the ruins of two walls that are present, he notes with authority, “the bulk of what one can see today is Herodian” (ibid.). Mageni’s assertions use a variety of sources for evidence, but they are put together in random and often idiosyncratic ways, forming a bricolage of the visual, textual, linguistic, and hypothetical, all rolled into one. He imparts a sense of mystery and discovery to each of his findings. Yet his quest to map the Bible raises the specter of what actually counts as historical evidence, whether it matters more than direct experience, and how the two work together in ways that seem meaningful for a religious audience.
Referring to the missing altar, Mageni deploys a kind of Talmudic logic (and rabbinic style of deduction) to explain its absence: “Although it is too far-fetched to say definitively that here stood the altar that is referred to in the book of Genesis,” he remarks, “all the information that we have, and all the material that we see before our eyes makes it impossible to say that it is definitely not [here]” (Mageni Family 2003:80). He then goes on to highlight the sublime place-based sensibility that is essential to his religious claims: “There is something that strikes us Jews in Eretz Yisrael today with a feeling of ḥerdat ḳodesh [sanctified trepidation] in recognizing that we have the privilege of being right at the site where the Divine revelation to Avraham Avinu, our father Abraham, took place” (ibid.). For those on the tour, not much formal training in biblical accounts, the rigors of rabbinic debate, or interpretive exegesis is required. Rather, a sense of awe and heightened experience prevails. On what grounds is this religious solidarity being elicited? Certainly the tour uses biblical quotation to reframe reality and posit a biblical place. Yet its persuasive nature depends not only on the events being invoked but also on Mageni’s ability to push a visible Palestinian presence into the background, deeming it to be nonpresent. Just as difference is collapsed into sameness and put in the service of origins during Mageni’s discussion of place names, so too does his sidelining of Palestinian lives create possibilities for a settler’s subjective investments in the biblical places he uncovers, and this attachment elicits solidarities among this group of onlookers.
Many accounts of the colonial aspect of Zionism from the pre-state period (1888–1945) to the present as well as other historical settler colonialisms talk about a refusal to see natives as having value (Massad 2006; Makdisi 2010). In these accounts, natives are either viewed as backward, as existing in a different moment in time, or as less technologically adept. In Julie Peteet’s (2009:41) scholarship on Palestinian refugees, she corroborates these claims by writing that the question of “native competence” and the issue of who is entitled to own the land became a matter of seeing and not seeing. She notes that early Zionists did not consider Palestinians deserving of the land because of their “backwardness,” and so they simply were made to disappear from consideration. Zionism’s conception of Jewish renewal required that land be depopulated, Peteet argues, and when the 1948 war led to a mass exodus of Palestinians, reality aligned with imagination (ibid). Yet the colonial and utopian dimensions of this earlier iteration of Zionist settlement seem to have been more directly engaged with issues of difference than Mageni’s biblical musings are here, suggesting that social hierarchies in the contemporary context have become more rigidly fixed. More direct engagements between different religious communities in Palestine and more contingency in Zionism’s ends required, in other words, more explicit forms of differentiation in colonial thought and (labor) practice.
In contrast, ideological settlers like Mageni use discourses that are often far less preoccupied with an explicit working through of difference between Jews and Palestinians. This work of differentiation already operates at a more macro level, through the presence of the military as well as through the occupation’s legal and spatial inequalities. Nevertheless, “difference” is not far removed from a settler’s biblical invocations, particularly when they occur on-site and are being used to create links to precise physical locations within an explicit social hierarchy. Physical boundaries, legal gray zones, as well as military restrictions in the occupation, in other words, serve to underscore the terms of difference that then get taken up in devout attachments to place.
More significantly, ideological settlers tend to reframe Palestinian lives through forms of exclusion that amplify the more ordinary sorts of social absences and erasures detailed in Erving Goffman’s Frame Analysis (1986). In his account of the performativity woven into social life, the “real” often depends on a particular framing or staging. Both the subjective investments that an audience brings to the frame and the power-laden rules of engagement serve to create an exclusive focus and scene of action. Others who may be present and who are actually needed to create a heightened sense of the real become shadow presences. In this manner, the staged drama is not only about a particular set of actions but is also an expression of existing power dynamics. Mageni’s claims to Halhoul using biblical events shape a distinct reality. Palestinians may be present at the scene of this biblical re-creation and are even critical to its plausibility, but they remain outside its key focus and concerns, a distinct form of erasure. This biblical recasting of the real during tours, walks, and other forms of trespass in Palestinian areas operates as a communicative act that incrementally gets translated into other spatial practices built into the fabric of the everyday.
Bypassing Difference
The macro or structural dimensions of ideological settling need further elaboration here, and it is important to note that they have changed over time. Mageni and other settlers were afforded a freedom of movement through many Palestinian population centers that subsequently became off limits because they were placed under the Palestinian Authority during the post-Oslo period (1993–2000). Both settler and Palestinian populations formerly used the main north-south artery, Route 60, which led from Jenin through Nablus, Ramallah to Jerusalem, and then down to Bethlehem and Hebron. In the spatial reorganization of the West Bank, however, during the post-Oslo period, a system of bypass roads for exclusive settler and military use alone was built, and these went around all the key Palestinian population centers, blocking any Palestinian access roads that might have linked up with them. This bypass infrastructure cut off Palestinian population areas from one another, while consolidating social connections between settlers and the military through quicker travel times.10 While the Israeli military saw these new roads as necessary to maintain control of the Occupied Territories after withdrawing from Palestinian population centers, Palestinians viewed them as further evidence of land confiscation and settler expansion. The spatial reorganization was also intensely disliked by ideological settlers because they saw it as a way of restricting their access to biblically significant areas. Whereas in Mageni’s tour, the Palestinian presence was erased through reframing and the use of biblical events, the large-scale spatial reorganization and infrastructure that occurred after Oslo made this earlier form of erasure seem to be an enduring reality.
The spatial reordering of the West Bank coincided with separating out realms of authority overseeing Palestinian and Jewish settler populations into areas designated as A, B, and C (Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2015: art. 11). The Palestinian Authority was charged with overseeing the civil and security affairs of Palestinian city centers designated as Area A, accounting for 18 percent of the West Bank, while ruling jointly with the Israeli military in the Palestinian towns, villages, and agricultural areas of Area B where they had civil control, comprising an additional 22 percent of the land. The Israeli military continued to be in charge of Jewish settlement areas designated as Area C in the remaining 60 percent of the land (cf. Hammami and Tamari 2001; Hass 2002). Yet, as with all boundaries, these new jurisdictions (A, B, and C) were not as grounded in distinct social realities as they initially appeared, since Palestinians lived in each of these three different zones, and different rules applied in all of them. In cases where Palestinians happened to live close to Jewish settlements, for instance, they were stranded without the security or municipal services of the Palestinian Authority (cf. Sanders 2013). In Hebron, specifically, where ideological settlement had been established directly within a Palestinian urban area, the “exceptional” classification of authority over the area was termed “H1 and H2.” While H1 gave control of most of Hebron to the Palestinian Authority, H2 kept 20 percent of the city, including its historic center, and over thirty thousand Palestinian residents directly under the control of the Israeli military, maintaining the pre-Olso condition of direct military rule (Andoni 1997).
Looking Back: A Soldier’s Retrospection