Israel’s civil defense apparatus relies upon a technologically advanced alarm system that isolates the warnings given to civilians into thousands of distinct “alert zones,” some only hundreds of meters in size. This fragmentation of space into separate risk areas enabled Israel to wage a 15-year-long war in the Gaza Strip while continuing business as usual at the homefront under recurring rocket attacks by Hamas. However, beyond its military effectiveness, the project behind this technological instrument is political: maintaining a perpetual state of war. The lecture shows how Israel designed the alert zone system to crumble the traditional notion of emergency and turn it from a collective into an individual experience. By delving into the history of this system combined with the history of the siege on the Gaza Strip since 2007, I will argue that Israel has shifted the meaning of war from a political crisis into a series of random events, thus naturalizing the encagement of Gaza in the Strip, stifling any effective demand for removing it and cementing an individualized form of state sovereignty.
Dotan Halevy is a historian of the modern Middle East and a senior lecturer at the Department of Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University. He is the co-editor of Israel’s Heterotopia: Gaza in Israeli Politics and Culture (Gama, 2023). His first monograph, Stripped: A Modern History of the Gaza Borderland, will be published by Stanford University Press.