Fragmented Emergency: Sirens, Cellphones, and Sonic Spatialization in Israel

Abstract

Israel’s civil defense apparatus relies upon a technologically advanced alarm system. Once a rocket is detected, a cellphone app alerts the residents of the targeted area, and only the sirens located close by start wailing. The ability to isolate hundreds of such “alert zones” from one another during conflagrations with the Gaza Strip has been celebrated as the key to Israel’s civil and economic resilience. Yet, when the history of this technology is examined, a different picture also emerges. Civil society in Israel has often contested the fragmentation of the country into distinct alert zones and surfaced the social and political inequalities it enhances. By following these claims, this article 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. The article argues that Israel has shifted the meaning of war, for its citizens, from a political crisis into a series of random events, thus naturalizing the perpetual conflict with the Palestinians, stifling any effective demand for resolving it, and cementing an individualized form of state sovereignty.