Chapter 1 focuses on the Israeli security community’s desire to preserve Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, a sentiment that serves as the basis for the security veterans’ disproportionate support for the two-state solution. This chapter explores the assessments of the security establishment from the 1967 War to the Oslo peace process of the 1990s to the breakdown of the peace process in the 2000s. It shows that proposals for a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip were submitted by the IDF and intelligence services to the Eshkol government even before the conclusion of the 1967 “Six Day” War. Two decades later, the IDF top brass played an important role during the first Intifada in prodding the Rabin-led government to pursue peace talks with the PLO. During the second Intifada in the early 2000s, retired senior security establishment officials urged Prime Minister Sharon to resume peace diplomacy with the Palestinians. As this chapter shows, Israeli governments have varied in their commitment to pursuing a deal with the Palestinians based on the two-state solution, often putting them at odds with the national security community.

Chapter 3 focuses on the policy disagreements with the security community in the period following Netanyahu’s return to power in 2009, a decade after he lost his reelection to Barak. His dismissal of the two-state solution and aggressive settlement policy in the West Bank; his approach toward Hamas-led Gaza; and key aspects of his policy aimed at thwarting Iran’s nuclear program have encountered serious opposition by the security establishment and retired senior security officials. This chapter describes how civil-military tensions spiked following the formation of Netanyahu’s sixth government in December 2022 and its pursuit of its highly controversial legal overhaul.

Netanyahu’s worldview, his modus operandi, and the significant steps he has taken to keep the generals at bay are explored in Chapter 2. It is argued that he is a pragmatic hardliner – a lifelong right-wing ideologue and opponent of Palestinian statehood who nevertheless has displayed flexibility, enabling him to remain coy about his territorial vision for Israel. A master manipulator of the media, he has cultivated an image of himself as “Mr. Security” and sought, early on, to exclude the IDF generals from the decision-making process, associating them with the political left and seeing them as potential rivals. The security community, for its part, sees Netanyahu not as “Mr. Security” but, rather, as a politician who routinely places his personal and political interests ahead of national security concerns.

When arriving by boat in Malta from Libya, migrants encounter a strong state and legal framework that shapes their mobilities and journeys. This chapter brings forward migrants’ lives in Malta’s reception structures. It reveals how people experience mobility as a form of stuckness, influenced by bureaucratic techniques of governance.

This chapter opens up space for rethinking the experiences, economies and governance of mobile life. It sheds light on aspects of comparison between migrants’ experiences in the fragmented context of Libya and in Malta’s legal framework, enabled through the book’s unique analytic of the journey. Journeys foster novel understandings of the intersections between economy and unauthorized migration, encapsulated by the concept of mobility economies. The ethnographic and analytical insights of the book furnish a new anthropology of mobility and economic life.

This chapter offers a temporal view on mobility: the ways in which migrants negotiate their longer-term futures in Malta’s state and legal system. Showing how onward movement is constrained by legal status and a bureaucratic landscape, it front stages the importance of the journey as an analytic for theorizing mobility.

Migrants’ journeys are often characterized by immobility and waiting. This chapter describes the experiences of migrants at a house in Libya as they prepare to take a boat to Europe. Furthering analyses of mobility economies, it brings economy into conversation with questions of time and immobility. The chapter reveals how a clandestine economy surrounding mobility intersects with intimate economies that reproduce the mobile body.

Confinement is a prominent feature of migrants’ journeys through Libya and onwards to Europe. Turning to migrants’ experiences in informal sites of confinement and in government-run detention centres in Libya, this chapter foregrounds how forced immobility is a crucial part of processes extracting value from migrants’ lives. Through a dynamic I call ‘accumulation by immobilization,’ the chapter reveals how peoples’ mobilities become a locus for generating value.