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
