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
