looks back on the beginning of Hebron’s settler presence from the vantage of Kiryat Arba for the lessons on illegality it provides. It does not pretend to be a complete history or a comprehensive study of the legal and illegal elements of the occupation as a whole. Rather, my aim is to highlight the conditions and contradictions that allowed a particular version of Jewish settler practice to be mobilized and take hold. In doing so, I reexamine the idea that historical continuity and the sacredness of Hebron alone led these religious settlers to inhabit the city. Rather, settling Hebron required incrementally producing a site on the ground in a Palestinian city that could then be apprehended as Jewish in order to make settler appeals to origins more plausible. Moreover, legal indeterminacy was the condition that enabled these settler activists to use small tactics on the ground to create an authoritative religious realm. They invoked Jewish law with the aim of diminishing the significance of the Palestinian presence in Hebron because the legal gray zone of the occupation rendered both legal limits and geographic boundaries malleable.2 This allowed settlers to mobilize limited interpretations of the Bible as prescribing religious imperatives in ways that would not have been possible in a more stable legal environment, granting religious devotion the power to play a key role in confronting the legal authority of the state.
In terms of this legal gray zone and the environment in which an ideological settler project first took hold, it is important to note that the Israeli government’s ambiguous position on international law was shaped by the absence of a Palestinian state. Israel contended, in other words, that it had not taken over territory from any “legitimate” sovereign power precisely because it deemed Jordanian rule of Palestinian West Bank areas unlawful. Rather, seeing itself as a liberal occupier, the state claimed that the Geneva Conventions on occupied territory did not apply because it was acting as a temporary trustee, administering the area on behalf of the Palestinian residents living there until they were prepared to rule themselves.
Hebron Settlers as an Inconvenience
According to Shlomo Gazit, who at the time of the Park Hotel takeover was serving as the head of the Unit for the Coordination of Operations in the Territories in the Israeli Labor government, the initial settler presence in Hebron was considered a headache (rather than a serious dilemma) because it afforded no strategic value for the military administration. Hebron had originally been excluded from Deputy Prime Minister Yigal Allon’s settlement plan, which, after the 1967 war, envisioned setting up security settlements directly along the Jordanian border and creating a land barrier by annexing a swath of territory ten to fifteen kilometers wide along the Jordan River along with other lands (cf. Shlaim 2014:274). Allon’s plan also called for creating two noncontiguous Palestinian areas, including major cities, which he thought would become either demilitarized autonomous Palestinian zones or areas given back to Jordanian rule. His idea was to include as few Palestinians as possible in the most amount of land that could be added to Israeli territory (ibid.). The government later adopted the Allon Plan as its own, modifying it by allowing a settler presence to be established just outside the heavily populated Palestinian city of Hebron and well beyond any previously envisioned security barrier.
Inside Israeli government circles, there was as yet no consensus around what the 1967 war’s large territorial gains meant for the long term (ibid.). While those in the Labor-led ruling coalition took the position that a portion of these lands should be exchanged for a lasting peace, others took a more hawkish view and maintained that holding onto all territorial gains made Israel more secure than it had been within its 1949 armistice lines. In trying to explain the ascendance of ideological settlers prompted by the settler group entering Hebron a year later, scholars point to the euphoric mood in Israel immediately after these vast territorial gains (Sprinzak 1991, 1999; Feige 2009). They allege that government officials and a comparatively secular Israeli public were more favorably disposed to a divinely inspired return to cities (East Jerusalem) and sacred sites (e.g., Tomb of the Patriarchs) deemed important in Judaism that had been under Jordanian control for nineteen years. Hebron, then, was seen as a religious exception to strategic plans for the West Bank during a period in which Jerusalem’s holy sites were being incorporated into the Israeli state.
As part of this wider security strategy after the war and in accordance with the Allon Plan, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol first began to establish Nahal (Hebrew acronym for Noar Halutzi Lochem, lit. “fighting pioneer youth,” a special unit of the Israel Defense Forces) military settlements in the newly expanded border areas, particularly in the Jordan Valley, mixing military outposts with agricultural activities (Gazit 2003:251). The idea behind establishing these Nahal settlements was to create an entrenched military presence while using agriculture to finance it and to allow for the possibility that these military bases would eventually be turned into civilian communities along the Jordanian border. Nahal settlements, then, introduced a way of integrating military aims with civilian elements, which in turn made possible a more permanent form of rule over the territories (ibid.). They also enshrined the government stance of “deciding not to decide,” which paradoxically extended relatively permanent forms of control while not committing the government to remain in these areas (Demant 1988; Gazit 2003; Zertal and Eldar 2009). In terms of Hebron’s ideological settlers, these Nahal settlements served as one of several justifications for religious right civilian-led initiatives. When religious settlers first entered Hebron in 1968, they framed their actions as similar to the Nahal initiatives already in progress, while invoking an earlier history of Zionist settlement to legitimize their actions. Yet at the same time, they began using elements of religious practice to test legal limits from the start, flouting military restrictions in a context where international law was itself being violated.
One could argue that at the time small-scale settler tactics on the ground meant little and that it was mainly government policy (or indecision) that set the stage for the entrenchment of a more radical settler ethos. Moreover, everyday religious lives shaped by adherence to Jewish law and tradition among ideological activists in this period may seem less significant than the bold statements of key religious leaders like Rabbi Moshe Levinger, Rabbi Hanan Porat, and Rabbi Eliezer Waldman, as well as a range of other Labor supporters. Yet the tactics the original Hebron settlers deployed on the ground are worth revisiting here because they tipped the scales in favor of settlement at a moment when a permanent ideological settler presence in Hebron still hung in the balance. Standing between a distinct shift in older forms of messianism, which scholars like Aviezer Ravitzky (1996) and Gideon Aran (1991, 2013) rightly pinpoint as significant in spearheading the religious sensibility of these ideological settlers, and the broader context of government indecision, there exists a whole range of small-scale practices, either directly illegal or pushing the boundaries of a decidedly ambiguous legality, which religious settlers used to create precedents on the ground and to persuade their supporters of the necessity of allowing them to remain in Hebron. By focusing on the spatial or material character of these activities and the agency of these settler-believers, it becomes possible to investigate how distinct forms of Jewish devotion and belief came to depend more fully on the legal gray zone of the Israeli occupation in its first year and thereafter.
Observing Passover, Skirting Authority
Shlomo Gazit, head administrator of the Occupied Territories during the Park Hotel takeover (and later a dissenting voice within the military establishment), contended in an interview that “chance” was largely responsible for allowing the initial settler presence to take hold in Hebron. He recalled that the two military authorities who would have intervened at the time of their entry were absent. Moshe Dayan, the Israeli minister of defense, had just been hospitalized for serious injuries after an archaeological accident (a wall had collapsed on him), and, as head administrator, he too had been away for the week sitting shiva (mourning) for his father, who had died the day before. “The military people who should have and could have intervened at the time didn’t exist,” he emphasized. He maintained that the settlers used this window of opportunity to enter Hebron illegally. After this, he insisted, it was the government alone who was to blame for their continued presence because its decisions were imposed on military leaders. That is, military leaders were charged with carrying out government orders from above rather than making policy of their own.
Historians
