Settling Hebron. Tamara Neuman
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affiliations such as these to claim land, because they are not easily made to stand in for situated identities. They signal mobile ways of locating the self that can be remembered and recalled by reference to lines of descent rather than through precise geographic links. In the decade after these pronouncements, Bethlehem, a Palestinian city of approximately 25,000 residents, has been made to disappear by another sort of erasure. One section of the bypass system, known as the “tunnels road,” transports Jewish settlers and the military directly under the city though a long tunnel. Riding in this tunnel conveys a new sense of normalcy—namely, ideological settlers riding through it have the feeling of being on a direct route home, without any recognition that this Palestinian city has been erased from view.
Conclusion
In sum, as a particular interpretive framing of the biblical “purchase” and a textual rendering of the biblical landscape shows, a settler’s religious attachments to Hebron are produced by multiple and complex forms of remaking. In part, this remaking entails the reorientation of an exilic religious tradition so that it always points toward sacred sites, inscriptions in the landscape, and expansions into Palestinian-populated areas. This allows a locally produced settler experience of the Bible as well as other canonical Jewish texts to align with an emerging material reality. Creating these correspondences depends on both narrowing interpretive possibilities and giving biblical passages a material form that brings the past to life in a particular way. This settler experience of the “real” inevitably depends on minimizing or marginalizing a Palestinian presence and on using aspects of Jewish tradition to provide an ethical overlay for this ideological project of erasure. Harassment, trespass, and violence combine with forms of devotion in ways that are no longer deemed antithetical to Jewish authenticity. Whereas in the colonial imagination, “others” were seen as backward and not deserving of resources, this religious framing is more difficult to grapple with because of its authoritative and “authentic” rather than overtly constructed character. While in Goffman, a given frame signaled a kind of social hierarchy that could be unveiled and critiqued, here Palestinian nonrecognition has become part of a more firmly entrenched devotional structure that is becoming more difficult to dismantle even from within its own terms.
Chapter 2
Between Legality and Illegality
In April 1968, a group of young religious students together with a number of families who were disciples of the hawkish leader Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook obtained a forty-two-hour permit from Uzi Narkiss, the commanding general of the Israeli Central Command, allowing them to enter the occupied city of Hebron. It was less than a year after the beginning of the occupation, and a permit was needed because the West Bank was closed off to Israeli civilians for overnight stays. This group of religious right activists rented out the Palestinian Park Hotel from its owner Fahd Kawasmeh under the guise of celebrating the Passover holiday in Hebron.1 They used the week-long time frame of the holiday to initiate a permanent return to a city deemed sacred in the Bible and second only to Jerusalem in its significance for Jews. Once inside Hebron, they squatted in the hotel for approximately six weeks and refused to leave. The Israeli government responded by deferring any binding decision on whether these settlers could remain permanently, relocating them instead to Hebron’s military headquarters. Settlers continued to live in this military compound for three years on a putatively temporary basis with their families, until they were granted the right to build the settlement of Kiryat Arba on the city’s outskirts.
The government’s decision to relocate the Hebron settlers to the military compound was controversial from the outset. It was spurred on in part by a seeming concern with international law, particularly the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits deporting protected persons or introducing part of an occupier’s own civilian population into an occupied territory. Under the Geneva Convention, then, an occupying power is bound to maintain the demographic composition of the territory under its control. The decision to transfer settlers into what was considered a de facto temporary military location was presented as a compromise that initially positioned these religious devotees as an extension of the occupying military presence. Nominally satisfying this noncivilian and temporary requisite established by the Geneva Conventions, however, gave rise to two important precedents that continue to have deep ramifications: retroactively recognizing as legal settlers’ illegal acts of squatting; and giving settlers arms so that the military would not be charged with directly defending them, claiming that they posed an additional security burden.
Figure 5. Archival photo of Kiryat Arba (1971). Central Zionist Archives, PHG/1066154.
Legal Indeterminacy and Religious Devotion
This chapter, based on interviews, primary sources, and secondary histories, looks back on the beginning of Hebron’s settler presence from the vantage of Kiryat Arba for the lessons on illegality it provides. It does not pretend to be a complete history or a comprehensive study of the legal and illegal elements of the occupation as a whole. Rather, my aim is to highlight the conditions and contradictions that allowed a particular version of Jewish settler practice to be mobilized and take hold. In doing so, I reexamine the idea that historical continuity and the sacredness of Hebron alone led these religious settlers to inhabit the city. Rather, settling Hebron required incrementally producing a site on the ground in a Palestinian city that could then be apprehended as Jewish in order to make settler appeals to origins more plausible. Moreover, legal indeterminacy was the condition that enabled these settler activists to use small tactics on the ground to create an authoritative religious realm. They invoked Jewish law with the aim of diminishing the significance of the Palestinian presence in Hebron because the legal gray zone of the occupation rendered both legal limits and geographic boundaries malleable.2 This allowed settlers to mobilize limited interpretations of the Bible as prescribing religious imperatives in ways that would not have been possible in a more stable legal environment, granting religious devotion the power to play a key role in confronting the legal authority of the state.
In terms of this legal gray zone and the environment in which an ideological settler project first took hold, it is important to note that the Israeli government’s ambiguous position on international law was shaped by the absence of a Palestinian state. Israel contended, in other words, that it had not taken over territory from any “legitimate” sovereign power precisely because it deemed Jordanian rule of Palestinian West Bank areas unlawful. Rather, seeing itself as a liberal occupier, the state claimed that the Geneva Conventions on occupied territory did not apply because it was acting as a temporary trustee, administering the area on behalf of the Palestinian residents living there until they were prepared to rule themselves.
Hebron Settlers as an Inconvenience
According to Shlomo Gazit, who at the time of the Park Hotel takeover was serving as the head of the Unit for the Coordination of Operations in the Territories in the Israeli Labor government, the initial settler presence in Hebron was considered a headache (rather than a serious dilemma) because it afforded no strategic value for the military administration. Hebron had originally been excluded from Deputy Prime Minister Yigal Allon’s settlement plan, which, after the 1967 war, envisioned setting up security settlements directly along the Jordanian border and creating a land barrier by annexing a swath of territory ten to fifteen kilometers wide along the Jordan River along with other lands (cf. Shlaim 2014:274). Allon’s plan also called for creating two noncontiguous Palestinian areas, including major cities, which he thought would become either demilitarized autonomous Palestinian zones or areas given back to Jordanian rule. His idea was to include as few Palestinians as possible in the most amount of land that could be added to Israeli territory (ibid.). The government later adopted the Allon Plan as its own, modifying it by allowing a settler presence to be established just outside the heavily populated Palestinian city of Hebron and well beyond any previously envisioned security barrier.
Inside Israeli government circles, there was as yet no consensus around what the 1967 war’s large territorial gains meant for the long term (ibid.). While those in the Labor-led ruling coalition