Sense-based Reactions and National Security: The Gaza Conflict

• In Event: Attitudes in Conflict Settings

Abstract

The State of Israel has gone to great lengths to develop a strategic civil defense system centered on biological and sense-based human reactions to environmental stimuli and security threats. Efforts in this regard have been particularly pronounced in the auditory realm, extending to the engineering of particular siren sounds in accordance with human auditory reactions, as well as the development of an extensive civilian training program which conditions behavioral in response to audial stimuli. In so doing, the State has instituted a carefully honed system of biopolitical control that influences specific behaviors via affective and sonic inducements in the service of national interests. My paper examines this behavioral conditioning at the subnational level from the perspective of civilian actors who experience it. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with officers in the Israeli Defense Forces, trauma specialists, and citizens residing within the four kilometer perimeter of Israel’s border with Gaza, it argues that the sound of the open-air civil air raid defense siren contributes to a fissured normalcy that produces citizens as simultaneously traumatized and resilient, rendering it possible to sustain communities in a territory that is regularly bombed, and depoliticizing the conflict with Gaza by transforming political problems into technological and psychological ones that may be “solved” via crisis management techniques. This constructed normalcy is accompanied by two social byproducts that are significant to our understandings of the conflict: first, the siren sound “amplifies” preexisting ideologies, radicalizing political opinion and contributing to rigidity in political attitudes; second, it deepens what Baruch Kimmerling and others have referred to as “cognitive militarism” in Israeli society.

Author

• Michelle Day Weitzel, University of Basel