Settling Hebron. Tamara Neuman
Читать онлайн книгу.
lead us to see the ways in which these military tactics further enable the agency of settlers and even grant greater plausibility to a settler’s ideological convictions.
Damaged Eyes: Seeing on the Periphery
In addition to the military occupation, we find other kinds of direct violence that similarly enable the inscription of a settler’s biblical vision to take hold. Palestinian farmers living adjacent to settlements who have directly experienced settler harassment and other forms of destruction offer important perspectives here. The Jaber family, owners of lands that border Kiryat Arba, gained the attention of Israeli and international peace activists as victims of verbal harassment and random acts of destruction perpetrated by a gang of male (adolescent) settlers living on the hills above them. The two brothers of the Jaber family, Atta and Habah, were in frequent contact with the Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT), a Mennonite peacekeeping presence devoted to nonviolence. The CPT operates in the area in order to protect Palestinian families who are vulnerable to settler violence because they live beyond the boundaries of the Palestinian Authority and away from the reach of Israeli police.15 During a conversation arranged by the CPT, Atta Jaber talked about how his house had been demolished several times by the Israeli military when he tried to build an addition onto it after having been denied the required building permits. Though he had repeatedly applied for these permits, they had not been granted (as they seldom are), and so he decided to expand his house on his own property without them. Then he spoke of High Court petitions, hospitalizations for injuries he incurred trying to defend his house, and after his house was demolished, attempts at rebuilding it along with Israeli and international peace activists. These demolitions and acts of rebuilding became highly visible media events (see, e.g., Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions 2013). His brother Habah, on the other hand, was less of a public figure and far more focused on being able to continue to farm and simply earn a living. A large portion of his land had been confiscated to build a gas station near the entrance of Kiryat Arba and the remainder of it was cut in two by a bypass road for the exclusive use of settlers and the military. Because of these land confiscations, a constant stream of cars coming down from the settlement ran through his vineyards. He lived a besieged life, defending his family from frequent settler attacks coming mainly from Kiryat Arba residents living on the heights above.
Habah Jaber recounted the following: “Settlers came in the middle of night, and they had a saw and cut sixteen grapevines. My father went to the city, and when he came back, he saw all the grapevines wilted. We don’t have any weapons. I cannot fight settlers. If they come, I can’t defend myself.” In telling this story, he talked about his personal sense of fear and frustration at not being able to protect his family. Another time, religious settler students smashed the windows of his house, partially blinding his oldest daughter, who subsequently needed expensive surgeries to restore her vision. Moreover, his four-year-old daughter was traumatized by seeing the settlers proceed to trample over the garden and destroy all the marigolds. He then pointed out that the soldiers stationed in the area did not intervene when settlers attacked his property and that the police did not have the will or manpower to enforce the law. In the face of future acts of settler harassment, Habah considered his choices to be leaving or resisting, and he chose to resist by simply staying put.
Ideological settlers do not see their acts as inherently violent. If they are caught up in direct violence, they claim, it is only in cases of retribution. Moreover, settlers rarely concede the gap between how they imagine the biblical landscape and the uses of force necessary to implement their vision. This gap is characteristic of many other utopian visions that use violence to achieve a desired end. Yet as the experience of Habah Jaber and others Palestinian farmers show, every act of building, renewing, and reenvisioning entails uses of force or direct violence against those resisting that vision by merely living on their land. One portion of the Jaber family land had already been taken over in order to build an expansion, or “neighborhood,” of Kiryat Arba known as Harsina (Mount Sinai) years earlier. But the more recent land confiscation in order to put up a gas station left Habah Jaber with a palpable sense of sadness. He alluded to the military decision to confiscate land for what had been termed “public” use: “I talked with the captain. He didn’t care about me. He didn’t care about my papers [meaning the deed to the land passed down from his grandfather and great grandfather]. He didn’t care about the trees. The captain said something I cannot forget: if you have power, you can do whatever you like.” Habah Jaber also mentioned that over a hundred of his olive trees had been cut down and carted away.16 “They didn’t give money; they just took the land. I wouldn’t have taken gold for it. This is my whole life. How would I exchange it for gold? They offered two shekels (approximately seventy-five cents) for a tree, which was twenty-five years old.” He emphasized that none of the Jaber family took money for it: “We would not take that money. Money disappears when you go to the market.” Jaber was dismayed that after years of cultivating his land, it could be rendered barren in an instant. “If someone came to photograph it with a camera,” he stated, “he would only have seen the soil, stones, and broken pipes for the water.”
In contrast to the Jabers’ relation to the land, settlers’ attachments to sacred sites operate at a much greater remove. Palestinians farmers are invested in Hebron’s land because their families have lived on it for generations and it provides them with a basic livelihood. Their attachments to land entail a vast knowledge of soil, water, trees, and agricultural techniques, as well as a mastery of Hebron’s long tradition of cultivating grapes and olives. A settler’s attachments to place, on the other hand, depend not on the productive capacity of land itself but on bounding it off, fencing it in, and directly residing in it, limiting its agricultural potential in order to sustain a distinct devotional lifestyle.17
Moral Hierarchy and Biblical Sites
Reconsidering once again aspects of Mageni’s tour in light of the two individual points of view sketched here, those of an Israeli soldier and a Palestinian farmer, it is worth noting that Mageni invoked Jewish mysticism to explain the sorts of vegetation growing on what he considered to be the sacred land beside Bethlehem. His invocation of Judaism’s mystical tradition came at the expense of the labor that Palestinians regularly used to cultivate their land. The Land of Israel is “uniquely blessed with seven species” (erets ḥiṭah u-śeʿorah ṿe-gefen), replete with two kinds of grain (wheat and barley), as well as five fruits (figs, dates, olives, grapes, and pomegranates) (Mageni Family 2003:43). Quoting the Zohar, a text of Judaism’s mystical tradition, Mageni then noted: “It is interesting that in the Zohar, Rav Shimon bar Yochai refers to the special reason that these particular seven species, rather than others, are the ones through which the glory of the Land of Israel is reflected.” Though other types of vegetation may be present, they “tend to grow in the valleys [ba-shefelah],” and quoting the Aramaic for further effect: “They strive for lowness [de-hainu shoʾafim le-shiflut] and are not notable” (ibid., 47). He then pointed out that the seven species that grow on the tops of the mountain ranges strive for highness (shoʾafim le-hitromemut), and are a treasured feature of the Judean Hills to this very day (ibid.). In Mageni’s invocation of the Zohar, hilltop vegetation reflected, by its very presence, a moral striving that was directly visible in the morphology of plants. Yet by pointing to rocky areas that could not be cultivated, this mystical tradition also had significant legal implications. The Ottoman land laws, which form part of the body of law used in the West Bank to make decisions on land ownership, equate cultivation with ownership. Land that has been left fallow can be reclaimed by the state for public use after three years (cf. Shehadeh 1988). Incorporated into Israeli military regulations, this law has been used as one of the main rationales for confiscating land on the hilltops and handing it over to ideological settlers, reclassifying Palestinian private property as state land. Mageni’s attribution of moral excellence to hilltop vegetation, then, in effect rationalizes the ongoing confiscation of hilltop land where Jewish settlers are given full control.
What of the presence of Bethlehem’s Palestinian population? The fields beyond Bethlehem were significant for Mageni because they gave rise to a royal Jewish lineage. It is precisely here, he suggested, that Naomi and her daughter-in-law Ruth approached Bethlehem from the east, and the location where Ruth married Boaz, who bore a son Oved, who in turn had a son Yishai who begot David (Mageni Family 2003:48). Yet