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.
