The intimacy of power: gender and US naval visits to Haifa port 1979–2001

Abstract

Using a method of feminist historical ethnography, this article offers a microanalysis of US Sixth Fleet port calls, Rest and Recreation, and naval diplomacy in Haifa port over the period 1979–2001. The documentation of everyday civil–military encounters in the city supports the claim that in the Mediterranean context, American military expansion was welcomed both by political elites and by the general public. In this process, a politics of consensus was built through repeated activities, ceremonies and cultural frames, which stressed the shared values and importance of US–Israel relations. Although the negative effects of routine visits (vandalism, crime, prostitution and rape) were never publicly acknowledged on the national level, two mechanisms for containing and minimizing urban conflict were developed over time by local officials and entrepreneurs. First, a discursive framing of port calls as a form of militarized tourism enabled municipal authorities to carefully plan and control the daily routine of foreign servicemen, including their exchanges with local residents. Second, the urban decay of the Haifa port district enabled the creation of intimate and confined bars that catered for American soldiers far from residential areas. Narratives of and about women who were involved as agents in the daily maintenance of these spaces reveal that intimacy, sexuality and even motherly love were significant for the development of both mechanisms. Furthermore, local forms of militarized femininity, namely the care for male soldiers as a motherly duty and the trivialization of sexual violence, were expanded to include US servicemen, contributing to the normalization of foreign military presence.

Keywords:

• Sixth Fleet
• port cities
• Haifa
• militarism
• intimacy

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by a grant from the Leonard Davis Institute for International Relations at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. I would like to thank the Haifa City Archives for their assistance in locating various documents and files. Most and foremost, I thank Cynthia Enloe for encouraging me to begin this project and for teaching me so much. Heartfelt thanks also to Merav Amir, Jutta Joachim and Andrea Schneiker for their reading and suggestions on earlier drafts, and to the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Commanding Officer, USS Austin (LPD-4), “1996 Command History for USS Austin (LPD-4),” 5750 Ser LPD4: NAV/038, 11 March 1999, 3–4. Available online at Naval History and Heritage Command:

https://www.history.navy.mil/content/dam/nhhc/research/archives/command-operation-reports/ship-command-operation-reports/a/austin-lpd-4-iii/pdf/1996.pdf (accessed September 17, 2014).

2. Department of Strategic Planning and Research, Visits of the Sixth-Fleet in Haifa, Haifa Municipality, 1997. Haifa City Archive (HCA) file no. 95624. [Hebrew].

3. Ridolfi, “Geostrategy and Naval Power in the Mediterranean,” 379; Lutterbeck and Engelbrecht, “The West and Russia in the Mediterranean,” 393.

4. Pain and Staeheli, “Introduction: Intimacy‐geopolitics and Violence,” 344–7.

5. Moon, Sex among Allies; Jennings, Unintended Consequences of Intimacy.

6. Pratt and Rosner, eds., The Global and the Intimate, 1–30.

7. Stoler, Carnal Knowledge, 211–13.

8. Fuhrmann, “Down and Out on the Quays of Izmir,” 170–1.

9. Kozma, Global Women, Colonial Ports, 67–72.

10. Marzagalli et al., Rough Waters, 6.

11. Posen, “Command of the Commons,” 8.

12. Kelly, Port Visits, 4–6.

13. See, for example, Chi-Kwan, “Vietnam War Tourists."

14. Lutterbeck and Engelbrecht, “The West and Russia in the Mediterranean,” 392.

15. Ridolfi, “Geostrategy and Naval Power,” 385.

16. “6^th Fleet Ships Leave Istanbul: 2 Die in Protest over U.S. Presence,” Toledo Blade, February 17, 1969; Güney, “Anti-Americanism in Turkey,” 474.

17. Artioli, “The Navy and the City,” 83.

18. Orsini, “Life in the Nuclear Archipelago,” 22–66.

19. Enloe, Maneuvers, 111–33.

20. Ingimundarson, “Immunizing against the American Other.”

21. Moon, Sex among Allies; Höhn and Moon, Over There: Living with the US Military.

22. Cooley and Nexon, “The Empire Will Compensate You,” 1037–8.

23. Aharoni, “An American Soldier in Bed,” 25–6.

24. Ben-Arie, “The Haifa Urban Destruction Machine,” 182.

25. Kolodney, “Contested Urban Memoryscape Strategies,” 123–7.

26. Fuhrmann, “Down and Out,” 170.

27. Khalidi, Resurrecting Empire, 118–50.

28. Aluf Ben, “Sixth Fleet Vessels Stop Docking in Haifa Since October,” Ha’aretz, July 31, 2001 [Hebrew]; also, for example, in the Command History of USS Saipan (LHA 2) 5750 Ser 30/1-07 the entry of 11 October 2000 reads: “As a result of the deteriorating situation between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, exercise NOBLE SHIRLEY and Haifa port visit were cancelled.” Available online at Naval History and Heritage Command: https://www.history.navy.mil/content/dam/nhhc/research/archives/command-operation-reports/ship-command-operation-reports/s/saipan-lha-2-ii/pdf/2000.pdf (accessed February 20, 2019).

29. This is reflected in the new maritime strategy developed by the US Navy, Marine Corps, and the Coast Guard in 2007. See Conway et al. “A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower.”

30. In 2017, after 17 years of absence, an American supercarrier arrived for a four-day R&R visit to Israel. USS George W. Bush finished a short deployment in the east Mediterranean which involved strikes against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. The carrier docked outside the port of Haifa and its estimated 5500 personnel spent the 4^th of July in Israel.

31. Weiss, A Confiscated Memory, 164.

32. Blumen and Halevi, “Staging Peace,” 980.

33. Kipnis, “Technology and Industrial Policy for a Metropolis,” 655.

34. Bernstein, Constructing Boundaries, Ch. 5.

35. Norris and Arkin, “New Base in the Mediterranean?”.

36. Geithner, Dallas, and Reb, Port of Haifa Study, 17.

37. Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire, 153.

38. Michael Oren, “The Ultimate Ally,” Foreign Policy, 25 April 2011: https://foreignpolicy.com/2011/04/25/the-ultimate-ally-2/ (accessed October 25, 2017).

39. Data and Figure 2 are based on the Department of Strategic Planning and Research report Visits of the Sixth-Fleet in Haifa [Hebrew].

40. Rynhold, The Arab-Israeli Conflict in American Political Culture.

41. Hirschhorn, City on a Hilltop.

42. Mitelpunkt, “The Cultural Politics of US-Israeli Relations,” 184–200.

43. Reuven Ben-Zvi, “The ‘New-Jersey’ Sailors Left 2 Million Dollars in the Country,” Ma’ariv, December 22, 1983 [Hebrew].

44. Iris Eyal, Activity Report: January 1993, USO-Israel, HCA file no. 28107.

45. Carney, Col. James R., “Defense Attaché, Embassy of the United States, Tel Aviv,” Letter to Mr. Yaacov Ron, Haifa Tourist Board, 5 May 1992, HCA file no. 30772.

46. “USO-Israel at a Glance,” Report to World USO-Honorary Chairman Chapman Cox, 1993, HCA file no. 28107.

47. Interview with Gilla Gerzon, June 26, 2013.

48. Wikipedia, Gilla Gerzon, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilla_Gerzon (accessed November 10, 2017).

49. Berkovitch, “Motherhood as a National Mission,” 606.

50. Herzog, “Family-military Relations in Israel”, 15.

51. Chorev at al., “Report of the Commission on the Eastern Mediterranean."

52. Dina’s real name and some of the personal details were alternated due to ethical considerations.

53. Gurel, “Funding Renovations of Haifa Port for Sixth Fleet Usage.”

54. Yaron Zelig, “Hail the Ships on their Way”, Al-Hamishmar, January 18, 1984 [Hebrew].

55. Kobi Eliyahu, “George Hale, A Sixth Fleet Sailor: Beautiful but Frightened,” Yedioth Aharonoth, Kol Haifa, December 23, 1983 [Hebrew].

56. A photocopy of the letter is in the hands of the author.

57. Punch, Adina. Lyrics and music: Eli Shauli, Yossi Babliki, Shalom Gad and Shlomo Rosenblum, 1991.

58. “Sailors from ‘Eisenhower’ Fight Pimps and Prostitutes in Haifa”, Ma’ariv, May 13, 1979 [Hebrew].

59. Ran Schecknick, “Business in the Backyard,” Yedioth Aharonoth, Mammon, April 15, 1997, 4 [Hebrew].

60. A short-lived municipal committee for the investigation of prostitution in Haifa operated from November 1995 to January 1996, HCA file nos. 33359, 33367, 33303.

61. Ajzenstadt and Steinberg, “Never Mind the Law,” 352–4.

62. 067468/96 2000, 2003.

63. Avi Shmul, “A Compensation Claim by a Woman Raped by Sixth Fleet Soldier Rejected by the Court,” Ha’aretz, July 28, 2000 [Hebrew].

64. Some of the details were changed due to ethical considerations. A copy of the original entry of the HRCC activity log is stored with the author.

65. 13049/97 1999.

66. Shmul, “A Compensation Claim.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sarai B. Aharoni

Sarai B. Aharoni is an Assistant Professor in the Gender Studies Program, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Previously, she was a researcher at the Center for Research on Peace Education at the University of Haifa (CERPE), the Leonard Davis Institute for International Relations at the Hebrew University and the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. Her work on gender, peace and conflict in Israel appeared in Politics & Gender, Social Politics, Security Dialogue, International Feminist Journal of Politics and International Political Sociology.