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.
Chapter 2
Between Legality and Illegality
In April 1968, a group of young religious students together with a number of families who were disciples of the hawkish leader Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook obtained a forty-two-hour permit from Uzi Narkiss, the commanding general of the Israeli Central Command, allowing them to enter the occupied city of Hebron. It was less than a year after the beginning of the occupation, and a permit was needed because the West Bank was closed off to Israeli civilians for overnight stays. This group of religious right activists rented out the Palestinian Park Hotel from its owner Fahd Kawasmeh under the guise of celebrating the Passover holiday in Hebron.1 They used the week-long time frame of the holiday to initiate a permanent return to a city deemed sacred in the Bible and second only to Jerusalem in its significance for Jews. Once inside Hebron, they squatted in the hotel for approximately six weeks and refused to leave. The Israeli government responded by deferring any binding decision on whether these settlers could remain permanently, relocating them instead to Hebron’s military headquarters. Settlers continued to live in this military compound for three years on a putatively temporary basis with their families, until they were granted the right to build the settlement of Kiryat Arba on the city’s outskirts.
The government’s decision to relocate the Hebron settlers to the military compound was controversial from the outset. It was spurred on in part by a seeming concern with international law, particularly the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits deporting protected persons or introducing part of an occupier’s own civilian population into an occupied territory. Under the Geneva Convention, then, an occupying power is bound to maintain the demographic composition of the territory under its control. The decision to transfer settlers into what was considered a de facto temporary military location was presented as a compromise that initially positioned these religious devotees as an extension of the occupying military presence. Nominally satisfying this noncivilian and temporary requisite established by the Geneva Conventions, however, gave rise to two important precedents that continue to have deep ramifications: retroactively recognizing as legal settlers’ illegal acts of squatting; and giving settlers arms so that the military would not be charged with directly defending them, claiming that they posed an additional security burden.
Figure 5. Archival photo of Kiryat Arba (1971). Central Zionist Archives, PHG/1066154.
Legal Indeterminacy and Religious Devotion
This chapter, based on interviews,
