Settling Hebron. Tamara Neuman
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an emotional link to a particular place, but it is an arbitrary one that stands in tension with other, de-territorialized forms of affiliation. While this tension is key to the biblical story, a settler stance attempts to create consistency and certainty in the face of the ambiguity it exposes. Any diasporic elements are made to disappear and then replaced by an emphasis on full ownership of this particular piece of property. Hebron and the edifice Meʿarat ha-Makhpelah are deemed significant by Jewish settlers because they are thought to mark the precise location of the graves of the biblical patriarchs and matriarchs.2
Contemporary property rights seem to be directly conferred by the Bible. Yet it is worth noting that many of the passage’s key elements regarding Abraham’s purchase are erased by this view. I have never heard any resident of Kiryat Arba or the remade Jewish Quarter in Hebron mention, for instance, that Abraham is a resident alien when he carries out the purchase, or that he buries his wife in a Hittite area, or that he bows low in deference to that people when purchasing the property, all features of the Bible that point toward a multilayered diasporic problematic.3 Abraham may own the property but his ownership is nonetheless underscored by his engagement with other (even pagan-worshipping) people and his outsider status in the area. The settler reading of this passage, in contrast, depends on an interpretative reframing that emphasizes his exclusive ownership and control, and this in turn is matched by prevailing social conditions outside the text that grant their particular readings an apparent plausibility. I am therefore interested in the ways that these ideological interpretations become authoritative and the ways secular Jews who support settlement defer to ideological settlers in the name of authenticity. In other words, what social conditions enable this particular application of Jewish tradition to appear both compelling and authentic to settlers and their supporters?
A Settler Tour
To consider the remaking of tradition in lived practice, I turn to the settler tours of Chaim Mageni, a founding resident of Kiryat Arba and guide who with a certain flair expressed key elements of this ideological settler sensibility.4 During his life, Mageni took hundreds of religious and settler-oriented Jewish tour groups directly into Palestinian neighborhoods throughout the West Bank and stood on location, recreating biblical events in order to bring the past, as he rendered it, to life. His tours consisted of stories, histories, archaeological evidence, hearsay, and hypothetical situations woven together to form a persuasive tale. Though disturbing in many respects, they illustrate how settler claims can seem persuasive for an audience disposed to believe them. To be convincing to the tourists in his charge, in other words, Mageni didn’t just quote a biblical passage, but rather, armed with the Bible, he actually sought to reframe his audience’s perceptions of an existing Palestinian reality. In short, Mageni’s authority as guide and as a devout Jew depended on the facility with which he could invoke and draw on a vast textual tradition that was equally grounded in colonial erasure. Given that most of Mageni’s tours took place in Palestinian towns, what sorts of claims seemed to forge attachments to place, shape community, and elicit devotion? These questions remain important because they point to an ideological formation incrementally taking shape in material form. Long before a Jewish settlement actually gets built, settler tours such as these and other practices that remake space lay the groundwork for a material inscription of the biblical past that provides an experience of devout “truth” in the present.
First, let me give a few biographical details about Mageni himself. He grew up in a working-class section of the Bronx and then became active in the Bnei Akiva movement, a religious-oriented Zionist youth movement in the United States that emphasized the importance of immigrating to Israel and working the land. He left the Bronx for Israel just after the 1967 war and studied in Yeshivat Merḳaz ha-Rav Kook, the premier national-religious school of higher education that historically has shaped the views of many leaders of the ideological settler movement. Shortly after he finished his education, Mageni was involved in establishing Gush Etzion, the first settlement to be built in the occupied territories south of Jerusalem in the Judean Hills (Mageni Family 2003). Gush Etzion was ideological in the sense that it did not have a direct security rationale attached to it. Rather, its significance was rooted in a national historical memory, reinstating a pre-state settlement that had been overtaken and whose residents were killed in an ambush during the 1948 war. The establishment of this settlement over the Green Line, shortly after the 1967 war and Israeli occupation of the West Bank, took place with the government’s blessing. Yet in order to carry it out, religious settlers first tapped into a wider nostalgia for the lost Jewish community that had once lived and died there. The subsequent founding of Kiryat Arba not long afterward employed a different ideological rationale because it was set up for explicitly religious reasons—Hebron was seen by most Israeli Jews as a significant site of origin. Like Gush Etzion, it also was important for the historical Jewish minority that had been massacred there during the 1929 riots that swept Palestine (cf. Mattar 1992:33–49; Cohen 2015). Settlers claimed to be returning to a point of biblical origin and, at the same time, to be renewing a more recent historical Jewish presence, reclaiming either the biblical or lost property of Jews without distinction since both were seen to form a continuous past.
Reconstructing the route of Mageni’s tour, I state in my fieldnotes that his bus traveled from Jerusalem through the Palestinian towns of Beit Jala, Bethlehem, Halhoul, and then directly to the city of Hebron. This took place during the early phases of the Oslo period before the Israeli army had actually redeployed from Palestinian city centers and before the Palestinian Authority had assumed control. My notes also document visible signs of the First Intifada, or uprising, in Palestinian areas, specifically garbage cans smoldering and burning tires strewn on the road. Overlooking these features, Mageni stood at the front of the bus with microphone in hand nearly choking on his words. “The road we are on, though paved with asphalt, is one of the oldest arteries known to mankind … it is the route that our father Abraham, the very first Jew, took from his place of birth in Ur Casdim to the city of Hebron, his hometown within the Land of Israel” (Mageni Family 2003:40). Mageni’s tour, in other words, begins by reframing the scene of protest and imbuing settler routes through Palestinian areas with a biblical aura. He tries to convince his audience that the arteries that shape a modern life are not just random asphalt roads secured by the military or avenues of conquest. Rather, they are meaningful as the very roads that have been traversed by Jews throughout their history. He emphasizes that Jews are not strangers in Palestinian areas (and that they are not even settlers) but part of a Jewish presence that has belonged to Hebron from biblical times to the present. Yet, as mentioned, the most extensively documented historical Jewish presence in Hebron was during Ottoman rule when an Arab-Jewish minority was integrated into a predominantly Muslim society (Klein 2014; Tamari 2009). It was never an armed settler minority allied with a military occupation working to expand the borders of an existing state.
Temporal Linearity as Interpretive Strategy
Mageni’s interpretive strategy seems to confirm what Tzvetan Todorov (1999:19), in the context of Columbus’s discovery of the New World, referred to as a truth “known in advance.”5 Verifying preexisting points of view is not limited to an ideological settler stance, but in this case it requires erasing or at the very least minimizing the presence of an entire Palestinian residential area marked by a culture, history, and orientation that remains at odds with Mageni’s rendering of its primarily Jewish character. Yet Mageni tries to reframe any visible signs of difference in ways that confirm the validity of presumed exclusive Jewish origins and claims. So for instance, while it is true that an Israelite (and proto-Hebraic) presence precedes one that is Aramaic, which in turn predates the Islamic conquests, the spreading of Islam, and the use of Arabic, there are also just as many intersections, continuities, and syntheses that can be pointed out—so much so that a linear time frame emphasizing Jewish origins alone does not do justice to the messy reality at hand.6
Place names, in particular, appear to be points where these historical convergences, linguistic resemblances, and intercultural contacts create fields of integration and exchange between Jewish, Muslim, and Christian Arab populations. Yet in the settler imagination, intermingling is recast as linear, and a late-coming Arabic place name always affirms the biblical Hebrew and legitimates contemporary Jewish Israeli claims. The initiate is shown a trajectory that begins with a biblical fact and ends with a modern settlement. Palestinians, when