my lease. This struck me as odd because the entire country was in a state of shock and mourning, and not once did she refer to the assassination. She proceeded, in an entirely businesslike fashion, to sort out the details of my move, emphasizing the benefit of living in a “desirable” location—the clean air, lack of congestion, lovely views, tight-knit community, and affordability. In retrospect, I imagine she was worried about finding a tenant because the tide of Israeli public opinion had turned against Kiryat Arba. Yigal Amir, Rabin’s assassin, maintained ties with settlers in Kiryat Arba, and in that period it was directly linked with his religious extremism.
I got off the armored and steel-grated bus that traveled from Jerusalem directly through the Palestinian town of Beit Jala, past the refugee camp of Deheishe into the adjacent town of Halhoul, until it stopped at the center of Kiryat Arba. It was the middle of the day and I arrived with two large overstuffed bags in order to carry out a research plan that I had conceived of in Chicago. The actual settlement felt pretty much dead and deserted except for a few kids playing in rusting playgrounds, their empty swings and ladders straining between the concrete and stone blocks of older prefab buildings. As I approached the four-story complex I would live in for much of the year, a three-year-old rode up on his faded plastic bicycle, seat low to the ground. I noticed, in spite of his refusal to say much, that he followed a few paces behind me, making a great effort to pedal fast enough to keep up. When I turned toward the entrance to the apartment building where his family lived, he broke his silence and pointedly said, “You’re secular,” referring to me as ḥilonit. It is true that I was wearing jeans rather than the long flowing skirts he was used to seeing, but it took me by surprise that even this young boy with a knitted skullcap and fringe slotted me so quickly. He carried on: “And your mother, father, sisters, and brothers are all secular too!” “Right,” I said with a certain didactic enthusiasm. Had I known more, I might not have been so quick to agree. Calling someone “secular” has a deeply pejorative sense, and as I got to know a few people in the settlement, they preferred that I call myself masorti (traditionally observant). Masorti meant, in their view, that I was not strictly observant but open to a religious point of view—that I would light candles on the Sabbath, keep kosher, and cease to work on the Jewish holidays, even if less rigorously than those who were devout.
I walked through the door of my rented studio, which had previously been inhabited by an Israeli soldier fulfilling his required service. It was a stark space with one window and a small cooking area. I imagined I would gain a better grasp of how settler ideology operated, though in truth this aim seemed rather abstract once I had arrived. More tangible was the physical layout of Kiryat Arba. It had a central core of four-story buildings, surrounded by Palestinian agricultural fields, which were farmed infrequently as it turns out, because their owners were prevented from accessing them. Then in view of these agricultural areas, there were other Jewish residential neighborhoods—newer parts of the settlement perched on hilltops overlooking the heights, including Givat Harsina, built and named after the pullout of the Israeli army from the Sinai Peninsula in the 1980s and Eshmoret Yitzhak, a newer extension.
Figure 4. Newer extension of Kiryat Arba encroaching on a Palestinian agricultural area, 2007. Photo by author.
The settlement was a patchwork of enclaves separated by green spaces. Cyclone fences, topped with large coils of barbed wire, enclosed the settled places. I was struck by the circularity of the roads in an older section of the settlement—the main road went around the settlement circumference, and the other roads seemed to circle into the main road, giving one the illusion of going somewhere, but then not. One ended up at the point where one began. These internal loops eventually led to a choice of one of three exits: the main gate off the road (Route 60) to Jerusalem; the western one by which the hourly bus and cars traveled on an unpaved road through Palestinian residential areas to reach the Tomb of the Patriarchs; and a little used gate near an industrial zone, apparently accessed more frequently in the past by Palestinian laborers employed in the factories within the settlement. Since all settlements are cut off from the pulse of life that surrounds them, they mainly tend to have a static quality compared to either cities in Israel proper or the Palestinian towns and villages that immediately surround them. In the middle of the day, with many of Kiryat Arba’s residents away at work, the settlement felt like a ghost town. In the evenings and on weekends, people gathered together in public areas and the stark housing came to life.
The bus, which arrived hourly from Jerusalem, turned out to be an important lifeline. Walking between neighborhoods wasn’t done because it required traversing Palestinian areas on foot. Most settlers either waited for the bus to get a two-minute ride to other settled sections or informally waved down a passing car. I once walked between these areas marking myself as a distinct outsider. A founding member of the settlement whom I had interviewed the day before saw me on the road and instantly stopped to give me a lift. I asked him about the patchwork character of the space, and his response was “Aren’t the vineyards nice?” My errors and inquiries were closed off by pleasantries. “So green,” he remarked. I had the sense of being in a small town where people took note of even slight transgressions. This attention to detail was coupled with a decided lack of seeing any Palestinians who lived across the fence. “I see them, but hardly see them,” one Kiryat Arba settler once remarked in passing. But residents of the settlement did keep an eye on me.
Some settlers I spoke to remarked that they were relieved I was not simply another journalist passing through. Yet the small-town aspect of the settlement and the troubled times created an atmosphere of suspicion and paranoia. Why did settlers speak with me? Perhaps it was the palpable monotony of daily life, the intent to convince an outsider of a religious point of view, or the hope of bringing a secular analyst into the fold. A synthesis of these experiences, together with my observations and formal interviews form the basis of what I present here as the dynamics of an ideological settler formation unfolding—one of seeing selectively, of using possibilities afforded by religious devotion to create resolute attachments, of legal gray zones, complicity with violence, and the search to recruit distant Jews. These aspects of the everyday deserve our attention because ideologically, emotionally, and even culturally an ideological settler view of the world is marked by its circumlocutions, erasures, as well as devotions, particularly in light of its detrimental impacts on the presence of an adjacent Palestinian population.
Chapter Sequence
The research has been conducted in short and long stints for a long period. I was neither well received nor shunned as a researcher, although I am grateful to those who sought to instruct me in religious and political matters in spite of our resounding differences. My informants believed that I had been brought to this study for a different purpose from the research interests I thought had motivated me, namely, that of fulfilling a Jewish destiny. Others took a more pragmatic approach and felt that it was worth making their point of view known to a researcher, particularly because of the hostilities they faced in the international context. I made few friends, and the friendships that did form were partial and guarded. Settlers often saw themselves as under siege and targets of government surveillance, and some found it easy to classify my research as part of wider aims to monitor their actions. Others, however, were taken by the novelty of a visiting anthropologist and, while hosting guests and family on holidays, would announce in earshot that an anthropologist was present.
The chapters are arranged thematically and analytically with attention to the chronology of events as I encountered or recorded them. In sequencing the chapters as I do, a key concern has been to provide an understanding of the ways religious ideology gives rise to violence and to outline the legal and security background for it. I begin with spatial practices and later examine the Goldstein massacre in order to disrupt the immediate association between religion and violence that prevails in discussions of “fanaticism.” I also highlight adaptations within Judaism that take place, invocations of tradition that align with settler aims, as well as the entanglements of spatial and religious elements in daily settler life.
The first
