settlement that evoke the different populations living in Hebron (ideological settlers, soldiers, and Palestinian farmers), showing the ways their views coexist as separate but intersecting realities. In a settler tour, a guide points to the presence of Jewish origins in Palestinian areas by invoking the Bible while redirecting the gaze, renaming places, masking human toil, and inventing genealogies. This contrasts with the views of a religious Israeli soldier turned conscientious objector who has also served in the area and those of a Palestinian farmer living adjacent to the settlement. The soldier focuses on the way a religious settlers’ actions place the lives of fellow soldiers in danger and how the occupation skews a soldier’s “ethical” choices. A Palestinian farmer discusses how he and his family have been impacted by ongoing acts of settler violence and the ways this violence occurs in tandem with the military’s destruction of property, revealing a double subjugation. Though not all-encompassing, these points of view are intended to sketch out telling perspectives that one might readily encounter in Hebron’s complex social field.
Chapter 2, “Between Legality and Illegality,” provides a brief historical overview of the claims and practices that formerly paved the way for ideological settlement to take hold. Emphasizing existing relationships between settlers, the military administration in Hebron, and officials in the Knesset, the chapter explores how the first ideological settlers to enter Hebron capitalized on what they deemed to be Jewish “origins” within the legal gray zone of the military occupation. It shows how they established their presence by getting military permission to celebrate the Jewish holiday of Passover and refusing to leave. In this case, Passover initially appears to be the common ground uniting settlers, soldiers, and elected officials. Once established in the area, however, settlers begin to use Jewish observance as a means of bypassing military and state authority, making their temporary status in Hebron permanent. Not only is the ambiguous legality of the occupation, its “state of exception,” relevant here but so too are the political divisions that lead to accommodation to a settler presence, in addition to the virtual lawlessness of the occupation that allows settlers to operate with impunity. Their invocation of Jewish origins and religious commitment seems to solidify ties with the state, but the difference between compliance with the law and undoing it is often very narrow. Settlers are therefore able to reinscribe territorial boundaries, push legal limits, and enshrine religious values in ways that establish their own distinct arena of control, albeit on religious grounds.
The process of actively shaping space and negotiating new boundaries is further elaborated in Chapter 3, “Motherhood and Property Takeover.” The chapter uses the lens of gender, specifically cases of protest featuring religious settler women and children in the mid-1970s, to analyze how maternalism and motherhood were deployed for political ends and continue to be a key strategy. It features the ways women claim property in Hebron on ethical and historic grounds as they move out of their homes, recreate domestic settings in Palestinian areas, and use bonds with children to establish ties to designated Jewish areas and biblical sites. As in other cases of fundamentalism, the gendering of everyday life is central to this new ideological formation insofar as it is intended to counter the changing roles of women in comparatively secular Jewish contexts. The spectacle of women as mothers protesting demonstrates one of the ways ideology gets embodied and internalized. In protest, as in the home, cycles of pregnancy and childbirth often produce the ties that bind, while serving as the basis on which domesticated spaces using a matrilineal logic are being deployed to take over Palestinian property.
Chapter 4, “Spaces of the Everyday,” focuses more directly on the inscription of an exclusive ethnic logic in spaces and practices that are being shaped by a devout settler presence in Hebron. It analyzes solidarities as they are worked out in a series of antagonistic social encounters between settlers and Palestinian “others.” The chapter then points to ways in which settler bonds and ethnic sensibilities are further enabled by distinct (re)readings of Judaism’s legal tradition and practice. The ethnography focuses on incidents where settlers storm through Palestinian space, engage in daily transactions that are marked by nonrecognition of the other, and participate in threatening exchanges over the fence that secures Kiryat Arba, separating it from Palestinian agricultural areas outside the city of Hebron. It also highlights the ironies, vulnerabilities, and impossibilities of creating a virtual world of exclusivity. Focusing on how spatially segregated areas and congealed notions of difference operate, the chapter then moves to a discussion of settler violence.
Having considered the micro-level clashes and disputes that multiply around boundaries, Chapter 5, “Religious Violence,” explores violence in the context of the partitioned space of the Tomb of the Patriarchs. It analyzes the 1994 Goldstein massacre, a key incident of settler violence that takes place inside the Tomb, by drawing on government inquiries, interviews and observation. It details the actions that went into the partitioning of the mosque and the ways in which violence inheres in the incremental remaking of sacred space. The chapter also shows how Jewish belief and practices come into conflict with Islamic worship by focusing on graves and saint worship to the exclusion of other dimensions of Judaism. While many scholars point to the signing of the Olso accords as the event that triggered the Goldstein massacre, this chapter offers a more process-based and spatial account of violence. It features conditions of the everyday, showing that routine acts of settler harassment give rise to an ongoing relationship to violence and shape ideological views that favor the use of force. Not only are settlers armed, but they often work with soldiers or serve in the military themselves. As spaces of religious settler control proliferate, and Palestinian residential areas are caught between overlapping arenas of settler and military rule, so too do opportunities for settlers to transgress boundaries increase, blurring the civilian-military divide while appropriating military violence to increase religious domains of control.
The sixth and final chapter, “Lost Tribes and the Quest for Origins,” transitions away from sacred place to the ideological settler search for Jewish origins in an ever-expanding diaspora with the aim of bringing “original” Jews back to their presumed place of origin in Hebron. The chapter highlights the diversity of Kiryat Arba’s population—while featuring settler attitudes toward Ethiopians, Russians, and the Bnei Menashe, as well as many converts—exploring the ways settlers bypass the law and use rabbinical authority as a cover for it. In this process, presumed “native” forms of Judaism are found in lost tribes that mirror the contemporary settler self. The irony is that the many cultural and linguistic differences introduced in the process of immigrant recruitment turn out to be as great if not greater than the cultural differences that exist between ideological settlers and their Palestinian adversaries. Cultural and social differences turn out to be less significant than matters of loyalty and ideological affinity. The chapter focuses on alienations that come out of immigrant recruitment and integration into an ideological settler community and the ways that internal differences are actively negotiated in a process religiously referred to as “exilic ingathering.” The push for conversion to Judaism, inimical to the known tradition, is ironically championed as a means of integrating many nontraditional Jews from remote places into an evolving settler formation.
The conclusion, “Unsettling Settlers,” begins with the social dislocations that came about with the 2005 withdrawal of settlers from the Gaza Strip and moves to the subsequent reentrenchment of the second-generation of ideological settlers, the so-called “hilltop youth,” in the hills of the Hebron area. It details the growing anarchistic and individualistic trends in religious settlement and the mainstreaming of religious settler values once seen as marginal. In doing so, it attempts to grapple with the legacies of a religious right rise to power in the Israeli political arena and beyond.
In sum, this ethnography aims to illustrate the changes that distinguish and define ideological settlement in terms of practice and sensibility from other settler iterations. It shows religious settlement to be a heterodox synthesis of religious practice and politics in a military zone enabled by existing structures of exploitation
