Settling Hebron. Tamara Neuman
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law and made the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank one of the longest standing occupations in modern history. However, religious settlers have forged a distinctly hybrid modality of power that draws on religious authority and practice as well as legal ambiguity to propel social change. Viewed from the ground up, the subjective sensibilities and values of religious settlers are profoundly place-based in the sense of being resolutely attached to sacred sites and, emanating from these, linked to larger parcels of land distributed throughout a fragmented landscape (cf. MacDonald 2003).
Religion and Space
In studying the transformative potential of religion as an ideological medium, I pay particular attention to the role that religiously inscribed space plays in remaking or dividing up Palestinian areas. Given the scale of these spatial processes on the ground, I focus on the intersection of “religion and locality” (Knott 2005, 2009). Highlighting religion’s relationship to the local, I analyze how settlers reorient Judaism to their social, economic, and geographic conditions as well as to Israeli military rule in Palestinian Hebron. In doing so, I analyze religiously inscribed space as that which has dynamic and power-laden qualities (cf. Lefebvre 1991; Foucault 1977, 1980; de Certeau 1984; Massey 1993).6 Space then is treated as an important ideological medium of change that can be actively used to shape forms of domination rather than as just a container of settler actions.
Highlighting the significance of this religiously inscribed space, however, doesn’t preclude its relation to temporality or the past. Rather, the focus on space also implies the ways conceptions of time “flow through space” and the way temporal reconfigurations of the past and biblical places of origin enable new power relations to take hold (Knott 2009:156). As this ethnography shows, time as well as space becomes increasingly fragmented through its reiterative and cyclical rendition, furthering settler practices of inscription. Settled spaces, then, tend to embody present orientations (the here and now) rather than future-oriented sensibilities and are thought to commemorate events that often repeat themselves—biblical, historical, the just past, and the ever present are temporalities that the settler imaginary stitches together to create a seamless sense of continuity and permanence.7
With respect to settling, this ethnography highlights how ideological settler uses of space herald a particular version of the past, which has significant social and political ramifications in the present. It shows not only how bounded spatial fields are made to invoke the Bible, but also how these cannot be disentangled from the religious investments and discourses shaping them, along with elements of social production and reproduction (cf. Knott 2009). So, for instance, the following events, which will be discussed in the ethnography, appear not as unique historical events in their own right but as reiterations lacking any historical specificity: the burial of the biblical matriarch Sarah, the burial of Hebron’s Jewish victims of the 1929 massacre, the 1974 burial by Sarah Nachshon of her son Abraham (in the wake of sudden infant death), the commemorations and burials of post-Oslo victims of Palestinian violence, and an array of deaths from natural causes. All of these are lined up as a sequence destined to repeat itself. In this, little difference across time is recognized, producing a distinct sense of victimization and fatalism. Reiterative time also makes plausible the naturalized replacement of Hebron’s former Jewish community, victims of the 1929 massacre, with that of a violent settler vanguard residing directly in Hebron, foregrounding ethnic similarities alone. It is worth noting that the focus on 1929 is a local settler memory that was all but erased in the national Israeli framework of memorialization because Hebron’s former Jewish community was anti-Zionist, religious, and Arabic speaking (Feige 2001; cf. Cohen 2015).
Given the rubric of “religion and locality,” this ethnographic approach is also distinguished by a preoccupation with small-scale devotional practices. By practice, I mean culturally patterned behavior that results in the spatial remaking of sites rather than preexisting social structures, rules, or cultural norms and that determines individual or collective action (Bourdieu 1977). This focus on spatial practice rather than on “materiality” or “environment” is intended to foreground contingencies, improvisations, tactics, and mishaps that figure into the remaking of space as an imagined biblical landscape, as well as adaptations of Jewish tradition itself (cf. Thift 2008; de Certeau 1984). My approach also stands in direct contrast to other classic frameworks that focus on the symbolic structure of religion (Geertz 1973) and its key concepts (e.g., the sacredness of land, messianic redemption) in the same way that analyses of language distinguish between an underlying grammatical system and pragmatic events of language use (Saussure 1983[1915]).
Figure 3. Archival photo of Hebron’s Talmud Torah (traditional elementary school) taken in 1902 featuring (seated in the center) Rabbi Meir Shmuel Kastel (leader of Hebron’s Arabic-speaking Sephardi community), Rabbi Rafael Franky, and Rabbi Hassan (chief rabbi) and Rabbi Tzarfati, who were killed in the 1929 riots, among other teachers and students. Central Zionist Archives, PHG/1023642.
To argue from symbolic concept to action, as symbolic analyses often do, suggests that actors are essentially captive to their ideas. Their behavior, in other words, appears to be uniquely determined by ideas that withstand change. Rather than providing an interpretation of a religious-symbolic system that presumably determines settler behavior on the ground, then, I consider settler practices that shape a new geography as well as religious interpretations that often lead to violence. This focus on practice also allows me to consider the paradoxes and contingencies of settling—insofar as creating new settler strongholds or expanding old ones is often an incremental process that does not always follow a given plan. There is an important situational aspect to settlement that cannot be captured by textual and symbolic accounts of Judaism alone. Yet at the same time, one needs a broader sense of how ideological settlers actually invoke tradition to create their locations and destinies in order to see how radical religious commitments resonate with an evolving material reality.
Place Making and Devotion
Small-scale settler practices in Palestinian areas result not only in places deemed to have Jewish origins but also in resolute attachments. These deeply felt religious investments in places are often mobilized for political aims, supporting the transformative potential of religion as an ideological medium (cf. Cresswell 2004; Massey 1994; Tuan 1990; Casey 1993; Brauch et al. 2008). Moreover, sacred places in this context also have a strong ethnonational aspect. In both cases, the relationship between people and place is forged on the ground through practices seeking to transform a geography that is itself being reorganized more broadly by the state (cf. Weizman 2012). While salient ethnonational practices include walking, parading, intimidating, confiscating, vandalizing, destroying, and demonstrating through Palestinian areas in Hebron, they may also be combined with elements of Jewish textual tradition as a form of legitimation, revealing combinations that are both syncretic and malleable while nevertheless orthodox in self-conception.
Because deep attachments to specific sites are a central feature of a settler identity, I map out their (paradoxical) character.8 Ideological settlement has become a way of lending a distinct order to the memory entailed in Jewish tradition, curtailing its dynamism, while narrowing possibilities for interpretation or revalorization. It shares features with Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire in the sense that it actually erases more variegated forms of local memory in favor of preserving narratives of a homogenized ethnonational past deemed suitable to this distinct form of Jewish observance (Nora 1989). In addition to erasing this type of variegated memory, ideological settlement reconstitutes the diasporic and transportable features of Jewish tradition replacing it with precise biblical sites. It does so in a way that is more literal and place-based than other known versions of Judaism, or labor Zionism (cf. Feige 2001).9 The literalism, then, of the religious settler project lies in the attempt to make places of habitation as sacred as the religious requirement of observing laws around marriage, diet, burial, and other commandments governing social life (mitsvot). In this manner, the legalistic aspect of Jewish tradition (halakha) becomes place dependent and enmeshed in actually inhabiting a material sacred geography (cf. Smith 1992).10
By focusing on place-based ties to religious sites and biblical regions (those that settlers refer to as “Judea” and