Settling Hebron. Tamara Neuman
be exchanged for a lasting peace, others took a more hawkish view and maintained that holding onto all territorial gains made Israel more secure than it had been within its 1949 armistice lines. In trying to explain the ascendance of ideological settlers prompted by the settler group entering Hebron a year later, scholars point to the euphoric mood in Israel immediately after these vast territorial gains (Sprinzak 1991, 1999; Feige 2009). They allege that government officials and a comparatively secular Israeli public were more favorably disposed to a divinely inspired return to cities (East Jerusalem) and sacred sites (e.g., Tomb of the Patriarchs) deemed important in Judaism that had been under Jordanian control for nineteen years. Hebron, then, was seen as a religious exception to strategic plans for the West Bank during a period in which Jerusalem’s holy sites were being incorporated into the Israeli state.
As part of this wider security strategy after the war and in accordance with the Allon Plan, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol first began to establish Nahal (Hebrew acronym for Noar Halutzi Lochem, lit. “fighting pioneer youth,” a special unit of the Israel Defense Forces) military settlements in the newly expanded border areas, particularly in the Jordan Valley, mixing military outposts with agricultural activities (Gazit 2003:251). The idea behind establishing these Nahal settlements was to create an entrenched military presence while using agriculture to finance it and to allow for the possibility that these military bases would eventually be turned into civilian communities along the Jordanian border. Nahal settlements, then, introduced a way of integrating military aims with civilian elements, which in turn made possible a more permanent form of rule over the territories (ibid.). They also enshrined the government stance of “deciding not to decide,” which paradoxically extended relatively permanent forms of control while not committing the government to remain in these areas (Demant 1988; Gazit 2003; Zertal and Eldar 2009). In terms of Hebron’s ideological settlers, these Nahal settlements served as one of several justifications for religious right civilian-led initiatives. When religious settlers first entered Hebron in 1968, they framed their actions as similar to the Nahal initiatives already in progress, while invoking an earlier history of Zionist settlement to legitimize their actions. Yet at the same time, they began using elements of religious practice to test legal limits from the start, flouting military restrictions in a context where international law was itself being violated.
One could argue that at the time small-scale settler tactics on the ground meant little and that it was mainly government policy (or indecision) that set the stage for the entrenchment of a more radical settler ethos. Moreover, everyday religious lives shaped by adherence to Jewish law and tradition among ideological activists in this period may seem less significant than the bold statements of key religious leaders like Rabbi Moshe Levinger, Rabbi Hanan Porat, and Rabbi Eliezer Waldman, as well as a range of other Labor supporters. Yet the tactics the original Hebron settlers deployed on the ground are worth revisiting here because they tipped the scales in favor of settlement at a moment when a permanent ideological settler presence in Hebron still hung in the balance. Standing between a distinct shift in older forms of messianism, which scholars like Aviezer Ravitzky (1996) and Gideon Aran (1991, 2013) rightly pinpoint as significant in spearheading the religious sensibility of these ideological settlers, and the broader context of government indecision, there exists a whole range of small-scale practices, either directly illegal or pushing the boundaries of a decidedly ambiguous legality, which religious settlers used to create precedents on the ground and to persuade their supporters of the necessity of allowing them to remain in Hebron. By focusing on the spatial or material character of these activities and the agency of these settler-believers, it becomes possible to investigate how distinct forms of Jewish devotion and belief came to depend more fully on the legal gray zone of the Israeli occupation in its first year and thereafter.
Observing Passover, Skirting Authority
Shlomo Gazit, head administrator of the Occupied Territories during the Park Hotel takeover (and later a dissenting voice within the military establishment), contended in an interview that “chance” was largely responsible for allowing the initial settler presence to take hold in Hebron. He recalled that the two military authorities who would have intervened at the time of their entry were absent. Moshe Dayan, the Israeli minister of defense, had just been hospitalized for serious injuries after an archaeological accident (a wall had collapsed on him), and, as head administrator, he too had been away for the week sitting shiva (mourning) for his father, who had died the day before. “The military people who should have and could have intervened at the time didn’t exist,” he emphasized. He maintained that the settlers used this window of opportunity to enter Hebron illegally. After this, he insisted, it was the government alone who was to blame for their continued presence because its decisions were imposed on military leaders. That is, military leaders were charged with carrying out government orders from above rather than making policy of their own.
Historians Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar (2009:24), commenting on the settler’s illegal entrance into Hebron, allege that Gazit’s claims and others like them amount to a rewriting of history in order to minimize the responsibility of those in authority who made a series of decisions that empowered the settlers.3 As evidence, they quote Rabbi Moshe Levinger, the radical right rabbi leading the Hebron settlers, who refutes the idea that settlers established themselves illegally: “We never told anyone that we were going only to celebrate Passover. The government authorities knew we wanted to settle … we didn’t want to play tricks. Had they followed us closely, they would have seen that any one going to Hebron with Frigidaires and washing machines wasn’t intending a pleasure trip. I don’t think that it is respectful of the truth, respectful of the Jewish people, or respectful of Hebron to say that if there are Jews in Hebron, it is because we rebelled and went against the will of the government of Israel” (Zertal and Eldar 2009:457n35).
If military authorities disagreed with the settlers, why did they not enforce their own rules and regulations? Did they not have the authority to do so? Gazit’s view of the situation was that the military was charged with overseeing Jewish visitation to the Tomb of the Patriarchs, while preventing any permanent Jewish presence to take hold in Hebron. Yet he also maintained that he was not about to resign over a dispute that seemed at the time to be relatively insignificant (Gazit 2003:164). In my conversation with him, Gazit emphasized: “I was in charge of an area with a [Palestinian] population of one million people. That was my population, not the Jewish [settlers], but the local Arab Palestinian population.” He spoke of the broad task of administering as one of taking on the responsibility for meeting the basic needs of Palestinians, specifically in Nablus, Hebron, Ramallah, and East Jerusalem—all areas that had absorbed refugees from the 1948 war. He also noted that as a fighting force, the military was not particularly well suited to the task.4 In comparison, he noted, this band of young religious settlers rightfully warranted little of his attention; not only were their numbers small, but their views were marginal. Gazit, however, did seem to have a basic sympathy with settler demands to pray at the Tomb of the Patriarchs, because he viewed it as a request entirely in keeping with the national ethos of returning to sacred Jewish places.
Occupying a Legal Gray Zone
A distinctive feature of the Israeli occupation has been the legal overlay granted to its many illegal actions. Palestinians under military rule have brought cases to the Israeli High Court, as a check to military actions, but they have rarely won. Ideological settlers, by contrast, have proven more successful in deploying legal ambiguities for their own advantage. The prevailing legal gray zone of the occupation for them meant capitalizing on multiple legal codes that could be invoked and enforced in an ad hoc way by the military administration controlling Palestinian areas. During the early period, this ambiguity allowed for maneuverability with respect to a variety of religious claims as well. Settlers sought to establish precedents, push against regulations, and expand spatial boundaries using religious rationales. These tactics were being deployed on the ground as debates took place in the Israeli government over whether the Occupied Territories were indeed truly “occupied.”
Sparked by Israel’s (and international) reluctance to recognize either Jordan or Egypt as the legitimate sovereign powers of the Palestinian territories, Israel maintained that it had liberated rather than occupied these areas. To quote Shlomo Gazit again expressing the Israeli government point of view: “Is the West Bank occupied, and if it is, do all the international laws