Feeling at Home? Space and Place in Everyday Wartime in Israel

This talk examines how belonging is articulated across everyday spaces in Israel during war. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted between 2024 and 2025 at Israel’s international airport and on the widespread phenomenon of memorial stickers commemorating fallen soldiers, I explore how wartime spatial meanings become embedded in routine movement. Contrary to the claim that airports are interchangeable zones of “nowhere,” I argue that Israel’s international airport during war functions as a highly charged nationalised space in which national narratives are articulated and rehearsed through images, texts, and their repetition in motion. Through signage, exhibitions, commercial campaigns, and memorial displays, arrival and return are framed as intimate acts of collective belonging. Following the attacks of October 7, 2023, memorial stickers have proliferated across Israeli public space commemorating civilians and soldiers. Appearing in neighbourhood streets, schools, parks, playgrounds, and beaches, these artefacts embed remembrance within everyday landscapes. Featuring smiling portraits alongside brief affirmations, they relocate commemoration from formal ceremonies into the fabric of daily life. Merging nationalist and religious language with the idioms of popular psychology and therapeutic culture, emphasising positivity, resilience, and future orientation, they align aspirational discourse with national and militarised values. By placing the airport and everyday spaces in conversation, the talk suggests that wartime belonging in Israel is produced not only through official statements or state ceremonies, but through visual and spatial forms encountered in everyday routine. These practices blur distinctions between public and private, sacred and mundane. Drawing on Lauren Berlant’s concept of cruel optimism, I consider how ideals that sustain endurance under prolonged crisis may also narrow the imagination of alternative futures. 

Dr Sari R. Alfi-Nissan is a postdoctoral fellow at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies (OSGA), University of Oxford. She is a cultural sociologist focusing on the sociology of space and the intersections of nationalism and current global youth culture and education. Sari was a visiting postgraduate researcher at the University of Kent and completed her PhD in Sociology at Bar-Ilan University, graduating as the university’s valedictorian. She was granted the Presidential Doctoral Fellowship of Excellence, the Rector Award of Distinction, and won several awards for article publications. Sari is a member of Critical Sociology and Philosophy of Education (CRISP) research group at the University of Helsinki. She is also a novelist and a lecturer of Storytelling of Knowledge. www.sarialfi.com