Settling Hebron. Tamara Neuman

Court, advocated using the more neutral-sounding terminology of “held” or “administered” territories (sheṭaḥim muḥzaḳim) rather than “occupied,” striking a compromise among divided Israeli opinion. Disputing the idea that the area had any legitimate sovereign ruler gave Israel greater liberty to reinterpret international law, overriding injunctions against selling or transferring property, while making permanent changes to the area’s demographic and Palestinian character.

      Though administering Palestinians within the boundaries of the Israeli state had already been established policy by the time of the occupation (cf. Robinson 2013), Gazit alleged that West Bank Palestinians were viewed as a distinct case by military authorities because they were slated to remain beyond the borders of the state. Unlike imposing military rule within its own territory, he contended, where Israel was dealing with Palestinians who were de facto citizens but whose rights had been suspended and would one day be returned, Palestinians in the West Bank were always viewed as a foreign population.⁵ Gazit also asserted that because the rights of Palestinian citizens would eventually have to be restored, the military administration necessarily observed more built-in limits in their case than in the West Bank. He did not, however, stipulate what these limits were or address rationales for the indefinite occupation of the West Bank.

      Apart from sidestepping international law, the occupying military also shaped its actions by using several inherited legal codes—Ottoman, British, and Jordanian. In Hebron as in other occupied areas, these were merged with Israeli administrative law and new military ordinances further expanding the legal gray zone. The convergence of multiple legal frameworks and codes changed the tenor of many of the original laws, allowing administrators and government officials to pick and choose the laws they saw as most relevant, while confiscating Palestinian land by citing pressing security concerns or military needs.⁶ Most prominent among these were the Ottoman-derived laws distinguishing “private” land from that which was “public,” or state-owned. In the view of the Israeli military, any lands that were deemed to be state lands, namely, Palestinian lands that had not been cultivated, presumably in keeping with Ottoman precedent, could be taken over to facilitate military rule on behalf of Palestinian civilians. Yet the “public” use of this state land translated into settler and military use alone, to the exclusion of Palestinian needs (Zertal and Eldar 2009:368–72). While confiscated land enabled settler religious claims to take further hold, it also gave rise to settler struggles with the military over whether they, as civilians, would be subject to its authority.

      Zertal and Eldar (2009), who contemplate the central role of illegality in their examination of Jewish settlement, hypothesize that the rampant illegality of settlers had its roots in the British Mandate period, where quickly made land claims under the rubric of “stockade and tower” settlements and the sidestepping of British colonial authority were tactics used in laying the foundation for the Jewish state. They do not grapple, however, with the implications of ideological uses of religion in the context of the occupation. Did settler claims based on the Bible contribute to the ways in which those in the government and the military were willing to override law in the name of “tradition”? The record shows that investments in Judaism alone did not directly lead to tolerating settler illegality. Initially, the predominant concern was with not wanting to publicly air internal disputes with the settlers that might jeopardize the military’s ability to rule over Palestinians. Moreover, there was also a strong reluctance on the part of the government to deploy the Israeli military against what was perceived to be the nation’s devout Jewish representatives.