Completely disoriented, feeling dizzy, nauseous and not certain where I was or if I was asleep or awake, I sat up in bed with a jolt. Fearing that there were men using jack hammers to crash through the roof, every muscle in my body tensed as I imagined a horrific home invasion. Then came a series of BOOMs, and the house shook. Suddenly I realised that these explosions were missiles from Gaza and that I was at home in my little house in the Negev of southern Israel. My mind then flashed on similar incidents from the recent past, and recognizing them as somewhat familiar, my head stopped whirling and my body began to relax. I found myself saying out loud. ‘Wait it out, it will pass’. And it did, for now (FM, early morning, May 12, 2021).

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Almostness is a definite position-on-the-brink that is difficult to pin down because it refers simultaneously to a certain something and its partial lack of that something. Akin to the transitional condition of liminality, it also differs because almostness is a state of being on the edge but not an intermediary. Uncanny as it may seem, almostness sui generis can slip into the quotidian.

Although the verge is a risky, often vertiginous place, the nearly contradictory logic of almostness can be used to clarify. In that way it differs from the utterly ungraspable and inescapable state of uncertainty that Zygmunt Bauman (2006) termed liquid fear. Almostness reminds us of and prepares us for more and for less, and for better and worse times. While not implicitly laden with promises or hopes, neither does almostness necessarily entail uncertainty or stuckedness. Standing on the verge can cause despair. It can also inspire action.

This essay derives from our ethnographic findings in Israel’s south during a prolonged period of sporadic military operations (2008-2021) in which Israel and Gaza attacked each other. Our goal here is to capture the unsettling effects of and ingenious efforts deriving from almostness among the Negev’s urban and suburban residents (see Shir-Vertesh and Markowitz, 2015). While this piece focuses on the experiences of Jewish Israelis, anguish, physical and emotional suffering were by no means confined to them. The operations resulted in approximately 4100 deaths in Gaza, and 106 deaths in Israel.

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Israelis and Palestinians uneasily share a tiny region of the Middle East that is perennially embroiled in conflict and often subject to outbursts of violence. Over the last decades Israel/Palestine has experienced a shift from conventional full-scale war to mainly smaller-scale hostilities, including missile attacks from Gaza to Israel and four Israeli military operations against Hamas-governed Gaza. For the residents of the Negev, rocket fire occurs in short bursts, upsetting Israel’s never entirely peaceful routine. Safe rooms built to withstand missile salvos in every school, workplace and most living spaces are continual reminders that Israelis are under threat of attack, even in the intimacy of their homes. The ordinariness of overlaps between symbols, mechanisms and acts of war and peace in Israel can be jarring and disorienting (Ochs, 2011; Yair, 2014).

Image 1. A neighbourhood shelter (מקלט). In times of almost-peace, these shelters are usually used for multiple activities and purposes and then locked. Local security opens them whenever there are attack warnings. Credit: Fran Markowitz.

All of these characteristics echo what Zygmunt Bauman calls ‘existential tremors’, which can disrupt people’s perceptions of who they are (2007: 10, on ‘quakes’, see Frederiksen, this issue). Consequently, they feel anxiety, experience fear and ambiguity and view the future as risky and uncertain. For Bauman, these disturbing emotions derive from negative globalisation and over-individualisation, and the failure of modernist projects and their progress-orientation to ensure that human life will only improve from one generation to the next.  He characterises as ‘unwinnable’ struggles against ‘the potentially incapacitating impact of fears and against the genuine or putative dangers that make us fearful’ (2006: 8). Barring a highly unlikely social overhaul, Bauman’s dark prognosis is absolute; it is all or nothing.

Our ethnographic findings in Israel reveal a somewhat different orientation. During the weeks of missile attacks, people reported shifts in their time and space practices and how they actively strove to mitigate fear by establishing control over their environment, altering their daily routines, reaching out to friends and family, and offering help to others in need (Shir-Vertesh and Markowitz, 2015). While taxing, nerve-wracking and sometimes scary, our research participants usually described these violent assaults as temporary and manageable. Once ceasefires were called, however, embodied reactions to the strikes often lingered, and we were frequently told that rocket fire from Gaza would certainly occur again. We termed what we heard and observed a state of almostness – Almost-Peace and Almost-War.

We offer the concept of almostness as a non-binary perspective for exploring ongoing risks in contemporary times. Instead of liquid fear or a war/peace or emergency/routine dichotomy, our ethnography demonstrates that 21st century Israelis live on the verge, in a dynamic, fluctuating condition of overlaps between almost-peace and almost-war. As the opening vignette illustrates, although the wartime-defence habitus recedes when ceasefires are called, its residues linger and continue to inform the quotidian. When attacks begin again, they are quickly reactivated into practice. Almost-peace and almost-war are not simultaneously existing timespaces of potentiality and anticipation, but rather mutable aspects of the very same condition – that of almostness.

Our interlocutors describe themselves as experienced in adapting to threatening, dangerous and difficult situations. They never said that it was easy, or that they were not anxious, but they did say that they could manage. Even at the height of attacks, Israelis reassured themselves that everything will be beseder, everything will be alright. And ‘beseder’ is precisely the intellectual knowledge and embodied feeling that their lives are seldom static; they are subject to sudden shifts and marked by an edgy awareness that as the war-and-peace situation changes so too must they. It may be dizzying, but it can also be stimulating. As bad as it gets, in all probability the almost-war of missiles shot from Gaza will not turn into total war, and standing on the verge is very different from hitting rock bottom. ‘After all’, we were told many times, ‘It is not the Shoah [Holocaust]’.

In hi-tech, edgy Israel, where continuous, even if sporadic, dangers from neighbouring Gaza are viewed as inevitable although unpredictable, the anguished uncertainty of Bauman’s Liquid Fear does not seem to apply. Bauman speaks of societies where decreasing government accountability coupled with increasing individualism and precarity lead to isolation and estrangement, where free-floating anxiety may have no specific source, and pessimism seeps in to shape people’s perceptions of the future. By contrast, most Israelis are not alienated, uncertain or hopeless. Their unease is grounded in the continuing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which includes sporadic riots, suicide bombings and missile attacks. Despite the rifts between various groups, Israelis live with a palpable sense of community and have strong family ties; they reach out to each other offering support and commiseration, especially in times of danger. With everything that Israelis face, most remain optimistic, even content and happy. After an exceedingly difficult year marked by COVID-19, rocket forays, and internal riots, in 2022, Israel moved up to ninth place in the World Happiness Report (Helliwell et al, 2022).

Bauman’s liquid fear and Israelis’ optimistic edginess are connected through the instabilities of late modernity. Yet in Israel, almostness, that barely definable extended moment of ebb or flow that indexes something and its partial lack, allow Israelis to grasp their existential situation as difficult yet not nearly as catastrophic as it could be. The fluctuations between almost-war and almost-peace are expected, they are part of the regional conflict, a constant variable in people’s lives. This inexorability can evoke feelings of alarm and of hope, as people compare it to more calamitous periods in Jewish history, rally themselves to shift gears, adapt to the present, and envision more prosperous futures and favourable prospects.

References

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