physical distance from one another, in order to “flatten the curve”), Strong (2021) argues that the moral meanings invoked by COVID-19, such as blame, shame, guilt and loss, bear an uncanny resemblance to those used in the HIV crisis. In other words, one pandemic has become the subtext for the other, triggering meanings for those affected by HIV. And while he admits that overt comparisons between HIV and COVID-19 have been limited, he points to the moral message this comparison conveys about lives that matter and those that don’t. Intimate violence may also serve as a subtext and a vantage point for viewing the shadowy, unspoken meanings and implications of the COVID-19 pandemic and the myths that it evokes.

Such is the case with the term domestic violence that is commonly used to describe intimate violence. Yet, despite its juxtaposition of the terms domestic and violence, and despite the preponderance of evidence about the widespread prevalence of the use of power, control, and oppression in intimate relationships, the ideal of home as an embodiment of safety remains as unassailable as ever. This essay analyzed two overlapping phenomena that emerged in policymaking during the first lockdown, namely, the spatialization of safety, and the securitization of health. Iargued that these co-constitutive processes reinforced mainstream gendered divisions of public and private, and justified the logic of masculinist protection that enabled the forgetting of intimate violence.

This forgetting has only been made possible by the persistent mythologization of family and home as being imbued with special significance (Gal, 2002). To understand the persistence of this signification despite dramatic evidence to the contrary during the lockdown, one must look at the ways in which the notions of intimacy, home and safety have been used to tackle the pandemic. Hence, even when violence is juxtaposed with home and family, grammatically, practically and publicly, the hegemonic meaning of safety, and its prescription has remained the same: “Waging war” as a means of securing the home; home as a signifier of safety; and the shadow pandemic of intimate violence that does not evoke any collective moral meanings or ethics of solidarity.