Settling Hebron. Tamara Neuman
certainties to take hold, even as they fueled doubts for some Israeli soldiers who were required to fulfill their military duty in Hebron. A soldier’s retrospective look at his service in Hebron offers a sobering perspective on the dynamics of rule that form the backdrop to a settler’s religious sensibility. After two years of service in Hebron, Yehuda Shaul became disillusioned and founded Breaking the Silence, a well-known Israeli activist group made up of ex-soldiers devoted to collecting anonymous testimonies of those serving in the occupation.11 They mainly work to educate pre-army draftees in Israel but do not explicitly promote conscientious objection because of its strong stigma. The army remains one of Israel’s core institutions, conscripting (mostly Jewish) citizens, male and female, after high school, for three and two years respectively, and is considered a key avenue of social advancement.
Why explore the narratives of a soldier here? First, it speaks to the long-standing and complex relationship that exists between religious settlers and the military. Kiryat Arba settlers, for instance, initially were based in Hebron’s military headquarters after a year of squatting in a Palestinian hotel. This early settler relationship with an occupying military force has in effect been carried through to the present. Moreover, an ideological settler’s sense of Palestinian lives transpiring beyond the frame is underscored by military restrictions on Palestinian movement that is enforced by checkpoints, curfews, imprisonment, as well as by restrictions on the growth of Palestinian residential areas subject to housing demolitions. Shaul’s disillusionment, skepticism, and concern with the randomness of a soldier’s actions stands in stark contrast to the certainty of a settler’s devotion and sense of continuity. Juxtaposing these two “tours,” then, brings out the kinds of military actions taking place in the background and the contradictions they pose for enabling a devout settler’s sense of biblical continuity in the present.12
On a tour through Hebron, Shaul’s knowledge of military matters, as well as his skepticism, contrasted with the resolute attachments of religious settlers. His views were significant not only for their critical sense of what soldiers actually do during their service but because they signal the unraveling of belief in these military actions among young Israelis charged with carrying them out. As an observant Jew with family links to religious settlements, Shaul did not reject fulfilling his military service out of hand. He noted that he went into the military believing that he could conduct himself in a principled fashion, but gradually realized he could not, and remained very doubtful that it was possible to do so in an occupation. It was only at the end of his service that he began to reexamine his experience: “I had some doubts and questions when I was a soldier but I put those questions aside. When you are a soldier, you push questions aside—comradeship is important for this.”
Shaul also mentioned that he was not a pacifist—if military service made Israeli lives better and safer and contributed to the defense of Israel, then he believed it was necessary to fulfill it. Yet if “serving” meant a pointless, useless show of force against a mainly civilian Palestinian population and if there was no exit strategy, he was firmly against fulfilling military obligations. His tour provided a good sense of what, from a military standpoint, this security regime looked like—who could enter, who was barred, the kinds of exits and entrances permitted to some classes of people, and the utilitarian naming of checkpoints.13 For example, he mentioned, the mathematical precision of Checkpoint 300, which masks the human tragedy created through its towering, winding, and labyrinthine rows of iron that look down on the subject pedestrian. As he spoke, Shaul’s narratives seemed slightly disengaged, revealing a person who saw the way the military trained him to see, but who was also committed to undoing military logics—orienting the tourist toward the many contradictions etched into a divided landscape. Traveling through some of the same areas Mageni traversed in his tour earlier on, spatial and political realities had hardened. A concrete separation barrier now made its way throughout much of the West Bank:
The fact that the barrier doesn’t match the Green Line creates some, uh, problems, some weird things, and I think this is one of the examples: on your right, you’ll see some Palestinian houses, the outskirts of the Palestinian village of Husan, and because of the barrier, encompassing Gush Etzion [settlement bloc], Husan, Datiou, Wadi Fuki, and Halin, around thirty thousand Palestinians in these villages are surrounded 360 degrees because they are stuck between [the boundaries of] Israel, the barrier, Jerusalem, and Gush Etzion. And their way in or out to their main city is through the so-called humanitarian passage, which is this simple tunnel.
He then pointed out a dirt tunnel that has been dug under the road leading from these villages to Khalda and on to the highway into Bethlehem. His perspective highlighted how seemingly rational military decisions gave way to sheer irrationality, as was evident in the many absurdities he pointed to in the fragmented spatial order. Interspersed with a sleek functional road system were, for instance, many mounds of dirt, cinder blocks, stones, and boulders, as well as gates that blocked the entrances from Palestinian villages onto the main road. He also detailed how soldiers carried out policies of separation: “The way these policies [of separation] were implemented and enforced is basically that you would go and put a bunch of big bricks or stones at the entrance from any village to the main road,” he noted. If Mageni’s route through Palestinian areas invoked a historical route that pointed to the Bible, infusing it with higher purpose, Shaul emphasized the routine activities soldiers carry out in order to create obstacles for Palestinian movement. Indeed, one of the many ironies of the bypass system as it exists today lies in this pairing of sophisticated and planned engineering with hundreds of blocked secondary roads using makeshift and casually produced methods.
Shaul attributed the military’s “policies of separation” to the armed conflict in the second phase of the Intifada, from 2000 to 2002, when there were “a lot of attacks on roads, ambushes, open fire on cars, and on settlers who were driving on the older roads,” followed by “a phase of suicide bombing attacks in Israel.”14 Yet he also admitted the absurdity of these separation policies because they forced Palestinians to use “back roads that connected villages to one another off the main highways, which for them became the main highways [requiring them] to travel in parts, taking a taxi to one military roadblock, getting off to cross it by foot and taking another taxi, piece by piece.” He was grappling with the implications of having helped to double and even triple travel times to places that were actually very close at hand.
Shaul also alleged that he had been required to sow fear among Palestinians and to actively “li-yetsor teḥushat nirdafut” (create the sense of being pursued). The idea was that instilling fear would presumably make Palestinian perpetrators afraid to attack, and he maintained that the military used this strategy in order to compensate for no longer directly administering Palestinian population areas. As a soldier, he said that he was required to engage in random and invasive forms of control: “What does it mean to make your presence felt?” he asked rhetorically. “In Hebron, it means twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week you have patrols; you bump into houses, you start your patrol at ten at night till six in the morning in the Old City, walk in the streets, bump into a house (it’s not a house you have intelligence about), wake up the family, men on one side, women on the other side, search the place, you can yourself imagine how it looks.” In terms of the roads, Shaul emphasized, the military’s “flying” checkpoints also meant long hours of patrolling areas at random that yielded little useful information for enhancing security:
Your mission is basically an eight-hour jeep patrol from the roundabout at Gush Etzion Junction down to Kiryat Arba on Route 60; this is your area and you just have to drive back and forth for eight hours and you just need to invade five houses, doesn’t matter where, doesn’t matter how long, do two flying checkpoints, doesn’t matter which lane, which side of the road, doesn’t matter when. You police for fifteen minutes, you can police for forty-five minutes, it can be one after the other, it can be a flying checkpoint where you check every car, it can be a flying checkpoint where you don’t check any cars, just if you are present on the road, and people drive slower and this is part of creating the feeling that we [the military] are all the time everywhere.
Shaul continued working through the trauma of his military service, while harboring suspicion and distrust of those in authority who sent him to carry out the mission. He alleged that there was no way of being an ethical soldier in the occupation