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Chapter 1

Orientations

To be a devout Jewish settler is a deeply contradictory project—from an ideological vantage, it requires reorienting exilic Judaism and its broad textual tradition toward specific sites that are deemed sacred. Not only does settling religiously emphasize actual places over the biblical Land of Israel, but more narrowly, it entails drawing precise correspondences from textual passages to sites in Palestinian areas where biblical events are deemed to have occurred.¹ In these attempts to remake the fabric of Jewish social life and marginalize a Palestinian presence, ideological settlement necessarily does away with many of the diasporic elements of Judaism and remakes tradition itself. Whereas in its exilic mode, Judaism relied on texts that could be carried, times rather than places of observance, shared language, and a set of religious laws in order to create commonalities in the absence of territory, in this settler version, observant practices that potentially bind people to place become far more valued. A great deal of remaking, reorienting, and even rupture, then, has gone into reinterpreting Jewish tradition through the lens of settling and endowing it with a sense of religious obligation.

This chapter explores the key dimensions of change in Jewish thought and practice that have provided religious rationales for settling in Palestinian areas. It focuses on three concurrent kinds of change, making the case that these are in fact the most significant for understanding an authoritative ideological formation in the making. These dimensions include the ethical realm of moral behavior in Judaism, its relation to place-based forms of residence, and the treatment of other non-Jewish residents that follow from this spatial (and territorial) turn (cf. Fonrobert 2009). Jewish settlers, then, are not simply messianic believers, shaped by a pragmatic orientation toward the coming of the messianic era as many allege (Aran 1991; Ravitzky 1996; Inbari 2009; Taub 2011); rather, as believers, they are engaged in far more extensive and complicated forms of remaking. This deeper reworking of Judaism and the social life that follows from it entails the wholesale reorientation of its primary texts, ethical obligations, and rabbinic interpretations, in effect narrowing and particularizing the tradition’s interpretive possibilities. Biblical places, boundaries, and ownership of land are some of the obvious emphases that settlers bring to Jewish observance, and these take on a value that overrides concerns with peoplehood and future-oriented messianic longing. Moreover, ideological settlers have added to their place-based emphasis a concern with seeking out and finding hidden or erased origins. Origins as much as observing religious obligations and laws come to define and orient the “authentic” Jewish community. In practice, then, devout settlers have emphasized the significance of a growing number of sites of origin, as well as the routes to them, in order to expand into key Palestinian areas.

As a way of introducing some of the critical themes of the book and focusing on the ways Jewish tradition is being reworked, I begin by reconstructing a tour of Hebron led by a Jewish settler, showing the way it invokes and applies elements of Judaism to claim Palestinian land. These settler claims are then juxtaposed with the perspectives of a dissident Israeli soldier who served in Hebron and those of a Palestinian villager whose farmland lies near Kiryat Arba. While the three tours through the Hebron area actually took different routes and occurred at different times, I discuss them together in order to highlight the ways a settler’s religious claims are often reinforced by the dynamics of the military occupation. As parts of a composite whole, these different tours and perspectives are intended to both examine and disrupt features of an ideological religious vision that is becoming increasingly hegemonic.

Reframing Scripture

To provide a better sense of what settling religiously entails, I begin by turning to a reading of the Bible (Torah) that Hebron settlers typically champion as authoritative. Again, I am interested in the way the Bible’s diasporic elements are routinely read out or reframed, and I consider it important to ask: What features of the text are being emphasized so that settling Palestinian Hebron appears to be biblically mandated in the contemporary moment? While Hebron has long been considered sacred to Jews and while there is ample documentation that an Arab-speaking Jewish minority lived in the city during the Ottoman period, Jewish settler activists radically transformed land adjacent to and directly within the Palestinian city after their arrival in 1968. If Judaism is actually a multivalent and multilayered form of observance, requiring a variety of texts to be read in relation to one another in order to draw out its key values through comparison and contrast (Fishbane 1998, 2012), how have settlers made it more singular and used the Bible as a charter for their practices of expansion? How has Judaism’s legalistic emphasis on “doing” been reoriented to enable land takeovers? Moreover, how have interpretive debates that have taken place among rabbis or sages from the Middle Ages to the present been transformed by settler applications of these in order to erase the presence of Palestinians?

Let us begin with the particular reading of a biblical story often cited by militant settlers as a justification for settling Hebron. The passage appears in Genesis 23 as the “Life of Sarah,” a prototypical story of Sarah’s death and Abraham’s purchase of a burial site for her. Abraham, a stranger (ger vetoshav; lit., “a resident alien”) in Canaan, approaches Ephron, a prominent Hittite and landowner, in order to negotiate the purchase of a field containing a cave, the Cave of Makhpelah, so that he can bury his wife. Abraham says, “I am a resident alien among you; sell me a burial site, that I may remove my dead for burial.” In the passage, Ephron the Hittite responds that he may take it without paying, but Abraham nevertheless insists on purchasing it. The transaction between them is conducted within the hearing distance of the entire Hittite community and gets cemented by their respective social obligations to it as well as to one another. Their verbal agreement, then, has a public dimension and this helps make the land deal between individuals of two different peoples binding: Ephron says to Abraham, “A piece of land worth four hundred shekels of silver—what is that between you and me [beni u-venkha mah-hi]? Go and bury your dead [ve-et metkha ḳavur].” Hebron’s contemporary Jewish settlers allege that the burial cave purchased by Abraham for the full amount is evidence that the contemporary place, where the Ibrahimi Mosque (al-Ḥaram al-Ibrahimi) now exists, is their exclusive property to this day. They claim to be the original owners and that the Jewish burial caves lie far beneath the Muslim cenotaphs above ground. For religious settlers, the presence of the mosque does not point to a convergence of Judaism and Islam but rather the usurpation of their original sacred Jewish site. They claim a right to worship directly within the space of the Ibrahimi Mosque because they claim it is built over bequeathed Jewish property. By extension, they also claim a right to expand into other Palestinian areas of Hebron because of the historical Jewish community that was massacred in the 1929 riots and forced to leave. What is clearly absent in their project of “renewal” is not only a sense of the interrelatedness of three traditions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—but the often syncretic ways Judaism has been lived in relation to these other traditions in history.

Casting aside the issue of being able to precisely map the topography of the Bible onto the contemporary Palestinian landscape or whether Abraham is a historical figure (biblical scholars consider him to be mythical), the settler claim depends on the idea that Judaism has a more authentic right to the site than do other religious traditions that emerge later in relation to it. Theirs is not, in other words, a pluralistic stance that recognizes multiple truths or the veracity of other traditions that intersect and come together in the figure of Abraham. Rather, Jewish settlers take as a given the need to pry these convergences apart and order competing claims along a linear time line. Christianity and Islam are thought of as later and less authentic additions. Ideological settlers are therefore concerned with returning to and restoring a form of authenticity deemed lost—not just a settler preoccupation, to be sure, but one that has been applied to the specific cause of settling in complicated ways. They also believe that as a Jewish vanguard (to the exclusion of other versions of Jewish observance or other Jewish communities in Israel and beyond) they have a right to stand in as the direct “inheritors” of Hebron for all other Jews. In other words, settlers emphasize that this property has literally been passed down to them across the ages (they are its heirs as the reflexive Hebrew term for “inherit,” hitnaḥel, suggests) and that all Jews must eventually return to a place bequeathed to Abraham’s descendants. They therefore claim to hold onto and inhabit property in Hebron not only for Jews in Israel and the direct descendants of those who actually lost property in the 1929 riots but for those living abroad in the diaspora. And yet other potential readings of Abraham’s purchase highlight the settlers’ interpretive reorientation of the Bible and show how it has transformed Judaism’s values around property and relations with non-Jews.

Much of the scholarship on diaspora mentions burial as a common dilemma (Levy 2001; Levy and Weingrod 2004; Ho 2006). Individual members of a diaspora are inevitably forced to create geographic ties when burying their dead, giving rise to competing loyalties. In other words, burials spur attachments to a grave as a site of remembrance, and the grave competes with deterritorialized self-definitions that do not depend on any particular locale (Levy 2001; Gonen 2004). Where, in other words, is it fitting to bury a person who has lived out his or her life within a diasporic context (cf. Clifford 1994; Huyssen 2003)? Anywhere and nowhere are equally sound answers. One could readily read Abraham’s purchase of Sarah’s burial site as working through this dilemma; a resident alien among Hittites, his family lacks a self-evident burial site, and he therefore purchases a plot. Sarah’s death and burial creates an emotional link to a particular place, but it is an arbitrary one that stands in tension with other, de-territorialized forms of affiliation. While this tension is key to the biblical story, a settler stance attempts to create consistency and certainty in the face of the ambiguity it exposes. Any diasporic elements are made to disappear and then replaced by an emphasis on full ownership of this particular piece of property. Hebron and the edifice Meʿarat ha-Makhpelah are deemed significant by Jewish settlers because they are thought to mark the precise location of the graves of the biblical patriarchs and matriarchs.²

Contemporary property rights seem to be directly conferred by the Bible. Yet it is worth noting that many of the passage’s key elements regarding Abraham’s purchase are erased by this view. I have never heard any resident of Kiryat Arba or the remade Jewish Quarter in Hebron mention, for instance, that Abraham is a resident alien when he carries out the purchase, or that he buries his wife in a Hittite area, or that he bows low in deference to that people when purchasing the property, all features of the Bible that point toward a multilayered diasporic problematic.³ Abraham may own the property but his ownership is nonetheless underscored by his engagement with other (even pagan-worshipping) people and his outsider status in the area. The settler reading of this passage, in contrast, depends on an interpretative reframing that emphasizes his exclusive ownership and control, and this in turn is matched by prevailing social conditions outside the text that grant their particular readings an apparent plausibility. I am therefore interested in the ways that these ideological interpretations become authoritative and the ways secular Jews who support settlement defer to ideological settlers in the name of authenticity. In other words, what social conditions enable this particular application of Jewish tradition to appear both compelling and authentic to settlers and their supporters?

A Settler Tour

To consider the remaking of tradition in lived practice, I turn to the settler tours of Chaim Mageni, a founding resident of Kiryat Arba and guide who with a certain flair expressed key elements of this ideological settler sensibility.⁴ During his life, Mageni took hundreds of religious and settler-oriented Jewish tour groups directly into Palestinian neighborhoods throughout the West Bank and stood on location, recreating biblical events in order to bring the past, as he rendered it, to life. His tours consisted of stories, histories, archaeological evidence, hearsay, and hypothetical situations woven together to form a persuasive tale. Though disturbing in many respects, they illustrate how settler claims can seem persuasive for an audience disposed to believe them. To be convincing to the tourists in his charge, in other words, Mageni didn’t just quote a biblical passage, but rather, armed with the Bible, he actually sought to reframe his audience’s perceptions of an existing Palestinian reality. In short, Mageni’s authority as guide and as a devout Jew depended on the facility with which he could invoke and draw on a vast textual tradition that was equally grounded in colonial erasure. Given that most of Mageni’s tours took place in Palestinian towns, what sorts of claims seemed to forge attachments to place, shape community, and elicit devotion? These questions remain important because they point to an ideological formation incrementally taking shape in material form. Long before a Jewish settlement actually gets built, settler tours such as these and other practices that remake space lay the groundwork for a material inscription of the biblical past that provides an experience of devout “truth” in the present.

First, let me give a few biographical details about Mageni himself. He grew up in a working-class section of the Bronx and then became active in the Bnei Akiva movement, a religious-oriented Zionist youth movement in the United States that emphasized the importance of immigrating to Israel and working the land. He left the Bronx for Israel just after the 1967 war and studied in Yeshivat Merḳaz ha-Rav Kook, the premier national-religious school of higher education that historically has shaped the views of many leaders of the ideological settler movement. Shortly after he finished his education, Mageni was involved in establishing Gush Etzion, the first settlement to be built in the occupied territories south of Jerusalem in the Judean Hills (Mageni Family 2003). Gush Etzion was ideological in the sense that it did not have a direct security rationale attached to it. Rather, its significance was rooted in a national historical memory, reinstating a pre-state settlement that had been overtaken and whose residents were killed in an ambush during the 1948 war. The establishment of this settlement over the Green Line, shortly after the 1967 war and Israeli occupation of the West Bank, took place with the government’s blessing. Yet in order to carry it out, religious settlers first tapped into a wider nostalgia for the lost Jewish community that had once lived and died there. The subsequent founding of Kiryat Arba not long afterward employed a different ideological rationale because it was set up for explicitly religious reasons—Hebron was seen by most Israeli Jews as a significant site of origin. Like Gush Etzion, it also was important for the historical Jewish minority that had been massacred there during the 1929 riots that swept Palestine (cf. Mattar 1992:33–49; Cohen 2015). Settlers claimed to be returning to a point of biblical origin and, at the same time, to be renewing a more recent historical Jewish presence, reclaiming either the biblical or lost property of Jews without distinction since both were seen to form a continuous past.

Reconstructing the route of Mageni’s tour, I state in my fieldnotes that his bus traveled from Jerusalem through the Palestinian towns of Beit Jala, Bethlehem, Halhoul, and then directly to the city of Hebron. This took place during the early phases of the Oslo period before the Israeli army had actually redeployed from Palestinian city centers and before the Palestinian Authority had assumed control. My notes also document visible signs of the First Intifada, or uprising, in Palestinian areas, specifically garbage cans smoldering and burning tires strewn on the road. Overlooking these features, Mageni stood at the front of the bus with microphone in hand nearly choking on his words. “The road we are on, though paved with asphalt, is one of the oldest arteries known to mankind … it is the route that our father Abraham, the very first Jew, took from his place of birth in Ur Casdim to the city of Hebron, his hometown within the Land of Israel” (Mageni Family 2003:40). Mageni’s tour, in other words, begins by reframing the scene of protest and imbuing settler routes through Palestinian areas with a biblical aura. He tries to convince his audience that the arteries that shape a modern life are not just random asphalt roads secured by the military or avenues of conquest. Rather, they are meaningful as the very roads that have been traversed by Jews throughout their history. He emphasizes that Jews are not strangers in Palestinian areas (and that they are not even settlers) but part of a Jewish presence that has belonged to Hebron from biblical times to the present. Yet, as mentioned, the most extensively documented historical Jewish presence in Hebron was during Ottoman rule when an Arab-Jewish minority was integrated into a predominantly Muslim society (Klein 2014; Tamari 2009). It was never an armed settler minority allied with a military occupation working to expand the borders of an existing state.

Temporal Linearity as Interpretive Strategy

Mageni’s interpretive strategy seems to confirm what Tzvetan Todorov (1999:19), in the context of Columbus’s discovery of the New World, referred to as a truth “known in advance.”⁵ Verifying preexisting points of view is not limited to an ideological settler stance, but in this case it requires erasing or at the very least minimizing the presence of an entire Palestinian residential area marked by a culture, history, and orientation that remains at odds with Mageni’s rendering of its primarily Jewish character. Yet Mageni tries to reframe any visible signs of difference in ways that confirm the validity of presumed exclusive Jewish origins and claims. So for instance, while it is true that an Israelite (and proto-Hebraic) presence precedes one that is Aramaic, which in turn predates the Islamic conquests, the spreading of Islam, and the use of Arabic, there are also just as many intersections, continuities, and syntheses that can be pointed out—so much so that a linear time frame emphasizing Jewish origins alone does not do justice to the messy reality at hand.⁶

Place names, in particular, appear to be points where these historical convergences, linguistic resemblances, and intercultural contacts create fields of integration and exchange between Jewish, Muslim, and Christian Arab populations. Yet in the settler imagination, intermingling is recast as linear, and a late-coming Arabic place name always affirms the biblical Hebrew and legitimates contemporary Jewish Israeli claims. The initiate is shown a trajectory that begins with a biblical fact and ends with a modern settlement. Palestinians, when they appear at all, are seen as caretakers and proof of the original truths of the Bible. To provide an example of this, consider the circumlocutions involved in Mageni’s discussion of Gilo, a settlement built adjacent to the Palestinian and mainly Christian town of Beit Jala. Gilo today forms part of a population barrier surrounding Palestinian and Bedouin residential areas on the outskirts of Jerusalem. From its inception, it housed Israeli suburban residents in search of affordable housing rather than devout ideological Jews as in Hebron. For this reason, Gilo is considered by most Israelis to be a quality-of-life rather than ideological settlement. Nevertheless, Mageni’s narration casts Gilo as part of a biblically inspired regeneration that is taking place throughout “Judea and Samaria,” the biblical terms he uses for the West Bank. Gilo becomes a “neighborhood” belonging to the “expanded municipal boundaries of Jerusalem,” and it is religiously significant for Jews because it is located near the Tomb of Rachel, an embattled biblical burial site near Bethlehem. Mageni then points to “Arabs,” sidestepping the term “Palestinian,” and claims they are recent arrivals, having lived on the hills for the past century and a half only, but that even they preserve the evidence of an original biblical Jewish past: He declares that Arabs living on the hill refer to their community by the name “Jala”; “And as we scratch the surface of that Arabic sounding pronunciation, we begin to realize the extent to which local residents in this area, yes, even Arab non-Jewish residents, are preserving the ancient names of the various towns and villages familiar to us from the Tanakh” (Mageni Family 2003:51). By using linguistic resemblances between Hebrew and Arabic and evolutionary linearity, Arabic is deemed useful as a record of all that is biblical and Jewish. Citing for authority chapter 15 (Pereḳ ṭeṭ-ṿaṿ) of the book of Joshua, Mageni explains that J and G are essentially the same letter and since “Jala” and “Gilo” are cognates, “Jala” confirms the original meaning of “Gilo,” which is “to reveal” (ibid). For him, these linguistic resemblances can be used to establish the worthiness of Jewish settler claims to the cultivated fields beside Beit Jala.

Through the collapsing of difference and the renaming of Palestinian places, settlers such as Mageni actively reorient a cognitive field. The visible markers of a Palestinian presence and sites of Christian and Islamic significance are taken to be either surface markers or recent additions that confirm the Jewish past. Difference is collapsed into sameness. The distinct Palestinian history of Beit Jala does not exist apart from a reference to Gilo in Joshua. While scholars have rightly pointed out that Zionism often posits a historical claim based on Jewish origins and appropriates Palestinian culture and history for its own purposes (Masalha 2007; Rose 2005), Mageni’s stance endows Israeli national logics with a distinct reading of the Bible and is devoted to a biblical spatial inscription as sacred history. Moreover, an ideological settler’s attempt to precisely map a biblical past onto the present evokes not so much land as a general concept as a religious identity forged in relation to a series of distinct locations where biblical events are deemed to have actually occurred.

Claiming Halhoul as a Jewish Site

The Palestinian town of Halhoul on the outskirts of Hebron provides another example of reframing and colonial erasure. In discussing this site, Mageni talks about the ironies of history, and among those he mentions are the following: While actually overlooking Halhoul, he claims to be located at the biblical site of Elonei Mamre (an oak grove) where God appeared to Abraham. Notwithstanding the precision with which he locates the site, there are no oak trees present. Therefore, he quotes the medieval Jewish commentator Rashi to explain that though Abraham pitches a tent and praises god at Elon Moreh and Beit El (biblical places that have now become ideological settlements located outside of the Palestinian cities of Nablus and Ramallah respectively), it is only in Halhoul that Abraham actually settles. Drawing on Rashi for authorization, Mageni again points to a variety of linguistic distinctions in biblical Hebrew that support his claim that, for Jews, Elonei Mamre is actually just as significant as Elon Moreh and Beit El and that by extension Halhoul deserves to be settled on religious grounds. Noting that the Bible describes Abraham’s actions with the terms va-yeshev, which comes from the Hebrew root “to sit” and va-yishkon, which comes from the root “to dwell,” Mageni emphasizes that the biblical passage specifically avoids using the term va-ye’ehal, which would indicate that Abraham was merely pitching a tent for a temporary period (Mageni Family 2003:74). For him, these linguistic distinctions make up part of the body of historical evidence that Abraham’s presence in this physical site was never intended to be temporary and that by extension a Jewish settlement should be built to commemorate his act of settling.

In this interpretation of the biblical text, a contemporary preoccupation with “settling” gets projected back in time and space, rereading the activities and movements of Abraham with linguistic and spatial precision. Yet for the skeptical observer standing before a Palestinian town, there is no external evidence to indicate much of a correspondence between the invoked biblical passage and his interpretation. Mageni proceeds to read the Bible as a text that can be used to map out exact events in a contemporary landscape: “Abraham lived here for 38 years or more before he purchased a plot to bury his wife in the Meʿarat ha-Makhpelah,” he continues (ibid., 75). By emphasizing the link between Abraham’s presence in Elonei Mamre and that of Meʿarat ha-Makhpelah, the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron, Halhoul becomes part of a wider network of significant places that need to be inhabited by devout Jews. Using these exegetical, monumental, syllogistic, and experiential elements, the possibilities for claiming other Palestinian places as significant Jewish sites expand exponentially. The issue is not so much belief in the Bible or whether there was ever a Jewish presence in Hebron but how devout settlers narrowly imagine and represent continuities with the Bible and what its implications are for Jewish practices and ethics in the present.

Mageni takes the miraculous event of God appearing to Abraham as bona fide history, raising the question of the Bible’s historicity in new ways. Even though the Bible does contain historical material, its mythical events cannot be subsumed into a straightforward historical narrative, and sorting out one domain from the other in this methodical manner involves many leaps of faith. While there is scattered evidence of a place named Mamre outside of Halhoul, there is nothing that links Abraham’s actions to the precise biblical sites Mageni points to because it is not actual history.⁷ While archaeological evidence often is used to further substantiate religious claims of this sort, it is actually not science alone that is most convincing to believers in these contexts (cf. Abu El-Haj 2002). Rather, a direct experience of being located at the site where a biblical event is thought to have occurred matters more: “It is here that Abraham receives the visitation of three divine messengers” who deliver the news that his wife Sarah is pregnant, Mageni suggests. Yet “here” has no meaning of its own other than indexing the context of the speaker who has uttered it (cf. Silverstein 1976). It is here where Abraham “circumcises himself, and receives a direct Divine revelation” (va-yera elaṿ ha-Shem; lit., “and you will look to God”), which includes not only “the promise of receiving land for his offspring” (le-zarʿakha, eten et ha’arets ha-zot; lit., “To your children I will give this land”) but also the actual boundaries of the Land of Israel (Mageni Family 2003:76). These boundaries are believed to lie “from the river of Egypt to the great river of the Euphrates in the northeast,” an area that far exceeds that of the territory of modern Israel (ibid.). The discrepancy between (a generally mythical) biblical past and the present created through a speech act is posed as a tension that needs to be resolved through human activity. Mageni’s emphasis on Halhoul as the site where biblically mandated boundaries have first been revealed thus provides the rationale for expansion and accords with ideological settler efforts to remake Israel’s national borders into those that have religious significance rather than those that have been arbitrarily determined through wars or armistice lines.⁸

Mageni then tells his tour group that God’s promise of the land was sealed through sacrifice at an altar. Land promised, biblical boundaries, and places of sacrifice are read as the most critical elements of the Bible, features of Judaism that settlers hope to reinstate through specific settled sites.⁹ He searches for material anchors, an altar perhaps, but there are none apart from other Palestinian villages or population centers in the area including the al-Arroub refugee camp to the north. He then quotes the Roman Jewish historian Josephus (37–100 CE), who notes that there had been an altar visible in his day (Mageni Family 2003:77). The altar, according to Mageni’s narrative, stood at the center of a Herodian construction and pointing to the ruins of two walls that are present, he notes with authority, “the bulk of what one can see today is Herodian” (ibid.). Mageni’s assertions use a variety of sources for evidence, but they are put together in random and often idiosyncratic ways, forming a bricolage of the visual, textual, linguistic, and hypothetical, all rolled into one. He imparts a sense of mystery and discovery to each of his findings. Yet his quest to map the Bible raises the specter of what actually counts as historical evidence, whether it matters more than direct experience, and how the two work together in ways that seem meaningful for a religious audience.

Referring to the missing altar, Mageni deploys a kind of Talmudic logic (and rabbinic style of deduction) to explain its absence: “Although it is too far-fetched to say definitively that here stood the altar that is referred to in the book of Genesis,” he remarks, “all the information that we have, and all the material that we see before our eyes makes it impossible to say that it is definitely not [here]” (Mageni Family 2003:80). He then goes on to highlight the sublime place-based sensibility that is essential to his religious claims: “There is something that strikes us Jews in Eretz Yisrael today with a feeling of ḥerdat ḳodesh [sanctified trepidation] in recognizing that we have the privilege of being right at the site where the Divine revelation to Avraham Avinu, our father Abraham, took place” (ibid.). For those on the tour, not much formal training in biblical accounts, the rigors of rabbinic debate, or interpretive exegesis is required. Rather, a sense of awe and heightened experience prevails. On what grounds is this religious solidarity being elicited? Certainly the tour uses biblical quotation to reframe reality and posit a biblical place. Yet its persuasive nature depends not only on the events being invoked but also on Mageni’s ability to push a visible Palestinian presence into the background, deeming it to be nonpresent. Just as difference is collapsed into sameness and put in the service of origins during Mageni’s discussion of place names, so too does his sidelining of Palestinian lives create possibilities for a settler’s subjective investments in the biblical places he uncovers, and this attachment elicits solidarities among this group of onlookers.

Many accounts of the colonial aspect of Zionism from the pre-state period (1888–1945) to the present as well as other historical settler colonialisms talk about a refusal to see natives as having value (Massad 2006; Makdisi 2010). In these accounts, natives are either viewed as backward, as existing in a different moment in time, or as less technologically adept. In Julie Peteet’s (2009:41) scholarship on Palestinian refugees, she corroborates these claims by writing that the question of “native competence” and the issue of who is entitled to own the land became a matter of seeing and not seeing. She notes that early Zionists did not consider Palestinians deserving of the land because of their “backwardness,” and so they simply were made to disappear from consideration. Zionism’s conception of Jewish renewal required that land be depopulated, Peteet argues, and when the 1948 war led to a mass exodus of Palestinians, reality aligned with imagination (ibid). Yet the colonial and utopian dimensions of this earlier iteration of Zionist settlement seem to have been more directly engaged with issues of difference than Mageni’s biblical musings are here, suggesting that social hierarchies in the contemporary context have become more rigidly fixed. More direct engagements between different religious communities in Palestine and more contingency in Zionism’s ends required, in other words, more explicit forms of differentiation in colonial thought and (labor) practice.

In contrast, ideological settlers like Mageni use discourses that are often far less preoccupied with an explicit working through of difference between Jews and Palestinians. This work of differentiation already operates at a more macro level, through the presence of the military as well as through the occupation’s legal and spatial inequalities. Nevertheless, “difference” is not far removed from a settler’s biblical invocations, particularly when they occur on-site and are being used to create links to precise physical locations within an explicit social hierarchy. Physical boundaries, legal gray zones, as well as military restrictions in the occupation, in other words, serve to underscore the terms of difference that then get taken up in devout attachments to place.

More significantly, ideological settlers tend to reframe Palestinian lives through forms of exclusion that amplify the more ordinary sorts of social absences and erasures detailed in Erving Goffman’s Frame Analysis (1986). In his account of the performativity woven into social life, the “real” often depends on a particular framing or staging. Both the subjective investments that an audience brings to the frame and the power-laden rules of engagement serve to create an exclusive focus and scene of action. Others who may be present and who are actually needed to create a heightened sense of the real become shadow presences. In this manner, the staged drama is not only about a particular set of actions but is also an expression of existing power dynamics. Mageni’s claims to Halhoul using biblical events shape a distinct reality. Palestinians may be present at the scene of this biblical re-creation and are even critical to its plausibility, but they remain outside its key focus and concerns, a distinct form of erasure. This biblical recasting of the real during tours, walks, and other forms of trespass in Palestinian areas operates as a communicative act that incrementally gets translated into other spatial practices built into the fabric of the everyday.

Bypassing Difference

The macro or structural dimensions of ideological settling need further elaboration here, and it is important to note that they have changed over time. Mageni and other settlers were afforded a freedom of movement through many Palestinian population centers that subsequently became off limits because they were placed under the Palestinian Authority during the post-Oslo period (1993–2000). Both settler and Palestinian populations formerly used the main north-south artery, Route 60, which led from Jenin through Nablus, Ramallah to Jerusalem, and then down to Bethlehem and Hebron. In the spatial reorganization of the West Bank, however, during the post-Oslo period, a system of bypass roads for exclusive settler and military use alone was built, and these went around all the key Palestinian population centers, blocking any Palestinian access roads that might have linked up with them. This bypass infrastructure cut off Palestinian population areas from one another, while consolidating social connections between settlers and the military through quicker travel times.¹⁰ While the Israeli military saw these new roads as necessary to maintain control of the Occupied Territories after withdrawing from Palestinian population centers, Palestinians viewed them as further evidence of land confiscation and settler expansion. The spatial reorganization was also intensely disliked by ideological settlers because they saw it as a way of restricting their access to biblically significant areas. Whereas in Mageni’s tour, the Palestinian presence was erased through reframing and the use of biblical events, the large-scale spatial reorganization and infrastructure that occurred after Oslo made this earlier form of erasure seem to be an enduring reality.

The spatial reordering of the West Bank coincided with separating out realms of authority overseeing Palestinian and Jewish settler populations into areas designated as A, B, and C (Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2015: art. 11). The Palestinian Authority was charged with overseeing the civil and security affairs of Palestinian city centers designated as Area A, accounting for 18 percent of the West Bank, while ruling jointly with the Israeli military in the Palestinian towns, villages, and agricultural areas of Area B where they had civil control, comprising an additional 22 percent of the land. The Israeli military continued to be in charge of Jewish settlement areas designated as Area C in the remaining 60 percent of the land (cf. Hammami and Tamari 2001; Hass 2002). Yet, as with all boundaries, these new jurisdictions (A, B, and C) were not as grounded in distinct social realities as they initially appeared, since Palestinians lived in each of these three different zones, and different rules applied in all of them. In cases where Palestinians happened to live close to Jewish settlements, for instance, they were stranded without the security or municipal services of the Palestinian Authority (cf. Sanders 2013). In Hebron, specifically, where ideological settlement had been established directly within a Palestinian urban area, the “exceptional” classification of authority over the area was termed “H1 and H2.” While H1 gave control of most of Hebron to the Palestinian Authority, H2 kept 20 percent of the city, including its historic center, and over thirty thousand Palestinian residents directly under the control of the Israeli military, maintaining the pre-Olso condition of direct military rule (Andoni 1997).

Looking Back: A Soldier’s Retrospection

These separate population zones enabled settler certainties to take hold, even as they fueled doubts for some Israeli soldiers who were required to fulfill their military duty in Hebron. A soldier’s retrospective look at his service in Hebron offers a sobering perspective on the dynamics of rule that form the backdrop to a settler’s religious sensibility. After two years of service in Hebron, Yehuda Shaul became disillusioned and founded Breaking the Silence, a well-known Israeli activist group made up of ex-soldiers devoted to collecting anonymous testimonies of those serving in the occupation.¹¹ They mainly work to educate pre-army draftees in Israel but do not explicitly promote conscientious objection because of its strong stigma. The army remains one of Israel’s core institutions, conscripting (mostly Jewish) citizens, male and female, after high school, for three and two years respectively, and is considered a key avenue of social advancement.

Why explore the narratives of a soldier here? First, it speaks to the long-standing and complex relationship that exists between religious settlers and the military. Kiryat Arba settlers, for instance, initially were based in Hebron’s military headquarters after a year of squatting in a Palestinian hotel. This early settler relationship with an occupying military force has in effect been carried through to the present. Moreover, an ideological settler’s sense of Palestinian lives transpiring beyond the frame is underscored by military restrictions on Palestinian movement that is enforced by checkpoints, curfews, imprisonment, as well as by restrictions on the growth of Palestinian residential areas subject to housing demolitions. Shaul’s disillusionment, skepticism, and concern with the randomness of a soldier’s actions stands in stark contrast to the certainty of a settler’s devotion and sense of continuity. Juxtaposing these two “tours,” then, brings out the kinds of military actions taking place in the background and the contradictions they pose for enabling a devout settler’s sense of biblical continuity in the present.¹²

On a tour through Hebron, Shaul’s knowledge of military matters, as well as his skepticism, contrasted with the resolute attachments of religious settlers. His views were significant not only for their critical sense of what soldiers actually do during their service but because they signal the unraveling of belief in these military actions among young Israelis charged with carrying them out. As an observant Jew with family links to religious settlements, Shaul did not reject fulfilling his military service out of hand. He noted that he went into the military believing that he could conduct himself in a principled fashion, but gradually realized he could not, and remained very doubtful that it was possible to do so in an occupation. It was only at the end of his service that he began to reexamine his experience: “I had some doubts and questions when I was a soldier but I put those questions aside. When you are a soldier, you push questions aside—comradeship is important for this.”

Shaul also mentioned that he was not a pacifist—if military service made Israeli lives better and safer and contributed to the defense of Israel, then he believed it was necessary to fulfill it. Yet if “serving” meant a pointless, useless show of force against a mainly civilian Palestinian population and if there was no exit strategy, he was firmly against fulfilling military obligations. His tour provided a good sense of what, from a military standpoint, this security regime looked like—who could enter, who was barred, the kinds of exits and entrances permitted to some classes of people, and the utilitarian naming of checkpoints.¹³ For example, he mentioned, the mathematical precision of Checkpoint 300, which masks the human tragedy created through its towering, winding, and labyrinthine rows of iron that look down on the subject pedestrian. As he spoke, Shaul’s narratives seemed slightly disengaged, revealing a person who saw the way the military trained him to see, but who was also committed to undoing military logics—orienting the tourist toward the many contradictions etched into a divided landscape. Traveling through some of the same areas Mageni traversed in his tour earlier on, spatial and political realities had hardened. A concrete separation barrier now made its way throughout much of the West Bank:

The fact that the barrier doesn’t match the Green Line creates some, uh, problems, some weird things, and I think this is one of the examples: on your right, you’ll see some Palestinian houses, the outskirts of the Palestinian village of Husan, and because of the barrier, encompassing Gush Etzion [settlement bloc], Husan, Datiou, Wadi Fuki, and Halin, around thirty thousand Palestinians in these villages are surrounded 360 degrees because they are stuck between [the boundaries of] Israel, the barrier, Jerusalem, and Gush Etzion. And their way in or out to their main city is through the so-called humanitarian passage, which is this simple tunnel.

He then pointed out a dirt tunnel that has been dug under the road leading from these villages to Khalda and on to the highway into Bethlehem. His perspective highlighted how seemingly rational military decisions gave way to sheer irrationality, as was evident in the many absurdities he pointed to in the fragmented spatial order. Interspersed with a sleek functional road system were, for instance, many mounds of dirt, cinder blocks, stones, and boulders, as well as gates that blocked the entrances from Palestinian villages onto the main road. He also detailed how soldiers carried out policies of separation: “The way these policies [of separation] were implemented and enforced is basically that you would go and put a bunch of big bricks or stones at the entrance from any village to the main road,” he noted. If Mageni’s route through Palestinian areas invoked a historical route that pointed to the Bible, infusing it with higher purpose, Shaul emphasized the routine activities soldiers carry out in order to create obstacles for Palestinian movement. Indeed, one of the many ironies of the bypass system as it exists today lies in this pairing of sophisticated and planned engineering with hundreds of blocked secondary roads using makeshift and casually produced methods.

Shaul attributed the military’s “policies of separation” to the armed conflict in the second phase of the Intifada, from 2000 to 2002, when there were “a lot of attacks on roads, ambushes, open fire on cars, and on settlers who were driving on the older roads,” followed by “a phase of suicide bombing attacks in Israel.”¹⁴ Yet he also admitted the absurdity of these separation policies because they forced Palestinians to use “back roads that connected villages to one another off the main highways, which for them became the main highways [requiring them] to travel in parts, taking a taxi to one military roadblock, getting off to cross it by foot and taking another taxi, piece by piece.” He was grappling with the implications of having helped to double and even triple travel times to places that were actually very close at hand.

Shaul also alleged that he had been required to sow fear among Palestinians and to actively “li-yetsor teḥushat nirdafut” (create the sense of being pursued). The idea was that instilling fear would presumably make Palestinian perpetrators afraid to attack, and he maintained that the military used this strategy in order to compensate for no longer directly administering Palestinian population areas. As a soldier, he said that he was required to engage in random and invasive forms of control: “What does it mean to make your presence felt?” he asked rhetorically. “In Hebron, it means twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week you have patrols; you bump into houses, you start your patrol at ten at night till six in the morning in the Old City, walk in the streets, bump into a house (it’s not a house you have intelligence about), wake up the family, men on one side, women on the other side, search the place, you can yourself imagine how it looks.” In terms of the roads, Shaul emphasized, the military’s “flying” checkpoints also meant long hours of patrolling areas at random that yielded little useful information for enhancing security:

Your mission is basically an eight-hour jeep patrol from the roundabout at Gush Etzion Junction down to Kiryat Arba on Route 60; this is your area and you just have to drive back and forth for eight hours and you just need to invade five houses, doesn’t matter where, doesn’t matter how long, do two flying checkpoints, doesn’t matter which lane, which side of the road, doesn’t matter when. You police for fifteen minutes, you can police for forty-five minutes, it can be one after the other, it can be a flying checkpoint where you check every car, it can be a flying checkpoint where you don’t check any cars, just if you are present on the road, and people drive slower and this is part of creating the feeling that we [the military] are all the time everywhere.

Shaul continued working through the trauma of his military service, while harboring suspicion and distrust of those in authority who sent him to carry out the mission. He alleged that there was no way of being an ethical soldier in the occupation and then mentioned the difficulty of reintegrating into civilian life. In sum, Shaul’s observations lead us to see the ways in which these military tactics further enable the agency of settlers and even grant greater plausibility to a settler’s ideological convictions.

Damaged Eyes: Seeing on the Periphery

In addition to the military occupation, we find other kinds of direct violence that similarly enable the inscription of a settler’s biblical vision to take hold. Palestinian farmers living adjacent to settlements who have directly experienced settler harassment and other forms of destruction offer important perspectives here. The Jaber family, owners of lands that border Kiryat Arba, gained the attention of Israeli and international peace activists as victims of verbal harassment and random acts of destruction perpetrated by a gang of male (adolescent) settlers living on the hills above them. The two brothers of the Jaber family, Atta and Habah, were in frequent contact with the Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT), a Mennonite peacekeeping presence devoted to nonviolence. The CPT operates in the area in order to protect Palestinian families who are vulnerable to settler violence because they live beyond the boundaries of the Palestinian Authority and away from the reach of Israeli police.¹⁵ During a conversation arranged by the CPT, Atta Jaber talked about how his house had been demolished several times by the Israeli military when he tried to build an addition onto it after having been denied the required building permits. Though he had repeatedly applied for these permits, they had not been granted (as they seldom are), and so he decided to expand his house on his own property without them. Then he spoke of High Court petitions, hospitalizations for injuries he incurred trying to defend his house, and after his house was demolished, attempts at rebuilding it along with Israeli and international peace activists. These demolitions and acts of rebuilding became highly visible media events (see, e.g., Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions 2013). His brother Habah, on the other hand, was less of a public figure and far more focused on being able to continue to farm and simply earn a living. A large portion of his land had been confiscated to build a gas station near the entrance of Kiryat Arba and the remainder of it was cut in two by a bypass road for the exclusive use of settlers and the military. Because of these land confiscations, a constant stream of cars coming down from the settlement ran through his vineyards. He lived a besieged life, defending his family from frequent settler attacks coming mainly from Kiryat Arba residents living on the heights above.

Habah Jaber recounted the following: “Settlers came in the middle of night, and they had a saw and cut sixteen grapevines. My father went to the city, and when he came back, he saw all the grapevines wilted. We don’t have any weapons. I cannot fight settlers. If they come, I can’t defend myself.” In telling this story, he talked about his personal sense of fear and frustration at not being able to protect his family. Another time, religious settler students smashed the windows of his house, partially blinding his oldest daughter, who subsequently needed expensive surgeries to restore her vision. Moreover, his four-year-old daughter was traumatized by seeing the settlers proceed to trample over the garden and destroy all the marigolds. He then pointed out that the soldiers stationed in the area did not intervene when settlers attacked his property and that the police did not have the will or manpower to enforce the law. In the face of future acts of settler harassment, Habah considered his choices to be leaving or resisting, and he chose to resist by simply staying put.

Ideological settlers do not see their acts as inherently violent. If they are caught up in direct violence, they claim, it is only in cases of retribution. Moreover, settlers rarely concede the gap between how they imagine the biblical landscape and the uses of force necessary to implement their vision. This gap is characteristic of many other utopian visions that use violence to achieve a desired end. Yet as the experience of Habah Jaber and others Palestinian farmers show, every act of building, renewing, and reenvisioning entails uses of force or direct violence against those resisting that vision by merely living on their land. One portion of the Jaber family land had already been taken over in order to build an expansion, or “neighborhood,” of Kiryat Arba known as Harsina (Mount Sinai) years earlier. But the more recent land confiscation in order to put up a gas station left Habah Jaber with a palpable sense of sadness. He alluded to the military decision to confiscate land for what had been termed “public” use: “I talked with the captain. He didn’t care about me. He didn’t care about my papers [meaning the deed to the land passed down from his grandfather and great grandfather]. He didn’t care about the trees. The captain said something I cannot forget: if you have power, you can do whatever you like.” Habah Jaber also mentioned that over a hundred of his olive trees had been cut down and carted away.¹⁶ “They didn’t give money; they just took the land. I wouldn’t have taken gold for it. This is my whole life. How would I exchange it for gold? They offered two shekels (approximately seventy-five cents) for a tree, which was twenty-five years old.” He emphasized that none of the Jaber family took money for it: “We would not take that money. Money disappears when you go to the market.” Jaber was dismayed that after years of cultivating his land, it could be rendered barren in an instant. “If someone came to photograph it with a camera,” he stated, “he would only have seen the soil, stones, and broken pipes for the water.”

In contrast to the Jabers’ relation to the land, settlers’ attachments to sacred sites operate at a much greater remove. Palestinians farmers are invested in Hebron’s land because their families have lived on it for generations and it provides them with a basic livelihood. Their attachments to land entail a vast knowledge of soil, water, trees, and agricultural techniques, as well as a mastery of Hebron’s long tradition of cultivating grapes and olives. A settler’s attachments to place, on the other hand, depend not on the productive capacity of land itself but on bounding it off, fencing it in, and directly residing in it, limiting its agricultural potential in order to sustain a distinct devotional lifestyle.¹⁷

Moral Hierarchy and Biblical Sites

Reconsidering once again aspects of Mageni’s tour in light of the two individual points of view sketched here, those of an Israeli soldier and a Palestinian farmer, it is worth noting that Mageni invoked Jewish mysticism to explain the sorts of vegetation growing on what he considered to be the sacred land beside Bethlehem. His invocation of Judaism’s mystical tradition came at the expense of the labor that Palestinians regularly used to cultivate their land. The Land of Israel is “uniquely blessed with seven species” (erets ḥiṭah u-śeʿorah ṿe-gefen), replete with two kinds of grain (wheat and barley), as well as five fruits (figs, dates, olives, grapes, and pomegranates) (Mageni Family 2003:43). Quoting the Zohar, a text of Judaism’s mystical tradition, Mageni then noted: “It is interesting that in the Zohar, Rav Shimon bar Yochai refers to the special reason that these particular seven species, rather than others, are the ones through which the glory of the Land of Israel is reflected.” Though other types of vegetation may be present, they “tend to grow in the valleys [ba-shefelah],” and quoting the Aramaic for further effect: “They strive for lowness [de-hainu shoʾafim le-shiflut] and are not notable” (ibid., 47). He then pointed out that the seven species that grow on the tops of the mountain ranges strive for highness (shoʾafim le-hitromemut), and are a treasured feature of the Judean Hills to this very day (ibid.). In Mageni’s invocation of the Zohar, hilltop vegetation reflected, by its very presence, a moral striving that was directly visible in the morphology of plants. Yet by pointing to rocky areas that could not be cultivated, this mystical tradition also had significant legal implications. The Ottoman land laws, which form part of the body of law used in the West Bank to make decisions on land ownership, equate cultivation with ownership. Land that has been left fallow can be reclaimed by the state for public use after three years (cf. Shehadeh 1988). Incorporated into Israeli military regulations, this law has been used as one of the main rationales for confiscating land on the hilltops and handing it over to ideological settlers, reclassifying Palestinian private property as state land. Mageni’s attribution of moral excellence to hilltop vegetation, then, in effect rationalizes the ongoing confiscation of hilltop land where Jewish settlers are given full control.

What of the presence of Bethlehem’s Palestinian population? The fields beyond Bethlehem were significant for Mageni because they gave rise to a royal Jewish lineage. It is precisely here, he suggested, that Naomi and her daughter-in-law Ruth approached Bethlehem from the east, and the location where Ruth married Boaz, who bore a son Oved, who in turn had a son Yishai who begot David (Mageni Family 2003:48). Yet it is particularly ironic that Mageni invokes genealogical affiliations such as these to claim land, because they are not easily made to stand in for situated identities. They signal mobile ways of locating the self that can be remembered and recalled by reference to lines of descent rather than through precise geographic links. In the decade after these pronouncements, Bethlehem, a Palestinian city of approximately 25,000 residents, has been made to disappear by another sort of erasure. One section of the bypass system, known as the “tunnels road,” transports Jewish settlers and the military directly under the city though a long tunnel. Riding in this tunnel conveys a new sense of normalcy—namely, ideological settlers riding through it have the feeling of being on a direct route home, without any recognition that this Palestinian city has been erased from view.

Conclusion

In sum, as a particular interpretive framing of the biblical “purchase” and a textual rendering of the biblical landscape shows, a settler’s religious attachments to Hebron are produced by multiple and complex forms of remaking. In part, this remaking entails the reorientation of an exilic religious tradition so that it always points toward sacred sites, inscriptions in the landscape, and expansions into Palestinian-populated areas. This allows a locally produced settler experience of the Bible as well as other canonical Jewish texts to align with an emerging material reality. Creating these correspondences depends on both narrowing interpretive possibilities and giving biblical passages a material form that brings the past to life in a particular way. This settler experience of the “real” inevitably depends on minimizing or marginalizing a Palestinian presence and on using aspects of Jewish tradition to provide an ethical overlay for this ideological project of erasure. Harassment, trespass, and violence combine with forms of devotion in ways that are no longer deemed antithetical to Jewish authenticity. Whereas in the colonial imagination, “others” were seen as backward and not deserving of resources, this religious framing is more difficult to grapple with because of its authoritative and “authentic” rather than overtly constructed character. While in Goffman, a given frame signaled a kind of social hierarchy that could be unveiled and critiqued, here Palestinian nonrecognition has become part of a more firmly entrenched devotional structure that is becoming more difficult to dismantle even from within its own terms.