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
