Binyamin Netanyahu’s rejection of Donald Trump’s Gaza peace plan is hardly a surprise, given the current mood among Israeli Jews. Anything less than the full termination of Hamas will be seen as a failure of leadership, threatening the prime minister’s chances of survival at the upcoming election.
But the problem is not simply Netanyahu, and it would be naive to think that his departure would necessarily lead to a different Israeli approach to Palestine.
Take the leading contender to replace him: Gadi Eisenkot, the former Israeli Army chief of staff and the leader of the newly formed Yashar Party. He is unlikely to take a radically different stance on the Palestinian cause, having been a member of Netanyahu’s war cabinet for the first nine months of the war on Gaza, when 30,000 Palestinians were killed, the majority of whom were women and children.
Israeli politics have, like politics everywhere, become trapped in a security paradigm in which threats are managed through ever more force, surveillance and control rather than resolved. This phenomenon is documented in Age of Security: The Rise of a Global Obsession, a new book by anthropologist Ruben Andersson.
He uses the concept of “liddism” to compare governments’ refusal to tackle the root causes of insecurity to keeping a lid on a pressure cooker: “Clank, a heavy lid over the problem instead of turning down the temperature.”
Here, Israel again offers a prime example. “Surveillance cameras, radars, sensors and remote-controlled weapons systems complemented this hulk of 140,000 tonnes of iron and steel, all overseen from state-of the art control centres,” Andersson writes of the “smart fence” built around Gaza to provide ‘total security’ for Israel, at a cost of a billion dollars.
Inaugurated in December 2021, the fence lulled Israelis into a false sense of security verging on hubris, which failed grievously less than two years later with Hamas’s 7 October attack.
But such miscalculations are not limited to Israel. Andersson draws impressively on many other examples from across the world to argue persuasively that we have moved into the era of ‘Big Security’, where the name of the game is protection of the status quo, invariably at the expense of the marginalised.
Big Security can take many forms. Control of migration is often at the forefront, but it also extends to increasingly authoritarian rule and an obsession with surveillance. It is also a global phenomenon; from El Salvador to China, India, Pakistan, Indonesia and the broad swathe of Islamist-affected states across the Sahel belt of the southern Sahara, Andersson shows there will always be ‘threats’ available for leaders to seize upon to support the imperative of control.
Other key examples come from Russia, where Vladimir Putin’s has reinforced centralised control; the UK, where successive governments have sought to suppress support for Palestine; and the US, where just this week a report found that Trump’s Department of Homeland Security spied extensively on left-wing groups opposing the neofascist ICE operation in Minnesota earlier this year.
Trump’s White House also shows how rapid the transition to the secure state can be. Having been ill-prepared during its first term from 2016 to 2020, the Trump administration used Joe Biden’s disastrous four years in office to plan in detail for its second chance in 2024.
An early sign was the use of federally controlled National Guard units to bring a pseudo-order to supposedly violent but Democrat-run cities, and another was the deep antipathy to the very idea of human-induced climate breakdown. For Trump supporters, this, especially, was dangerous nonsense, and every effort was made to close down any federally related response.
In its own way, responding to climate breakdown is a serious problem for Big Security, as it requires thoughtful cooperation at every level from the neighbourhood to the state and even globally. One of the signs of hope in an otherwise unstable world is that we now know that rapid decarbonisation of economies is possible, so much so that extremes of climate can be forestalled.
Yet, against this are the well-funded and powerful fossil carbon lobbies. For them, the rising public concern over climate breakdown is anathema and must be faced down with vigour. Moreover, Big Security is highly profitable and builds on the close overlap with the world’s military-industrial complexes and their vast experience of lobbying. This is currently on a roll with repeated and often successful calls for bigger military budgets.
Age of Security presents a dismaying vision of things to come, but Andersson does argue that there are many ways to respond effectively, not least in opposing Big Security at every level. Even so, anyone involved in efforts to control the arms trade is all too aware of the power of that lobby.
Once again, there is much to do and time is short.
