Settling Hebron: Jewish Fundamentalism in a Palestinian City

The Ethnography of Political Violence

by Tamara Neuman

The city of Hebron is important to Jewish, Islamic, and Christian traditions as home to the Tomb of the Patriarchs, the burial site of three biblical Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, and Jacob and Leah. Today, Hebron is one of the epicenters of the Israel-Palestine conflict, consisting of two unequal a traditional Palestinian majority without citizenship, and a fundamentalist Jewish settler minority with full legal rights. Contemporary Jewish settler practices and sensibilities, legal gray zones, and ruling complicities have remade Hebron into a divided Palestinian city surrounded by a landscape of fragmented, militarized strongholds.

In Settling Hebron , Tamara Neuman examines how religion functions as ideology in Hebron, with a focus on Jewish settler expansion and its close but ambivalent relationship to the Israeli state. Neuman presents the first critical ethnography of the Jewish settler populations in Kiryat Arba and the adjacent Jewish Quarter in the Old City of Hebron,considered by many Israelis as the most "ideological" of settlements. Through extensive fieldwork, interviews with settlers, soldiers, displaced Palestinian urban residents and farmers as well as archival research, Neuman challenges dismissive portraits of settlers as rigid, fanatical adherents of an anachronistic worldview. At the same time, she reveals the extent of disconnection between these settler communities and mainstream Modern Orthodox Judaism, both of which interpret written sources on the sacredness of land—biblical texts, rabbinic commentary, and mystical traditions—in radically different ways. Neuman also traces the violent results of a settler formation, Palestinian responses to settler encroachment, and the connection between ideological settlement and economic processes. Settling Hebron explores the complexity of Hebron's Jewish settler community in its own right—through its routine practices and rituals, its most extreme instances of fundamentalist revision and violence, and its strategic relationships with successive Israeli governments.

Genres: Judaism

256 pages, Hardcover

Published June 1, 2018

Reviews

[Raphael Cohen-Almagor · Rating 3 out of 5]

Neuman analyses the discourses, values, and practices through which settlers justify their settlement in Hebron. Her aim is “to document the lived rather than merely textual aspects of Judaism in this particular context in order to highlight how its transformations legitimate processes of territorial expansion” (p. 4). In other words, Neuman wishes to document life in the settlements. Neuman sees the spatial dimensions of religious practice to be a key domain of power. In the first chapter, she describes views of Palestinians, Jewish settlers and soldiers. She shows how ideology is used to maintain a cohesive community facing everyday challenges. Chapter 2 provides a historical overview of the claims and practices that paved the way for Jewish ideological settlement at the heart of a Palestinian city. Chapter 3 explains how maternalism and motherhood were deployed for political aims. Many religious secular women wish to have large families as a way of rejecting secular feminist norms, and live what they perceive as an authentic expression of Jewish identity (p. 91). Chapter 4 analyses a series of antagonistic social encounters between settlers and Palestinians. Neuman observes that indifference toward the Palestinians enables settlers to navigate through the winding roads of Palestinian areas. The Palestinian residents are subjected to playing the role of unwilling spectators, whilst settlers display their power and domination. Space and movement are clearly demarcated. Whereas the Palestinians are subjected to arbitrary, unjust rules of occupation, Jewish settlers are a constitutive part of Jewish domination and reinforce the occupation. Chapter 5 is concerned with religious violence and extremism in the context of the Baruch Goldstein massacre in 1994 at the Tomb of the Patriarchs. The chapter recounts the disturbing justifications provided by settlers for Goldstein’s heinous crime and explains why countless settlers perceive Goldstein not only as a hero but also as a saint. Their attitudes are characterised by denial, racism and an unwillingness to honestly reflect on what this “good doctor” did when he opened fire on people who were praying inside a holy place, killing twenty-nine of them. In the final chapter, Neuman describes the diversity of the Kiryat Arba population composed of native Israelis and Jewish immigrants from different parts of the world, including the Bnei Menashe who arrived from north-east India, the Beta Israel of Ethiopia, Russians, converts and Sabras (people who were born in Israel). Neuman describes the cultural, ideological and religious schisms that separate these groups. She argues that integrating the Bnei Menashe and the Beta Israel, both non-white, within the settlement did not translate into greater accommodation of social or ethnic difference. Instead it produced an exclusive form of settler Judaism (p. 169). Neuman further argues that the massive Jewish-Russian presence is at odds with the hard-core religious settlement. This is because the Russians are not committed to leading religiously observant lives nor do they particularly ideological. They are not driven by a strong belief in the trilogy of Am (People of) Israel, Torat Israel (Bible), and Eretz (Land of) Israel. The Russians came to Kiryat Arba for economic reasons. This Russian secular, economic-driven presence elicits negative views among the settlement’s long-time residents.

Neuman provides a detailed account of a troubled, unfair and divisive co-existence where Palestinians are denied basic human rights while settlers are driven by exclusive, divine ideology that permits and fuels this injustice. She describes the indoctrination of children who understand from a young age what role God will have in their lives, the different motivations that brought Jewish settlers to live in discord with Palestinians who, according to their extreme ideology, deserve no rights. Neuman sheds important light on this complex reality that bolsters and justifies this occupation, where the “holy Trinity” theology of Am (people of) Israel, Torat (Bible of) Israel and Eretz (Land of) Israel is employed to cleanse that which cannot be cleansed.

The book is dotted with photos that show places and illustrate descriptions and it has extensive bibliography and a useful index. This book is a must read for those who wish to understand the motives that drive the Jewish settlement movement. Anthropologists of the West Bank and the settlements, as well as political anthropologists worldwide will find this book most illuminating.