Settling Hebron. Tamara Neuman
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Ideological Formation
This ethnography approaches religion in settlement as an ideological medium rather than as a symbolic system in order to focus on its transformative and power-laden potentialities. My aim is to document the lived rather than merely textual aspects of Judaism in this particular context in order to highlight how its transformations legitimate processes of territorial expansion. This “ideological” designation also references an internal distinction that Israelis themselves make, distinguishing settlers who have moved over the Green Line (the 1949 Armistice lines) for religious reasons from those who have moved due to economic or quality-of-life incentives and in search of affordable housing.3 By ideology, I refer to the “amalgam of ideas, strategies, tactics, and practical symbols” used for realizing social and political change (Friedrich 1989:301). I distinguish this from the classic (Marxist) formulation of “ideology” as that which distorts an actual underlying truth, or its related Gramscian version as the way in which a ruling class not only justifies dominance but manages to win the active consent of those over whom it rules (Kertzer 1979:324). Rather, I give the term a different inflection, referring to a particular version of religious observance among those who advocate social change while relying on “asymmetrical or exploitative relations of power” to achieve their ambitions (Friedrich 1989:302). These unequal relations are fused with understandings of “difference” that tend to distort, obfuscate, and constrict possible “imaginings of the self” and “dialogic as well as other human relations” (ibid.).
The “ideological” here then implies thinking about the ways Jewish tradition has been particularized and funneled through the lens of settling. This narrowed or fundamentalist focus involves three further changes that are also useful for framing this study: the first is that religiously inscribed space, particularly the remaking of many Palestinian areas into a geography of biblical sites and origins, has been given a new significance in the construction of a distinct Jewish (settler) identity. Spatial reorganization has also resulted in a range of incremental practices included under the rubric of religion that link up with this process of inscription—including renaming, reenvisioning, and rebuilding. These practices in turn support and magnify resolute place-based attachments. The second shift is that these remade biblical sites, specifically in Hebron and within the Tomb of the Patriarchs itself, are being given a new centrality in Jewish observance, one that largely cancels out the exilic orientation of Jewish tradition. They give rise to a form of Jewish observance focusing on exact origins and specific graves to the exclusion of a more characteristic yearning for the messianic future. Third, the final change entails writing out the many historical convergences between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam reflected in the traditions themselves so as to eliminate possibilities for accommodating difference, while using Jewish observance and forms of direct violence in order to erase the presence of an existing Palestinian population.
These particular shifts in Jewish observance are understood to be ideological in the sense that they mask existing relations of power, having affective and embodied elements that play a role in shaping overtly political but also intimate decisions. They include modes of religious (settler) life that may not always have instrumental aims but that nevertheless have significant political effects (cf. Friedrich 1989). To reiterate, then, I distinguish my approach from that focused on either a symbolic or a textual analysis of tradition alone as well as that exclusively based on comparative forms of settler colonialism because of this synthetic religious and spatial character, and its relation to the context of a contemporary military occupation. If we are to take the ideological aspect of settling seriously then, as I intend here, we need to approach it not as a product of devout ideas alone, whether as canonical texts, on the one hand, or as religious ideas only furthering extractive colonialism, on the other. Instead, the ethnography shows that ideological settlement entails distinct practices, values, and communities that are oriented toward remaking much of a known Jewish ethical terrain and form of devotion while also appropriating Palestinian land on religious grounds.
Continuities and Disjunctions in Settlement
Labor Zionist and later Jewish refugee immigration to Palestine, the 1948 War of Independence/Nakba and Palestinian expulsion, the state’s pronatalist policies, and military rule over remaining Palestinian areas played substantial roles in creating a Jewish majority in the Israeli state. These past iterations of settlement have been linked to processes of demographic change, both in establishing the Israeli state and later as a means of distributing a distinct national population throughout its territory. Settlement has also served as an Israeli security strategy, using populations to guard areas bordering on Arab states. Yet settling out of religious right devotion, as opposed to Jewish (ethnic) affiliation, was a later addition to the settler equation given that most observant Jewish communities initially defined themselves against a Zionist ethos. Observant Jewish communities motivated to settle for mainly theological reasons in what they deemed to be the biblical Land of Israel appeared on the political horizon only in the wake of the 1967 war. These ideological settlers began to espouse their distinct view of Judaism, linking it with nationalist territorial expansion during a period of popular exuberance after the 1967 war, when Israel tripled its land mass and took control of Jordanian-ruled East Jerusalem and the West Bank, as well as areas formerly belonging to Syria and Egypt (Sprinzak 1991, 1999; Segev 2008).
In its most basic sense, settlement as discussed here means creating an ethnic enclave within another population for the purpose of marginalizing its power and/or controlling its resources. This book focuses on the post-1967 Jewish ideological settlements that have been established for religious reasons within Palestinian population areas beyond the Green Line, Israel’s de facto border. I concentrate on the settlements built adjacent to and within the Palestinian city of Hebron because this is where some of the earliest and most deeply ideological areas of Jewish settler residence were built. The term “ideological” distinguishes these settlements from those that are deemed to be overtly security-related and state-initiated built along the Jordanian border, or “economic” in that they attract residents because of cheaper housing.4 While the divides between these different kinds of settlers have often been blurred in practice, I focus on those initially established for religious or ideological reasons alone in militarily occupied Palestinian Hebron because they were deemed to be exceptions to the security strategy pursued by the Israeli government at the time.5
Comparatively speaking, the term “settlement” comes from a broader settler colonial formation, where, as the scholar Patrick Wolfe (1999:209) aptly suggested, invasion is a “structure rather than an event” or a process that takes shape over the longue durée. This process entails resource extraction by establishing power asymmetries based on conceptions of social difference. Settler colonialism, in other words, features forms of “destruction that seek to replace” (ibid.), displacing populations from their territory. As a technique of both land acquisition and rule, it has an extensive history, appearing in the medieval writings of Machiavelli, the conquest of the Americas, westward expansion in the United States, Australian and Japanese colonialism, as well as many other contexts of resource extraction (Wolfe 1999; Elkins and Pedersen 2005). Understanding the influence of a distinctly ideological form of settlement in the Israel-Palestine case, however, requires thinking through the elaboration of a religious ideology as lived and practiced in the context of an occupied military zone, on the one hand, and thinking through its relation to a changing Israeli national project, on the other. It has a significant colonial dimension but includes other important drivers and determinations as well (cf. Ram 1999, Shafir 1999).
I therefore take the position that it is necessary to account for ideological settlement’s specificity over the 1967 Green Line if only to trace its disproportionate social and political influence within Israel itself. What distinguishes all settlement in this context from its earlier periods is, first, that it is conjoined to an existing state that has never entirely defined its borders. The occupation of the West Bank on Israel’s periphery created, in other words, an in-between zone, featuring a densely populated Palestinian area governed by a semi-permanent military administration. In this territory under occupation, multiple legal codes have been at play, private Palestinian property has been confiscated by decree, and its residents have been excluded from the rights of citizenship (cf. Hanafi 2009). Settlement added to this legal gray zone a more permanent social presence than what was presumed to be merely a temporary and finite