Settling Hebron. Tamara Neuman

      Early on in my fieldwork, Rivka Ashkenazi, an elderly Parisian resident of the West Bank settlement of Kiryat Arba took me to see the Tomb of the Patriarchs in the city of Hebron. As we walked before the monumental structure, she explained that this was the burial site of Judaism’s most important matriarchs and patriarchs, and that few nations exist today that know exactly where their ancestors lie. It was in this sense, she continued, that the Jewish people were distinct. Approaching the massive outer walls of this seventh-century site, I took in the vast military panorama encircling the area—observation towers, camouflage netting, barbed wire, steel fencing, metal detectors, and checkpoints. Two towering square minarets, rising up from the diagonal corners of the site’s rectangular outer wall, stood as staunch witnesses to the site’s Islamic character. As I further observed the scene, Rivka recounted the suggestion by medieval Jewish philosophers that the area stood at the entrance to the Garden of Eden. The dissonance of seeing this heavily militarized zone while hearing her claim that we were standing before Eden remains etched in my mind to this day. Her projection of a biblical utopia onto an elaborate latticework of militarism was telling. Realities, to be sure, can be parsed in myriad ways, but it seemed impossible not to notice the deadening effects of the many soldiers deployed throughout a Palestinian urban area. Rivka’s Eden was part of a claim to an exclusive site of Jewish origin, underwritten by a sense of permanent belonging. This claim has great existential as well as political ramifications. When seen through the lens of religious settlement, much of the conflict it has fueled comes about by creating resolute ties to recreated Jewish sites in Palestinian areas and making changes in the landscape to affirm their self-evident biblical link to the past.

      On Seeing and Believing

      It might seem easy to dismiss Rivka’s assertions as an illusion. Yet in remaking and residing in sacred places such as these, Jewish settlers establish a putative sense of the real, which arises from the very materiality of the scene. Being able to see in this particular way, to look beyond the presence of actual Palestinian lives and be invested in Jewish origins alone, comes from the ability to bound off discordant elements of an ideological vision as “alien” or as falling outside an arena of concern. Yet in fact Rivka was confronted by an array of conditions that might in other circumstances have disrupted her religious vision. There was no mistaking, for instance, the crumbling state of many uninhabited Palestinian buildings that had fallen into disrepair or the tension palpable in this volatile and conflict-ridden zone. Rivka’s principal focus, however, was on reclaimed Jewish spaces and origins. Her vision was enmeshed in a biblical sense of place and shaped by a mystically rooted experience of self quite unknown in other times and contexts of Jewish observance.

      In this book, I analyze the discourses, values, and practices through which ideological settlers remake Palestinian Hebron as a site of Jewish origins in the context of the militarily occupied West Bank to create a rationale for permanently controlling territory in these areas.¹ Rivka’s way of seeing has many resonances with those of earlier immigrant settlers or labor Zionists in Palestine by virtue of erasing the Palestinian presence she encounters, but it also reveals a number of features that distinguish her sensibility as unique. By addressing this distinct iteration of settlement, I aim to give ideological settlement the focused attention that it warrants, while situating it within a wider set of social transformations and ruptures that give it resonance within the context of Zionism and Israeli nation building. There are several conjoined processes that have worked together to propel Jewish immigration to Palestine over the course of a century. While settlement has figured distinctly at each stage, it has not taken the syncretic form of ideological or devoutly religious settlement that we find in the present, as it manifests itself in Kiryat Arba and Hebron in particular, as well as in other fundamentalist Jewish settlements.

      Located in the West Bank and established on confiscated Palestinian land in 1971, Kiryat Arba consists of approximately seven thousand Jewish settlers (Central Bureau of Statistics 2015) in a settlement that has the status of an Israeli municipality and development town. It is situated adjacent to Hebron, a large Palestinian city and key economic hub with over 215,000 residents (Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics 2016). An offshoot of Kiryat Arba, the remade Jewish Quarter was subsequently established in 1979 and lies directly within the historic Old City of Palestinian Hebron. It is a heavily militarized enclave of seven hundred residents including many children. The urban location of this offshoot makes its settler presence particularly volatile, resembling only parts of the Old City in Jerusalem. The paramount religious site in Hebron is known (variously according to each community) as al-Ḥaram al-Ibrahimi (Abraham’s Sanctuary) in Arabic, Meʿarat ha-Makhpelah (Multiple Cave) in Hebrew, or the Tomb of the Patriarchs (a name given to the site during the British Mandate). Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions all designate the area as the burial site of three key patriarchal couples, Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, and Jacob and Leah. The Jewish settler presence in the Tomb of the Patriarchs has turned this site of convergence into a touchstone of violence. While the site functioned as a mosque from the seventh century until the Israeli occupation of the West Bank in 1967, it was subsequently partitioned for use as a synagogue and mosque.² Jewish settlers have also claimed and settled formerly Jewish residential areas near the mosque that were evacuated in the wake of 1929 anticolonial riots. Other provisional settler outposts and semi-permanent housing have subsequently been scattered throughout the hilltop areas to the south known as the Hebron Hills.