“The supermarket became an army base!”

This chapter investigates security practices at a supermarket in an Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank, where most low-wage workers are Palestinian occupied subjects. Ethnographic research suggests a tension and an ongoing vacillation between two tendencies of Israeli security in this context. On the one hand, there is a partial civilianisation of security that furthers the normalisation of Israeli settler presence and dominance in the West Bank. It does so by creating a consumer-focused atmosphere in which military occupation and its attendant political dynamics recede to the background of everyday experience, especially for Jewish-Israelis. On the other hand, there is a re-militarisation of security, in which the continuity and inseparability of the military and the civilian are performed and acknowledged with varying degrees of open-ness, so that political tensions to come to the fore and unsettle the normalisation of settler life. Attending to this everyday blurring between civilianisation and re-militarisation advances an analysis of the relationship between military occupation and settler colonialism, while pointing to an anthropology of security that is not so much about governance and stabilisation as about unruly affect, political tension and the partial destabilisation of dominant social projects.