Among the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the most Israeli one is the Horseman of War. It seems that there has never been a moment when the hooves of war were not heard in the country that was established here seventy-six years ago. Even when the noises of war faded, we discovered that it was always here. I would like to examine the Israeli Horseman of War — at least one of them — and propose a revolutionary idea: to put a bridle and saddle on him.

It is important to say, first of all, that the apocalypse is a Christian variant on the End of Days prophecy. Searching for ‘signs of the apocalypse’ may cause panic, since the Christian Armageddon is only revealed when everything is already lost, when there is nothing left to do. This is when the moment of reward and punishment arrives, shaking the world, leaving only those who have behaved well to survive it. According to this reading, the Horseman of the Apocalypse are the vanguard of the disaster, from which there is no escape.

As opposed to that, I will try to present the horseman of the apocalypse as a seismograph of the apocalyptic state: the way in which the treatment of the harbinger, the first messenger, may cause the spread of this situation or its demarcation; the collapse of systems, or the act of holding a racing bull by its horns. I see this kind of seismograph in the way that the State of Israel deals with the challenge of civil protection.

At the beginning there was a shelter. The neighborhood shelter is a spatial marker, like a grocery store or a school, and the placement of the shelters creates a map that networks the residential neighborhoods and also tells something about its neighbors. Similar to the hundred-meter map that was used during Covid, the number of seconds it takes to arrive at the shelter creates the image of the neighborhood, and the possible connections that may be formed within it.

In addition, the shelter of the shared building is also a spatial marker of proximity: the public space of the building is not only a transition area but rather a space that one stays in, which requires shared maintenance at best, or shared neglect. However, here we can see that the idea behind protection is undergoing a process of privatization: shifting from a problem of the urban planner to a problem of the shared building. Unlike the neighborhood map, the characteristics of the building shelter are not related to traffic regulation, or strategic location: it can be central or hidden, depending on its planner. Thus, the shelter was relegated from a strategic point in space to a suppressed point: the public was sent to the stern of the ship.

However, the shared shelter is also behind us. Following the Gulf War, civil defense moved into the house itself: from the sealed room, the path to the residential protected space was short – the so-called ‘mamad’. The path became even shorter with the integration of economic interest: the residential secure space is considered a ‘service area’ and not a main space, which permits adding an entire room to the house. This incentive was already difficult to resist, hence, the ‘mamad’ was annexed to the house.

In its public guise, civil defense was pushed to the margins. Its transformation to the private sector mobilized its path back to the center and from this moment, it took over public systems. Instead of being an addendum to the house – a protected space that happens to be inside one’s home – the ‘mamad’ became the initiator of the plan. If its location is the largest stone, the clearest point in the planning sudoku, it is easier to plan the house around it. From now on, it is no longer a home with a secure space, but rather a house that is wrapped around it. 

Hence, civil defense returned to the public domain: not only did the entire apartment become an annex to the ‘mamad’, but also the entire building. The concrete shelters are stacked on top of each other, forming the building’s core. And not only the building, but the entire residential space: ‘TAMA 38’, which was rooted in earthquakes and continued in civil defense, is the significant spatial generator of the current era.

The Home Front Command’s hopes were to integrate the protected space as part of the house, thus sustaining a routine of war. Entering and exiting. Alarms as a part of life. Beyond the costs associated with this approach, it seems that the opposite result was achieved: instead of creating a routine of a refuge-city, the panic was spread to the entire Israeli public space.

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The conceptualization of civil defense as the Apocalyptic Horseman of War does not aim to replace cause and effect. War is war, and treating its symptoms is a very indirect – and often unexpected – way to influence the event itself. Civil defense must be examined, first and foremost, with tactical and strategic tools, aiming to save lives.

As mentioned, civil defense affects the way that war is perceived: whether the apocalyptic space is delineated or whether it takes over additional territories by using its emissaries. While the presence of the public shelter is integrated into everyday life in the urban sphere, the residential secure space (the ‘mamad’) reverses the picture: instead of introducing a routine into a state of emergency, it imposes the emergency state onto the routine. 

In this way, the Horseman of War is unrestrained: it affects everything it comes into contact with. Instead of defining the emergency state by introducing routine, it infiltrates war into the mundane. The emergency shelter replicates itself like a virus, floor after floor after floor, ׳TAMA’ project after another. Thus, the presence of the public shelter is calming, while that of the private one is stressful.

Civil defense is a call of action, a need to delineate the apocalyptic situation and plan its healthy surroundings. It is ironic to think that these were the reasons for deploying defenses on entire schools in the Gaza Strip: instead of allowing for a routine life to continue during an alarm, these serve as a constant reminder of the war that is yet to come. As mentioned, these are the Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

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In order to discover how to put a bridle on the horseman of civil defense, one must isolate the variables, by examining the elements of the defense system outside of their context. This should be done by exploring the mobile shelters and the different stories that they carry, which are scattered around Gaza, .

Mobile shelters are an unusual phenomenon in the process of privatizing the public sphere —  a phenomenon that operates by using a reverse logic from the one described above, and precisely for this reason they exacerbate the state of emergency. After the ׳mamad’ took over the urban planning, it turned out that there were holes in the net, and these were filled by mobile shelters. They are placed without any planning, as an independent object that is difficult to describe in a way, other than a ‘mamad that ran away from home’. During October 7th events, they were etched in the collective memory, becoming immediate monuments for public expression or emotional anchors. Their treatment is now important for the demarcation of the unrepressed apocalyptic space.

Perpetuating the mobile shelters in their places, is also the stagnation and perpetuation of the apocalyptic situation. Not only do they serve as a memory of a disaster that has occurred, but as each civil defense structure, they represent the possibility of a future catastrophe. On the other hand, their disappearance from the landscape – beyond the emotional damage that accompanies such actions, carried out by mistake in the days leading up to the events – is nothing more than emotional repression: the challenge lies in the ability to put them in their place, while planning their surroundings.

They cannot become memorial candles, since their hooves refuse to rest. It is best to harness them for the sake of preserving the apocalyptic boundaries: building a space for processing, by creating sites for action and integrating commemoration into a local, daily routine. These are sites of gray memory, spaces that deconstruct the cataclysmal state in order to maintain alertness and action – in other words, an answer for situations in which one must flee.

 ¹The term ‘mamad’ stands for the initials of  the Hebrew words: ‘Mekhav Dirati Mugan’ – a term that refers to a residential protected space.

 ²TAMA is a national outline plan. Meaning, a plan that applies to the entire territory of the State of Israel. National Outline Plan No. 38 was initiated out of the need to improve the resistance of existing buildings to earthquakes and later also to the threat of high-altitude shooting. It was expanded and duplicated indefinitely as it was an easy entrepreneurial path to construction with a quick transition through the regulatory planning institutions.