Paper short abstract:

We argue that inbuilt bomb-shelters in Israeli houses reify the home-front as military-front. This conceptual simultaneity naturalizes spatiotemporal ontology of dwelling, which we call 'routinegency'

Paper long abstract:

Since 1992 a law in Israel obliges building contractors to construct bomb-shelters in residential homes. These are popularly known by the Hebrew acronym MMD (merhav mugan dirati, pronounced 'mamad'), meaning 'apartment protected space'. Formally a marginal social domain underground used as a storage space, the bomb-shelter in Israel has thus become a space of and for mundane activity. Based on 12 months of fieldwork and 65 semi-structured interviews with Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel, in this paper we will demonstrate that mamad policy and practice effectively reifies the home-front as military-front. We argue that this conceptual overlap instantiates a new ontology of dwelling in Israel, which we call 'routinurgency': the constant emergence of security urgency as conceptually and experientially intrinsic to 'routine' life. We will analyze three ways by which routinurgency alters the relations between political subjects and governing bodies in Israel: on the ideological level it hones the local disparity between national affiliation (Jewish, Palestinian) and citizenship (Israeli); on the affective level it boosts discourse on fear and post-trauma, side-by-side with the governmentality of collective resilience; and on the spatial level it entails a thorough transformation of Israeli architectural landscape.