Settling Hebron. Tamara Neuman
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involved in Mageni’s discussion of Gilo, a settlement built adjacent to the Palestinian and mainly Christian town of Beit Jala. Gilo today forms part of a population barrier surrounding Palestinian and Bedouin residential areas on the outskirts of Jerusalem. From its inception, it housed Israeli suburban residents in search of affordable housing rather than devout ideological Jews as in Hebron. For this reason, Gilo is considered by most Israelis to be a quality-of-life rather than ideological settlement. Nevertheless, Mageni’s narration casts Gilo as part of a biblically inspired regeneration that is taking place throughout “Judea and Samaria,” the biblical terms he uses for the West Bank. Gilo becomes a “neighborhood” belonging to the “expanded municipal boundaries of Jerusalem,” and it is religiously significant for Jews because it is located near the Tomb of Rachel, an embattled biblical burial site near Bethlehem. Mageni then points to “Arabs,” sidestepping the term “Palestinian,” and claims they are recent arrivals, having lived on the hills for the past century and a half only, but that even they preserve the evidence of an original biblical Jewish past: He declares that Arabs living on the hill refer to their community by the name “Jala”; “And as we scratch the surface of that Arabic sounding pronunciation, we begin to realize the extent to which local residents in this area, yes, even Arab non-Jewish residents, are preserving the ancient names of the various towns and villages familiar to us from the Tanakh” (Mageni Family 2003:51). By using linguistic resemblances between Hebrew and Arabic and evolutionary linearity, Arabic is deemed useful as a record of all that is biblical and Jewish. Citing for authority chapter 15 (Pereḳ ṭeṭ-ṿaṿ) of the book of Joshua, Mageni explains that J and G are essentially the same letter and since “Jala” and “Gilo” are cognates, “Jala” confirms the original meaning of “Gilo,” which is “to reveal” (ibid). For him, these linguistic resemblances can be used to establish the worthiness of Jewish settler claims to the cultivated fields beside Beit Jala.
Through the collapsing of difference and the renaming of Palestinian places, settlers such as Mageni actively reorient a cognitive field. The visible markers of a Palestinian presence and sites of Christian and Islamic significance are taken to be either surface markers or recent additions that confirm the Jewish past. Difference is collapsed into sameness. The distinct Palestinian history of Beit Jala does not exist apart from a reference to Gilo in Joshua. While scholars have rightly pointed out that Zionism often posits a historical claim based on Jewish origins and appropriates Palestinian culture and history for its own purposes (Masalha 2007; Rose 2005), Mageni’s stance endows Israeli national logics with a distinct reading of the Bible and is devoted to a biblical spatial inscription as sacred history. Moreover, an ideological settler’s attempt to precisely map a biblical past onto the present evokes not so much land as a general concept as a religious identity forged in relation to a series of distinct locations where biblical events are deemed to have actually occurred.
Claiming Halhoul as a Jewish Site
The Palestinian town of Halhoul on the outskirts of Hebron provides another example of reframing and colonial erasure. In discussing this site, Mageni talks about the ironies of history, and among those he mentions are the following: While actually overlooking Halhoul, he claims to be located at the biblical site of Elonei Mamre (an oak grove) where God appeared to Abraham. Notwithstanding the precision with which he locates the site, there are no oak trees present. Therefore, he quotes the medieval Jewish commentator Rashi to explain that though Abraham pitches a tent and praises god at Elon Moreh and Beit El (biblical places that have now become ideological settlements located outside of the Palestinian cities of Nablus and Ramallah respectively), it is only in Halhoul that Abraham actually settles. Drawing on Rashi for authorization, Mageni again points to a variety of linguistic distinctions in biblical Hebrew that support his claim that, for Jews, Elonei Mamre is actually just as significant as Elon Moreh and Beit El and that by extension Halhoul deserves to be settled on religious grounds. Noting that the Bible describes Abraham’s actions with the terms va-yeshev, which comes from the Hebrew root “to sit” and va-yishkon, which comes from the root “to dwell,” Mageni emphasizes that the biblical passage specifically avoids using the term va-ye’ehal, which would indicate that Abraham was merely pitching a tent for a temporary period (Mageni Family 2003:74). For him, these linguistic distinctions make up part of the body of historical evidence that Abraham’s presence in this physical site was never intended to be temporary and that by extension a Jewish settlement should be built to commemorate his act of settling.
In this interpretation of the biblical text, a contemporary preoccupation with “settling” gets projected back in time and space, rereading the activities and movements of Abraham with linguistic and spatial precision. Yet for the skeptical observer standing before a Palestinian town, there is no external evidence to indicate much of a correspondence between the invoked biblical passage and his interpretation. Mageni proceeds to read the Bible as a text that can be used to map out exact events in a contemporary landscape: “Abraham lived here for 38 years or more before he purchased a plot to bury his wife in the Meʿarat ha-Makhpelah,” he continues (ibid., 75). By emphasizing the link between Abraham’s presence in Elonei Mamre and that of Meʿarat ha-Makhpelah, the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron, Halhoul becomes part of a wider network of significant places that need to be inhabited by devout Jews. Using these exegetical, monumental, syllogistic, and experiential elements, the possibilities for claiming other Palestinian places as significant Jewish sites expand exponentially. The issue is not so much belief in the Bible or whether there was ever a Jewish presence in Hebron but how devout settlers narrowly imagine and represent continuities with the Bible and what its implications are for Jewish practices and ethics in the present.
Mageni takes the miraculous event of God appearing to Abraham as bona fide history, raising the question of the Bible’s historicity in new ways. Even though the Bible does contain historical material, its mythical events cannot be subsumed into a straightforward historical narrative, and sorting out one domain from the other in this methodical manner involves many leaps of faith. While there is scattered evidence of a place named Mamre outside of Halhoul, there is nothing that links Abraham’s actions to the precise biblical sites Mageni points to because it is not actual history.7 While archaeological evidence often is used to further substantiate religious claims of this sort, it is actually not science alone that is most convincing to believers in these contexts (cf. Abu El-Haj 2002). Rather, a direct experience of being located at the site where a biblical event is thought to have occurred matters more: “It is here that Abraham receives the visitation of three divine messengers” who deliver the news that his wife Sarah is pregnant, Mageni suggests. Yet “here” has no meaning of its own other than indexing the context of the speaker who has uttered it (cf. Silverstein 1976). It is here where Abraham “circumcises himself, and receives a direct Divine revelation” (va-yera elaṿ ha-Shem; lit., “and you will look to God”), which includes not only “the promise of receiving land for his offspring” (le-zarʿakha, eten et ha’arets ha-zot; lit., “To your children I will give this land”) but also the actual boundaries of the Land of Israel (Mageni Family 2003:76). These boundaries are believed to lie “from the river of Egypt to the great river of the Euphrates in the northeast,” an area that far exceeds that of the territory of modern Israel (ibid.). The discrepancy between (a generally mythical) biblical past and the present created through a speech act is posed as a tension that needs to be resolved through human activity. Mageni’s emphasis on Halhoul as the site where biblically mandated boundaries have first been revealed thus provides the rationale for expansion and accords with ideological settler efforts to remake Israel’s national borders into those that have religious significance rather than those that have been arbitrarily determined through wars or armistice lines.8
Mageni then tells his tour group that God’s promise of the land was sealed through sacrifice at an altar. Land promised, biblical boundaries, and places of sacrifice are read as the most critical elements of the Bible, features of Judaism that settlers hope to reinstate through specific settled sites.9 He searches for material anchors, an altar perhaps, but there are none apart from other Palestinian villages or population centers in the area including the al-Arroub refugee camp to the north. He then quotes the Roman Jewish historian Josephus (37–100 CE), who notes that there had been an altar visible in his day (Mageni Family 2003:77). The altar, according to Mageni’s