Settler-Indigeneity in the West Bank 022801879X, 9780228018797

Table of contents :
Cover
Copyright
Contents
Figures
Acknowledgments
1 Introduction
2 “Women from the Tribe of Judah”: Gendering “­Settler-Indigeneity” in an International West Bank Seminary
3 Soulful Soil and Colonial Quality: Organic Farming in the West Bank
4 “We Came Back”: Winemaking as Storied Performativity
5 Indigeneity after Destruction: Religious Zionist Settlers in Halutza
6 Negotiating Indigeneity in Hebron: Criminality, Tourism, and Liberal Settler Colonialism
7 Dangerous Mimicry in the West Bank
8 When Does a Settler Become a Native? (With Apologies to Mamdani)
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

S e t t l e r - In d igeneity i n t h e W e st Bank

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M c Gi ll-Q ueen’s Az r ieli I nsti t u t e of Isra el S tud ies S eries Series Editor: Csaba Nikolenyi

Editorial Advisory Board: Yael Aronoff, Maya Balakirsky Katz, Yael Halevi-Wise, Daniel Heller, Menachem Hoffnung, P.R. Kumarswamy, Ira Robinson, David Tal, and Noam Zadoff Books in the McGill-Queen’s Azrieli Institute of Israel Studies Series reflect the disciplinary and methodological diversity that characterizes the field of Israel studies. Accordingly, the editorial board welcomes proposals for books that report on original research from all areas of scholarly inquiry related to the study of modern Israel, including fine arts, history, literature, translation studies, sociology, political science, law, religious studies, and beyond. The series, which is committed to academic excellence, encompasses comparative works that situate Israel in broader ­international and cross-national frameworks and works that apply a critical lens.   1 Fictions of Gender Women, Femininity, and the Zionist Imagination Orian Zakai   2 Settler-Indigeneity in the West Bank Edited by Rachel Z. Feldman and Ian McGonigle

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Settler-Indigeneity in the West Bank

E d i t e d by R a c h e l Z . F e ldma n a n d I a n M c G on ig le

McGill-­Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

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©  McGill-Queen’s University Press 2023 ISB N 978-0-2280-1879-7 (cloth) ISB N 978-0-2280-1953-4 (eP DF) ISB N 978-0-2280-1954-1 (eP U B) Legal deposit fourth quarter 2023 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free McGill-Queen’s University Press in Montreal is on land which long served as a site of meeting and exchange amongst Indigenous Peoples, including the Haudenosaunee and Anishinabeg nations. In Kingston it is situated on the territory of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabek. We acknowledge and thank the diverse Indigenous Peoples whose footsteps have marked these territories on which ­peoples of the world now gather.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Settler-Indigeneity in the West Bank / edited by Rachel Z. Feldman and Ian McGonigle. Names: Feldman, Rachel Z., editor. | McGonigle, Ian, editor. Description: Series statement: McGill-Queen’s Azrieli Institute of Israel Studies series; 2 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20230439241 | Canadiana (ebook) 20230439292 | ISB N 9780228018797 (cloth) | IS BN 9780228019541 (eP U B ) | ISB N 9780228019534 (eP DF) Subjects: LC S H : Land settlement—West Bank. | LC SH : Jews—West Bank. Classification: LCC D S 110.W 47 S 48 2023 | DDC 956.94/2—dc23

This book was typeset by Marquis Interscript in 10.5/13 Sabon.

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Contents

Figures vii Acknowledgments ix  1 Introduction  3 Rachel Z. Feldman and Ian McGonigle   2 “Women from the Tribe of Judah”: Gendering “­Settler-Indigeneity” in an International West Bank Seminary  45 Rachel Z. Feldman   3 Soulful Soil and Colonial Quality: Organic Farming in the West Bank 68 Ariel Handel, Daniel Monterescu, and Rafi Grosglik   4 “We Came Back”: Winemaking as Storied Performativity  98 Ian McGonigle   5 Indigeneity after Destruction: Religious Zionist Settlers in Halutza 125 Hayim Katsman   6 Negotiating Indigeneity in Hebron: Criminality, Tourism, and Liberal Settler Colonialism  153 Emily Schneider   7 Dangerous Mimicry in the West Bank  192 Amir Reicher

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vi Contents

  8 When Does a Settler Become a Native? (With Apologies to Mamdani) 222 Raef Zreik Contributors 253 Index 255

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Figures

1.1

1.2 3.1

3.2 3.3 3.4

3.5

3.6 3.7 4.1 4.2 4.3

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Poster produced by “The Sovereignty Movement,” ­celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Six Day War. Photograph by Ian McGonigle.  7 West Bank Areas A, B, and C. Reproduced with permission from B’Tselem.  22–3 Aerial photo of Susya settlement and Har-Sinai farm. g is  analysis and illustration by Dror Etkes, Kerem Navot. 76 Har-Sinai farm and the adjacent military tower. Photo by Daniel Monterescu.  78 Farming in Palestinian Susya. Photo by Daniel Monterescu. 79 Aerial photo of Givo’t Olam farm and the adjacent Hill 777 outpost. gis analysis and illustration by Dror Etkes, Kerem Navot.  81 Aerial photo of Tekoa settlement and Freund Farm. g is  analysis and illustration by Dror Etkes, Kerem Navot. 86 Freund Farm. Photo by Daniel Monterescu.  87 Red Wiggler Earthworms in Tekoa. Photo by Daniel Monterescu. 88 Biblical prophecies pertaining to returning to winemaking. 106 Eliav Hillel poses in the barrel room of Kabir Winery in Elon Moreh. Photograph by Ian McGonigle.  107 The view of Kabir Winery vineyards from the winery ­restaurant’s balcony. Photograph by Ian McGonigle.  107

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viii Figures

4.4

4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8

5.1 5.2 5.3 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4

6.5 6.6

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Elad Movshoviz (Drimia Winery) points out an ­abandoned synagogue in ancient Susya. Photograph by Ian McGonigle. 110 A bottle of Ya’ar Levanon, the top wine of La Forêt Blanche Winery. Photograph by Ian McGonigle.  113 A bottle of wine from Ariel Winery, named in memory of Hallel Yaffa Ariel. Photograph by Ian McGonigle.   114 A banner hanging over the bar at Har Bracha Winery’s ­visitor centre. Photograph by Ian McGonigle.  116 Storied-performative indigeneity. Photograph from January 2015. Reproduced with permission from Heart of Israel Wines, Greg Tzvi Lauren.  117 Location of the three Halutza settlements. Accessed via Google Maps.  129 Location of the three Halutza settlements. Accessed via Google Maps.  129 Letter from Gaza. Retrieved from Sara Kostiner’s Facebook profile. 132 Goldstein tomb. Photograph by Emily M. Schneider.  162 Shuhada Street. Photograph by Emily M. Schneider.  166 Settler signs. Photograph by Emily M. Schneider.  168 “Gas the Arabs painted in Hebron,” by Magne Hagesæter, 29 June 2008, accessed via Wikimedia Commons. 171 Settler billboards. Photograph by Emily M. Schneider.  173 Aida Refugee Camp key. Photograph by Emily M. Schneider. 176

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Acknowledgments

There are several people we must acknowledge for their support, encouragement, advice, inspiration, and counsel over the course of conceiving, assembling, and editing this collection. First, our volume contributors participated in a three-day online symposium entitled “Settler-Indigeneity” in June 2021, hosted by Nanyang Technological University and Franklin and Marshall College, and much of the discussions during these sessions served to develop the collection as a coherent project. These conversations helped us greatly in thinking about and theorizing settler-indigeneity. Particular mention must be made to Ariel Handel, who acted as a plenary discussant at the closing of this symposium and who wisely highlighted important directions and issues for our authors to consider in finalizing their chapters. Thanks also to all the participants for acting as initial internal peer reviewers of other chapter drafts and for adhering to tight deadlines as the publication evolved. The cross-fertilization of ideas helped draw the papers closer and generate resonance across the collection. We must recognize that our project follows and builds on important prior work on West Bank settlers, such as Normalizing Occupation: The Politics of Everyday Life in the West Bank Settlements, the volume published by Ariel and his colleagues, which was an important precursor to this work. Of course, the anthropological study of settlers was really pioneered by the late Michael Feige, and we are much indebted to his seminal work Settling in the Hearts: Jewish Fundamentalism in the Occupied Territories. There are, of course, many other scholars who have established this area of study and set a precedent for utilizing an anthropological approach to the study of Israel/Palestine. Their work is discussed in the introduction, and they are cited throughout

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x Acknowledgments

the pages of the volume. We are also deeply indebted to the groundbreaking theorists of settler-colonialism and scholars working in indigeneity studies, who also appear in the introduction and whose scholarship provided the theoretical frameworks through which we developed the ethnographic material contained in this volume. Thanks to Will Tamplin for advising on the correct Arabic terms relating to indigeneity. A special thanks to Gabi Kirk and Matt Berkman with whom earlier conversations on the topic of contem­ porary Jewish indigeneity activism (in Israel and in the US) nourished some of the ideas that appear in this volume and kick-started the idea of working with “settler-indigeneity” as an analytic category. We are very grateful to the three anonymous reviewers that offered generous and constructive feedback on our initial draft volume. Their apt criticism and insights greatly improved the final manuscript, and we recognize their time and effort invested in helping bring the project to fruition. In Singapore, Sharad Pandian provided extensive support, offering meticulous editing, formatting, and patience with manuscript preparation. Funding from Nanyang Technological University Nanyang Assistant Professor Startup Grant no. 04Ins000553c430 supported the manuscript preparation. Molly Mullin also assisted us with extensive developmental edits, copyediting, and manuscript formatting. We are grateful to Csaba Nikolenyi at McGill-Queen’s University Press and the Azrieli Institute of Israel Studies at Concordia Univer­ sity for initially recognizing the merits of the project and linking us with the Azrieli Institute of Israel Studies at Concordia University, which provided generous funding to support the publication. Richard Ratzlaff at McGill-Queen’s University Press was an invaluable source of guidance through the swift and smooth review process. Credit, finally, to Sarit Michaeli at B’Tselem for granting us permission to reproduce figure 1.2.

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S e t t l e r - In d igeneity i n t h e W e st Bank

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Introduction R ac h el Z. Feld ma n and I an M c Gonigle

“Jews Are Indigenous to Israel” announces the title of an article in the February 2020 issue of Sovereignty: A Political Journal, published by “The Sovereignty Movement,” an organization promoting Jewish settlement and exclusive Jewish sovereignty over “Judea and Samaria” (the Biblical Hebrew names for northern and southern regions of the contemporary West Bank).1 While this is clearly an example of the politicization of the concept of indigeneity in the context of Israeli settlement, it is curious that the Hebrew version of this newsletter contains the same article but with a different title, “The Only Indigenous People of the Land of Israel Are Jews,” with the addition of the following statement: “The world determines the defining rules of who are indigenous to an area like this or any other. The connection between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel is the only one that meets all the criteria.” It is this translation of both the concept of indigeneity and its mobilization as a modality of self-definition in the context of Jewish settlement that is noteworthy. After reviewing seven criteria offered by the u n Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the article concludes that “there may be populations of longstanding presence in the land of Israel, [that] yet fail to have a language, spirituality, and culture distinct to the land of Israel.”2 These other populations do not qualify, the author concludes, “because their origins are from lands and territories not included in this definition of ‘indigenous.’”3 This newsletter makes several issues clear: first, that the concept of indigeneity has entered both English-speaking and Hebrew discourse over claims to Jewish sovereignty in the West Bank; second, that the Hebrew word that stands in for the English indigenous is yelidi, connoting birth or nativity; and, finally, that the Hebrew version of this

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newsletter makes a much more forceful assertion and exclusive claim on the land, as witnessed in the editors’ opening remarks: We apply sovereignty over the Land of Israel, we build and develop the Land of Israel, and in it we realize the Zionist vision and the longings of the Jewish people throughout its years in exile. The very existence of Israeli agreement to the idea of ­establishment of a foreign state on the inheritance of our ­forefathers would constitute a fatal blow to the Zionist idea and its virtue as the expression of our historic right to the Land of Israel. We will not agree to this under any circumstances.4 Here, claims to Jewish indigeneity are tied to future visions of exclusive Jewish sovereignty including and beyond the territorial limits of Israel’s internationally recognized borders. What then is the historical, cultural, and linguistic genealogy of this political configuration of Jewish indigeneity? How is the notion of Jewish indigeneity mobilized in the contemporary moment as a resource for Israel’s ongoing and unfinished territorial expansion into the West Bank? Processes of Jewish “indigeneity-making” in Israel date back to pre-state years and can be observed, geographically speaking, anywhere that Zionist settlement has taken place (i.e., both inside “Israel Proper” and ­territories under Israeli military occupation). While we address some of this history below, the case studies included in this volume will focus primarily on contemporary indigenizing practices playing out in the West Bank. To be clear, the category of “settler” in the context of Israel/Palestine is not exclusive to Jews living in the West Bank and, as previous research has demonstrated, might be used to capture the ongoing power relations between Israelis and Palestinians inside Israel’s internationally recognized borders. We chose to focus on the geographic space of the West Bank precisely because it demarcates a zone of active and unfinished territorial conquest, where indigenizing practices are concentrated and diversified. Moreover, in a region under Israeli military occupation and subject to ongoing international ­scrutiny, indigeneity practices have become a creative and flexible resource for settlers seeking political and ethical legitimation – a ­process documented empirically and ethnographically by our authors and that we refer to and theorize as a mode of “settler-indigeneity.” The conceptual category of “settler-indigeneity” hints at a paradox: How can one be settling the land and claiming to be indigenous at the

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Introduction 5

same time? In what ways does the effort to make oneself feel more at home in the land reveal a displaced foreignness or an attempt to shed a diasporic identity? At what point, if ever, does a settler become a native? How do Jewish settlers imagine their belonging to the land in ways that both resemble and break from other settler-colonial projects? The very fact that Israeli settlers have developed and deployed diverse practices of “indigeneity-making” points to how their indigenous status is suspended in question and remains an ongoing source of epistemic anxiety. Given recent trends and the proliferation of indigeneity discourses, this volume reflects on the category of “­indigeneity” itself: to examine not only its usage and co-optation as political resource5 in Israel and abroad, but the diverse modalities through which indigeneity is imagined, felt, embodied, and performed by Jewish settlers.6 During the June 1967 Six-Day War, Israel seized the West Bank from Jordan, which had been occupying the area since the armistice agreement in 1948. With Israelis gaining new access to these areas, a group of religious Jewish settlers from the mercaz ha-rav yeshiva in Jerusalem – under the auspices of Rav Zvi Yehuda Kook7 – seized the euphoric moment and rushed to settle the area and return to the ancient Biblical sites of Hebron, Jericho, and Shechem.8 At the time, this area was home to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, many of whom were displaced refugees from the war of 1948 – what Israel calls its War of Independence and what Palestinians refer to as the Nakba, or catastrophe.9 The early settlers were undeterred by the Palestinian presence and, with the support of the State of Israel, they began establishing a series of settlements along the Jordan Valley and on the hilltops of “Judea and Samaria” as well as the Golan Heights. Many were filled with messianic fervour, believing firmly that they were returning home to the land of their forefathers and taking a decisive move toward the prophesied redemption. This settler movement was consolidated and institutionalized with the formation of the Gush Emunim (the Block of the Faithful) organization in 1974, which propelled the movement to become a major force in Israeli society. According to the c i a World Factbook, of the 2,949,246 (July 2021 estimate) total residents of the West Bank, as of 2018, approximately 418,600 were Israeli settlers and, as of 2017, approximately 215,900 Israeli settlers were living in East Jerusalem.10 The settlement movement has thus grown from a fringe element of the religious Zionist yeshivas to a major section of the

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Israeli electorate and a cultural force among Israel’s national religious. Today, the Yesha Council is the predominant umbrella organization of the Jewish authorities in Judea, Samaria, and the Jordan Valley.11 In 2017, in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the 1967 conquest, bus stops, roadsides, and public areas in the West Bank were plastered with posters celebrating Israel’s continued settlement-­ building, proclaiming “continuing with Zionism, building, and sovereignty!” (Figure 1.1.) Indigeneity has also historically been used by Palestinians in the battle for recognition of ethno-national belonging and sovereignty in Palestine/Israel, and Jewish Israelis have increasingly taken up the term, in part in reaction to its usage by Palestinians fighting for rights and on the international stage. Since the 1960s, when they began participating in transnational coalitions with indigenous groups, including Native Americans, Palestinians have engaged indigeneity as a form of cultural and national resistance12 and they have articulated their own experiences of settler colonialism in relation to indigenous anti-colonial struggles in the Americas and elsewhere since at least the 1960s.13 In recent decades, indigeneity discourses have been amplified, “becoming a central political formula promoted by the political, civic and intellectual leadership” of Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line.14 Inside Israel, Palestinian residents have defended their vulnerable citizenship by demanding recognition from the state as “an indigenous national minority that deserves rights beyond citizenship status.”15 In the 1990s, the concept of indigeneity became a salient concept for Bedouin in the Negev in their own struggle for land ownership.16 This semantic development can again be observed in the opening sentence of their statement of rights, “The Future Vision of the Palestinian Arabs in Israel,”17 which states, “We are the Palestinian Arabs in Israel, the indigenous peoples, the residents of the States of Israel, and an integral part of the Palestinian People and the Arab and Muslim and human Nation.”18 The same document claims that “Palestinian Arabs are the sole long-resident population with rights over the land, while Jews are but recent foreign conquerors.”19 This is a textual example of indigeneity discourse clearly situating Palestinians as the dispossessed victims of colonization with an unbroken connection to the land since time immemorial. While the claim that Palestinians are “not merely native or original but indigenous” (emphasis added) is not novel. Palestinian scholars and activists rely on the language of indigeneity to, according to Steven

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Introduction 7

Figure 1.1  Poster produced by “The Sovereignty Movement,” celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Six Day War. The poster reads “Continuing 50 Years of Zionism, building, and sovereignty,” June 2017.

Salaita, situate “Palestinian dispossession in a specific framework of colonial history rather than as an exceptional set of events brought forth by ahistorical circumstances” to reveal overlapping legal, political, and economic circumstances that connect Palestinians with other colonized peoples, most notably Native Americans and Native Hawaiians.20 While a full analysis of the history and diversity of Palestinian engagements with indigeneity is beyond the volume’s scope, we note that indigeneity remains an important concept for Palestinians for the purposes of territorial and human-rights claims on the international stage, as well as within Palestinian historical and familial

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narratives, and it can be seen in diverse practices of rooted belonging that go beyond discourse – such as the cultivation and global commodification of “indigenous” agricultural products by Palestinians.21 As Gabi Kirk’s recent scholarship documents, the sale of organic olive oil by Palestinian fair-trade companies and non-governmental organizations (ngos) in the West Bank, such as Canaan Palestine, “valorizes and commodifies” indigeneity for a global consumer, specifically by marketing an image of the Palestinian farmer as the “ecologically noble savage,” who lives “ in ecological sync with non-human plants and animals.”22 Here, as Kirk argues, indigeneity is not only valorized and commodified, but it is racialized as well: “evoking a racial identity position of Palestinians as cohabitating with natural ecosystems since time immemorial” 23 and revealing how, through indigeneity practices, “race itself is valorized and commodified as capital,”24 which can be bought and sold in a global marketplace in the form of native agricultural products. The last fifteen years have seen the rise of post-colonial theory as an important scholarly paradigm for understanding political, sociocultural, and economic dynamics in Israel/Palestine. Anthropological case studies of Palestinian and Israeli contexts have engaged with the literature from settler-colonial studies to analyze modes of land annexation, unequal power relations, and the impact of the Israeli state’s protracted military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.25 The settler-colonial paradigm is now commonly employed to account for the interplay of material and ideological factors that have enabled the rapid expansion of Israeli settlements in the twenty-first century, an expansion that has transformed the West Bank into a cantonized landscape, one that now seems to architecturally foreclose the possibility of a contiguous Palestinian state and thus a two-state solution.26 Yet, it is also at precisely this moment, when the settlercolonial paradigm is looked to by anthropologists of the Middle East as the analytically and morally appropriate framework for the a­ cademic study of Palestine/Israel, that indigeneity discourses and projects of indigeneity-making are proliferating and being mobilized in increasingly diverse ways by Israeli settlers themselves, and more broadly in transnational pro-Israeli discourses. In 2015, the World Zionist Congress met in Jerusalem and passed a resolution declaring the Jewish people “a Semitic people, indigenous to the Land of Israel and seeking international recognition of its  ­indigenous status.”27 In the wake of the resolution, pro-Israel

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Introduction 9

advocacy and political lobby groups have increasingly relied on arguments of Jewish indigeneity, often making comparisons to Native American indigenous struggles, to legitimize Jewish right to the Biblical Land of Israel based on claims of historical precedence.28 Concurrently, the “settler peace movement,” led by disciples of the late Rabbi Froman, has been advocating for a shared Jewish and Palestinian homeland, specifically by recognizing both Jewish and Palestinian indigeneities.29 Rabbi Froman famously met with Palestinian leaders and claimed he would live under Palestinian sovereignty in exchange for recognition of his indigenous right to reside in the West Bank in the land of his ancestors. Meanwhile, international scholars working in the field of critical indigeneity studies have opposed equating Zionism with indigenous sovereignty struggles in North and South America, for example, arguing that it amounts to a form of “red washing” that aims to justify Israeli state actions, specifically forms of land annexation and violence aimed at Palestinian populations and carried out in the name of security.30 Not long after the World Zionist Congress resolution, Israel passed its controversial “nation-state law” (2018), which declares selfdetermination in Israel exclusive to the Jewish people and promotes Jewish settlement as a national value. In 2019, former president Donald Trump signed an executive order declaring the Jewish people a “nationality.” The declaration was aimed at stemming criticism of the State of Israel by equating such criticism with anti-Semitism, but it also emphasized the idea of Jews as an ethno-national group and downplayed other ethnic and diasporic notions of Jewish ­identity, promoting a racialized conception of Jewishness that was welcomed by pro-Israel Jewish indigeneity activists. Recent scholarship has noted both the application of an indigeneity framework by  local and transnational political actors as well as the embrace of indigeneity as a political strategy by West Bank settlers and right-wing Israeli ngos. These groups use liberal and humanrights discourses to invert the relationship of settler and native, mark­ing Jews as victimized “natives” struggling against a “foreign” and violent Palestinian “occupier.”31 While there is now an extensive literature examining Israel/Palestine from the perspective of settler-colonial studies that works within the paradigm of Israelis-as-settlers and Palestinians-as-natives, what is missing from this literature is a sustained ethnographic examination of the ways in which Israeli Jews actively attempt to upend and invert

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these categories as they justify claims to land and natural resources. The ethnographic accounts contained in this volume reveal a diversity of conceptualizations of indigeneity at play in the West Bank today, local practices that are also entangled within a much larger trans­ national arena of indigeneity discourses. The empirical research represented by the contributions to this volume tracks a range of “indigenizing” practices in the West Bank, including but not limited to the revival of Biblical religious rituals, new forms of tourism, the fusion of traditional Judaism with New Age spirituality and healing techniques, new agricultural practices, winemaking, scriptural exegesis, mimicry of Palestinians, political activism, and forms of political violence. The following case studies document such practices and put them in conversation with a variety of related literatures – including those on race and gender and in economic anthropology, political theology, and ecology. Following the insights of indigenous scholars and anthropologists, we are thinking here about indigeneity not as an essence but as a process. Furthermore, by examining Israeli settlers’ engagements with indigeneity we are not claiming to be doing indigeneity studies in the same way as historically marginalized indigenous scholars. For those scholars, critical indigeneity studies involve the study of “indigenous knowledges to develop theories, build academic infrastructure, and inform our cultural and ethical practices”32 and a commitment to the “disengagement of Indigenous knowledges from the confines and violences associated with Western knowledge ordering” to produce scholarship dedicated to the practice of decoloniality.33 In this volume we are examining the co-optation and mobilization of indigeneity discourses and practices within a state-sponsored project of nativizing settlers, where the recognition of Israeli sovereignty and support for Zionism has historically operated within and through Eurocentric modes of knowing and ordering. Moreover, when academics write about the politics of indigeneity, it is usually in reference to ­historically victimized populations who are claiming a “native” or “indigenous” status to demand rights from a nation-state which has colonized and exploited them, or who are seeking recognition from international non-governmental organizations (ngos).34 In contrast, Israeli settlers are protected citizens under the shelter of a state in which rights are afforded by virtue of Jewish ­identity.35 We do, however, draw on insights from critical indigeneity studies, namely, the important ­conceptual work indigenous scholars have done in deconstructing

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Introduction 11

the very categories of “settler” and “native,” demonstrating how they function as co-constituting categories, a binary forged within the settler-colonial histories of European colonial powers.36 Building on this literature, we begin with the premise that concepts like “native” are not natural categories, but products of colonial encounters and power relations, where natives were defined as such, according to Kim Tallbear, “in opposition to the settlers who encountered them” and specifically for projects of domination.37 As Mahmood Mamdani explains,38 the birth of the modern European nation-state does not predate colonialism, but rather the two were contemporaneous projects. The birth of the nation-state required acts of ethnic cleansing and minority persecution that were necessary to forge new supposedly homogenous national populations, effectively creating the permanent majority-minority division around which the nation o ­ perates and ­distributes rights.39 Simultaneously, in the colonies, the division occurring at home was also playing out abroad, as new nations sought to aggrandize themselves and encountered “uncivilized” populations in the process.40 Conquest of the “native,” a word used specifically to define those deemed uncivilized, was justified as the moral responsibility of the civilized nation.41 Zionist Jews eventually came to see themselves as the true natives of Mandatory Palestine, defined here not as the ones in need of civilizing, but natives in the sense of having an exclusive and divinely mandated right to the land.42 In the case of Israel/Palestine, a fuller understanding of the field and of local injustices is possible when we include in our ethnographic inquiry the cultural, historical, and theological logics at play in the daily lives of Israeli settlers. This volume documents the world views and practices of settlers to arrive at an understanding of their beliefs, their socio-economic and political positionalities, and indeed, their very conditions of possibility. In doing so, it is not our intention to normalize the experience of Palestinians in the West Bank, but to use the tools of anthropology to deepen our understanding of those who are lumped into the category of “settler,” a demographic block that is often portrayed in one-dimensional and simplistic stereotypes that, as anthropologists Joyce Dalsheim and Assaf Harel argue, artificially separate “immoral” settlers from an imagined normative or “moral” Zionism inside “Israel Proper.”43 The task of this volume is to use the tools of ethnography to reveal the historical and cultural production of “settler-indigeneity.” What does it mean to think about concepts like settler, native, and indigenous

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in the context of Israel/Palestine today, as Israeli settlers, belonging to the Jewish majority population of an expansionist nation-state, ­continue to embody these categories through diversifying modalities of discourse and praxis? We test the interpretative limits of the concept “settler-indigeneity” to capture the ways in which Israeli settlers engage in modes of belonging to the land and of “becoming native” that are embedded in larger dynamics of a state-backed military occupation and the broader neo-liberal social and economic processes that have enabled West Bank settlement expansion in the twenty-first century. Practices of settler-indigeneity function, we contend, as one means by which, in the words of Lorenzo Veracini, “settler colonialism obscures the conditions of its own production.”44

T h e O r i g i n s o f Zi onism a n d   “ S e t t l e r - In digeneity” Those who have objected to settler-colonial theory informing the academic study of Israel/Palestine typically emphasize the reasons why Zionism is unique and cannot be equated with European settlercolonial regimes. Unlike the settlers of European colonial projects, early Zionist settlers did not have a home empire. The European Jewish leaders who initiated the Zionist movement came from an historically persecuted minority population with a long-standing historical and religious connection to the Land of Israel, despite centuries of geographic dispersion.45 From their locations across the diaspora, Jews maintained a connection to Israel through daily prayers, replete with aspirational references for eventual return, religious rituals and annual holidays that are tied to agricultural cycles of the land, and the Hebrew language, which Jewish communities maintained in written and liturgical form. While Jews did not return to Israel in large numbers or attempt to establish a sovereign polity in the region until the advent of political Zionism at the end of the nineteenth century, they did maintain physical contact with the land through pilgrimage and episodic immigration from antiquity through the modern period.46 By highlighting the continuous Jewish religious connection and presence in the Land of Israel, critics of the settler-colonial paradigm claim that the Israel-Palestine conflict is beyond historical comparison, and, moreover, that any attempts to compare Zionism to European colonialism amount to a form of anti-Semitism and a denial of the Jewish right to self-determination. It is, however, entirely possible to recognize

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the historical Jewish connection to the Land of Israel and the uniqueness of Zionism, while also attending to its colonial origins, in terms of modes of political thought and modalities of control over land and resources and continued settler-colonial power dynamics in Israel/ Palestine, in a way that does not simplistically equate all historical cases of settler colonialism. Zionism, a movement that was simultaneously colonial and national in origin, might be understood as a sort of “orthogonal colonialism,” in which the settler attempts to become more native than the local people, morally, epistemically, and ontologically, through the practices documented in the following chapters. As Lorenzo Veracini reminds us, the goal of any settler-colonial project is “supersession,” in which the colonial project is normalized,47 and, in the case of Zionism, this has meant crafting ways of belonging and becoming part of the land. While Israeli-Jewish identity is historically tied to the geographic space of Israel, it is also, like all projects of modern nationalism, constructed through social, linguistic, scientific, and religious practices. The concept of settler-indigeneity we are thinking with here references ongoing efforts of “imagining” the ethno-national community.48 At the end of the nineteenth century, the ethno-national dimensions of Jewish identity underwent a resurgence, as rising European nationalisms put increasing pressure on Jewish minority populations who had not been fully incorporated into new European nation-states as equal citizens. European Jews were faced with the pressure to assimilate, which meant trading Jewish religious and cultural particularity for socio-economic mobility and acceptance. However, even secular and highly assimilated European Jews like Theodore Herzl, the founding father of political Zionism, found their efforts were often in vain, as they contended with rising anti-Semitism and as European nationalist movements continued to regard Jews with suspicion, viewing them as Semitic foreigners who could never be truly incorporated into the national body.49 Such conditions at the turn of the century convinced European Jewish intellectuals like Herzl that only the founding of a sovereign Jewish nation-state in the historic homeland of the Jewish people would finally bring to an end centuries of persecution. Although the first Zionist settlers were fleeing a context of persecution in Europe, they brought with them dominant notions of European superiority and viewed the Palestine population that they encountered according to prominent Orientalist50 frameworks of the time.

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Palestinian locals were regarded as primitive natives in need of “civilizing,” and early Zionist leaders were convinced that Palestinians would be grateful for the modernization that technologically and culturally superior European Jews would bring.51 While the first waves of Zionist immigration were certainly motivated by a desire to escape persecution in Europe, it is also undeniable that Zionist philosophers understood Zionism as a colonizing and civilizing venture, and articulated it in these terms.52 Rather than integrating into the local population as immigrants would (and indeed as earlier waves of Jewish immigrants did by becoming members of the pre-existing political community in Palestine), by the Second Aliyah (1900 to 1923) Zionist leaders articulated explicit plans to displace and dominate the native population until Jews were firmly ensconsed as the majority in the land. Revisionist Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinksy saw local Palestinians as a “native people” with an “instinctive love and true fervor”53 for the land, who would not quietly step aside and relinquish their claims. This would necessitate a violent and forceful settlement project led by settler militias styled after European settler defence forces in African colonies.54 As Jabotinsky wrote in 1923: “Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native [Palestinian] population. This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop under the protection of a force ­independent of the local population – an iron wall which the native [Palestinian] population cannot break through. This is our policy towards the Arabs. To formulate it any other way would be hypocrisy.”55 The settler-colonial violence resulting from Zionist settlement in the twentieth century was particularly intense during and after the 1948 War of Independence, the period that Palestinians refer to as the Nakba (catastrophe). During the war, approximately four hundred Palestinian villages were destroyed by Jewish paramilitary groups – such as the Irgun, founded by Jabotinsky – and 80 per cent of the Palestinian population fled (either out of fear or due to forced and coordinated acts of expulsion by paramilitary groups); later they were prevented from returning to their lands and homes by the Israeli state. By the end of the war, approximately seven hundred thousand Palestinians became refugees, and today there are 4.3 ­million Palestinian refugees living in UN-sponsored refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria.56 Subsequent acts of displacement have continued throughout the

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twentieth century inside Israel (for example, the displacement of Bedouin in the Negev) and following the Six-Day War of 1967, when Israel gained control over the West Bank and Gaza. Since 1967, approximately sixty thousand Palestinian homes and livelihood ­structures have been demolished in the West Bank and fifteen thousand Palestinians have been displaced by the construction of the separation wall.57 A robust literature describes how conditions on the ground in Israel operate according to a “settler-colonial system of institutional and personal relationships,”58 and how expansionist policies, Jewish ethno-nationalism, and forms of racial segregation continue to drive Israeli policies from the right to the left of the political spectrum.59 In the West Bank, for example, Palestinians live under de facto Israeli sovereignty but are not granted citizenship rights or the protections of civil law. They are subject to martial law, trials in military court, land expropriation, home demolitions, and a severe restriction of movement through Israeli-controlled checkpoints and segregated road systems.60 Attempts by Palestinians to peacefully protest land expropriation, such as the loss of agricultural lands due to Israel’s expansion of the separation wall and settlements over the Green Line or the destruction of olive groves and grazing lands by Jewish settlers, are met with disproportionate military force, as well as the frequent imprisonment of both adults and minors without due process.61 Palestinian resistance to Israeli settler expansion – both violent and non-violent – is delegitimized through a state security framework that criminalizes resistance and defines it as terrorism, while normalizing and obscuring routine state violence as part of the “ongoing management of security” in the West Bank.62 As Shira Robinson argues, Israel is best characterized today as a “liberal-settler state.”63 Palestinians live under the authority of a Western-identified state that flaunts its liberal inclusivity yet continues to maintain a settler-colonial regime that denies civil rights to Palestinians. In response to the human-rights norms of international law, Israel formally extends the category of citizenship to Palestinians within the Green Line – while maintaining the fundamentally ethnocratic nature of the state, where access to political power, economic resources, and immigration rights are fundamentally dependent on Jewish nationality.64 In Israel/Palestine today, liberal ideologies and human-rights discourses often conjoin with messianic-Zionist ideologies and piety practices to support territorial expansion.65

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Settler-colonial dynamics do not only shape the relationships among the Israeli state, Israelis, and Palestinians. They have also sustained forms of intra-Jewish racism, namely the marginalization of Mizrahim, which is critical for understanding how settler-indigeneity operates more broadly in a diverse Jewish population that has been coalesced under the category of “Israeli.” As previous scholarship has demonstrated, Israeli society is structured around an internal Jewish racial division, whereby Mizrahi Jews (Jews from North Africa and the Middle East), who make up the majority of Israel’s Jewish population, have experienced forms of discrimination by an elite Ashkenazi minority that is disproportionally represented in politics and upper-class professions. The Ashkenazi Jewish leaders who founded the Zionist movement and established the first state institutions regarded Mizrahi Jewish immigrants with the same Eurocentric and Orientalist gaze applied to Palestinians, viewing Mizrahim as culturally inferior and in need of modernization.66 Since the establishment of the State of Israel, Mizrahim have experienced a lack of socio-economic mobility, at least in part because they have been channelled into working-class labour and settled in economically disadvantaged towns in Israel’s periphery – and more recently in West Bank settlements.67 Mizrahi marginalization has not only been geographic and socio-economic but also cultural and psychological, as Mizrahim have been forced to reject their Arab ethnic and linguistic identities and in turn have suffered from internalized self-hatred.68 As Jews were discursively condensed into one ethnic unity through the Israeli Zionist account of the “ingathering of exiles,” they were also gathered under an Ashkenazi universalist umbrella. While Mizrahim were marked as ethnically particular in the early years of state formation, Ashkenaziness was de-ethnicized and came to stand in for the entire Jewish collective.69 Intra-Jewish racial dynamics, the erasure of Arab-Jewish identity, and the production of the Jewish-vs-Arab binary are critical for understanding how settler-indigeneity works. The production of a homogenous Jewish indigeneity requires the configuration of a racially blind Jewishness in which Jewish cultural, ethnic, and linguistic diversity is erased and power dynamics between Israeli Jews are obscured. Only in this way can diverse Jews be ­condensed into an ethnic category that sits in opposition to the Arab “Other.” For Mizrahim, the process of indigenizing has meant subscribing to hegemonic Ashkenazi religious and ethnic meanings of Israeliness acquired through socialization in Ashkenazi-run

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institutions.70 As Smadar Lavie notes, official state discourse continues to “camouflage the fact that the majority of Israel’s citizenry is of Mizrahi origin,” specifically through the use of the demographic category of yelidei ha’aretz, meaning “Israeli Jews born in Israel,” which in addition to masking “racial-ethnic zones of privilege,” also functions to sever Jews born in Israel from their diasporic cultural roots. While the phrase yelidei ha’aretz is ethnically inflected and used to reference a notion of Jewish indigeneity and belonging to the Land of Israel that transcends diasporic differences, it continues to serve a political and nationalist function. Language matters here. Investigating modalities of settler-­indigeneity in Israel/Palestine today becomes even more complex when we consider the fact that the English words “settler” and “indigeneity,” whose contextualized meanings are inextricably linked to the histories of European empires, do not have clear equivalents in Hebrew. The term “settler colonialism” notably does not have a direct Hebrew translation, and Hebrew Wikipedia notably lacks an entry for the term. While the Hebrew word mitnachel is translated into English as “settler,” and within Israel that word is most commonly used to describe Israelis living in settlements over the Green Line, the word is actually derived from the Hebrew nachala, meaning “inheritance.” This comes closer to how ideologically motivated settlers see themselves – as descendants of ancient Hebrews reclaiming their territorial and cultural inheritance in the Land of Israel. In distinction to the English term settler, then, mitnachel is itself a disavowal of foreignness and is often spoken as a proud assertion of the retrieval of an ancient ancestral homeland. For these reasons, an ethnographic examination of settler identity must be attentive to the linguistically specific ways in which belonging is imagined and culturally configured. In English, the term indigenous comes from the Old Latin indu (in  within) and gignere (to beget, produce), such that an indigenous people can be thought to have “sprung from the land” as “natives.” The English concept of indigenous peoples is most commonly translated into Hebrew as yelidim, from the Biblical word yelid, meaning “someone who was born in a given place.” Translating indigeneity as yelidim or yelidei ha’aretz, meaning native-born, again misses the broader lexical usage of the word indigeneity in English, which now implies a particular kind of power relation and a population that has been persecuted and subject to ethnic cleansing by a more powerful colonizing nation that continues to exert its cultural, economic,

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political, and religious hegemony in the natives’ ancestral homeland. The existing Hebrew words for “native” are also at odds with the ways in which Jewish indigeneity is imagined and upheld in Israeli legal policies. Israel’s Law of Return, for example, constructs all Jews as indigenous and entitles any Jew to claim citizenship, regardless of where their ancestors were born. Meanwhile, a Palestinian born in Israel but displaced during 1948 or 1967 would not be able to claim citizenship and return. Nativity and indigeneity are thus peculiarly uncoupled in Israel’s sui generis settler-indigenous context. It is also noteworthy that religious settlers typically do not use the word yelidim, but more commonly use the word ivri (Hebrew) to reference their sense of rooted belonging and Biblically substantiated indigeneity in the land. Yet, the word ivri presents us with a paradox, as it comes from the same root as the verb la’vor, meaning “to pass, cross over, or move,” and is used in the Hebrew Bible to describe the Jewish patriarch Abraham, who arrives in the land of Canaan as a foreigner. Avraham ha-Ivri (Abraham the Hebrew), as he is referred to in the Bible, is instructed by God to leave his homeland and undergo geographic dislocation, arriving as a foreigner in the land of Canaan to spread the revelation of monotheism. Moreover, the Hebrew Bible itself is replete with references that challenge the notion of Jewish autochthony. In Genesis 23:3–4, Abraham arrives in Hebron, introduces himself as a foreigner (ger toshav), and purchases land from the local inhabitants, the Hittites. Following the Exodus from Egypt, the Children of Israel engage in battles of conquest with local populations as they establish their own monotheistic kingdom. Based on the Biblical narrative alone, the ancient land of Canaan was an ethnically and culturally diverse landscape, and the ancient Israelites were one of a number of ancient ethno-national communities to inhabit the land. The use of the word indigenous by Israeli settlers, speaking in English when addressing international audiences, as well as by American Jewish supporters, also deserves analytic attention. As mentioned previously, indigeneity discourses are employed in English on the international stage as a political resource, with the aim of challenging settler-colonial framings of the conflict by equating Zionism with transnational indigenous struggles for self-determination and the ­experiences of other colonized ethnic groups.71 Likewise, it is noteworthy that the concept of indigeneity, in the context of Palestinian discourses, does not have a direct Arabic equivalent but rather is expressed through a constellation of local terms that variously reference

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originality, rootedness in the land, familial ties, and steadfastness/ resistance in the face of oppression. For example, the Arabic asli, referring to roots or origins, is used to discuss one’s genealogy and familial roots in the region, carrying with it inflections of “untainted, original, pure, organic, local, real.” Likewise, the adjective baladi is used to ­highlight that a person or a product (agricultural or cultural) is “of the land” and part of the country of national heritage, the blad, or homeland. Sumud, meaning “persistence,” also carries with it nationalist overtones and is used to reference the idea that Palestinians are firmly bonded to the land, remain steadfast in their aspirations for sovereignty, and will not be uprooted by Zionism. Palestinians also use the word “indigeneity” in English as a means of claiming recognition as a colonized people and demanding rights, solidarity, and specific interventions from the international community (such as boycotts, divestments, and sanctions of the Israeli state). In summary, competing indigeneity discourses and practices of indigeneity-making continue to shape not only Israeli and Palestinian identities, but how the Palestine-Israel conflict is perceived internationally.

Zio n ist S e t tlement a n d In d i g e n e i ty-Making The case studies of settler-indigeneity featured in this volume must be situated within the broader history of Zionism, dating back to prestate years, and previous attempts to fashion diverse Jews into natives of a reimagined territory, Eretz Israel, that extend beyond the geographic space of the West Bank.72 The Biblical past has long been a resource for “socializing natives” in Israel.73 Religious and secular Zionist movements alike have relied on a romanticized vision of the Biblical past, alongside scientific disciplines like archeology and genetic science, as resources for constructing Jewish indigeneity and authenticating the national project. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Zionist movement, led by European Jewish intellectuals, came to view Jewish life in the diaspora as “inherently regressive and repressive” and advocated for “revival of Jewish national life as experienced in antiquity.”74 From the perspective of Zionist collective memory, antiquity was a golden period of national vitality, and exile was a “long, dark period of suffering and persecution” that had effectively “turned the Jews into oppressed, submissive, weak and fearful ­people.”75 The establishment of a Jewish state in the Land of Israel

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was conjoined in Zionist discourse with the rehabilitation of the Jewish body, namely through the revival of an imagined “Hebrew” national identity. The new Hebrew nation would be fashioned in the nostalgic image of Biblical Hebrews as a “proud nation, rooted in its land … ready to fight for their national freedom and, if necessary, to die for it.”76 Palestinian peasants (fellaheen) and local Bedouin, regarded by European Jews from an Orientalist perspective as “primitive” remnants of the Biblical past, became templates for Jewish immigrants, who mimicked aspects of their dress, cuisine, and lifestyles as they bonded with the land.77 The transformation of the Diaspora Jew to renewed Hebrew was seen as finally coming to fruition with the first native-born generation, nicknamed the “Sabras,” who were believed to be a “radically transformed breed of Jews.”78 The sabra was the antithesis of the weak and bookish Jew of Exile; he was a muscular, proud (Ashkenazi) man, firmly bonded to the land through agricultural work and military power. The sabra became the nation’s “chosen body,” an “ideal type by which concrete Israeli bodies are screened and moulded from their birth to their death.”79 Another way in which an authentic native sabra identity was constructed was through speech codes and stylized linguistic performances. Tamar Katriel’s descriptions of language practices in early Israeli settlement identify speech as a crucial site for the crafting of the “New Hebrew culture.” This emergent culture, she writes, contained two forms: “one was the neo-Romantic version inspired by the German youth culture of the turn of the twentieth century and its individualisthumanist ethos, which sought to attain personal redemption through the re-creation of an organic-national community” and “the other version of the New Jew was influenced by Russian pre-revolutionary movements that preached the return to nature and to the simple life via menial, productive work.”80 Such distinctive genres of talk also had implications for the continued settlement of the land, with “the tellings and re-tellings of the heroic saga of Israel’s pre-state era” taking form as “pedagogical and commemorative materials on the one hand, and political debates concerning the present day West Bank settlement movement on the other.”81 For this volume, what is most important about this linguistic anthropology research is the connection made between “acts of settlement” and “the rhetoric of place.”82 National projects aimed at indigenizing the Jewish body also required a reorientation to the natural landscape through socialization activities such as touristic excursions, pioneering youth movements,

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and archeology – state-sponsored activities that enlisted immigrants in making the landscape both sacred and Jewish. Even before the creation of the State of Israel, during the British mandate period, Jews in Palestine were building a Biblical tourism industry in order to promote nationalist goals, inspired by the ethos of yedi’at ha’aretz (knowledge of the land).83 Since the 1920s, practices of yedi’at ha’aretz have been implemented and funded by non-profit organizations, private donors, and the Israeli school system.84 These practices have included guided walks (tiyulim), meant to connect new Jewish immigrants to the territory of Israel and forge a cohesive national identity among linguistically and ethnically diverse immigrants. After 1948, the new Israeli state made a concentrated effort to market a sacred landscape, and professional tour guides helped make visible a Jewish sacred geography, while simultaneously obscuring the diversity of ethnic and religious histories also embedded in the land since antiquity.85 The excavation of Biblical sites, alongside the physical return of Jewish “exiles,” validated the Jewish messianic eschatology of national renewal, eventually giving rise to the political theology of religious Zionism, as well as secularized messianic discourses that have continued to provide ideological motivation for Zionist settlement. In the West Bank, religiously motivated settlers have prioritized the settlement and Judaization of locations that appear in the Hebrew Bible, such as Shiloh and Susya, using the development of touristic archeological parks at these sites in tandem with the expansion of housing units and agriculture. This systematically annexes land away from Palestinian farmers and evicts Palestinians from their homes in Area C, which includes the majority of Palestinian agricultural lands and natural resources and is subject to Israeli administrative control (in contrast to Area A and Area B, which remain under Palestinian civil control but are still subject to Israeli military control). In Area C, which encompasses the majority of the West Bank, Palestinian v­ illages and Israeli settlements sit adjacent to one another. Settlement expansion into Palestinian agricultural land, facilitated by the c­ onstruction of the separation wall on Palestinian lands over the Green Line, has created a situation in which Palestinians have faced intensified economic pressures due to the loss of an agricultural economy, and are subject to daily Israeli military surveillance and control. The tensions in Area C, due to the proximity of settlements and the land and villages of Palestinians have perpetuated cycles of violence and retaliation between Israelis and Palestinians (figure 1.2).

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Figure 1.2  West Bank Areas A, B, and C.

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As religiously motivated settlers have worked to reclaim Biblical sites in the West Bank, they have also carried on a project of ­indigeneitymaking inherited from earlier years of Zionist state building inside the Green Line. As Michael Feige argues, in the second half of the twentieth century, the sabra, originally a secular construct, was imbued with new religious meaning, giving rise to the “Biblical sabra,” the second generation of Gush Emunim, the children of religious settlers raised in Judea and Samaria.86 This generation, which has yielded the radical element known as the “hilltop youth,” see themselves as pioneers in search of new frontiers, with a desire to “mark their own place in history” through the establishment of new settlement outposts.87 Influenced by Jewish mysticism and New Age spirituality, they try to embody the notion of simple and authentic Hebrew lives, rejecting middle-class comforts for life in trailers on remote hilltops, and opting for “Biblical occupations” such as farming.88 For Biblical sabras, the state is no longer sacred, and is portrayed as an obstacle standing in the way of theocratic rule over all of Eretz Israel.89 Religious Zionism has undoubtedly functioned as a powerful ideological motivator for Jewish settlement over the Green Line in the decades following Israel’s victory in the 1967 war, which has been interpreted by religious Zionists (both religious Jews and international Christian allies) as a sign that messianic times are approaching.90 Inspired by the events of 1967, Gush Emunim (Block of the Faithful), a messianic right-wing settlement organization, was founded in 1974 in order to help extend Jewish settlement into the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and the Gaza Strip, with the aim of fulfilling Jewish prophecies of national revival and ushering in a messianic era. Concurrently, as the political dominance of secular socialist Labor Zionism declined following the Yom Kippur War (1973), religious Zionism took on an increasingly hegemonic role in the political and public sphere by championing an expansionist territorial vision that dovetailed with the hardline security stance and neo-liberal economic policies of the newly governing secular right-wing Likud party.91 While religious Zionism has been a driving force in Israel’s settlement project, the apocalyptic fervour of Gush Emunim has transformed into a more far-reaching right-wing nationalism. It joins together a broad spectrum of secular and religious Israelis92 who are united by core religiousnationalist ideologies, including a shared resistance to territorial withdrawals and the belief that Jews have an exclusive right to all of “Greater Israel.”

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While messianic desire helped catalyze settlement expansion post1967, more “banal motivations” account for the construction of large settlement blocs and a settler population currently numbering around six hundred thousand (out of Israel’s total population of eight million), with the majority located just over the Green Line in the middle-class suburbs that constitute a de facto annexation of East Jerusalem by Israel.93 Today, the image of “Biblical sabra” does not match the majority of Israelis living in the West Bank, a heterogeneous mix of secular and religious Jews with diverse ethnic and national origins, motivated by the significant social and economic benefits of living in the West Bank. Such benefits include the availability of affordable housing and access to educational and social services, within the context of Israel’s significantly diminished welfare state and rising cost of living.94 While the stereotypical image of the West Bank settler remains that of an Ashkenazi religious Zionist settler, Mizrahim are also a significant part of the settler demographic.95 As Smadar Lavie points out, Mizrahim constitute the “silent majority” in the settlements,96 having moved to the West Bank primarily out of economic necessity, as the government subsidies for housing in the settlements provided a pathway to economic advancement long denied to Mizrahim. Today, the religiously motivated settler population accounts for approximately one-third of all settlers in the West Bank. It is thus imperative to think about the forms that settler-indigeneity takes for this diverse population as a whole, and how indigeneity discourses and practices operate across a range of religious/redemptive valences to more practical and economically driven modes of belonging and rootedness in the land.

N a t i v i z i n g t he Nation: S c i e n c e , F o o d , a n d Agriculture After the foundation of the State of Israel, science was mobilized to ensure the survival and continuity of the state, while also furthering the narrative of return and redemption in an ancestral homeland.97 In its early years, the State of Israel, like many other young states, depended on science and technology to generate revenue by stimu­ lating market activity and to fulfill basic health needs,98 provide security,99 support agricultural production,100 and facilitate infrastructural development.101 This, of course, is an instrumentalist reading of the interdependent relationships of science and state and their mutual

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reliance. Beyond meeting such immediate needs in ways that yielded material and economic prosperity, science and technology also helped inculcate popular visions of progress and prosperity; visions of technological progress also fed theological imaginations of destiny and ethnic belonging as manifestations of ge’ula, the redemption.102 An example is David Ben-Gurion’s redemptive vision of science and technology and his so-called “scientific utopianism”103 and the implementation of Israeli state ideology, or mamlakhtiyut,104 glossed in English – with much loss of idiom – as “society’s ability to construct a civilized sovereign polity based on the respect of democracy, law, and civic values.”105 Science and technology thus became part of the material building blocks of a state, and at the same time a cultural framework upon which to edify the nascent society’s civic ethic and collective values. This narrative is based on an anthropological reading of the relationship between science and the state, a reading that focuses on the way in which the cultural and historical backdrop shapes the emergence of science and technology, influences science and technology’s popular reception, and renders certain scientific pursuits more meaningful and indeed more aligned with the emergent ethos and ethno-national mythology of the nascent nation-state. For this volume and its focus on the disparate practices through which ­indigeneity is performed and rendered lively and meaningful, this anthropological approach will be instructive. Indeed, science and technology may be understood to function as an ideology, a force structuring ideas and beliefs, which helps make the nation a more intensely felt and lived reality. Previous scholarship on Zionist settlement has documented the politics and patterns of territorial control deployed by the state.106 In the 1920s, for example, the electrification of British-ruled Palestine marked the land with electricity poles,107 so that the process of electrification gained a political character. Rather than being mere material infrastructure, electrification became a part of nation building that widened the cultural and symbolic divide between Jews and Arabs and, by marking the Jewish territory as civilized, modern, and technologically sophisticated, asserted Jewish sovereignty. Studies of West Bank settlers108 similarly have described the progressive transformation of the country’s symbolic landscape with the making of territorial facts. Archeology, in particular, held prominent importance in establishing a Jewish national identity built on an imagined return to an ancestral ethnic homeland. Michael Feige writes that

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Zionism “adopted archeology and used it to support its claims, perhaps even more than other nationalist movements,” and, pointing to the particular importance of archeology in the Israeli national narrative, observes: “It is difficult to find in other national communities such broad popular affection for archeology as was displayed by the Jewish-Zionist population in Israel in the early years of the state.”109 Archeologists, as much as they were dedicated to uncovering historical truth, were conditioned, motivated by, and encouraged within the context of early Zionism and the enthusiasm of returning to an ancient homeland. State-funded archeological projects, many of which became popular tourist destinations, helped to present a narrative that seamlessly linked a Jewish antiquity to a Jewish national present, erasing a Palestinian history in the process and contributing to the Judaization of Palestinian lands and holy sites.110 Archeological excavations were critical in the early years of state building, because they provided the empirical scientific evidence of Israelites as a category of people, affirming “the Israelite nation as a material-historical fact.”111 These practices not only shaped the Jewish national imagination, but reinforced a particular epistemology of the nation, one that presumed “the nation” or “a people” as reified categories that map onto an archeological record.112 Through the development of archeological science in Israel, the past became a means for generating the national legitimacy needed to carry out colonization; to this day archeological projects continue work in conjunction with land expropriation and the expansion of Jewish settlements over the Green Line. In the East Jerusalem Palestinian neighbourhood of Silwan, for example, the Israeli settlement organization Elad has created an archeological theme park dedicated to uncovering artifacts from the ancient City of David, while simultaneously evicting Palestinians from their homes surrounding the site.113 Indeed, archeology became the “identity-forming practice par excellence,”114 which would yield artifacts as “objects of history” that breathe life into Biblical stories and ancient memories. Moreover, as archeology was considered a scientific endeavour, carrying an image of diligent precision and an ethic of reliable objectivity, the discipline served to support the legitimacy of the historical claims of Jewish return to an ancient ancestral homeland. Anthropologist Nadia Abu El-Haj115 argues that archeology became a form of “­colonial knowledge”116 and “helped to realize an intrinsically Jewish

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space, continuously substantiating the land’s own identity and purpose as having been and as needing to be the Jewish national home” (emphasis in original). In the context of settler colonialism in Mandatory Palestine (1920–48), archeology propagated an imagination of a national indigenous people, with “an elective affinity between archeology’s epistemological and methodological commitments and the cultural politics of the Jewish colonial nation-state-building ­project.”117 In this way, science and technology became entwined with the various practices of indigenization in the context of Jewish settlement in Israel/Palestine. But the notion of Jewish ethnic belonging in an ancestral homeland is itself nothing new. The imagination of Jewish indigeneity by family descent is deeply rooted in the Jewish textual tradition. Whether this exceptional chosen status is understood to originate from the parted family lines of Isaac or Ishmael, conferring on their descendants the right to exclusive occupation of certain lands; whether the rights to the land are justified by the Biblical stories that report Shechem, the Temple Mount, and the Cave of the Patriarchs being purchased with money (Genesis 23:16; Genesis 33:19; Samuel 24:24); or whether the origin point of contemporary Jewry’s indigenous status is thought of as beginning from victimhood, with the Roman destruction of the second Temple in 70 c e and the Jewish exile, galut, the place of national origins is consistently thought of as the historic Land of Israel. How these ancient beliefs and convictions change over time and gain legal, emotional, and epistemic traction in the political present is the concern of this volume. The indigenous Hebrew, as we will see, is a recent production, with a culturally codified set of performances. The new Hebrew culture of the settlements of Mandatory Palestine in the early-twentieth century, which gave rise to both a novel ideal Hebrew type as well as the image of the degenerate Exile Jew, has continued relevance.118 This dynamic can be traced to internalized anti-Semitic tropes as well as racial science in the late-nineteenth century, when Jews first began to see themselves as a kind of race, adopting the blood metaphors commonly found in European nationalist discourse.119 While racial science was eventually used to facilitate Jewish genocide by the Nazi regime in Europe, it was also actively employed by Zionist intellectuals themselves as a response to anti-Semitism and as a means of articulating Jewish nationalism.120 By the beginning of the twentieth century, European Jewish scientists were searching for the biological origins of Jewish ethnicity in an attempt to articulate

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a secular ethnonational conception of Jewishness, one inspired by and moulded in the image of rising European ethno-nationalisms of the era. Zionist philosophers coupled the notion of a Jewish “blood community” with the idea of returning to one’s native land and soil as part of the process of renewing the Jewish body and spirit.121 Twentiethcentury ways of imagining Zionist indigeneity would eventually give way to others, rooted in very different contexts. With technological developments – and particularly with advances in molecular genetic technologies in the mid- to late-twentieth century – the science of ethnic difference and ethnic origins entered a new epistemic moment.122 A new discourse of race and ethnicity emerged in the language of biology and, specifically, genetics. Abu El-Haj described what she terms “genetic history” in relation to the discourse around Jewish origins in the context of Zionism, calling this discursive field “anthropological genetics,” which studies and makes assertions about human origins, historical migrations, and, crucially, “genealogies of particular populations.”123 Such genetic studies can describe the population structure of ancient populations and tie contemporary ethnic national identities to these past imagined communities. In the context of Israel/Palestine, the crucial issue is proving and authen­ ticating indigeneity, a notion that has also been defended with the seemingly more objective language of biological science. Abu El-Haj argues that the genetic studies of Jewish populations in the first decades of the State of Israel expressed “a desire – indeed, a need – to find a ‘content’ for the a priori nationalist belief in the fact of Jewish peoplehood.”124 A settler needs a narrative context of settlement and, in Israel/Palestine, the narrative frame is one of an indigenous people returning to an ancestral homeland. Several scholars have reiterated this viewpoint about the mutual constitution of Israeli genetics and the emergent national identity. Nurit Kirsh argues that in the 1950s Israeli geneticists unconsciously internalized the Zionist narrative and ideology, and that their research is built upon their assumptions and beliefs about Jewish origins in historic Israel, serving to help establish a national identity and confirm the Zionist narrative.125 Snait Gissis similarly found that, in the second half of the twentieth century, Israeli geneticists perceived the Jewish population “as consisting of one homogenous group,”126 and Noa Kohler demonstrates that genetics has continued to hold traction as a science of ethnic origins, meaning that a debate among scientists over the origins of Ashkenazi Jews persisted into recent years.127 Such

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is its extensive influence that Yulia Egorova suggests this turn to genetics is contributing to a “‘biologization’ of Jewish culture and historical narrative,” in which genetic evidence functions as a “­rhetorical means for inscribing identities,” especially in relation to “favoured accounts of the origin and historical development of the tested communities.”128 Building on these insights, McGonigle has argued that there is a “privileging of the molecular realm as a site for authoritative articulations of ethnonational identity and belonging” in contemporary Israel and in other contexts.129 In short, this body of work that describes the relationships between ethnic identity and genetics research demonstrates the rhetorical power biology wields in describing the contours and limits of the imagined nation. Furthermore, the epistemic robustness of genetics and its putative ability to identify an authentic ethnic subject is such that in Israel there have also been discussions at the level of the state and among rabbis about the possible use of genetic tests to determine citizenship.130 In the contemporary era, then, science, and particularly biology, holds great sway in helping prop up notions of national origins, national belonging, and national inclusion in the context of an ancestral national homeland. Another prominent way in which identity is commonly fashioned and affirmed – both in Israel and across the world – is through the cultivation and consumption of natural products. Food, drink, and other natural products, like drugs and tobacco, can encode social life with specific meanings and can mark periods of time and underscore ritualized transitions of identity.131 Whether it is the ritual use of wine during Erev Shabbat dinner, the culturally encoded sharing of cigarettes, the ritualized preparation of tea or coffee, or the backyard barbeque with friends or family, the preparation of objects of consumption typically entails a culturally authorized mode of consumption that has socially generative potential. Moreover, specific substances of consumption themselves carry unique meanings, be they labelled as organic, kosher, vegan, national cuisine, or natural, such that the consumer reconstitutes a particular identity through the preparation and consumption of these objects. By buying kosher wine, a Jew acts out an observant lifestyle, supports the kosher industry, encourages the fulfillment of Biblical commandments (particularly as related to agriculture in the Land of Israel), and by ingesting the substance, can imagine himself living out a purer spiritual existence that connects him to imagined Israelite ancestors. The performance and ritual

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consumption of traditional animal sacrifices, a growing practice among religious-nationalist Biblical-revival activists,132 provides another modality through which indigeneity is embodied with the aim of eliciting personal and national transformation. As Rachel Z. Feldman argues, the revival of Biblical animal sacrifices not only works to nativize the participant but proposes a nativizing of the state, as activists coordinating the sacrifices (discontinued in Judaism since the destruction of the Second Temple) work to replace the State of Israel with a Biblical-style theocratic kingdom. Producing such consumables helps foster particular identities in the producer, consumer, and the wider community. Agricultural images were both explicit and implicit content in the Zionist promise of redemption from its origins in nineteenth-century Europe, and, for many religious settlers today, the semiotics of agriculture marking the land remains a necessary part of the process of returning to the land. Since the Biblical prophecies of a promised land flowing with milk and honey,133 Jews have imagined Eretz Israel in various ways, but the agricultural metaphor continues to be particularly effective at carrying a vision of healthy development and a productive way of living. As much as a self-identified indigenous people may settle their ancestral homeland, the land itself is also transformed, as the dialectic of indigenous subjectivity is cultivated in relation to the territory settled. The planting of grapes and olives in Israel/Palestine, for example, connotes a return to the ancestral crops mentioned in the Hebrew Bible and, specifically in the case of grapes, distinguishes the land as Jewish. The Palestinian areas, with their Muslim-majority Arab residents, are mostly devoid of grapes, due to the Islamic prohibition on drinking alcohol.134 Other plantings also mark the land as settled and as belonging to Jewish residents.135 Irus Braverman writes of the extensive planting of pine trees by early Zionists: these trees and forests embodied the emphasis that Labor Zionists placed on healthy bodies, growth, and productive agriculture and marked the land as uniquely Jewish.136 With the ongoing ­settlement of the imagined historic Land of Israel in the West Bank settlements, the phenomenological experience of reconnecting with God, becoming a returning native, rooting in the land, and living out the process of ge’ula, redemption, manifests in a multitude of performances, and agriculture is no small part of the story. It is this set of practices and beliefs that this volume will attempt to reveal and illuminate.

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What concerns us in this volume is how indigeneity itself has become the cultural object par excellence, the highest claim to authenticity and unimpeachable sovereignty. As Lorenzo Veracini writes, this presents a predicament: “while a colonial society is successful only if the separation between colonizer and colonized is retained, a settler colonial project is ultimately successful only when it extinguishes itself – that is, when the settlers cease to be defined as such and become ‘natives,’ and their position becomes normalized.”137 As to how difference is overcome and authenticity is maintained in crosscultural performances, this is a struggle for both the colonizer and the colonized.138 Cha pter Summ a r i e s In chapter 2, Rachel Z. Feldman introduces us to the American students of the English-speaking women’s seminary in the religious West Bank settlement of Bat Ayin, in Gush Etzion. Feldman provides a gendered and racialized reading of indigeneity politics, showing how international Jewish women are socialized to adopt observant Orthodox Jewish lives, organic lifestyles, non-liberal feminism, and the political theology of messianic Zionism. Through their socialization into “indigenous” back-to-the-land lifestyles, and adoption of an exclusionary liberation theology, Jewish women in the seminary become pious actors, who participate in obscuring settler-colonial power dynamics in the West Bank. Chapter 3 focuses on organic agriculture in the West Bank, demonstrating that, in settler-colonial settings, farming is a means of reclaiming territorial sovereignty and indigenous identity. Rafi Grosglik, Ariel Handel, and Daniel Monterescu use the case study of organic farming in Jewish settlements in the West Bank to examine epistemic and political spatial operations on the colonial frontier. They apply a relational conceptualization of three spatial modalities – soil, land, and territory – to explore the ways in which these modalities serve as political apparatuses. They argue that organic farming in colonial frontiers operates relationally by claiming autochthony, repositioning spaces as terra nullius and fostering territorial expansion. Chapter 4 discusses religious Jewish winemakers in the West Bank and demonstrates how their winemaking is entangled with the wider processes and performances of settlement, as well as the storytelling around the return to the Land of Israel. McGonigle shows how the growing of grapes and the production of wine is understood by

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the settler-winemakers as the realization of ancient prophecies. For the winemakers, their professional vocation is not only about a geographical return to specific sites, but also a phenomenological return to the time of the Bible. In this way, winemaking becomes a storied and performed way of establishing roots and self-fashioning a native, indigenous, identity. In chapter 5, Hayim Katsman takes us away from the West Bank to describe how a sense of indigeneity is cultivated among religiousnationalist settlers in the Halutza Sands communities of the Negev. His chapter traces the construction of a sense of identity in territories never previously settled by Jews, providing a counterpoint to the other case studies. The religious-nationalist settlers that Katzman studies faced an arguably even more fraught and paradoxical task of belonging to the landscape. Katsman identifies distinct modes of settlement in Halutza, based on notions of religious purity, national unity, and territorial distance/disconnection from Palestinians. In chapter 6, Emily Schneider takes us to Hebron, a contested epicentre of discursive indigeneity battles and one of the most iconic sites of “alternative” tours to the West Bank. Demonstrating the contested nature of indigeneity in this region, she shows us how liberal American Jewish tourists witness patrols of the Israel Defense Forces, settler graffiti, and checkpoints that bar Palestinians from accessing roads within their own neighbourhoods. She shares the reactions of tourists confronted with competing claims of indigeneity from Israelis and Palestinians and how those claims are justified and reciprocally negated. Strikingly, she shows how American Jews even solidify their own sense of being indigenous to the region through efforts to support Palestinian resistance. In chapter 7, Amir Reicher inverts Homi Bhabha’s notion of “colonial mimicry” (the colonized mimicking the colonizer) to describe how, in the case of West Bank settlement, second-generation Jewish settlers increasingly mimic Palestinian and Bedouin attributes, including clothing, music, agricultural and pastoral lifestyles, and the Arabic language, as a means of constructing “authentic” Jewish indigeneity. Through his close ethnographic reading of three male settlers attempting to “pass” as Palestinian, Reicher also reveals how settler-colonial mimicry is further complicated by intra-Jewish racial dynamics in Israel when his informants embrace and reclaim Mizrahi or ArabJewish identity as an avenue for Jewish indigenization in the West Bank landscape.

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Chapter 8, by Raef Zreik, serves as the conclusion to our volume by pinpointing the theoretical and political questions at stake in the previous chapters. Zreik asks: “When does the settler become a native? What actions must the settler undertake to become a native? And what is the role of the native [Palestinian] himself in this entire process?” We note for the reader that Zreik’s chapter was previously published in 2016 as an article for Constellations.139 We chose to reprint it here with minor edits specifically so that it would serve as a more theoretical capstone chapter for the volume, namely, one that parses out the moral and conceptual distinctions between settlers and natives in the context of Israel/Palestine. While chapters 2 to 7 are primarily ethnographic, meant to document and analyze the diversification of settler-indigeneity practices taking place in Israel/Palestine, Zreik’s chapter zooms out from the specificity of embodied and discursive settler practices to initiate a broader theoretical conversation regarding the stakes of decolonization. Zreik’s elegant consideration of the ethical responsibilities that are demanded of both settlers and natives as they attempt to achieve a decolonized coexistence recapitulates the volume’s core argument regarding the dynamic contradictions of settler-indigeneity as identity and practice and brings the collection to a close on the hopeful note of transcending the limits of the closed dialectic of settler and native. Notes   1 Nan Marie Greer, “Jews Are Indigenous to Israel,” Sovereignty: A Political Journal, no. 12 (2020): 18, https://www.ribonut.co.il/Greer.   2 Ibid., 27.  3 Ibid.   4 Ibid., 3.   5 Mario Krämer, “Introduction: Ethnicity as a Political Resource in Different Regions of the World,” in Ethnicity as a Political Resource: Conceptualizations across Disciplines, Regions, and Periods, edited by University of Cologne Forum, 99–106 (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2015), https://library.oapen.org/­bitstream/id/c4524997-70a2-467a9bce-958cdec9961d/624913.pdf   6 Assaf Harel, “Under the Cover of the Kippah: On Jewish Settlers, Performance, and Belonging in Israel/Palestine,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 25, no. 4 (2019): 760–77.

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  7 Rav Zvi Yehuda Kook is the son of Rav Isaac Kook, largely considered one of the founding fathers of religious Zionism. The younger Kook (Zvi Yehuda) mobilized his father’s philosophical and mystical writings for political action, using them as the ideological basis for religiously motivated settlement.   For more information on the roots of Gush Emunim see the work of Gideon Aran: Gideon Aran, Kookism: The Roots of Gush Emunim, Jewish Settlers’ Sub-Culture, Zionist Theology, Contemporary Messianism (Jerusalem: Carmel, 2013) (Hebrew); Gideon Aran, “The Father, the Son, and the Holy Land: The Spiritual Authorities of Jewish-Zionist Fundamentalism in Israel,” in Spokesmen for the Despised: Fundamentalist Leaders of the Middle East, edited by R. Scott Appleby, 294–327 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).   8 M. Billig, “The Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria (1967–2008): Historical Overview,” Israel Affairs 21, no. 3 (2015): 331–47.   9 Nur Masalha, The Palestine Nakba: Decolonising History, Narrating the Subaltern, Reclaiming Memory (London: Zed Books, 2012). 10 “West Bank,” cia World Factbook (Washington, dc : Central Intelligence Agency, 2021), https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/ west-bank/#people-and-society. 11 “f a q ,” the Yesha Council, 2021, http://myesha.org.il/?CategoryID=498. 12 Steven Salaita, Inter/Nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016); Ilan Pappé, “Indigeneity as Cultural Resistance: Notes on the Palestinian Struggle within Twenty-First-Century Israel,” South Atlantic Quarterly 117, no. 1 (2018): 157–78. 13 Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (New York: Verso, 2019). 14 Amal Jamal, Arab Minority Nationalism in Israel: The Politics of Indigeneity (New York: Routledge, 2011), 28. 15 Ibid. 16 Morad Elsana, Indigenous Land Rights in Israel: A Comparative Study of the Bedouin (New York: Routledge, 2020); Ilan Troen and Carol Troen, “Indigeneity,” Israel Studies 24, no. 2 (2019): 17; Mansour Nasasra, The Naqab Bedouins: A Century of Politics and Resistance (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017); Havatzelet Yahel, “Israel and International Law: The Indigenous Concept in Supreme Court Rulings,” Israel Studies 26, no. 1 (2020): 172–95.

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17 National Committee for the Heads of the Arab Local Authorities in Israel, “The Future Vision of the Palestinian Arabs in Israel” (Nazareth, 2006). 18 Cited in Ilan and Carol Troen, “Indigeneity,” Israel Studies 24, no. 2 (2019): 17. 19 Ibid. 20 Salaita, Inter/Nationalism, 3; Kauanui J. Kēhaulani, Speaking of Indigenous Politics: Conversations with Activists, Scholars, and Tribal Leaders (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 14–20, 262–326. 21 Gabi Kirk, “Commodifying Indigeneity? Settler Colonialism and Racial Capitalism in Fair Trade Farming in Palestine,” Historical Materialism (forthcoming). 22 Ibid., 4–5. 23 Ibid., 5. 24 Ibid., 19–21. 25 See for example the following anthropological case studies of Palestinian and Israeli societies: Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins, Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine, Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures (Palo Alto, ca: Stanford University Press, 2020); Julie Marie Peteet, Space and Mobility in Palestine: Public Cultures of the Middle East and North Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017); Daniel Monterescu, Jaffa Shared and Shattered: Contrived Coexistence in Israel/Palestine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015); Adi Kuntsman and Rebecca L Stein, Digital Militarism: Israel’s Occupation in the Social Media Age, Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures (Palo Alto, ca: Stanford University Press, 2015); Amahl A. Bishara, Back Stories: US News Production and Palestinian Politics (Palo Alto, ca: Stanford University Press, 2013); Khaled Furani, Silencing the Sea: Secular Rhythms in Palestinian Poetry (Palo Alto, ca: Stanford University Press, 2012); Nasser Abufarha, The Making of a Human Bomb: An Ethnography of Palestinian Resistance. The Cultures and Practice of Violence Series (Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 2009). 26 Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir, “The One-State Condition: Occupation and Democracy,” in Israel/Palestine, Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures (Palo Alto, c a : Stanford University Press, 2013); Ian Lustick, Paradigm Lost: From Two-State Solution to One-State Reality (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019); Gabriel Piterberg, “Israeli Sociology’s Young Hegelian: Gershon Shafir and the Settler-Colonial Framework,” Journal of Palestine

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Studies 44, no. 3 (2015): 17–38; Gershon Shafir, “Land, Labor, and the Origin of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: 1 ­ 882–1914,” Science and Society 56, no. 2 (1992): 216–18; Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (London: Verso, 2012). 27 Resolutions of the Zionist Congress XXXVII, 2015, 6–7, https://www. wzo.org.il/congress38/index.php?dir=site&page=content&cs=3028&lang page=eng. 28 Matthew Berkman, “The West Bank ‘Alternative Peace Movement’ and Its Transnational Infrastructure: A Case Study in ‘Primordialist Universalism,’” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 17, no. 3 (2017): 304–25. 29 Assaf Harel, “Beyond Gush Emunim: On Contemporary Forms of Messianism among Religiously Motivated Settlers in the West Bank” in Normalizing Occupation: The Politics of Everyday Life in the West Bank Settlements, edited by Ariel Handel, Marco Allegra, and Erez Maggor (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017). 30 Gale Courey Toensing, “‘Redwashing’ Panel Follows Academic Associations’ Boycott of Israel,” Indian Country Today, 2018, https://­ indiancountrytoday.com/archive/redwashing-panel-follows-academicassociations-boycott-of-israel. 31 Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon, The Human Right to Dominate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 32 Aileen Moreton-Robinson, ed., Critical Indigenous Studies: Engagements in First World Locations (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2016). 33 Brendan Hokowhitu, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Linda Tuhiwai-Smith, Chris Andersen, and Steve Larkin, eds., Routledge Handbook of Critical Indigeneity Studies (New York: Routledge, 2021). 34 Dorothy L. Hodgson, Being Maasai, Becoming Indigenous: Postcolonial Politics in a Neoliberal World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011); Jeff Corntassel, “Who Is Indigenous? ‘Peoplehood’ and Ethnonationalist Approaches to Rearticulating Indigenous Identity,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 9, no. 1 (2003): 75–100; Krämer, “Introduction.” 35  As the chapters contained within will reveal, even if West Bank settlers are protected citizens under Israeli law, many do not perceive themselves as protected and privileged, but rather as victims in a struggle for Jewish ­self-determination in their native homeland. 36 Kim Tallbear, Native American dna: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013); Kauanui J. Kēhaulani, Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and

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the Politics of Sovereignty and Indigeneity (Durham, nc : Duke University Press: 2008); Salaita, Inter/Nationalism. 37 Tallbear, Native American dna , 5. 38 Mahmood Mamdani, Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities (Cambridge, ma : Harvard University Press, 2020). 39 Ibid., 7. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid., 19 43 Joyce Dalsheim and Assaf Harel, “Representing Settlers,” Review of Middle East Studies 43, no. 2 (2009): 219–38. 44 Lorenzo Veracini, Israel and Settler Society (London: Pluto Press, 2006), 14. 45 Historically, there have been a number of different and competing “Zionisms.” The particular Zionist vision that we are referring to here is modern political Zionism that views Jewish self-determination as only possible in the context of an ethnocratic Jewish nation-state established through modes of settler-colonial control. 46 Alan Dowty, Israel/Palestine, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, uk : Polity, 2008), 24–8. 47 Veracini, Israel and Settler Society, 22. 48 Benedict R. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 2006 [1983]). 49 Dowty, Israel/Palestine, 31. 50 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). 51 Edward W. Said, The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination, 1969–1994 (New York: Pantheon Books: 1994). 52 Jeff Halper, Decolonizing Israel, Liberating Palestine: Zionism, Settler Colonialism, and the Case for One Democratic State (London: Pluto Press, 2021), 17–50. 53 Excerpted in Uri Davis, Apartheid in Israel: Possibilities for the Struggle Within (London: Zed, 2003), 199–200. 54 Mamdani, Neither Settler nor Native, 262. 55 Excerpted in Davis, Apartheid in Israel, 199–200. 56 Halper, Decolonizing Israel, 4. 57 Ibid., 5. 58 Veracini, Israel and Settler Society, 1. 59 Nur Masalha, Imperial Israel and the Palestinians: The Politics of Expansion (London: Pluto Press, 2000); Halper, Decolonizing Israel; Ilan Pappé, ed., Israel and South Africa: The Many Faces of Apartheid (London: Zed Books, 2015); Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War

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on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 (New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, 2020). 60 Jasbir K. Puar, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (Durham, nc : Duke University Press, 2017); Michael Chabon, Ayelet Waldman, and Moriel Rothman-Zecher, eds., Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation (New York: Harper Perennial, 2017); Saree Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010); Neve Gordon, Israel’s Occupation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); Laetitia Bucaille, Growing Up Palestinian: Israeli Occupation and the Intifada Generation, Princeton Studies in Muslim Politics (Princeton, n j: Princeton University Press, 2004). 61 Lisa Hajjar, Courting Conflict: The Israeli Military Court System in the West Bank and Gaza (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 62 Halper, Decolonizing Israel, 49. 63 Shira Robinson, Citizen Strangers: Palestinians and the Birth of Israel’s Liberal Settler State (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013). 64 As’ad Ghanem, “The Expanding Ethnocracy: Judaization of the Public Space,” Israel Studies 26, no. 1 (2011): 7–21; O. Yiftachel, Ethnocracy: Land and Identity Politics in Israel/Palestine (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Nadim Rouhana, Identities in Conflict: Palestinian Citizens in an Ethnic Jewish State (New Haven, c t: Yale University Press, 1997). 65 Rachel Z. Feldman, “Temple Mount Pilgrimage in the Name of Human Rights: The Use of Piety Practice and Liberal Discourse to Carry out Proxy-State Conquest,” Journal of Settler Colonial Studies 8, no. 4 (2018). 66 Ella Shohat, “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims,” Social Text 19/20 (1988): 1–35. 67 Smadar Lavie, “Mizrahi Feminism and the Question of Palestine,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 7, no. 2 (2011): 58. 68 Yehouda Shenhav, The Arab Jews: A Postcolonial Reading of Nationalism, Religion, and Ethnicity (Stanford, c a : Stanford University Press, 2006), 6–8. 69 Orna Sasson-Levy, “A Different Kind of Whiteness: Marking and Unmarking of Social Boundaries in the Construction of Hegemonic Ethnicity,” Sociological Forum 28, no. 1 (2013): 36. 70 Atalia Omer, “Hitmazrehut or Becoming of the East: Re-Orienting Israeli Social Mapping,” Critical Sociology 43, no. 6 (2015): 10. 71 Berkman, “The West Bank.” 72 Eyal Ben-Ari and Yoram Bilu, Grasping Land: Space and Place in Contemporary Israeli Discourse and Experience (Albany, ny : suny Press,

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1997); Michael Feige, “Passion and Territory in Israeli Historiography,” Israel Studies 16, no. 1 (2011): 179–97; Fran Markowitz, Stephen Sharot, Moshe Shokeid, and Alex Weingrod, Toward an Anthropology of Nation Building and Unbuilding in Israel (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015); Amos Morris-Reich, “The Israeli Paradigm of Territory,” Space and Culture 19, no. 2 (2016): 127–38; O. Yiftachel, “Territory as the Kernel of the Nation: Space, Time, and Nationalism in Israel/Palestine,” Geopolitics 7, no. 2 (2002): 215–48. 73 Gideon Aran, “Denial Does Not Make the Haredi Body Go Away: Ethnography of a Disappearing Jewish Phenomenon,” Contemporary Jewry 26 (2006): 76–7. 74 Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 14. 75 Ibid., 18–19. 76 Ibid., 23. 77 Smadar Lavie, “Sinai for the Coffee Table: Birds, Bedouins, and Desert Wanderlust,” Merip Middle East Report 150 (1988): 40–4. 78 Zerubavel, Recovered Roots, 27. 79 Meira Weiss. The Chosen Body: The Politics of the Body in Israeli Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 5. 80 Tamar Katriel, Performing the Past: A Study of Israeli Settlement Museums (New York: Routledge, 2009), 19. 81 Tamar Katriel and Aliza Shenhar, “Tower and Stockade: Dialogic Narration in Israeli Settlement Ethos,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 76, no. 4 (1990), 359. 82 Ibid. 83 Kobi Cohen-Hattab, “Zionism, Tourism, and the Battle for Palestine: Tourism as a Political-Propaganda Tool,” Israel Studies 9, no. 1 (2004): 61–85. 84 Katriel, Performing the Past. 85 Gideon Bar, “Reconstructing the Past: The Creation of Jewish Sacred Space in the State of Israel, 1948–1967,” Israel Studies 13, no. 3 (2008): 1–21; Jackie Feldman, “Constructing a Shared Bible Land: Jewish Israeli Guiding Performances for Protestant Pilgrims,” American Ethnologist 34, no. 2 (2007): 351–74. 86 Michael Feige, Settling in the Hearts: Jewish Fundamentalism in the Occupied Territories (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009), 229–46. 87 Ibid., 233; Shimi Friedman, “Hilltop Youth: Political-Anthropological Research in the Hills of Judea and Samaria,” Israel Affairs 21, no. 3 (2015), 391–407.

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 88 Feige, Settling in the Hearts, 240.   89 Ibid.; Moshe Hellinger, Isaac Hershkowitz, and Bernard Susser, Religious Zionism and the Settlement Project: Ideology, Politics, and Civil Disobedience (Albany, n y: su n y Press, 2018).   90 Motti Inbari, Jewish Fundamentalism and the Temple Mount (Albany, ny : s uny Press, 2009).   91 Yoav Peled and Horit Peled, “Religious Zionism: The Quest for Hegemony,” paper for the ecpr General Conference, Wroclaw, 2019. 7–9, https://ecpr.eu/Events/Event/PaperDetails/46025.   92 Paul Scham, “A Nation that Dwells Alone: Israeli Religious Nationalism in the 21st Century,” Israel Studies 23, no. 3 (2018): 211.   93 Ariel Handel, Marco Allegra, and Erez Maggor, Normalizing Occupation: The Politics of Everyday Life in the West Bank Settlements (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017).   94 Ibid., 6; Nissim Leon, “Self-Segregation of the Vanguard: Judea and Samaria in the Religious-Zionist Society,” Israel Affairs 21, no. 3 (2015): 348–60.   95 Joyce Dalsheim, “Twice Removed: Mizrahi Settlers in Gush Katif,” Social Identities 14, no. 5 (2008): 535–51; Yehouda Shenhav, Beyond the Two State Solution: A Jewish Political Essay (London: Polity Press, 2012).   96 Smadar Lavie, “Mizrahi Feminism and the Question of Palestine,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 7, no. 2 (2011): 69.   97 David Ohana, ed., Nationalizing Judaism: Zionism as a Theological Ideology (Lexington Books, 2017).   98 Rhona Seidelman, Under Quarantine: Immigrants and Disease at Israel’s Gate (New Brunswick, n j: Rutgers University Press, 2019).   99 Yitzhak Mualem, “Diaspora in the Service of State: The State of Israel, Jews, and the Dimona Nuclear Project,” Diaspora Studies 12, no. 1 (2019): 79–98. 100 Tal Golan, “The Fall and Rise of the Kishon River,” Water 8, no. 7 (2016): 283. 101 Leo Corry and Raya Leviathan, weizac : An Israeli Pioneering Adventure in Electronic Computing (1945–1963), Springer Briefs in History of Science and Technology (Springer, 2019). 102 Adi Sherzer, “The Jewish Past and the ‘Birth’ of the Israeli Nation State: The Case of Ben-Gurion’s Independence Day Speeches,” Middle Eastern Studies 57, no. 2 (2021), 310–26. 103 Ari Barell and David Ohana, “‘The Million Plan’: Zionism, Political Theology and Scientific Utopianism,” Politics, Religion & Ideology 15, no. 1 (2014), 1–12.

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104 Ari Barell, Engineer-King: David Ben Gurion, Science, and Nation Building (Sede Boker, Israel: Ben Gurion University Press, 2014); Ari Barell, “The Failure to Formulate a National Science Policy: Israel’s Scientific Council, 1948–1959,” Journal of Israeli History 33, no. 1 (2014b), 85–107; Nir Kedar, “Ben-Gurion’s Mamlakhtiyut: Etymological and Theoretical Roots,” Israel Studies 7, no. 3 (2002): 117–33. 105 Kedar, “Ben-Gurion’s Mamlakhtiyut,” 117. 106 Baruch Kimmerling, “Change and Continuity in Zionist Territorial Orientations and Politics,” Comparative Politics 14, no. 2 (1982): ­191–210; Baruch Kimmerling, Zionism and Territory: The SocioTerritorial Dimensions of Zionist Politics (Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, University of California, 1983). 107 Ronen Shamir, Current Flow: The Electrification of Palestine (Palo Alto, c a : Stanford University Press, 2013). 108 Gideon Aran, “Jewish Zionist Fundamentalism: The Bloc of the Faithful in Israel (Gush Emunin),” in Fundamentalism Observed, American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Feige, Settling in the Hearts; Ian S. Lustick, For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1988). 109 Michael Feige, “The Imagined Communities of Archaeology: On Nationalism, Otherness, and Surfaces,” Democratic Culture in Israel 12 (2010): 12. 110 Nadia Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 111 Ibid., 125. 112 Ibid., 3. 113 Joel Beinin, “Mixing, Separation, and Violence in Urban Spaces and the Rural Frontier in Palestine,” Arab Studies Journal 21, no. 1 (2013): 14–47. 114 Feige, Settling in the Hearts, 100. 115 Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground, 18. 116 Ibid., 6. 117 Ibid., 16. 118 Almog Oz, The Creation of the New Jew (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 119 David Biale, Blood and Belief: The Circulation of a Symbol between Jews and Christians (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 162–3. 120 Ibid., 182.

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121 Ibid., 184–5. 122 Nadia Abu El-Haj, The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Ian McGonigle, Genomic Citizenship: The Molecularization of Identity in the Contemporary Middle East (Cambridge, ma : mit Press, 2021); I.V. McGonigle and R. Benjamin, “The Molecularization of Identity: Science and Subjectivity in the 21st Century,” Genetics Research 98, e12 (2016); I.V. McGonigle and L. Herman, “Genetic Citizenship: dn a Testing and the Israeli Law of Return,” Journal of Law and the Biosciences 2, no. 2 (2015): 469–78; Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Tallbear, Native American dna. 123 Abu El-Haj, The Genealogical Science, 3. 124 Ibid., 4. 125 Nurit Kirsh, “Genetics in Israel in the 1950s: The Unconscious Internalization of Ideology,” Isis 94, no. 4 (2003), 631–55. 126 Snait B. Gissis, “When Is ‘Race’ a Race? 1946–2003,” Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci. 39, no. 4 (2008): 446. 127 Noa Sophie Kohler, “Genes as a Historical Archive: On the Applicability of Genetic Research to Sociohistorical Questions: The Debate on the Origins of Ashkenazi Jewry Revisited,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 57, no. 1 (2014), 105–17. 128 Yulia Egorova, “Theorizing ‘Jewish Genetics’: dna , Culture, and Historical Narrative,” in The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Jewish Cultures, ed. Nadia Valman and Laurence Roth (London: Routledge, 2014), 354, 360. 129 Ian McGonigle, Genomic Citizenship, 157. 130 N. Kirsh and Y. Hashiloni-Dolev, “m tdna Tests as a Vehicle for Jewish Recognition of Former Soviet Union Israeli Citizens: Religious and Political Debate,” BioSocieties (2021); McGonigle, Genomic Citizenship; McGonigle and Herman, “Genetic Citizenship.” 131 Mary Douglas, “A Distinct Anthropological Perspective,” in Constructive Drinking: Perspectives on Drink from Anthropology, vol. 10 of Mary Douglas: Collected Works, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 3–15; Haim Hazan, “Holding Time Still with Cups of Tea,” in Constructive Drinking: Perspectives on Drink from Anthropology, vol. 10 of Mary Douglas: Collected Works, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 205–19; I. McGonigle, “In Vino Veritas? Indigenous Wine and Indigenization in Israeli Settlements,” Anthropology

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133

134

135

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Today 35, no. 4 (2019): 7–12; Yael Raviv, Falafel Nation: Cuisine and the Making of National Identity in Israel (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015). Rachel Z. Feldman, “Jewish Theocracy at the Biblical Barbeque: The Role of Third Temple Activism and Sacrificial Reenactments in Shaping Self and State,” Journal of Contemporary Jewry 40, no. 3 (2020): 431–52. Tamar Novick, “Bible, Bees, and Boxes: The Creation of ‘The Land Flowing with Milk and Honey’ in Palestine, 1880–1931,” Food, Culture & Society 16, no. 2 (2013): 281–99. Ariel Handel, Galit Rand, and Marco Allegra, “Wine-Washing: Colonization, Normalization, and the Geopolitics of Terroir in the West Bank’s Settlements,” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 47, no. 6 (June 2015): 1351–67; Daniel Monterescu and Ariel Handel, “Liquid Indigeneity,” American Ethnologist 46, no. 3 (2019): 313–27; Daniel Monterescu and Ariel Handel, “Terroir and Territory on the Colonial Frontier: Making New-Old World Wine in the Holy Land,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 62, no. 2 (2020): 222–61. Liron Shani, “Liquid Distinctions: Negotiating Boundaries between Agriculture and the Environment in the Israeli Desert,” Anthropological Quarterly 91, no. 3 (2018): 1075–103. Irus Braverman, Planted Flags: Trees, Land, and Law in Israel/Palestine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Lorenzo Veracini, “The Other Shift: Settler Colonialism, Israel, and the Occupation,” Journal of Palestine Studies 42, no. 2 (2013): 28. Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” October 28 (1984): 125–33; Michael T. Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993). Raef Zreik, “When Does a Settler Become a Native? (With Apologies to Mamdani),” Constellations 23, no. 3 (September 2016): 351–64.

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2 “Women from the Tribe of Judah” Gendering “Settler-Indigeneity” in an ­International West Bank Seminary rachel z. feldman

Within nationalist movements, women’s gendered bodies play important roles as territorial markers and “reproducers of the narratives of nations.”1 Women often serve as metonym of the nation – sacred bodies that must be protected from defilement by enemy “Others,” and motherly guardians of family, caretakers of land, and reproducers of national identity and religious traditions.2 More specifically, in the context of Israel/Palestine and religiously motivated settlement in the West Bank, scholars have noted the important roles that Jewish women play in land annexation, often using feminized activism to accomplish political goals. As Tamara Neuman argues in regard to Jewish women activists who establish settlement outposts in the Palestinian territories, such representations facilitate the expansion of Israeli occupation by relying on feminine stereotypes that cover violence with a facade of maternal care.3 Maternal discourses play on the notion of women belonging to the private realm, crafting their appearance as “apolitical” protectors of children and family, and thus they are less likely to be subject to police intervention.4 For example, Israeli soldiers are less likely to evict a female settler activist in the West Bank because she is seen as representing feminine ideals of “peace and rootedness” in the home.5 When it comes to annexing land, especially sacred Biblical sites, religious Jewish women obscure settler-colonial power dynamics since they are often perceived as having authentic and sympathetic spiritual motivations, rather than being driven by political goals.6

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Building on scholarship that examines the role of religious Jewish women in West Bank settlements, and religious Zionism more broadly, I ask these questions: How, exactly, is the phenomenon of “settlerindigeneity” gendered? How do women’s bodies, normative gender roles, and particular embodiments of non-liberal religious feminism and neo-tribalism shape social constructions of Jewish “indigeneity?” What role do religious women play in the process of “going native” and in facilitating an imagined physical and spiritual “return” to the Land of Israel? This chapter transports the reader to Midreshet B’erot Bat Ayin, a West Bank midrasha (women’s seminary) founded in 1994 and catering primarily to international Jewish women in the process of becoming religious or completing a conversion to Orthodox Judaism through the Israeli rabbinate. The chapter is based on participant observation and more than a dozen formal and informal interviews that I conducted in Bat Ayin during the summer of 2014, research that was part of a much larger ethnographic study of messianic Zionist activism in Israel that I conducted between 2014–17. Bat Ayin was one field site within my larger study of the Third Temple movement in Israel, a messianic Biblical revival movement that aspires to rebuild a central temple on Temple Mount/Haram ash-Sharif in Jerusalem and re-establish a theocratic Jewish kingdom in “Greater Israel.”7 I chose the midrasha as a fieldwork location within the context of this larger ethnographic project because, in addition to examining the religious right wing in Israel, I was interested in how Jewish women coming from abroad were socialized into messianic Zionist political theologies. Moreover, I was fascinated by the fact that this socialization process was taking place during a pivotal moment in the lives of most students. While student ages at the midrasha have ranged between eighteen and sixty-eight (according to the midrasha’s website) the majority of students are English-speaking, young, adult Jewish women (mid to late twenties) engaged in the process of “doing ­teshuva” (becoming religious), a personal spiritual journey typically occurring after college and prior to marriage and child-bearing. Teshuva,8 commonly translated as “repentance” but with the double meaning of “return,” came to characterize the experiences of my informants on personal, political, and mystical registers, as seminary content reinforced the idea that, as diasporic Jewish women, they were not only “returning” to their ancestral homeland but also “healing” exilic bodies and souls in order to re-embody more “authentic” identities as observant Jewish women living in the Land of Israel.

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As a West Bank settlement, Bat Ayin has a reputation for combining religious Zionist ideologies with Jewish mysticism and alternative “hippie” lifestyles influenced by New Age practices. The particular configuration of influences is, more broadly, an extension of the American Jewish-influenced “neo-Hasidic” countercultural movement, characterized by its “environmental consciousness, ‘back to the land’ ethos, attraction to non-Western spiritualities, and traditional or premodern lifestyles.”9 Residents in Bat Ayin, who are carefully screened before they are allowed to live in the settlement, often integrate practices like yoga, meditation, herbal medicine, spiritual healing methods, and organic gardening into a lifestyle guided by the norms of strict Orthodox observance. Reflecting the ethos of the Bat Ayin settlement, Midreshet B’erot Bat Ayin markets a “holistic” seminary experience to international Jewish women, one that combines knowledge of Torah and Jewish observance with an experiential connection to the Land of Israel and an emphasis on healthy lifestyles. According to the midrasha’s mission statement, their goal “is to create a warm, open environment where women of all ages and backgrounds are able to integrate Torah learning and values into their daily lives, while deepening their connection to the Land of Israel and ­gaining a greater understanding of their roles as women in the Jewish world. Our primary goal is to engage the whole student, mind, body, and soul, through a curriculum which combines academic Torah with innovative classes and workshops in spirituality, the arts and agricultural education.” The physical and spiritual development promised to prospective students is, according to the midrasha, enhanced by its historic location in Bat Ayin, among the hills of ancient Judea, where “the stunning panoramic views of the surrounding Judean hills offer radiant sunrises, starry nights and peaceful stillness to energize body and mind while inspiring a special closeness to G––d.” Through its pedagogical emphasis on a holistic (mind, body, and soul) experience in the Biblical Land of Israel, the midrasha fuses together the concept of teshuva with a characteristic New Age emphasis on individual healing and self-transformation.10 By undergoing a physical and spiritual healing, through a return to Orthodox observance in the Land of Israel, young women attending the seminary are fashioned into agents of national restoration. Drawing on participant observation in classes and on interviews with students, the first half of this chapter aims to capture the multivalent and gendered imaginations of teshuva in the midrasha, as women became vehicles for the revival

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of an imagined “native” past and a redemptive messianic future. As the women engaged in the process of teshuva, they came to articulate a Jewish indigeneity narrative that reaffirmed their decisions to become religious, while simultaneously delegitimizing Palestinian rights to the land. Central to this process of undergoing teshuva and adopting Jewish indigeneity discourses, I argue in the second half of the chapter, is the embodiment of a particular kind of non-liberal religious feminism that claims to embrace non-Western notions of female agency.11 In religious-nationalist movements, women activists often para­ doxically both transgress and reinscribe traditional gender roles, challenging male leaders and finding empowerment in positions of political and religious leadership.12 They may also enable racism and state violence by reinforcing the boundaries between the family/nation and enemy “Others.”13 My interviews with young women at the midrasha were reflective of both of these trends: a complex and often fraught relationship with patriarchy alongside a reinforcing of Jewish ethno-nationalism grounded in a spiritual and Biblical-genealogical elitism. The religious feminism modelled for young women in Bat Ayin, I argue, ultimately provided an ideology and praxis through which to experience and narrate a discourse of “Jewish indigeneity.” The process of becoming religious and adopting a proudly “nonWestern” religious feminism helped to invert the settler-colonial binary for these young women, locating them on the side of the colonized and effectively obscuring their own participation in settler-colonial power dynamics vis-à-vis Palestinians. As I explore practices of indigeneity-making at play in the daily life of the midrasha, I highlight the central role of scriptural interpretation and theological/pedagogical interventions as the young women were socialized into a (paradoxically) exclusionary liberation theology, one influenced by progressive postmodern, countercultural, and New Age philosophies, yet directed toward reactionary ethnonational ends. During the summer of 2014, I enrolled in Midreshet B’erot Bat Ayin as a student for an intensive one-month course, and lived on-site in the settlement during this time. During my stay, I was open about my work as an anthropologist and my interest in eventually writing about the seminary as part of a larger book project on Jewish messianism. By enrolling as a full-time student, I was able to observe first-hand the theological and ideological material presented to Jewish women and to build trusting relationships with students prior to conducting interviews.14 I also gathered observations informally during shared lunches,

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hikes, and late-night conversations with the dozen young women attending the program at the same time. Most of the women that I spoke with had already been attending the midrasha for four to six months prior to my arrival. For the sake of continuity, this chapter focuses primarily on the interviews that I conducted with ten American Jewish women between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-eight, who were primarily from secular Ashkenazi Jewish backgrounds, although Jewish women from Europe, South Africa, and Latin America were also present at the midrasha during the time that I was there. In order to attend the seminary, I was required to adhere to a modest Orthodox dress code. My normative gender presentation and appearance as an Orthodox woman, wearing long skirts and sleeves to my elbows, contributed to my ability to gain access to students and Bat Ayin residents. In general, even if my status as an anthropologist was known, I was welcomed warmly and identified as a baalat ­teshuva (returner to Orthodox observance), thus most residents engaged with me as someone with the potential to be “c­onverted” to Orthodox religious Zionism. After my time at the seminary concluded, I continued to return for follow-up visits to Bat Ayin during 2014 and 2015, when I met with students attending the seminary and spent time with residents from Bat Ayin who were p ­ articipating in Third Temple movement activism, such as pilgrimages to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and workshops aimed at training women to prepare ritual objects for the future Third Temple.

B a t A y i n : Hist o r i c al Background Bat Ayin, a religious settlement with approximately fifteen hundred residents, is in Gush Etzion, a cluster of religious settlements in the West Bank. Bat Ayin was founded in 1989 by American-Israeli rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburg, whose teachings blend messianic religious Zionism with Chabad mysticism to advocate for the building of the Third Temple and the revival of a Jewish monarchy and priesthood in the Land of Israel. Today, Bat Ayin consists predominantly of baalei ­teshuva (literally “masters of repentance”), Jews who grew up in secular homes but “returned” to Orthodox observance in adulthood. Bat Ayin residents are predominantly Ashkenazi, although the settlement does have a Sephardic synagogue, and residents are influenced by religious-nationalist and Hasidic streams of Orthodox Judaism, especially Chabad and Breslov Hasidism.

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Bat Ayin is a desirable location for Jews who wish to return to Orthodox observance and a haven for those who want to rid themselves of the galut, the Jewish exile, in both body and mind by living a “Hebrew roots” lifestyle in the Judean landscape. With their ideological emphasis on healthy and holistic alternative lifestyles, residents embody Michael Feige’s notion of the “Biblical sabra.”15 In the second half of the twentieth century, the sabra, originally a secular term used to refer to Jews born in the Land of Israel who embodied the new rugged Israeli cultural style, was imbued with new religious meaning by the second generation of Gush Emunim, the children of religious settlers raised in Judea and Samaria.16 Biblical sabras see themselves as pioneers in search of new frontiers, with a desire to “mark their own place in history” through the establishment of new settlement outposts.17 Jewish mysticism and New Age spirituality led them in search of an authentic Hebrew life, rejecting middle-class comforts for “Biblical occupations” like farming.18 Reflecting the ideology of rootedness in the land, Bat Ayin is the only settlement in the area that refuses to install a security fence and instead relies on resident volunteer guards and the Israeli military for protection. Refusing to use a security fence, according to residents, sends a message that they are in fact the true “natives” of the land, not foreign “invaders” who need to live in fear and isolation. The political ideologies of Bat Ayin residents often align with what has been described as “theocratic post-Zionism,”19 viewing the Israeli state as having veered from its sacred messianic purpose by capitulating to the demands of the international community. For Biblical sabras in Bat Ayin, the state is no longer sacred and is commonly seen as standing in the way of Jewish ethno-theocratic rule over all Greater Israel. Alongside its reputation for spirituality and alternative lifestyles, Bat Ayin has a history of religiously motivated violence and extremism. In 2001, the Bat Ayin underground was arrested for planting bombs in a Palestinian schoolyard in the village of Yatta. Over the past decade, politically motivated attacks on Palestinians have continued, carried out primarily by teenaged boys born and raised in the settlement. These teens belong to a larger demographic commonly referred to as the “hilltop youth,” who have become involved in attacks of revenge and dissent directed at both Palestinians and the State of Israel for any actions taken to inhibit settlement expansion, such as the demolition of new outpost structures on the outskirts of the settlement. Bat Ayin residents often see themselves as living outside

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the law and boundaries of the State of Israel, between an imagined Israelite past and a future messianic kingdom. A few days prior to my own departure to the midrasha, Alana,20 an American Jewish woman who spent two years living in Bat Ayin before marrying and moving to a nearby settlement, explained candidly: “I am Jewish, but I don’t call myself Jewish anymore after my time in Bat Ayin. Now I just consider myself a woman from the tribe of Judah.”

T e mpl e B u i l d i n g and Teshuva: Wo m e n a s A g e n t s o f a Messi anic Future When I enrolled in the midrasha in June 2014, it was for the specific purpose of attending a course on the meaning of the Beit Hamikdash, the Holy Temple, the House of God that once stood on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem in antiquity. The course promised to explore the significance of the ancient temple and the sacrificial practices described in the Torah, alongside mystical kabbalistic understandings of the temple as an axis mundi (centre of the earth), the indwelling point for the divine presence on earth. While learning about the importance of the temple in Judaism, students would work on their own “inner temples,” on enhancing their knowledge of Jewish observance, ­personal emunah (faith), and relationship with God. The course, with its focus on physical and spiritual “Temple building,” was scheduled to coincide with the three weeks leading up to Tisha B’Av. The ninth day of the month of Av is an annual fast day, when Jews collectively mourn the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans and pray for its rebuilding in the form of a future Third Temple, where it is believed that the divine presence, the Shechinah, will return to earth, ushering in a messianic era of peace and unity for all humanity. Following the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 ce by the Romans, rabbinic Judaism, now influenced by the conditions of exile and diaspora, developed a ritual and textual tradition that responded to the dislocation of the Jewish people from their holy land. Jews could now connect with divinity from anywhere in the world through the observance of mitzvot (commandments) and daily prayers, which are considered substitutions for the animal sacrifices that once took place on the Temple Mount.21 The very absence of the temple inspired a rich canon of Jewish thought, focused on the immaterial and metaphysical aspects of the temple. The human body was imagined as a personal temple, one that can be purified and sanctified through the

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performance of mitzvot, and the entire world was conceived as a potential temple and vessel for divinity to reside in through righteous acts of tikkun olam (world-fixing). While metaphorical interpretations of the temple remain central to Orthodox Judaism, attachment to the physical temple and hopes for its eventual rebuilding were strengthened following the establishment of the State of Israel. Today, a growing number of religious Zionists wish to physically rebuild the temple and renew the priesthood and the practice of animal sacrifices.22 My informants in Bat Ayin emphasized the importance of both spiritual and physical temple building as part of the messianic process, placing importance on personal religious strengthening in the Land of Israel alongside practical material actions of settling Greater Israel, annexing the Temple Mount, and rebuilding the temple through practical human efforts (rather than waiting for divine intervention).

On the morning of the first class, the women were greeted in the midrasha by one of its more experienced teachers. Shoshanna was a respected teacher, whose lessons emphasized women’s empowerment through Torah observance, connection with the Biblical matriarchs, as well as the mystical and medicinal properties of plants native to the Land of Israel. Some of the women who attended the midrasha explained they had chosen to study there because of the teachers’ particular focus on Jewish femininity, religious feminism, and spiritual healing. While attending classes, some students also pursued private therapy with the teachers and other women “healers” from the surrounding settlement.23 The women entered the study hall with notebooks and steaming cups of herbal tea. Shoshanna welcomed them and initiated the summer session with an impassioned speech on “galut mentality,” explaining that, by coming to Bat Ayin, by coming home to Israel, the women were engaged in the difficult work of shedding a diasporic identity. According to Shoshanna, each woman had a tikkun, a physical and spiritual rectification to complete, and each were individual players in larger messianic tikkun, or world-fixing, taking place through the actions of religious settlers who were reviving the Hebrew nation, God’s chosen nation, in the holy Land of Israel. There is a special role for women to play, she explained, in the rebuilding of the

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Third Temple. The final return of the Shekhinah, the feminized divine presence, to her home on the Temple Mount was bound up in a revealing of the “feminine light” in the world, the hidden redemptive power of women that would catalyze the messianic era. By undergoing a process of teshuva, becoming observant, and bringing Jewish children into the world, women were helping to build the messianic Third Temple, helping to build a home for God on earth and to restore the cosmic union of God and Israel. The opening lecture ended with an abrupt register shift, moving from messianic visions to practical advice for life in the settlement for newcomers and a warning about the “dangerous” Palestinian village located in the valley below Bat Ayin. I recall Shoshanna explaining, “You should never go there. And if you hear a rocket alarm, do not fear. The rockets will not hit us because we are all under the protection of God. If you read the news, you will see the rockets somehow never manage to hit us. There are miracles all around us.” These sentiments were repeated throughout my month at the midrasha. Esoteric lectures on the temple from kabbalistic and Hasidic perspectives would suddenly take a sharp turn into the contemporary reality and an escalating political situation. Just before my arrival at the midrasha, on 12 June 2014, Israeli teens Naftali Frenkel, Gilad Shaer, and Eyal Yifrah were kidnapped at a hitchhiking spot close to Bat Ayin and later murdered by two Palestinian men, initiating a two-year-long cycle of reciprocal violence. On 2 July, Israeli teenagers kidnapped Mohammed Abu Khdeir, a sixteen-year-old Palestinian boy from East Jerusalem, and burned him alive in the Jerusalem forest. Retaliatory acts continued from both sides throughout the summer, as Israel conducted “Operation Brother’s Keeper,” attempting to arrest Hamas leaders in the West Bank and Gaza. Hamas responded with renewed rounds of rocket fire, prompting Israeli airstrikes and a ground bombardment in Gaza referred to in Israel as “Operation Protective Edge.” In the end, the 2014 Gaza War left seventy Israelis and two thousand Gazans dead, before giving way to a period of continued instability and violence that would last through 2016 and become known as the “Third Intifada” or the “Intifada of the Knives” (2014 to 2016).24 During my month at the midrasha, daily lectures and workshops linked together themes of temple building, the process of teshuva, and healing (both personal and collective). I recall in one lesson, entitled “Building Your Inner Mikdash (Temple),” the teacher, Zipporah, a

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middle-aged mother and meditation instructor, explained that women could work on their inner traits in order to help bring the Third Temple. “We are living in amazing times,” she explained at the beginning of the class. “That is why there is so much suffering, especially now in the month of Av when we are longing for the temple,” she continued, pointing to the recent rocket attacks and political escalation as signs of an impending messianic era. Zipporah went on to explain that the first temple represented the midot, or character traits, of the Biblical Abraham: “The First Temple was one of complete love like Abraham, but too much unconditional love without balance is a problem, and thus it was destroyed because of idolatry.” The Second Temple represented Yitzhak and his character of strict discipline, “but Torah observance without heart led to a hatred of others and thus sinat hinam [baseless hatred] destroyed the Second Temple.” Finally, she explained, the Third Temple will represent Yaacov “both wisdom and compassion, the perfect balance of Abraham and Yitzhak.” She then led the class through a guided visual meditation of the Temple Mount: “Visualize entering the Temple Mount and being close to God, visualize the light, and ask God for protection.” She guided the women through the outer courtyard to the inner area, where animal sacrifices were offered and the Levites sang songs of praise, and finally into the inner sanctuary, where they were instructed to think about building their own “inner temples” by embodying, through daily actions and a process of religious strengthening, both the love of Abraham and the discipline of Yitzhak: “Ask yourself: How can I open the walls of my heart? What can I discipline in myself? What do I have to do to bring God more into my life? What do you need to heal in yourself to do this?” Zipporah’s meditation connected themes of teshuva and temple building with personal and collective healing. By becoming religious and working on their own midot, the women could fashion themselves into agents of national and cosmic transformation, symbolized by the penultimate rebuilding of the Temple. The first step in this process, though, was the rectification of one’s own “inner mikdash,” or inner temple, again revealing the hybrid influence of New Age and Hasidic theology on Bat Ayin residents. New Age religions often emphasize concepts like personal transformation or self-actualization as the precursory steps to a larger planetary healing.25 Breslov Hasidism, an important influence in Bat Ayin, similarly emphasizes

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individualized spiritual work and character development as integral to a larger global tikkun. Guided visualizations were frequently integrated into more traditional seminary text studies and lectures at the midrasha. After twenty minutes, Zipporah brought the women back out of the meditation and connected the work of inner temple building to the surrounding contemporary reality: “The temple was so holy that our ancestors could just feel God’s presence. They came three times a year, and they would see the holy mountain and the Shekhinah and just bow down. Today we don’t even know what we are missing. The time of Tisha B’Av is a time of great darkness … We cry for what we are missing. Why do we need the Third Temple? Because it will be Yaacov’s perfect temple, a house of prayer for all nations. You are here to help us bring the Third Temple, to discover your true soul. Be grateful to be a Jewish woman in the land.” Zipporah again linked the individual journeys of the women, out of secular assimilation and diasporic exile to observance in the Biblical homeland, to a larger messianic process of national revival. After the meditation ended, one student raised her hand to inquire about the current situation on the Temple Mount/Haram ash-Sharif and the Palestinian connection to this shared and contested holy site. “The answer is quite simple actually,” Zipporah responded. “The Muslims pray to Mecca … they don’t need the Temple Mount. They are just holding it for us until we do the spiritual work and deserve it. We are waging this war not just for Israel but for the sake of the whole world. This is a battle of deep cosmic forces. Remember, there is [an] angel on top of every rocket … We must settle every part of the land, including the Temple Mount. We have to reclaim our native culture. That is what we are doing here in Bat Ayin. But even with settling the land, we need mental integration. If our minds remain outside [in exile] even though we are physically here, that is a big problem. To sympathize with Palestinians is a lack of clarity that comes from exile and assimilation,” she warned. Zipporah’s response to the questioning student implied that concern for Palestinian rights to the land represents a kind of false consciousness, one that stems from an assimilated exile mentality that must be overcome. Echoing Shoshanna’s opening speech on the first day of classes, Zipporah’s lesson interpolated the students’ individual physical and spiritual teshuva and the process of reclaiming a “native culture” into a larger “battle of cosmic forces.”

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R e l i g i o u s F emi nism a n d D e - a ssimilation Interwoven in the mystical lessons on teshuva and temple building were specific directives on proper Orthodox-Jewish womanhood. Returning to the Land of Israel and shedding a diasporic mind/body required the adoption of new codes of dress and normative gender and sexuality ideologies that idealized procreative heterosexual marriage and women’s domestic caregiver roles. During their time in the midrasha, women were guided in the selection of modest clothing and gently corrected by female teachers when their own wardrobe fell short – for example, when they wore necklines that were too revealing or skirts that were too short. Women, especially those in the midrasha’s conversion program, who openly defied Orthodox gender and sexuality norms, could be subject to more serious repercussions. Miriam, for example, studied in the midrasha in 2014 to prepare for an Orthodox conversion with the Israeli rabbinate (she had grown up in a Jewish home, but her American mother’s non-Orthodox conversion invalidated her own Jewish status, according to Jewish law). When it became known, following her successful conversion, that she was in a lesbian relationship with another woman, the midrasha threatened to appeal her conversion with the Israeli rabbinate. In private interviews, three women noted the social pressure they felt from teachers and local Bat Ayin families whom they had befriended, who urged them to look for a marriage partner and begin a family as soon as they “felt strong in their teshuva.” In the midrasha, women were encouraged to engage in rigorous Torah study and take on positions of spiritual leadership, as long as these achievements did not lead them to act in an immodest way or inhibit their ability to function as homemakers and caregivers. Shoshanna explained that “woman is like a pearl … she is hidden in clothes and speech precisely because she is so precious, and this hidden nature allows her to be more holy than men.” This is a common Orthodox apologetic in response to criticism of women’s roles and patriarchal dominance in the religion: women are not inferior or less important than men – on the contrary, they are so holy that they must be treasured and hidden. More broadly and comparatively, this stance reflects the paradoxical position of religious feminisms in relation to patriarchy. Case studies of Christian, Islamic, and Hindu religious feminism have illustrated how religious women challenge patriarchal

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dominance, carving out spaces of spiritual and political leadership, while reaffirming gender norms for other women and reinscribing themselves in larger patriarchal structures, even as they transgress traditional roles.26 By creatively playing within the bounds of religious norms and laws, women often manage to strategically expand their spheres of spiritual and political influence and authority. In a lecture on feminism, Shoshanna explained to the students that the feminist movement, having influenced the religious Jewish world in a way that led to more advanced Torah study opportunities for women, was actually part of a divinely ordained messianic process playing out in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She referred to the Talmudic parable of the “sun and moon,” explaining the messianic era would slowly bring about a revealing of the lunar light, or the hidden feminine energy, which would help to rebuild the Third Temple.27 “The feminist movement increased access to the Torah for women,” she explained, “and this is part of the evolution of the relationship between man and women intended by God that also reflects the larger evolving relationship between the Jewish people and God. When Israel achieves an ultimate consummate relationship with God, then there will be an ultimate equality between men and women. Soon, in the time of redemption, we won’t say baali, my master, we will only say ishi, my man, when referring to our ­husbands.” In this speech she connects the emergence of a Jewish religious feminism with the redemption of Israel playing out in the Land of Israel. The particular religious feminism modelled by the midrasha had a profound impact on the students that I interviewed, helping them to reconcile their previously secular feminist stances with the gender expectations of Orthodox Judaism. Rebecca, age twenty-five at the time, reflected on her decision to become an ultra-Orthodox woman following two years of study in Bat Ayin and another religious Zionist seminary in the West Bank: I take a lot of pride in saying that I am a staunch feminist, a ­radical feminist. A lot of people outside of the Torah world don’t understand how that can go hand in hand with my choice to be an observant, even ultra-Orthodox, woman. I really don’t see it being something mutually exclusive now. What I learned here is that in the Torah world women are valued in such a deep ­and potent way that I don’t recognize so much in Western

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c­ ulture. In the Western world, in order to gain value as a woman you have to either behave as a man would and become ce o or ­something. In the Torah world, you can argue whether the essential differences are true. I am not such a typical woman. I ­do not really embody all the traits that are given in g­ eneralizations that they teach us. But regardless, just by being a woman you are recognized as being such a valuable member of the community and having such an important role in bringing the redemption. Rebecca’s time in religious settlements helped her cultivate a more nuanced critique of Western feminism, which she eventually came to view as inherently foreign to Jewish culture. “I guess I was brainwashed by the assimilation,” she adds. “It makes me sad thinking how much we lost in the last few generations. You know, it is not just Jewish women here who taught me this. I also look at the Muslim women here and the way they cover their hair with pride. They are really strong in modesty, and watching them also made me want to do the same.” Rebecca’s admiration of Muslim modesty goes against stereotypical settler disdain for Palestinian rootedness and tradition. Rather, her comments illustrate how the fashioning of indigeneity is asserted, less in contradiction to perceived indigenous others, but rather, in negative relation to the galut mentality the students were being taught to shed. Palestinians, ironically, became templates for this very process of indigenizing. Batya, twenty-two, articulated similar ideas in an interview, highlighting both the role of religious feminism in de-assimilating her Judaism and in a larger redemptive process: People think feminism is about women’s rights. But in Judaism women play the biggest role. We always have. We light Shabbat candles and that isn’t a small thing, we bring in the light for the ­rest of the week. Everything women do plays a huge part in ­Jewish family life and maintaining the traditions that were lost. We have a huge responsibility to do this for the Jewish ­community. We are here learning because we are the future mothers. When the Jewish women left Egypt, it was the Jewish women who brought them out playing tambourines. We are all ­here in the midrasha because we are the future mothers who ­will ­see the messianic era. We are working towards that ­salvation. It’s a constant journey and constant struggle.

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In summary, in the midrasha, embracing feminism was encouraged, as long as the women stayed within the bounds of proper gender norms. Female modesty practices, both physical and behavioural, were frequently reinforced in lectures on the spiritual significance of hair covering after marriage and family purity practices (taharat hamishpacha). Hair coverings were frequently reframed by teachers from an oppressive or patriarchal practice to an empowering feminist one connected to the reclaiming of native Israelite culture. Viewing such practices as “oppressive” was again attributed to false consciousness, the result of Jewish women’s assimilation and capitulation to secular feminist ideologies. Becoming a native of the land and an agent of messianic potential could be achieved through a particular religiousfeminist embodiment that was characterized for the students as explicitly “non-Western,” and thus part of rectifying a diasporic mind/ body. In turn, the adoption of a non-liberal religious feminism played an important role in the social construction of Jewish “indigeneity.” Doing teshuva and going native in Bat Ayin required women not only to undergo distinct changes in religious praxis, but to make specific ideological shifts and commitments. During my fieldwork in the midrasha and in subsequent months of follow-up meetings, I watched as the women I met became strictly shomer shabbat (observing Shabbat according to Jewish law) and purchased increasingly modest wardrobes, donning shirts to the elbow and long, flowing skirts. In the evenings after class, students helped each other set up profiles on religious dating websites mediated by matchmakers and practised different styles of Orthodox hair coverings to explore how they would wrap their hair following marriage. As these visible changes were taking place, significant ideological ones were as well. Informants developed narratives in which they positioned themselves in the category of “indigenous” within the settler-indigenous binary. Sarah, a twenty-three-year-old college graduate from the United States, who grew up in a secular Jewish home, was spending a gap year at the midrasha when my time there overlapped with hers. In an interview a few months after leaving the midrasha, she explained how her time in Bat Ayin had altered her self-perception and sense of Jewish identity: Look, I was not completely naive coming there. I knew that Bat Ayin had this reputation of being extremist. But the more you spend time there you realize how deeply they are misunderstood.

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There is so much about that lifestyle that is so authentic. I saw the women growing food and baking challah before Shabbat and ­dressing in these beautiful clothes. I love the way they cover ­their hair like they are wearing a crown on their head. I ­remember feeling so much shame growing up Jewish in America. My reform synagogue was really superficial. Like bagels-and-Holocaust Judaism. There was no spirituality, no connection to my past. So in college of course I explored a lot. Things like yoga and meditation and even psychedelic plants, which is also why I was drawn to the vibe of Bat Ayin. Also, I ­majored in Anthropology. I think I was attracted to other native cultures because I was so disconnected from my own. I ­didn’t even realize I had a native culture! At some point after college, I was like “why am I searching everywhere else when I ­can go home?” Coming to Bat Ayin reframed Sarah’s perception of Judaism, and she came to see it as its own type of native culture tied to land-based traditions. This connection to the land was critical for Sarah in feeling a sense of rootedness and belonging. “I learned a lot from Shoshanna about healing plants in the land and how the Jewish tradition says to use them. That is when I realized we also have this indigenous knowledge, just like the Native Americans who knew how to find medicine in their land.” I decided at the end of the interview to push Sarah as to whether she also saw Palestinians this way, as a rooted and indigenous people with land-based knowledge and traditions. The question made her visibly uncomfortable, and she quickly deflected. “Look, what is going on here is way more complicated than just calling us ‘colonizers,’” she explained. “We are also natives who have returned to this land.” While the specific word “indigeneity” was not commonly used in seminary classes by instructors (words like “native” or “Israelite” were more common), the word did frequently emerge in my private conversations with students, particularly with American Jewish women like Sarah, who had grown up in secular homes and had come to Bat Ayin to transition into Orthodox observance, while considering whether they wanted to make aliyah (immigrate) and live in Israel permanently. Notably, out of ten interviews that I did with American Jewish women in their twenties, six women reported coming from more liberal political backgrounds and were aware of the use of indigeneity as a concept

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in post-colonial discourse. Like Sarah, they described their time in Bat Ayin not only as physically and spiritually healing, but as a venue for what they viewed as their own “de-assimilation” or “decolonization” journey. These women borrowed from decolonial discourses of historically oppressed groups like Native Americans – and, in some cases, Palestinians – to cultivate a more authentic and indigenous Jewish identity centred on the adoption of a religious feminism that was critical of secular liberal ideologies. Gabriela, a twenty-seven-year-old American college graduate, who had been living in Israel for two years prior to arriving at the midrasha, shared similar sentiments: People are often surprised to hear that I have this lefty ­background. I was really involved in social-justice issues in ­college. I ­was always really interested in the history of ­colonialism and indigenous people, especially Native Americans. I just never ­realized that this was my story too. Zionism is our struggle for self-determination …What they taught me here was that when you live in exile and assimilation so long, it is hard to see it. I was always made to feel shame in college for siding with Israel, and I couldn’t really let go of that guilt until I came here. Like Sarah, Gabriela comes from a secular and left-leaning American Jewish home, but found her upbringing to be ritually and spiritually lacking. The Jewish indigeneity paradigm that she was exposed to in Bat Ayin gave her a stronger sense of Jewish identity, which allowed her to parallel her own experiences with the oppressed groups with whom she stood in solidarity in college, while obscuring her own participation in the occupation and oppression of Palestinians. As Joanna Steinhardt has argued in her work on American Jewish “neoHasids,” who relocate to the West Bank, American countercultural discourse often provides “an ideological bridge to Zionist Orthodox Judaism” and disrupts “the familiar right-left political continuum in Israel by exhibiting both progressive and reactionary political features.”28 For American Jews like Sarah and Gabriela, the indigeneity discourses that they were exposed to in countercultural American circles were, in Steinhardt’s words, successfully “grafted onto local identities and narratives” within the West Bank religious settler community, ultimately with a depoliticizing effect.29

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I conducted a follow-up interview with Gabriela in 2018. At this point she was married, had two children, and was living an Orthodox life in a small settlement outpost in the West Bank, where she maintained an organic farm, raised chickens, and offered meditation retreats for Jewish women. “I know what people think when they see me, this bohemian woman living in a trailer. They just look at me and my big headscarf and they see the evil ‘settler.’ But I know who I am, I know that I have returned to the land of my ancestors, that I am living my most authentic life. I refuse to feel guilty for that.”

C o n c l u sio n : J e wis h I ndigeneity a n d   R e - r a c i a lization The particularly American context of my interviews cannot be ignored, and while I have endeavoured to reveal some of the ways in which notions of Jewish “indigeneity” are gendered in the West Bank, the dynamics of race, and more specifically the emphasis on “de-assimilation” expressed by my American informants, warrants further analysis. Karen Brodkin’s (2010) groundbreaking research examined the history of Ashkenazi Jewish immigration to the United States and the assimilation process through which American Jews gradually had to “learn the ways of whiteness” in order to attain social mobility.30 By the second half of the twentieth century, the successful adoption of a white habitus enabled American Jews to transition to the “white side” of America’s white/black racial binary, a sliding racial spectrum on which ethnic and religious groups are distributed and continuously redistributed relative to one another in America.31 The loss of religious traditions, the Yiddish language, and adherence to normative white cultural standards allowed Ashkenazi Jews, initially subject to forms of racial discrimination and a marginalized “off-white” racial designation, to rapidly gain access to forms of social and economic privilege as the second generation moved into suburban middle-class lifestyles.32 My informants’ decisions to become religious in the West Bank and their attachment to this idea of de-assimilating/reclaiming Jewish indigeneity represent, on the one hand, a sincere grappling with the loss of Jewish identity and tradition following the assimilation of their parents and grandparents and, at the same time, hints at their own discomfort with their position of relative privilege and dominance within the racial hierarchy in America. From this perspective, “return”

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to the Land of Israel becomes an antidote to whiteness, and the narrative of indigeneity effectively masks the women’s participation in a new hierarchy of racial dominance in Israel/Palestine, where access to land, resources, and civil rights are distributed along ethnocratic lines on the basis of recognizable Jewish identity.33 Israel’s 2018 passing of the “nation-state law,” which declares self-determination in Israel as exclusive to the Jewish people, and promotes Jewish settlement as a national value, is further reflective of these ethnocentric and antidemocratic trends. Matt Berkman’s recent work has highlighted the growth of Jewish indigeneity discourses in the past decade, and he locates these discourses within a specifically Anglo engagement with Zionism and advocacy for West Bank settlement.34 The lobbying efforts of American Jewish indigeneity activists, such as the Alliance for a New Zionist Vision (anzv), played a key role in the passing of a resolution in 2015 by the World Zionist Congress that declared “the Jewish people ‘an indigenous nation’ in accordance with the definition of indigenous communities, people, and nations established by the United Nations Economic and Social Council.”35 At the heart of a n z v activism, Berkman argues, is a “re-grounding of the American Jewish connection to Israel in a primordialist concept of Jewish identity anchored in Biblical myth, secular historiography, archaeology, and population genetics.”36 Similar groups promote the idea that diasporic Jewish identity is “colonized” and that Jews have been subject to a process of “cultural deracination,” since they underwent “assimilation to European Christian norms and categories” in order to achieve white privilege.37 Through the use of indigeneity discourses, American Jewish lobby groups increasingly co-opt leftist languages of decolonization and social justice, attracting young Jews to what is often, in fact, a hardline right-wing nationalist stance on Israel that denies Palestinian rights. Conversely, other indigeneity activist groups, such as Alternative Action (a group based in the West Bank and led by an American rabbi), attempt to validate Jewish indigeneity by drawing lines of comparison between Jewish settlers and Palestinians. Alternative Action specifically advocates for dialogue and cooperation between Jewish settlers and their Palestinian neighbours, whom they view as having shared “anti-colonial” aspirations.38 Groups like Alternative Action “promote the construction of a common ‘Semitic’ identity rooted in mutual indigeneity to the land and a shared genetic heritage.”39 According to Jewish indigeneity activists, the root cause

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of the Israel-Palestinian conflict is “the product of a category error on the part of Palestinian militants, who misrecognize Jews as foreign invaders.”40 The women that I interviewed in the midrasha might be located within this broader milieu of circulating Jewish indigeneity discourses that are particularly prominent in American Jewish circles. In addition to the identity resources highlighted by Berkman (the use of Biblical myth, archeology, and genetics), gendered religiosities play a role in the social construction of an “indigenous” Jewish identity in the West Bank today. By becoming religious in the Biblical landscape of the West Bank, the women that I interviewed saw themselves through an inversion of the very settler/native binary that they had been introduced to in leftist circles in the United States. Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon describe this inversion of the settler-colonial binary as part of a larger move by right-wing pro-settlement organizations in Israel, where the language of the secular left wing has been strategically co-opted to legalize and justify the annexation of Palestinian lands, positioning settlers as the “natives” who are threatened by a Palestinian “occupier” and must protect their lands from a state that discriminates against them.41 My interlocutors’ adoption of non-liberal religious feminism alongside indigeneity narratives revealed the intricate ways that gender, religion, and race co-constitute one another.42 In this case, study, religion, and more specifically religious feminism, function to strategically re-racialize Ashkenazi Jewish women from America into “returned” Israelites, or, in the words of my informant Alana, “women from the tribe of Judah.” In summary, a “vicious cycle of racialization” emerges before the ethnographer. Jewish racialization as non-white Semitic foreigners at the turn of the century in Europe resulted in their persecution and the Holocaust. The subsequent incorporation of Ashkenazi Jews into a white habitus in America in the second half of the twentieth century has now given way to the desire to be racialized again, as relative whiteness is tied to loss, assimilation, and cultural void. The religious racialization that I have documented here, operating in the context of a larger ethno-nationalist movement that continues to annex and Judaize the West Bank, exemplifies Etienne Balibar’s notion of “fictive ethnicity,” an imaginary that ­ultimately undergirds all national projects that rely on ideas of shared origins and ethnic unity, ideas that are essential to maintaining individual and collective belonging to the nation.

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Notes   1 Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation (London: Sage, 1997), 39.   2 Paola Bacchetta and Margaret Power, Right-Wing Women: From Conservatives to Extremists around the World (New York: Routledge, 2002); Amrita Basu, “The Gendered Imagery and Women’s Leadership of Hindu Nationalism,” Reproductive Health Matters, 4, no. 8 (1996): 70–6.   3 Tamara Neuman, “Maternal ‘Anti-Politics’ in the Formation of Hebron’s Jewish Enclave,” Journal of Palestine Studies 33, no. 2 (2004): 51–70.   4 Ibid., 52–6.   5 Michael Feige, Settling in the Hearts: Jewish Fundamentalism in the Occupied Territories (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009), 212–28.   6 Rachel Z. Feldman, “Putting Messianic Femininity into Zionist Political Action: The Case of Women for the Temple,” Journal of Middle Eastern Woman’s Studies 13, no. 3 (2017): 395–415, 406–8; Lihi Ben Shitrit, Righteous Transgressions: Women’s Activism on the Israeli and Palestinian Religious Right Wing (Princeton, nj : Princeton University Press, 2015).   7 Rachel Z. Feldman, The Children of Noah: Jewish Messianism in the 21st Century (Rutgers: Rutgers University Press, forthcoming); Rachel Z. Feldman, “Jewish Theocracy at the Biblical Barbeque: The Role of Third Temple Activism and Sacrificial Reenactments in Shaping Self and State,” Journal of Contemporary Jewry 40 (2020): 431–52; Rachel Z. Feldman, “Temple Mount Pilgrimage in the Name of Human Rights: The Use of Piety Practice and Liberal Discourse to Carry out Proxy-State Conquest,” Journal of Settler Colonial Studies 8, no. 4 (2018): 537–58; Feldman, “Messianic Femininity”; Sarina Chen, “Liminality and Sanctity: A Central Theme in the Rhetoric and Praxis of Temple Zealot Groups” (in Hebrew), Jerusalem Studies of Jewish Folklore 24/25 (2007): 245–67; Motti Inbari, Jewish Fundamentalism and the Temple Mount (Albany, ny : suny Press, 2009); Gershom Gorenberg, The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).   8 The phenomenon of secular Jews becoming religious, commonly referred to in Israel as chozrim b’tshuva (returners to the faith), includes many Israelis, not only new immigrants.   9 Joanna Steinhardt, “American Neo-Hasids in the Land of Israel,” Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 13, no. 4 (2010): 24.

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10 Sarah Pike, New Age and Neopagan Religions in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 11 Orit Avishai, “‘Doing Religion’ in a Secular World: Women in Conservative Religions and the Questions of Agency,” Gender and Society 22, no. 4 (2008): 409–33; Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). 12 Julie Peteet, “Icons and Militants: Mothering in the Danger Zone,” Signs 23, no. 1 (1997): 103–5. 13 Bacchetta and Power, Right-Wing Women, 7–10. 14 The language of instruction in the midrasha was English. 15 Feige, Settling in the Hearts. 16 Ibid., 229–46. 17 Ibid., 233. 18 Ibid., 240. 19 Inbari, Jewish Fundamentalism and the Temple Mount, 51–95. 20 All informants have been assigned pseudonyms. 21 Dalia Marx, “The Missing Temple: The Status of the Temple in Jewish Culture Following Its Destruction,” European Judaism: A Journal for the New Europe 46, no. 2 (2013): 67–70. 22 Feldman, “Jewish Theocracy” and “Temple Mount Pilgrimage.” 23 In addition to taking on Orthodox observance, students were eager to engage in different forms of therapy and healing arts, including ­psychotherapy, yoga, dream interpretation, and energy work. 24 This was a period of instability and violence characterized by lone-wolf knife attacks targeting Jewish Israelis. A total of 350 knife attacks took place, resulting in the death of thirty-four Israelis and two hundred Palestinians (most killed while attempting attacks). The stabbings were largely spontaneous and imitative acts carried out by teenage Palestinian males experiencing the humiliation and desperation of life under military occupation coupled with the lack of any diplomatic solutions or prospects. 25 Pike, New Age and Neopagan. 26 Katie Gaddini, “Between Pain and Hope: Examining Women’s Marginality in the Evangelical Context,” European Journal of Women’s Studies 26, no. 4 (2019): 405–20; Bacchetta and Power, Right-Wing Women; Basu, “The Gendered Imagery.” 27 See the Babylonian Talmud Chullin Daf 60b. This is a midrash on Genesis 1:16 explaining why the moon, originally equal in size and light to the sun, was diminished. According to the parable, the moon (representing feminine energy) complained about sharing power with the sun and was

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diminished by God, who eventually brings an atonement offering for decreasing the light of the moon. This parable is often read in religious circles as an explanation for male dominance, the sacred but concealed power of women, and eventual rectification of the moon’s light (feminine energy) in messianic times as alluded to in the Rosh Hodesh blessing, “May the light of the moon be like the light of sun and like the light of the seven days of Creation, as it was before it was diminished.” 28 Steinhardt, “American Neo-Hasids,” 23. 29 Ibid., 24. 30 Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks: And What That Says about Race in America (New Brunswick, NJ : Rutgers University Press, 2010), 10. 31 Ibid., 25–52. 32 Ibid., 1–52. 33 As’ad Ghanem, “The Expanding Ethnocracy: Judaization of the Public Space,” Israel Studies Review 26, no. 1 (2011): 21–7; Oren Yiftachel, Ethnocracy: Land and Identity Politics in Israel/Palestine (Philadelphia, p a : University of Philadelphia Press, 2006); Nadim Rouhana, Identities in Conflict: Palestinian Citizens in an Ethnic Jewish State (New Haven, c t : Yale University Press, 1997). 34 Matthew Berkman, “The West Bank ‘Alternative Peace Movement’ and Its Transnational Infrastructure: A Case Study in ‘Primordialist Universalism,’” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 17, no. 3 (2017): 304–25. 35 Ibid., 304. 36 Ibid., 305. 37 Ibid., 311. 38 Ibid., 310. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid., 312. 41 Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon, The Human Right to Dominate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 105–28. 42 Gil Anidjar, Semites: Race, Religion, Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008); Yulia Egorova, “Redefining the Converted Jewish Self: Race, Religion, and Israel’s Bene Menashe,” American Anthropologist, 177, no. 3 (2015): 493–505; Nasar Meer, “Racialization and Religion: Race, Culture, and Difference in the Study of Anti­ semitism and Islamophobia,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 36, no. 3 (2013): 385–95; Noah Tamarkin, “Religion as Race, Recognition as Democracy: Lemba ‘Black Jews’ in South Africa,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 637, no. 1 (2011): 148–64.

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3 Soulful Soil and Colonial Quality Organic Farming in the West Bank ariel handel, daniel monterescu, and rafi grosglik

Known as “the father figure of the outposts,” as well as “the sheriff of the hills,” Avri Ran, the owner of Givo’t Olam farm, is one of the founders of the notorious Hilltop Youth, a movement of radical Jewish settlers in the West Bank. As such, his reputation is synonymous with the violent land grab of Palestinian property. Ran is, however, also one of the most prominent organic farmers in Israel/ Palestine. In the context of the West Bank, organic farming by Jewish settlers is often considered by critical observers as a form of whitewashing, meant to conceal the colonial expansion through alternative agriculture. For Ran, however, organic farming spells also a revival of what he considers an ancient Jewish philosophy. “The entire Talmud is all about organic farming. It’s a textbook for organic farming!” he told us when we met him on his farm in the summer of 2018. “Organic farming is preserved in the Jewish genes, though we lost some contact with it,” he continued, as he walked us around his farm. Yet Ran also insisted on a different story of efficacy and quality-­ oriented agricultural production, a story detached from religious references: “Don’t look for slogans here, you shouldn’t seek messianic statements ... Conventional farming is dangerous and poisonous. It would be a crime to use pesticides here. It’s suicidal. Here, this farm is about quantity and quality.” The intertwined environmentalism, religiosity, and productivity embedded in Ran’s narrative are part of the changing economic and cultural structures of Israeli settler colonialism in the occupied

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Palestinian territories. But the complexity of organic agriculture in the West Bank does not make it less political and exclusionary. Using the case study of organic farming in the Jewish settlements, we point to the multiple ways in which alternative agriculture and colonial spatialization converge. While much of the scholarship on the colonial project in the Occupied Territories focuses on either its territorial-geopolitical aspects1 or its economic dimensions,2 we suggest a relational conceptualization that examines the tension between the three vertices of a complementary triad: territory, land, and soil. While soil designates a romantic perception of cultivable space, territory is concerned with defensible borders and political sovereignty,3 and land is a space of pragmatic exchange and a source of capital accumulation.4 Examining these spatial modalities, we show how the depoliticization of land and the commodification of soil normalize the governance of territory and how quality-driven organic farming emerges as a gastro-political platform in settler-colonial settings.5 Our ethnographic fieldwork between 2018 and 2020 included visits to eleven organic farms across the West Bank – in Tekoa, Shiloh, Itamar, Bat Ayin, and Susya. We conducted twelve open-ended ­interviews with Jewish organic farmers and content analysis of their marketing materials. We use a qualitative methodology that includes semi-structured interviews and published sources from public media. All interviews were recorded, transcribed, and thematically analyzed.6 Most of our interlocutors are public spokespeople for organic agriculture, and we use pseudonyms for all individuals mentioned in the article who are not public figures. This chapter explores the connections between the violence of colonial territoriality and the “quality space”7 of organic farming. The chapter starts by conceptually framing the three modalities of soil, territory, and land as co-constitutive elements in the production of colonial space in the West Bank. We then outline the contours of the field of organic farming as a historical and political project in relation to Jewish expansion and Palestinian dispossession. Next, we describe the discourses and practices employed by organic settler-farmers to solidify their claim through the making of soil, territory, and land. We conclude by arguing that the implementations of these spatial modalities through organic farming normalize the inherent violence of the colonial project and strengthen the settlers’ claim for political privilege (see Zreik, this volume).

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Organic farming discourse and practice lends itself to diverse interpretations.8 Since its inception in the early 1980s, organic farming among Jewish settlers in the Occupied Territories has undergone several transformations. Initiated as a private Jewish agricultural project, for over three decades organic farming in the West Bank and Gaza Strip has instantiated neo-Zionist visions of “the redemption of the land.”9 The organic ethos has been embedded in Biblical narratives and used to claim Jewish exclusionary indigeneity, as well as to appropriate material resources such as land and water.10 Of late, the discourse of organic agriculture in the West Bank settlements has diversified and become part of a hybrid discourse addressing quality, politics, and philosophies of place-making. Furthermore, we identify a new shift in organic farming in West Bank settlements, which we term the “colonial quality turn.” It stems from the contemporary trend in agriculture and food production known as “the quality turn,” which refers to the current emphasis of food producers responding to the demand of affluent and reflective consumers.11 The colonial quality turn reframes “qualisigns”12 to rebrand settler agriculture and associate it with global standards of consumer value. We will show how the symbolic value of organic produce is tied to place-making and the ­commodification of products of the settlement project.

S e t t l e r C o l onialism a n d O r g a n i c A griculture In recent years, several studies have described the use of farming for reclaiming indigenous identity in settler-colonial settings.13 Most studies focus on agro-activism as a means of resilience used by the colonized subject, and the ways in which local identity frames resistance against colonial attempts to erase indigenous identity.14 Our study, however, turns critical attention to the colonizers and highlights the multiple uses and abuses of organic farming in a settler-colonial power arrangement: land seizing, capital accumulation, and “self-indigenizing.”15 Lorenzo Veracini distinguishes between colonialism and settler colonialism, claiming that “in theoretical terms, one crucial distinction between colonialism and settler colonialism as separate formations is that the first aims to perpetuate itself whereas the latter aims to supersede itself … that is, when the settlers cease to be defined as such and become ‘natives,’ and their position becomes normalized.”16

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However, normalization takes different forms: Jewish settlers in the West Bank draw on the longue durée of soil and on Biblical narratives to argue that Jews inhabited the region long before Palestinians, thus substantiating their claim for exclusive autochthony. At the same time, the settlers profess environmental care, as opposed to the irresponsible neglect they attribute to the native (inter alia repositioning Palestinian lands as terra nullius).17 Concomitantly, a process of normalization via the colonial quality turn (namely, a process of depoliticization by means of a discourse on agricultural quality) is taking place. In the process, indigeneity is predicated on unapologetic spatial appropriation, which legitimizes the metamorphosis of a settler into a native, also known as self-indigenization, by trivializing territorial violence.18 These forms spell out different connections between identity, history, and space, and, by implication, varying relationships between soil, land, and territory. The three modalities of soil, land, and territory play a crucial part in settler-colonial place-making in Israel/Palestine. As a political space produced by various state apparatuses, territory is long considered the central concept in scholarly debates on the Occupied Territories.19 Prima facie, the struggle is always about territory as part of a constant attempt to achieve the highest degree of control and sovereignty over the space at stake.20 In this case, territoriality is not only formally exercised by the state, but also by the settler farmers, who function as private entrepreneurs claiming sovereignty over the disputed territory. Thus, they sustain a long Zionist history of seizing land and setting boundaries through agriculture.21 Nevertheless, the struggle over territory is not the sole social issue embedded in the case of organic farming in the West Bank, as economic and cultural aspects of settling the colonial frontier are equally consequential. Land, which embodies property relations and the means of production, is the second vertex in our triadic analysis.22 The notion of land, as we suggest in this chapter, recalls that modern agriculture – organic or conventional – is also an economic business in a competitive capitalist system. The rise of “corporate organic” in the Global North, beginning in the early 1990s, is the result of processes of industrialization and conventionalization of organic agriculture. Subsequently, contemporary organic agriculture – in Israel/Palestine and elsewhere – seeks to be profitable, and therefore must reckon with land as a means of production, as well as with the exploitation of labour for profit, marketing, and branding. 23 As we describe below, pragmatic

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considerations of efficiency, profit, and marketing strategies are also an important part of organic agriculture in the West Bank. Like other settlers’ economic initiatives in the West Bank, organic farming is heavily subsidized by the state and the occupation authorities due to the strategic role of agriculture in land seizing.24 Nevertheless, organic farmers in the West Bank also compete in a segmented global neoliberal market for economic reasons, and they adjust themselves to its logic. The final vertex is soil, representing not only roots and belonging,25 but also ecology, materiality, and visceral relationality between the human and non-human sphere.26 The affective connection to soil stands against the “violence of abstraction”27 inherent in both the political production of territory and the capitalist production of land. While the notions of territory and land are predicated on the “accumulation of space,”28 namely the emptying-out of a given space from its materiality, historical context, and sociality,29 soil suggests an imagined return to the embodied passion of the place. As soil generation and regeneration usually occurs at time scales well beyond many human generations,30 it is not surprising that they are imagined as natural and timeless. This perception is congruent with the myths of autochthony – the idea that people spring naturally from the earth and are directly linked to the soil of which they are born31 – but also with the desire for self-indigenization as a critical characteristic of settler-colonial regimes.32 In the context of organic farming, soil has always been a basic pillar in the philosophical foundations of the global organic movement. As the deepest concept of the philosophy of organic farming, soil forms a holistic ecosystem that embodies relationships between humans and non-humans. It includes all living creatures in a given space, underground and above, bound together in the longue durée. In The Living Soil, one of the canonical texts of the global organic agriculture movement, Eve Balfour argued that there is a causal link between human health and what she terms “soil vitality.”33 Following Balfour and her successors, “soil” assumed a central status in organic discourse: not as an object for economic exploitation (namely, “land”) but rather as a “living body,” where all constituents – minerals, micro-organisms, insects, plants, animals, and humans – work in mutual harmony. Statements such as “being an organic farmer, I’m focusing on growing soil, not vegetables” have become commonplace in the organic-­farming circles we frequented.

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The complex understanding of soil in the philosophy of organic farming has made room for a wide variety of meanings, including humanistic (if not more-than-humanistic) and inclusionary meanings, as well as chauvinistic and exclusionary (“blood and soil”) meaning. The relationships between soil and social health received special political attention early on, with the writings of botanist Albert Howard, who pointed to connections between soil fertility and issues of social solidarity and national resilience.34 Thus, the interlacing of organic agriculture, religiosity, and right-wing nationalism is not new, and certainly not unique to the Israeli/Palestinian case. Looking at the political affiliations of organic agriculture from a historical and global perspective, one notes that many of the early practitioners and advocates of organic farming were associated with an anti-liberal world view affiliated with conservative groups and even with eco-fascism.35

T h e Hist o r y o f O r g anic Agriculture b e y o n d t h e G reen Li ne: S p a c e a n d N a t i o n al I deology Organic agriculture in the West Bank and Gaza Strip emerged in the late 1980s. Since 1967, agriculture has increasingly served as a central tool by which the settlement movement consolidated control over large areas in the Occupied Territories. Over 103,000 dunams (25,450 acres) in the West Bank are currently designated for Jewish agriculture. This area is much larger than the actual built-up area of the settlements and outposts, which is about 60,000 dunams (14,826 acres). Between Jewish agricultural expansion and sprawling settlements, the last decades have seen a decline of about one-third in cultivated Palestinian agricultural lands in the West Bank. According to a report published by Kerem Navot (a non-governmental organization that monitors Israeli land policy in the West Bank), since 1997, through agricultural activity, settlers have taken over about 24,000 dunams of land, of which about 10,000 dunams are privately owned by Palestinians.36 These agricultural activities can be seen as motivated by three factors: agro-religious ideology striving for an unmediated connection between people and place, economic considerations striving to maximize ­revenues, and territorial expansionism striving to extend Jewish control over Palestinian land. While organic agriculture has been playing a relatively minor role in this broader project, it remains of great symbolic and discursive significance.

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The critical juncture in incorporating organic agriculture in the ­settler movement was spearheaded by Mario Levi, known as “the  pioneer of organic agriculture in Israel.”37 In 1983, while serving as the c eo of the Israel Bio-Organic Agriculture Association (ibo aa), Levi began to promote the project. The transformation of the Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank into a hub of organic agriculture and a major force in the Israeli agro-economy was accompanied by several discursive frameworks – most of which included an agricultural-scientific perspective regarding the quality of the soil. When Levi was asked about the early days of organic agriculture in the Occupied Territories, he argued that the development of organic agriculture was particularly suitable for these “uncontaminated” soils: “[The soils] were cultivated [prior to the Jewish settlement] in primitive ways. Many of these lands were “virgin soils” [adama betulit, uncultivated soil], these were soils that were not cultivated using conventional methods. It is first and foremost an agricultural matter, it is a scientific matter, and these were the advantages and the qualities of the soils there.” Here, the scientific-agrarian and nationalist discourses converge. Echoing the old Zionist slogan “a land without people to people without land” (and thus referring to the Palestinian space as terra nullius), Levi’s notion of “virgin soils” goes beyond its scientificagrarian meaning. The place is portrayed as empty and undeveloped, and thus it should be “redeemed” by Jewish settlers, particularly by those who are organic farmers.38 In the following pages we will present relational modalities of organic farming, which tie together material and non-material components, such as soil types, human labour, water regimes, agricultural practices, land regulations, ideological discourses, and local knowhow. Understanding the mutual co-constitution of soils, land regulations, and modes of territoriality in the West Bank requires a brief introduction to the 1858 Ottoman Land Code, which still guides the land regime in the West Bank. Article 78 of the Ottoman Land Code states that the sovereign can seize ownerless and uncultivated lands.39 While the original purpose of Article 78 was to encourage agriculture in areas that were distant from the centre of the Ottoman Empire and for the purpose of eliciting tax revenue, the State of Israel has largely used it as a means of land expropriation. In its new apparatus, non-cultivated lands have been declared “state lands,” an act

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that allowed them to be used for settlement expansion.40 Thus, the conditions of these terrains and the ambiguities of legal property regime have made it possible for Jewish settlers to extend their claims on the space.

O r g a n i c Soil: R e d e e min g t h e Lost Roots Har-Sinai farm is an outpost located on the periphery of Susya settlement in the south Hebron hills of the West Bank (a region also known in Arabic as Masafer Yatta). The region is part of a semi-arid area on the desert threshold, with an annual average precipitation of just above two hundred millimetres of rain. Due to the scarcity of natural springs, inhabitants of the region must collect rainwater in cisterns. The soil in the area is rocky on the hilltops, with shallow loess and lithosol in the lower parts. Traditionally, agriculture in the area is based on dry farming of field crops (such as wheat and other grains) around the stream basins and grazing in the rest of the area. Scarcity makes soil and water an integral part of the political conflict in the area (as it does in the rest of the Middle East region). As we shall see, however, these play an important role not only in terms of material needs and land regulations but also in the symbolic narratives of authenticity and connection to the place, as well as questions of violence and the relationships between Jewish settlers and Palestinian villagers. Har-Sinai farm was founded by Dalia and her late husband, Yair, to “put down roots in the land [of Israel] and spiritual roots in heaven.” While the farm itself is built on declared “state land,” most of its agricultural lands are located outside the declared area (figure 3.1). Like many other outposts, the farm was built without state authorization, yet it receives de facto governmental support in the way of infrastructures, military protection, and economic support.41 Over the years, Yair Har-Sinai became a revered figure among many Jewish settlers, and his persona was associated with the image of an unruly and independent settler who walks freely in contested areas as if these are his own property. Murdered by Palestinians in 2001, Yair is still a mythical figure among the Jewish settlers and their supporters. Dalia, for her part, has continued to run the farm and advance its initial goals since Yair’s death. The story of Har-Sinai farm, the legacy of Yair, and Dalia’s activities articulate the discourse

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Figure 3.1  Aerial photo of Susya settlement and Har-Sinai farm, marking state lands and settler agricultural takeovers.

of soil by portraying organic farming as a romantic mission of redemption. Raised in secular Moshavim (co-operative agricultural communities) in the central district of Israel, Dalia and Yair had strong connections to land and nature, but not to religious spirituality. This would change after a crucial meeting with Mario Levi (the c e o of the ib o a a ), who was a religious charismatic figure. Dalia and Yair “discovered [their] Jewish roots,” as Dalia put it. Subsequently, they moved to the Susya settlement, established in 1983 on the lands of the Palestinian village of Susya. When we met with Dalia on the farm, she rationalized her life project in terms of sustainability, tradition, and modesty: “I have no interest in expansion. Other [Jewish settler organic] farmers want to be bigger, to show presence. It is as if they say: ‘we want to display power, ability and control beyond what we can actually produce, beyond our ability to cultivate the soil. While [those] farmers were focused on growing

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crops, we wanted to learn the ancient methods of cultivating the soil, dryland farming [ba’al], the methods used by our ancestors; we looked for ancient species of grapes and olives.” However, the conversion to organic farming and the departure from modern agricultural technologies have been mediated by the couple’s complex relations with their Palestinian neighbours. What Dalia described as a “return to the Jewish roots” was in practice learned from mimicking local Palestinian practices.42 Dalia reflects on their process of mimesis: Yair learned a lot from Arab shepherds. He realized that the way to cultivate the soil and to protect the land would be to raise goats. We were the first [Jewish shepherds] in Judea and Samaria. At first the [Jewish] residents of the settlement were surprised and told us: “shepherding is only for the Arabs.” But Yair did not give in, and we bought a small herd. Our ­relationships with the Arabs can be described as mutual respect but also of mutual suspicion. At first, they were very flattered that Yair followed them. He even learned to speak Arabic ­fluently. But later, they saw that [through herding] the soils have actually returned to us, so the Arabs were less enthusiastic … Yair went out every day with the herd to graze around Susya, and slowly the Arabs withdrew. Dalia’s narrative revolves around the claim that “soils have actually returned to us,” and discursively elides violence and territorialization, as if giving the soil itself the agency over the humans that cultivate it.43 Her narrative emphasizes that their main interest was not terri­torial expansion, nor material profit, but rather authenticity, self-sufficiency, and a deep connection between Jewish identity and the soil. Nevertheless, what Dalia and Yair have actually accomplished is territorial expansion. In Yair’s memoir-cum-manifesto, practices of “pushing out the Arabs” are entangled with folkish-nationalistic meanings of farming: “We have to train an army of Jewish warriors who will yield bread from the soil and occupy it with their feet. The Arabs are about to finish their shift in the Land of Israel. They must be displaced and abandon their grip on the sanctity of these lands … and return to their place.”44 Accordingly, practices of working the soil (avodat ha-adama) embody a paradox: recognizing Palestinian know-how and mimicking

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Figure 3.2  Har-Sinai farm and the adjacent military tower.

it, while maintaining radically antagonistic relations with the original owners of this knowledge.45 This differentiation is based on the valorization of Jewish organic farming, and explicitly blames the Palestinians for harming the environment. For example, Yisrael, a settler farmer from Bat Ayin (a settlement near Bethlehem), who shares a similar world view to Dalia and Yair, told us in an interview: “We are organic farmers. They [the Palestinian farmers] use pesticides because they need to sell huge amounts of produce, so they sell contaminated produce. And where does it start? It starts with the philosophy of Esau [referring to the Biblical figure of the farmer who is ‘a man of the field,’ characterized by his ‘rough’ qualities and greediness]. Esau always wanted more and more profit. But for us [the Jewish settler farmers], organic means ‘this is our produce, our space, and our way to get settled.’ My settlement is supposed to satisfy all my needs, not to maximize profits. We are settlers in the deep sense of the word.”

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Figure 3.3  Farming in Palestinian Susya, adjacent to the Jewish Settlement of Susya.

O r g a n i c T e r r i toriality: Vio l e n c e a n d Expansi on The notion of territory embeds the soil in a political system of active bordering. Territory, as Mark Neocleous explains, is etymologically derived “from terra (of earth, and thus a domain) … but it also has links with terrere, meaning to frighten … Territory is a land occupied and maintained through terror. The secret of territoriality is thus violence.”46 In the context of Israel/Palestine, while the settler project of “working the soil” operates within the framework of religiousutopian nationalism and a folkish-romantic discourse of redemption, colonial territoriality hinges on a variegated repertoire of strategies – ranging from violent land grab to a discourse on mass production. Arguably, one of the most prominent figures in that process would be Avri Ran of Givo’t Olam. Like Dalia and Yair Har-Sinai, Avri was

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not “born” into radical religious nationalism. He grew up in a secular and socialist kibbutz (a communal agricultural community), converted to a religious way of life, and moved to the settlement of Itamar, in the north part of the West Bank, between Ramallah and Nablus. Soon after, he decided to take over one of the high hills, east of the settlement of Itamar, and set up a new, unauthorized outpost, “Givo’t Olam,” translated literally as the Eternal Hills. For Avri, every act of farming is part of a broader act of faith and territorialization: “Every egg I collect, every chicken I care for, and every animal or grass in the yard is part of my covenant with the Land of Israel and the Torah of Israel.”47 However, Avri’s project departs from Har-Sinai’s vision of small-scale autarchic agriculture by launching a business model of organic farming that is fully ­integrated in the colonial and capitalist economy. The modality represented by Avri is one that capitalizes on the symbolic meanings and political potential of soil by transforming it into a territorial project. Soil, from this perspective, loses its tangible and intangible qualities – as stressed in organic philosophy – and becomes subjugated to the logics of expansion, both spatial and economic. Avri’s farming is aimed at bordering, ordering, and othering48 – creating facts on the ground to mark the Jewish settler territory and violently claim his right to conquer and exclude. Givo’t Olam is located in a relatively rainy region (with an annual average of around six hundred millimetres), characterized by terra rosa, a well-drained reddish Mediterranean soil, typical of karstic regions. Historically, most of the lands in this fertile region have been cultivated by Palestinian villagers.49 Since soil thickness ranges from a few centimetres on the rocky hilltops to a few metres in the stream basins, agriculture traditionally has been limited to the lower slopes, while the hilltops have served mainly for grazing. After the occupation of this area by the State of Israel in 1967, many lots around the hilltops were declared “state lands,” paving the way to their capture by Jewish settlers. From its inception, Givo’t Olam has sought to become an organic farming power centre. The total area currently occupied by Avri is spread over nine hundred dunams, most of which was privately owned by Palestinians until Avri dispossessed them of it (figure 3.4). These lands were rapidly converted into a farm of seventy thousand free-range, organic chickens. The feed for these chickens (a mixture of organic clover and oats processed in a mill Avri built) is grown

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Figure 3.4  Aerial photo of Givo’t Olam farm and the adjacent Hill 777 outpost.

organically in the 450 dunams of land around the outpost. One can also find a packing house, where Avri’s workers label and distribute their organic eggs. Nowadays, Avri is by far the major producer of organic eggs in Israel/Palestine. In addition to the organic egg business, he built a goat pen, raises thousands of goats, and produces a variety of organic dairy products. Currently, the vast area covered by Givo’t Olam includes animal pens, olive groves, fields of organic vegetables, a flour mill, a vineyard, offices for marketing, and a synagogue. Avri refers to himself as a “self-made man,” insisting that he built his spacious organic farm with his bare hands, with no support from governmental or regional authorities. Despite this rhetoric, his organic enterprise was heavily subsidized by various state apparatuses. As part of a strategic plan carried out by Itamar settlers in the last two decades, Avri’s actions endeavoured to create territorial continuity between Itamar settlement and Gitit settlement in the Jordan Valley, nearly twenty kilometres away. To this end, Itamar settlers have taken

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over more than thirteen thousand dunams of Palestinian land adjacent to the towns Akraba and Beit Furik and Yanun village. The state has actively supported the project of expansion by providing infrastructure, such as roads, electricity, and military protection; it also has overlooked the settlers’ violent attacks on Palestinians and recurrent legal violations.50 Moreover, Avri receives governmental veterinary services and a government-guaranteed price for eggs, determined by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development. Finally, he receives organic certification services from Agrior – one of the leading organic certification and inspection agencies authorized to operate in Israel according to the Law for the Regulation of Organic Produce in Israel.51 When we visited Givo’t Olam and interviewed Avri, we realized that organic farming for him serves as an apparatus to distinguish between the Jewish legitimate dwellers of the place and the illegitimate invaders – the Palestinians, to whom he often refers as “an invasive species.” The former, according to him, are traditionally gifted farmers, blessed by some sort of inherent efficacy. As he puts it: “Our Sages [Hazal] speak about farmers who can take a lump of soil and know intuitively what should grow in it … And back then – it was organic farming, obviously! It was organic farming that could carry the entire world! … We are the best farmers in the world, and the most efficient in the world … because of the “Jewish genius.” For Avri, organic farming is not only an expression of inherited knowledge, but also of a superior power of will attributed to Jewish farmers. His reasoning is based on both practical considerations and environmental racism. Spatial development, environmental care, the creation of healthy agricultural ecosystems, and productive ways of farming – all serve to compartmentalize Jews and non-Jews: “Look, nowadays we live alongside the Arabs, so it’s very easy to see the difference: I always want more. I’m Jewish! It’s a matter of genes … I would never agree that my yields will amount only to a hundred kilo of wheat per acre. No way, that’s not enough for me! The gentile farmer – not only the Arab farmer, any non-Jewish gentile farmer – will ‘throw’ the seeds off to the ground and, as far as he is concerned, ‘whatever will be, will be.’ He’s okay with it. But not me! We, as Jews, think differently and cannot accept that.” Contrary to the philosophical foundations of the organic idea that emphasize a discourse of small-scale non-conventional farming (such as in the case of Har-Sinai’s farm), and the cultivation of healthy soil,

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Avri emphasizes mass production of organic foods and operates according to quantity and quality-driven agricultural methods. Since the construction of his farm in 1996, hundreds of young settlers have gathered around Avri, followed his path, and engaged in the hard labour of organic farming on remote hills. Sociologist Shlomo Fischer notes that “the outposts and the hilltop settlements … are spread horizontally over distances so that each farmhouse merges with the rocks, soil and olive trees in its immediate vicinity … Thus, they interweave the themes of ecology and unmediated contact with nature, the earth, its elements and violence.”52 Indeed, violence is part and parcel of the organic enterprise Avri spearheaded along these colonial frontiers. For the nearby Palestinian village of Yanun, Giv’ot Olam spelled disaster.53 Avri himself was convicted in court of assault four times, including one case of aggravated assault. Describing Givo’t Olam’s land grabbing, intimidation, harassment, and physical v­ iolence, political scientist Hagar Kotef notes that Avri’s dedication to organic farming is consistent with his world view. For him, brutality and aggression are part and parcel of being in nature, cultivating lands, and practising agriculture.54 Avri’s combination of working the terra while applying terror points to the extent of his territorialization life project.55 We should thus understand his philosophy of environmental racism as inseparable from his permanent quest for agricultural quality and quantity.56 His attitude might seem at times instrumental and pragmatic, referring to productivity, marketing, and health. However, his discourse and practices are fed by an urge for ongoing territorial expansion. In contrast to Har-Sinai, who pushed aside his neighbours – the Palestinian shepherds – while performing complex colonial mimicry and “going native,”57 Avri doesn’t see the Palestinians as a point of reference, but rather merely territorial rivals: “I believe that this land is mine … I don’t hate Arabs. Absolutely not. I am indifferent to them. For me they are merely dust.”58

O r g a n i c Land: T h e C o l o n i a l Q u ality Turn The third spatial modality we identified among organic farmer settlers reconfigures agricultural space as land, namely as a resource for producing high-value produce mostly for urban upper-middle-class consumers. Many of the Jewish settlers we met in the West Bank are concerned less

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with ideologies – whether an organic ideology, a national-political ideology, or religious ideology – than with ­market-driven strategies and profit-making in a global neo-liberal market. Working the land as a material resource, rather than as spiritual or territorial components of the settlement project, these farmers subordinate the political and symbolic concepts of colonial settlement to the economic logic of exchange. Clearly, all the organic farmers we encountered operate within the economic field just as much as they take part in the cultural and territorial production of their surroundings. In practice, the weight they attribute to each of the modalities creates different balances in their actions. Thus, while Dalia Har-Sinai emphasized self-sufficiency and Avri Ran oriented his actions toward territorial expansion, the following farmers seem to be more concerned with questions of quality and profit. “Do you want to talk about organic agriculture or about ‘the territories’ [ha-shtahim, namely, ‘the Occupied Territories’]?” This was how Yona Tzoref, an organic poultry farmer from Shilo (north of Ramallah), provoked us during our tour of his farm. “Organic [agriculture] has nothing to do with [the politics of] the Territories. There is no ideology behind my decision to do that. Are you asking me why am I dealing with organic eggs? Well, my answer is that this is simply what I do. Some produce donuts, and I produce organic eggs, as simple as that.” Yona, and many other settler farmers like him, reproduce a depoliticized discourse of “quality,” a narrative that targets urban and secular clientele: “Our consumers have all kinds of requirements,” says Yona. “Some of them are Leftists who prefer quality eggs from free-range chickens, just like my chickens.” Other food producers operating in this area confirm Yona’s reading of consumer trends. For example, in our visit to Achia organic olive oil farm in Shilo, Moshe, the marketing manager of the farm, told us: “There is a growing demand for healthy, high-quality ­products in general. Consumption of olive oil is on the rise, including organic olive oil. We had a certain piece of land that we converted to organic.” In the case of Achia, the transition to organic olive oil production seems to be motivated by the desire to strengthen their brand and by the attempt to cultivate a “niche” product within their marketing plan. In addition to the secular liberal market in metropolitan centres in Israel, the framing of their operations in neutral terms of quality enables them to target the global market. Moshe, for example, boasted

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that Achia’s olive oil is also exported to China. We asked him whether Chinese customers are interested in the Biblical story, in which Shilo features as the city of the Tabernacle, the Ark, and the Prophet Samuel. His reply was unequivocal: “No, not at all! Quality, quality, quality! That’s what interests them. Once, I exported oil to China without labelling it as ‘Israeli olive oil.’ They stopped the shipment at the port and sent it back. This Israeli brand signifies quality and without this label – the Chinese consumer will simply not buy it.” The growing emphasis on global standards of quality among organic farmers in the West Bank is compatible with broader processes that can be termed normalization by commodification.59 The booming scene of agri-tourism and the economy of singularities divert attention from the colonial circumstances within which food is produced,60 and highlight instead its culinary and economic value. This approach was well illustrated in Tekoa, a Jewish settlement built on lands belonging to the Palestinian village of Teqoa. The settlement is located on the semi-arid outskirts of the Judean Desert. With thin and rocky loess soil and a scarcity of water sources, traditional Palestinian agriculture in the region is based on barley, wheat, and olives, as well as on goat and sheep grazing. Thus, it might come as a surprise to discover that, despite these harsh conditions, the settlement of Tekoa is a hub of conventional and alternative farming, where one can find organic farming of exotic herbs, mushrooms, and northern-European berries. All this is accomplished by a nearly complete detachment from the actual soil and local climate in Tekoa, replacing both the socio-spatial philosophy of soil and territory for the technology of land. The colonial quality turn is well represented by Matanyah Freund. an organic farmer in his thirties and the son of Gilad Freund, one of the first organic farmers in the West Bank. Matanyah produces both organic and conventional crops, including cultivars that are foreign to the region: raspberries, blackberries, and asparagus, all grown in climate-controlled pots and greenhouses. Guiding us around his farm, he talked about the high-tech features of efficient farming. Describing his cutting-edge technological greenhouse that he operates by remote control from his smartphone, he asserted with great pride: “It’s the Rolls-Royce of agriculture … We have greenhouses with full climate control. When humidity decreases, the greenhouse will automatically launch a system that will increase the level of humidity. If the crops get too cold, it will turn on the heating. Everything is automatic here.”

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Figure 3.5  Aerial photo of Tekoa settlement and Freund Farm.

In contrast to the romantic farmers who seek to “work the soil” with simplicity and minimal intervention, the Freund farm endorses technology in the service of organic distinction: “Organic farmers should use all possible science and technological knowledge. They should be more advanced than the conventional farmer.”61 Differentiating himself from farmers like Avri Ran, who seek to maximize territorial control, Freund openly prioritizes efficiency over quantity. Recently, he reduced his farmland from 17.5 dunams to 3.5 dunams of high-technology greenhouses. Tellingly, Matanyah’s spatial approach – which is associated with the search for the most efficient land (rather than territory or soil) in terms of agricultural output – is congruent with his use of hydroponic soilless culture (menutakey karka). Another land-related practice is related to Freund’s use of red wiggler earthworms (also known as Eisenia fatida). These earthworms are used for vermicomposting both domestic and industrial organic waste. Their use in soil production has granted them nicknames

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Figure 3.6  Freund Farm. In the background: the settlement of Tekoa, the Herodion National Park, and the Judean Desert.

such as “soil engineers” and “a proletariat of diggers.”62 Earthworms are now used to produce soil in desert areas, in urban rubble, and recently also in na s a ’s experiments toward the settling of humans on Mars.63 Their ability to produce soil anywhere suggests that Tekoa’s actual physical and cultural-political geographies (specific location, with a given soil- and place-based history) are of little significance to organic farmers operating from a land modality. Agriculture always operates on the tension between nature and culture. While Dalia and Yair Har-Sinai sanctified the given conditions of nature, and thus used dryland farming and traditional practices with minimal intervention, Matanyah, on the other side of the spectrum, produces soil using “foreign” non-human agents and advanced technology. Just like his hydroponic crops, his political discourse seems as “soilless” as his distance from the discourse of the sanctity of soil. Here, worms and high-tech highlight the dialectic relations between place-making and dis-place-ment. The political attachment

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Figure 3.7  Red Wiggler Earthworms in Tekoa.

to space is made not on a presumed natural basis of an imagined autochthony, but rather on an apolitical normalization that conceals traces of violence and appropriation. Matanyah and other organic farmers of the second generation of Jewish settlers in the West Bank whom we met express the logic of progress and technologically based organic farming.64 At the same time, they easily dismiss the political implications of these practices in that specific territory. “I’m fed up with the Jewish-Palestinian conflict. It’s all about special interests and money,” Matanyah concludes. Similarly, Gadi, a certified agronomist, and manager of Tekoa Farms, replies to our query about the divergence between the founders and the second-generation organic farmers, to which he belongs: “We care for this place. We always think ‘What would it be in a hundred years?’ But politics is desperation, so we are just dealing with much more basic things required for production – earth, water, and air.”

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The neo-liberal–pragmatic discourse endorsed by Matanyah, Gadi, Yona, and Moshe from Achia farm reflects the main spatial perception of these farmers: the spatial modality of land – a space that serves as a means of production and an uncontaminated resource that has the potential to yield quality produce. As such, they place notions such as quality and profitability at the centre of their discourse and depoliticize their practices by removing them from geography in order to introduce their produce to the culinary fields in Israel and beyond. Importantly, the discourse of land – rather than soil or territory – marks the peak of the normalization process of the settlement project, which banalizes the agents of the occupation and renders them entrepreneurial actors in an ostensibly free market.

C o n c l u sion Using the lens of organic farming in the West Bank, we trace the ­political spatialization of the contemporary colonial-settler movement. As a category of practice, organic farming draws on three modes of ­political-cultural spatialization: intimate connection to place (soil), political entitlement (territory), and property management (land). While we distinguish analytically between these modalities, they often intersect in practice. These spatial modalities form different repertoires that allow settlers to activate the appropriate discourse and logic of action in multiple contexts. Har-Sinai farm and the ­martyrdom of the late Yair Har-Sinai feature within a narrative of redemption; the narrative of Avri Ran positions the organic project between territorial expansion and practical-commercial rationality; and Matanyah Freund’s economic enterprise invokes the pragmatic and instrumental logic of the land. Amid the challenging conditions of the semi-arid desert frontier and realities of the colonial settlement project, a set of oppositional farming philosophies and practices are cultivated by Jewish settlers who are organic farmers. Traditional and local agricultural practices – such as dryland farming (ba’al)65 – are “revived,” on the one hand, and hightechnology climate-controlled greenhouse and soilless agriculture are thriving, on the other hand. While traditional crops index the Biblicalsymbolic references of “grain, wine, oil, and cattle” (2 Chronicles 32:28) in Susya, other crops, such as northern-European berries cultivated in Tekoa, are packaged for global markets.66 In addition to the main crop cultivated by each one of these actors, the livestock in each modality

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can be seen as emblems of the different agricultural philosophies and eco-theological principles employed by them.67 In this regard, goats symbolize the connection to the soil and holding on to the land; ­free-range chickens, whose cultivation requires an area seven times larger than a conventional chicken coop, accommodates the logic of territorial expansion;68 and earthworms, which operate as “soil engineers” in any given land, embody placeless detachment from the specificities of local soil. The three spatial modalities discussed above also reveal the variegated colonial formations linking Jewish settlers and Palestinian inhabitants. For Dalia Har-Sinai, for example, the insistence on dryland farming and goat herding is concomitant with the principle of local authenticity and an ambivalent colonial imitation of the local Palestinian farmers. Avri Ran’s project, however, instantiates a classical violent colonial territorialization. The aggressive and confrontational position he takes vis-à-vis Palestinians reflects his interpretation of territory as defensible space and his view of “the Arabs” as mere “dust.” Finally, Matanyah Freund and Yona Tzoref, who are primarily interested in economic success and quality production, see no problem with employing Palestinian workers in their organic farms (and they describe their relationship with their Palestinian neighbours and ­workers as a form of “co-existence”). It should be noted that each of the actors described above is not a pure ideal type of place-making in a colonial context, but rather an actor who integrates and stresses different aspects of the triad “soilland-territory.” Together, they display the complexity of diverse positionalities, which make up the Jewish settler organic (sub)field in the West Bank. Furthermore, by demonstrating economic resilience in a highly competitive global market, the combined agricultural and spatial activities of these settler organic farmers invigorate the colonial settlement project at large in Palestine. As such, organic food grown in these places can be seen as an ethno-quality commodity that generates complementary layers of value: it strengthens the alleged timeless connection between “blood and soil,” it produces economic profit via the branding of organic quality, and it raises the value of national ownership by promoting agricultural development and progress. Sociologist Michael Feige argues that “the greatest challenge ever faced by the [Jewish] settlements in their entire existence is the ­challenge of normalization.”69 In the same vein, Lorenzo Veracini recognized the settler-colonizer’s drive for self-indigenizing as a desire

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for unproblematic normality.70 The analysis of the discourses and practices of Jewish settler organic farmers reveals the multiple workings of self-indigeneity and place-making – the imagination of a harmonic relationship between humans and places, whether this relationship is understood as cultivating the soil, benefiting from the fruit of the land, or claiming territorial ownership. All these approaches combined enable the settlers-turned-natives to imagine themselves as legitimate cultivators of their ancestral lands and as inseparable from “the soil of which they are born.”71 While soil comes to represent the imagined timeless connection between people and place, territory provides the political framework of sovereignty, and land seals ultimate normalization by concealing politics altogether. The polysemic and slippery term “organic” – which connotes both a return to pre-modern lifestyle72 as well as a strict set of regulated codes73 – is revealed as an effective instrument of place-making. It is used as a socio-political apparatus (for self-indigenization, territorial expansion, and capital accumulation); it serves as a platform to convey different cultural meanings (religiosity, environmentalism, and economic efficacy); and, respectively, it serves as the basis of the constitution of different spatial modalities – soil, territory, and land. Altogether, the representation of a colonized region as a place of “good taste” and of high-end ecological products banalizes altogether the occupation, ­normalizes its inherent violence, and strengthens the settlers’ claim for political privilege.74 The relational framing of the organic agricultural space exposes the connections between soil types, state land regulations, farming practices, eco-theological narratives, and economic interests, and it lays bare the relations between colonizers and colonialized subjects in the West Bank. Echoing Patrick Wolfe’s argument that agriculture is “a potent symbol of settler-colonial identity,”75 the case of Jewish organic farming in the West Bank demonstrates how different agrospatial constructions – such as soil, territory, and land – work concertedly as a powerful regime of placement and displacement. ACKNOWLEDG M ENT S

The authors are grateful to Hagar Kotef, Irus Braverman, Erez Tzfadia, Charlotte Glennie, Matan Kaminer, and Gadi Algazi for commenting on preliminary drafts of this article. We thank Nir Avieli, Azri Amram, Dafna Hirsch, Aeyal Gross, Jad Kadan, Vered Shimshi, Orphee Senouf Pilpoul, and Ido Fuchs for their useful suggestions. Special thanks are due to Dror

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Etkes and Kerem Navot for the illustrations and GIS analysis, and to Molly Mullin for her professional editorial comments and helpful remarks. This research was made possible thanks to generous funding by Gerda Henkel Foundation (“Cities Lost and Found: Ruins and Ruination in Israel/Palestine”).

NOTES   1 Sari Hanafi, “Spacio-cide: Colonial Politics, Invisibility, and Rezoning in Palestinian Territory,” Contemporary Arab Affairs 2, no. 1 (2009): 106–21; Ghazi Walid Falah, “Dynamics and Patterns of the Shrinking of Arab Lands in Palestine,” Political Geography 22, no. 2 (2003): 179–209.   2 Sara Roy, “Palestinian Society and Economy: The Continued Denial of Possibility,” Journal of Palestine Studies 30, no. 4 (2001): 5–20; Shir Hever, The Political Economy of Israel’s Occupation: Repression Beyond Exploitation (London: Pluto Press, 2010).   3 Stuart Elden, “Governmentality, Calculation, Territory,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25, no. 3 (2007): 562–80; Arjun Appadurai, “Sovereignty without Territoriality: Notes for a Postnational Geography,” in The Geography of Identity, edited by Patricia Yaeger, 40–58 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996).   4 Stuart Elden, “Land, Terrain, Territory,” Progress in Human Geography 34, no. 6 (2010): 799–817.   5 Michaela DeSoucey, Contested Tastes: Foie Gras and the Politics of Food (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).   6 Anselm Strauss and Juliet Corbin, eds., Grounded Theory in Practice (Thousand Oaks, ca: Sage, 1997).   7 Daniel Monterescu and Ariel Handel, “Terroir and Territory on the Colonial Frontier: Making New-Old World Wine in the Holy Land,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 62, no. 2 (2020): 222–61.   8 Rafi Grosglik, Globalizing Organic: Nationalism, Neoliberalism, and Alternative Food in Israel (Albany, n y: suny Press, 2021).   9 Uri Ram, The Globalization of Israel: McWorld in Tel Aviv, Jihad in Jerusalem (New York: Routledge, 2008); Oren Yiftachel, Ethnocracy: Land and Identity Politics in Israel/Palestine (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). 10 Grosglik, Globalizing Organic; Dror Etkes, Israeli Settler Agriculture as a Means of Land Takeover in the West Bank (Jerusalem: Kerem

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Navot Report, 2013) [in Hebrew]; Hagar Kotef, Colonizing Self; or, Home and Homelessness in Israel/Palestine (Durham, nc : Duke University Press, 2020). 11 Seshia Galvin Shaila, “Nature’s Market? A Review of Organic Certification,” Environment and Society 2, no. 1 (2011): 48–67; Douglass Warner Keith, “The Quality of Sustainability: Agroecological Partnerships and the Geographic Branding of California Winegrapes,” Journal of Rural Studies 23, no. 2 (2007): 142–55. 12 Anne Meneley, “Oleo-Signs and Quali-Signs: The Qualities of Olive Oil,” Ethnos 73, no. 3 (2008): 303–26. 13 Lauren Kepkiewicz and Bryan Dale, “Keeping ‘Our’ Land: Property, Agriculture, and Tensions between Indigenous and Settler Visions of Food Sovereignty in Canada,” Journal of Peasant Studies 46, no. 5 (2019): 983–1002; Sam Grey and Raj Patel, “Food Sovereignty as Decolonization: Some Contributions from Indigenous Movements to Food System and Development Politics,” Agriculture and Human Values 32, no. 3 (2015): 431–44. 14 For an analysis of Palestinian farming initiatives, see Anne Meneley, “Hope in the Ruins: Seeds, Plants, and Possibilities of Regeneration,” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 4, no. 1 (2020):158–72; Omar Tesdell, “Wild Wheat to Productive Drylands: Global Scientific Practice and the Agroecological Remaking of Palestine,” Geoforum 78 (2017): 43–51; Mikko Joronen, “Negotiating Colonial Violence: Spaces of Precarisation in Palestine,” Antipode 51, no. 3 (2019): 838–57. 15 Lorenzo Veracini, “What Can Settler Colonial Studies Offer to an Interpretation of the Conflict in Israel-Palestine?” Settler Colonial Studies 5, no. 3 (2015): 268–71. 16 Lorenzo Veracini, “The Other Shift: Settler Colonialism, Israel, and the Occupation,” Journal of Palestine Studies 42, no. 2 (2013): 26–42, 29. 17 See also Irus Braverman, “Nof Kdumim: Remaking the Ancient Landscape in East Jerusalem’s National Parks,” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 4, no. 1 (2019): 109–134. 18 See Zreik, this volume. 19 Oren Yiftachel, “Territory as the Kernel of the Nation: Space, Time, and Nationalism in Israel/Palestine,” Geopolitics 7, no. 2 (2002): 215–48; Ariel Handel, “Where, Where To, and When in the Occupied Territories: An Introduction to Geography of Disaster,” in The Power of Inclusive Exclusion: Anatomy of Israeli Rule in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, eds. Adi Ophir, Michal Givoni, and Sari Hanafi, 179–222 (New York: Zone Books, 2009).

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20 Baruch Kimmerling, ed., The Israeli State and Society: Boundaries and Frontiers (Albany, n y: su n y Press, 1989), 265–84. 21 Tamar Novick, “Milk & Honey: Technologies of Plenty in the Making of a Holy Land, 1880–1960,” PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2014; Boaz Neumann, Land and Desire in Early Zionism (Waltham, ma : Brandeis University Press, 2011). 22 Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet (Oakland, ca: University of California Press, 2017); Elden, “Land, Terrain, Territory.” 23 Grosglik, Globalizing Organic; Julie Guthman, Agrarian Dreams: The Paradox of Organic Farming in California (Oakland: University of California Press, 2014); Josée Johnston, Andrew Biro, and Norah MacKendrick, “Lost in the Supermarket: The Corporate-Organic Foodscape and the Struggle for Food Democracy,” Antipode 41, no. 3 (2009): 509–32. 24 Etkes, Israeli Settler Agriculture. 25 Appadurai, “Sovereignty without Territoriality,” 46–7. 26 Francisco Salazar Juan, Céline Granjou, Matthew Kearnes, Anna Krzywoszynska, and Manuel Tironi, Thinking with Soils: Material Politics and Social Theory (London: Bloomsbury, 2020); María Puig de la Bellacasa, “Making Time for Soil: Technoscientific Futurity and the Pace of Care,” Social Studies of Science 45, no. 5 (2015): 691–716. 27 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 289. 28 Bruno Latour, “Visualization and Cognition,” Knowledge and Society 6, no. 6 (1986): 1–40. 29 David Sack Robert, Human Territoriality: Its Theory and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Nicholas Blomley, “Law, Property, and the Geography of Violence: The Frontier, the Survey, and the Grid,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 93, no. 1 (2003): 121–41. 30 Puig de la Bellacasa, “Making Time for Soil.” 31 Stuart Elden, The Birth of Territory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 32 Veracini, “The Other Shift.” 33 Evelyn Barbara Balfour, The Living Soil (London: Faber and Faber, 1943). 34 Albert Howard, The Soil and Health: A Study of Organic Agriculture (New York: Devin-Adair, 1947). 35 Cf. Laura Sayre, “The Politics of Organic Farming: Populists, Evangelicals, and the Agriculture of the Middle,” Gastronomica 11, no. 2 (2011):

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38–47; Matthew Reed, “Fight the Future! How the Contemporary Campaigns of the u k Organic Movement have Arisen from Their Composting of the Past,” Sociologia Ruralis 41, no. 1 (2001): 131–45. 36 Etkes, Israeli Settler Agriculture. 37 Grosglik, Globalizing Organic. 38 Dalsheim, Joyce. Unsettling Gaza: Secular Liberalism, Radical Religion, and the Israeli Settlement Project (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 39 Btselem, “Under the Guise of Legality: Israel’s Declarations of State Land in the West Bank,” Btselem.org, 2012, https://www.btselem.org/­ publications/summaries/201203_under_the_guise_of_legality. 40 Irus Braverman, “The Tree Is the Enemy Soldier”: A Sociolegal Making of War Landscapes in the Occupied West Bank,” Law & Society Review 42, no. 3 (2008): 449–82; Ian Lustick, For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1988). 41 Erez Tzfadia, “Informal Outposts in the West Bank,” in Normalizing Occupation: The Politics of Everyday Life in the West Bank Settlements, ed. Ariel Handel, Marco Allegra, and Erez Maggor, 92–111 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017). 42 See Reicher, this volume. 43 See also Dalsheim, Unsettling Gaza. 44 Yair Har-Sinai, Kt’avim. Israel: Dalia Har-Sinai (in Hebrew, private ­publication, 2007), 43. 45 Mori Ram, “White but Not Quite: Normalizing Colonial Conquests through Spatial Mimicry,” Antipode 46, no. 3 (2014): 736–53; Braverman, “Nof Kdumim.” 46 Mark Neocleous, “Off the Map: On Violence and Cartography,” European Journal of Social Theory 6, no. 4 (2003), 412. 47 Aviv Lavie, “The Fear of the Hills,” Haaretz (7 April 2003) [in Hebrew] https://www.haaretz.co.il/1.874468. Accessed 31 August 2020. 48 Henk Van Houtum and Ton Van Naerssen, “Bordering, Ordering, and Othering,” Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie 93, no. 2 (2002): 125–36; Chiara Brambilla and Reece Jones, “Rethinking Borders, Violence, and Conflict: From Sovereign Power to Borderscapes as Sites of Struggles,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 38, no. 2 (2020): 287–305. 49 Beshara Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 50 Kotef, Colonizing Self; Handel, “Where, Where To.” 51 Grosglik, Globalizing Organic.

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52 Shlomo Fischer, “Radical Religious Zionism from the Collective to the Individual,” in Kabbalah and Contemporary Spiritual Revival, ed. Boaz Huss, 302 (Be’er Sheva: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, 2011); see also Tzfadia, “Informal Outposts.” 53 Michael Feige, Settling in the Hearts: Jewish Fundamentalism in the Occupied Territories (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009), 236–7. 54 Kotef, Colonizing Self. 55 Stuart Elden, Terror and Territory: The Spatial Extent of Sovereignty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); Neocleous, “Off the Map.” 56 On the co-production of colonialism and capitalism, see Onur Ulas Ince, Colonial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 57 Livnat Konopny-Decleve, “Colonial Mimicry,” Mafte’akh 13 (2018): 25–42 (in Hebrew). 58 Avri Ran, cited in Chen Kotes-Bar, “Are the Arabs Afraid of Me? They Adore Me!” nrg , 16 September 2005 (in Hebrew), https://www.­ makorrishon.co.il/nrg/online/1/ART/983/927.html. 59 Ariel Handel, Galit Rand, and Marco Allegra, “Wine-Washing: Colonization, Normalization, and the Geopolitics of Terroir in the West Bank’s Settlements,” Environment and Planning A 47, no. 6 (2015): 1351–67. 60 Lucien Karpik, Valuing the Unique: The Economics of Singularities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). 61  Gilad Freund, quoted in Yuval Heiman, “Judea and Samaria: An Organic Superpower,” nrg, 2 February 2010 (in Hebrew), https://www.­ makorrishon.co.il/nrg/online/54/ART2/048/094.html. 62 Germain Meulemans, “A Proletariat of Diggers: Worms as Engineers in Practices of Soil Construction,” paper presented at asa 15: Symbiotic Anthropologies: Theoretical Commensalities and Methodological Mutualisms, Exeter, u k, 2015. 63 Filippo Bertoni, “Soiling Mars: ‘To Boldly Grow Where No Plant Has Grown Before’?” in Thinking with Soils: Material Politics and Social Theory, edited by Juan Francisco Salazar, Céline Granjou, Matthew Kearnes, Anna Krzywoszynska, and Manuel Tironi, 107–22 (London: Bloomsbury, 2020). 64 Also known as “conventionalized organic,” Guthman, Agrarian Dreams. 65 For more on dryland farming (ba’al in Arabic), see: Omar Imseeh Tesdell “Territoriality and the Technics of Drylands Science in Palestine and

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North America,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 47, no. 3 (2015): 570–3. 66 On winemaking in the Jewish settlements, see McGonigle, this volume; Handel et al., “Wine-Washing.” 67 Cf. Natalia Gutkowski, “Bodies that Count: Administering Multispecies in Palestine/Israel’s Borderlands,” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 4, no. 1 (2020): 135–57. 68 Kotef, Colonizing Self. 69 Feige, Settling in the Hearts, 119. 70 Veracini, “Settler Colonial Studies.” 71 Elden, Birth of Territory, 51. 72 Melissa Caldwell, Dacha Idylls: Living Organically in Russia’s Countryside (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). 73 Guthman, Agrarian Dreams. 74 Cf. Ariel Handel, Marco Allegra, and Erez Maggor, eds., Normalizing Occupation: The Politics of Everyday Life in the West Bank Settlements (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017); Handel, Rand, and Allegra, “Wine-Washing”; Tzfadia, “Informal Outposts.” 75 Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006), 396.

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4 “We Came Back” Winemaking as Storied Performativity ian mcgonigle I knew … nothing about pruning, nothing about vineyards, nothing about wine. I knew this is the mission because this is coming back to the land of our fathers – and we came back. Amichai Ariel, Ariel Winery, Kiryat Arba Any history is a story about the unfolding state of the world told from the vantage point of a particular set of ideas about the world and its dynamics; in other words, there is no intrinsic difference between the terms “history” and “story,” as the former necessarily implies the latter. Mario Blaser1

In his basement boutique winery on the outskirts of Hebron, Amichai Ariel tells me that he sees his winemaking as part of a return to both the Biblical territory and the way of life of the Jewish patriarchs by citing specific passages of the Hebrew Bible: “Jacob the Patriarch was born here, and he grew up here. And, as it’s written in the Torah, in Genesis, 50–49, chapter 49, it says six phrases about wine, six phrases about grapes.” Indeed, in the Bible, Talmud, and Kabbalah, as well as in poetry and philosophy, “Eretz Israel” is narrated variously, as “a place to long for, to make pilgrimage to, or to die and be buried in.”2 With the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, many of these imaginaries of landscape and place could be actualized and made part of everyday life and experience. Landscapes, of course, both give body to and trigger emotions, offering a substrate upon which to

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imagine the rooting of human culture in nature and in tangible history. Planting vineyards, for example, can be experienced as a return not only to a Biblical territory but to an ancient way of life. With the Jewish settlement of historic Palestine, the stories and imaginations of the traditional Jewish texts came to life as a living culture and took form in communities that imagined themselves setting down roots in Eretz Israel.3 It is against this cultural and historical backdrop that Zionism fuelled the idea that an indigenous people was returning to its ancestral homeland.4 The planting of vines and the production of wine in this context similarly marked the land and its communities as Jewish and readily distinguished from Arab communities and their agriculture, since the Muslim-majority Palestinians typically observe the Islamic prohibition on drinking alcohol.5 In the contemporary West Bank, Palestinian communities are subjugated under unequal power relations and endure stark injustices. Meanwhile, Jewish settlers are legally protected citizens under Israeli law, who, even while living on land outside of official state borders, enjoy military protection and state resources. The Israeli army controls movement and patrols the roads, and Palestinians must deal with roadblocks, searches, or arrests. Palestinians in the West Bank thus live under Israeli military rule, with diminishing access to land and resources and no diplomatic solution on the horizon, since the Israeli political establishment continues to support settlement expansion. Attempts by Palestinians to resist, both non-violently and violently, are met with military suppression. These dynamics, in conjunction with antagonism from settlers, have perpetuated ongoing cycles of violence between Palestinians fighting for their rights, the Israeli military, and settlers who view the land as their Biblical inheritance. The West Bank has thus seen much violence in recent decades, and near-weekly terror attacks and clashes between Jewish settlers, the Israeli army, and Palestinians. For the religious settlers in the West Bank to defend their rights to – and meaningful belonging in – the territory, agriculture becomes a performance of the dignified cultivation of the Biblical land through Jewish use. In this fraught context, viticulture and winemaking hold particular weight as a realization of the redemptive process, and they become a performance of the prophesied return of the Jewish people to a Biblical way of life. Studies of Jewish peoplehood6 have focused on how the Jewish people or the Jewish nation are constructed discursively and imagined as both human subjects and as a historical object, inviting a reading

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of Jewish peoplehood not simply as a historical fact but also as a human practice and discourse that can be apprehended ethnographically. Moreover, in recent years, there has been a wave of scholarship that has characterized the emergence of religious nationalism in Israel.7 How something as abstract and diffuse as a religious-national identity is acted out concretely and narrated in the context of the everyday viticulture of the West Bank settlements is the focus of this chapter.

C o n s u mpt i o n - Id e n t ity-Ontology In addition to traditional religious practices, another way in which identity is fashioned and affirmed – both in Israel and around the world – is through the cultivation and consumption of local natural products. Food and drink, especially, can imbue social life with specific meanings, can mark blocks of time, and can intensify ritualized transitions of identity.8 In this regard, wine is an especially important social tool in many Jewish customs and rituals. Jews bless and imbibe wine ceremonially at many important religious occasions, life events, holidays, and celebrations. In fact, wine has a central symbolic role in weddings, in the brit mila (circumcision) of male babies, in every Jewish holiday, and at the beginning and end of Shabbat. In line with the teachings of the Kabbalah, religious Jews believe that wine has the special capacity to elevate carnal or mundane events, like conjugal union or eating, to a higher spiritual level. Moreover, the production of kosher wine requires that the winemaker be a Shabbat-observant Orthodox Jew and that the cultivation of grapes grown in the Land of Israel follows special laws (mitzvot), such as letting the land rest on the seventh year (shmita) and not taking fruit until the fourth year (orlah). Furthermore, only observant Orthodox Jews may be in contact with the wine and its vessels during production. For these reasons, wine production and consumption offer a window on the production and maintenance of the Jewish religious identities and boundaries that make the West Bank such a fiercely contested piece of real estate. There are at least two to four hundred9 wineries in Israel/Palestine in total. In the West Bank, in the areas that religious Jews call Judea and Samaria, which sit outside the internationally recognized sovereign territory of the State of Israel, almost every significant settlement community has its own boutique winery10 – or one close by. Among many scholars, and even among the Israeli public, there is much thought and debate about what to call this region: the West Bank,

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Judea and Samaria, Greater Israel, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, the contested territories, or, simply, Palestine. Perhaps the most expansive – although nonetheless divisive – term might be “the contested territories,” which avoids taking a position on the final political character of the area. The winemakers that this chapter describes are deeply invested in the Biblical names and, through their winemaking, assert the identity of the area as Judea and Samaria, the place of the Hebrew Bible. For these winemakers, and for many religious-nationalists, the character of the territory is singular, indisputable, and exclusive. There is no legitimate debate over the real nature of the land. There is an ontological conflict that pits the religious-nationalist experience of the enchanted holy lands of the Bible in conflict with any other definition or identity of the territory. We can understand this ontological conflict though the stories of the region’s winemakers who actively assert, narrate, and perform their connection to the Biblical landscape. If you drive north or south from Jerusalem on Route 60, you will see several roadside signs advertising local wineries and their visitor centres. These wineries are located on putative Biblical sites, and many explicitly reference their locations in the Biblical geography. Beit El Winery, for example, refers to the Biblical site where Jacob the Patriarch dreamt of angels ascending and descending a ladder to the heavens. Har Bracha Winery indexes the Mount of Blessing, which the People of Israel encountered when they first entered the Promised Land. And Shiloh Winery shares its name with the ancient city of Israel in three books of the Hebrew Bible. Wine production in these locations becomes a historical claim to the land, a claim about the land itself being Biblical territory, while also providing an opportunity for wine producers to perform – indeed enact – the story of return to the Biblical land in their daily life and professional vocation. Wineries and vineyards are both an infrastructural and symbolic part of community-building in the West Bank settlements,11 with wine and “indigenous grape varietals” being tools to both justify settlement and also to present an image of the settlers as sophisticated connoisseurs. An indigenous grape suggests, by association, an indigenous people, and the cultivation of ancient indigenous varietals can be understood as part of the wider performances and self-fashioning of indigeneity. Examining the role of wine in a religiously inflected narrative of redemption and the realization of Biblical prophecies, however, can help illuminate the ways in which identities are performed

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and narrated as part of everyday life and industry. In the context of the West Bank settlements, wine is also an ethnically charged signifier that affirms the theological undercurrents of Jewish settlement through the prophecies that it validates and, concomitantly, asserts the historical and political legitimacy of Jewish return. This proposition, however, needs to be situated in an anthropological framework in order to clarify my position and intentions vis-à-vis the ethnographic informants, the winemakers and the settlers of the West Bank. In the last decade or so, a conversation in anthropology has been taking place on the problem of cultural translation. Some have discussed this development in relation to the long-standing anthropological concern with incommensurability and have regarded the body of scholarship as an “ontological turn” in anthropology.12 Much of the origins of this conversation can be traced to the study of Amazonian cosmologies and their distinct ways of knowing and recognizing objects.13 The key take-home of the so-called ontological approach is that it suspends the normalizing and naturalistic metaphysics of secular Western scientific societies and their world views and opens up a space for engaging with “radical alterity.” By being more open to other systems of knowing and being in the world, an ontological approach invites an openness to less familiar ways of knowing and worlding, taking them seriously, to the point that indigenous beliefs and entities that may escape the apprehension of outsiders are regarded as real and existing with relative parity.14 Ontological anthropology is particularly suited to the study of controversies in which indigenous or alternative “ways of knowing and being” are in conflict with materialistic or naturalistic world views. Ontological conflicts “involve conflicting stories about ‘what is there’ and how they constitute realities in power-charged fields.”15 In Ecuador and Bolivia, for example, indigenous people pushed for the recognition of “pachamama (translated with much loss as mother nature) as a subject with rights” during struggles against neo-liberal state policies.16 Mario Blaser elaborates on the nature of this problem of incommensurability in such conflicts, saying “the generalized assumptions that we are all modern and that the cultural differences that exist are between perspectives on one single reality ‘out there’ rule out the possibility of multiple ontologies and what is properly an ontological conflict (i.e., a conflict between different realities).”17 He invites a rethinking of the problem, as “a foundationless foundational claim,” in which “ontology is a way of worlding, a form of enacting

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a reality.”18 With the key concept of “storied performativity” that he puts forth, “enactments or practices are storied, and stories are themselves enacted.”19 As a way of reading and understanding cultural conflicts, storied performativity emphasizes the connection between stories and practices and sidesteps the question of what exists or not by instead focusing on how worlds are narrated, rendered, intimately experienced, and phenomenally apprehended.20 This proposition offers a way out of the true/false binaries that would risk impugning one party and their claims and beliefs in a dispute. Blaser explains that “stories are not only or not mainly denotative (referring to something ‘out there’), nor are they fallacious renderings of real practices. Rather, they partake in the performance of that which they narrate.”21 The ethical import of this approach is that it opens up a space for listening to the stories of others and for engaging in their ways of worlding in a way that may be more “conducive to a coexistence based on recognizing conflicts rather than brushing them off as irrelevant or nonexistent.”22 It should be noted that this approach to the study of controversial topics is not to pre-emptively cede all political ground to indigenous claims, or to claims to authentic indigeneity, nor is it to simply characterize them as no more than idiosyncratic and fictional narratives. Rather, the effort is to reveal how and why such stories become the concrete blocks of community building, identity formation, and the meaningful practices of everyday life. Blaser, of course, developed his approach with attention to the cosmologies of indigenous subaltern populations in the American context who have a way of understanding themselves in the world “in spite of Europe.” The question that this chapter poses is how we can think about the lived realities and ontological commitments of religiousnationalist settlers who, in an inverted power relation, have the upper hand over the Palestinians but for whom the enchanted and holy character of the land is critical. The settlers are fashioning themselves as natives of the Biblical territory “in spite of Europe,” as well as in spite of the Palestinians. But the settlers are living “in spite of Europe” in a mode distinct from the indigenous Amerindians and their animistic cosmologies. Notwithstanding that Europe has yielded a number of primordialist ultranationalist movements, as well as evangelical political projects, with transatlantic, Asian, and sub-Saharan colonizing missions, Europe is now formally dominated by the secular naturalist ontology that conceptually (if not completely practically) separates religion from ordinary political life.23 And even while many religious

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West Bank settlers are themselves Jews with family historical roots in Europe, their religious nationalism is at ontological odds with Europe’s secular ontology. Their romantic inhabiting of the Biblical landscape is thus also out of step with international law, human-rights conventions, and even with the conception of the West Bank territory as legitimately disputed. This is one of the reasons why my informants’ claims to indigeneity are particularly fraught and often backfire when they are presented as a political resource in the international arena. Not only is their claim to “indigeneity” out of sync in terms of power relations (they are unquestionably the dominant ethno-religious group in control of the land), but it rests upon a privileging of Biblical logic, of messianic time and space, over and above a secular democratic theology or ethos that has come to define many Western nation-states in the twentieth century. It is with this conceptual approach in mind that I examine the stories and practices of the winemakers of the West Bank, engaging them and listening to them from an anthropological standpoint that seeks to understand what active worlding and identity formation their religious beliefs and stories achieve in the context of their winemaking. My intention is not to dispel their beliefs or stories as a choreographed strategy to justify their settlement, nor is it to buy wholeheartedly into the prophetic and messianic world view of the winemakers to provide a justification for their pursuits. Rather, my aim is explore precisely how and why the story of redemption and return is so powerfully nourished by the prophetic imagination, which strengthens a lived sense of settler indigeneity. Theoretically, this chapter considers whether an ontological anthropology that embraces theories of worlding and the pluriverse applies only to subaltern communities or if indeed religiously motivated settlers necessitate a rethink. This chapter emerges from approximately six months of fieldwork over the course of four trips to Israel between June 2017 and March 2020.

R e t u r n i n g t o the Land Of the fifteen settler-winemakers I interviewed and spent time with in the West Bank, all were male and between their thirties and sixties. All of the wineries are kosher-certified, and all fifteen winemakers are observant Orthodox Jews. The phenomenon of wineries in the West Bank is relatively new. Yoram Cohen, winemaker at Tanya Winery in

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Ofra, told me in an interview that his was the first winery established in Samaria, in 2002. Moreover, at least nine of the winemakers were first-generation settlers, four of whom were olim (immigrants or returnees to Israel); at least ten of the winemakers were first-generation agriculturalists. This combination of the winemakers’ gender with, for many, a relatively recent reconnection to the land confers an image of the settler-winemaker as a rugged pioneer, pushing boundaries both personal, historical, and territorial. For many, the process of becoming a winemaker seems to represent a radical departure from a more urban and non-agricultural way of life. Becoming a winemaker in these areas is part of an active push to refashion a native identity and live out a spiritual purpose. Jewish winemaking in the contested territories has a religious character that transcends the material world, strengthens religious identities, and fosters a sense of belonging and destiny. Winemaking thus becomes one of the ways of imagining a spiritual connection to a contested territory, which in turn supports Jewish claims to sovereignty over that territory. In this regard, winemaking becomes both a “storied” and “performed” part of a wider process of enacting and practising Jewish settlement. In the contested territories, the winemakers stressed that their winemaking is more than a commercial endeavour. Many of the winemakers told me in interviews that their motivations are connected to the stories and prophecies of the Bible. In fact, some winemakers see this process of returning to the ancient winemaking sites and ancient practices as part of the process of ge’ula, redemption. Erez Ben Saadon of Tura Winery in Rechelim tells me: “In my vineyard I found a coin, a very ancient coin with a Star of David” and “I feel when drinking Tura [wine], you get a wine whose roots are deep in the soil of its history here.” The landscape, vines, grapes, and wines are read and narrated by the winemakers as a realization of the prophecies, such that the image of vines yielding fruit entails strong religious sentiments of authentic belonging (figure 4.1).

R o o t i n g i n the Land Eliav Hillel fills the shoes of a veteran settler well. He tells me in an interview in the visitor centre of Kabir Winery in Elon Moreh that he has been living there for thirty-seven years (figures 4.2 and 4.3). After the peace agreement with Egypt, he was forced to leave the community

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Figure 4.1  Biblical prophecies pertaining to returning to winemaking.

of Yamit in the Sinai Peninsula, and he decided to come to Elon Moreh in 1992. He says that he has had two careers during this period: one as a computer programmer and, for the past ten years, as a winemaker. The walls of the visitor centre are plastered with wine awards, and Hillel tells me that the winery has won several prizes, which he modestly attributes to the excellent wine terroir of the Samaria mountains. The shiraz grape varietal, he believes, thrives particularly well here. He sees his work as a continuation of what his ancestors did in the same place: “This was a wine region for thousands of years. You can find in this place eight ancient wine presses and in all of Samaria there are hundreds of wine presses.” He elaborates on the purpose that underpins his profession as a winemaker: “When I’m making wine, it’s not only for money, it’s to fulfill the prophecy. Specifically, this area is very special, where the creation of the nation of Israel happened here. Abraham, the first time he came here, he came through

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Figure 4.2  Eliav Hillel poses in the barrel room of Kabir Winery in Elon Moreh.

Figure 4.3  The view of Kabir Winery vineyards from the winery restaurant’s balcony. Shechem (Nablus) can be seen in the background.

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this way from the Jordan Valley through Derech Ha’Avot, which means the fathers’ way. Abraham came through here and Jacob came through here. And the people of Israel when they came from Egypt for the first time, they entered through here to Mount of Ebal. So, I’m feeling this place is very important, and making wine is connecting me to my history.” When I ask Hillel about the prophecies, he smiles, cites Jeremiah and Amos (Figure 4.1), and tells me that he is happy to be part of the prophecy. This is the place, after all, where the nation of Israel was created, and winemaking is connecting him, personally, to that history. However, some winemakers are more emphatic about connecting the political project of the settling of the land of Judea and Samaria with the broader Zionist movement. Nir Lavi meets with me in his wood-panelled visitor centre and restaurant on Mount Gerizim, overlooking the city of Shechem (Nablus). Lavi, a native Israeli in his forties and a first-generation settler who lived overseas as a child, tells me what it means for him to be a settler: Zionism is all around the land. Zionism is a regular Israeli that lives in Tel Aviv, has an apartment that he bought, and he’s working there daily. He’s doing Zionism like I’m doing Zionism over here. So, let’s not get confused about it. It’s the same. Here we’re doing pioneer. Here we’re doing from scratch, things that are not made at all, have to be made from zero. A settler today is really putting his life in the area that is being settled. It starts from there. Because the Galil, to settle the Galil, or to settle the Negev, other parts in Israel, or to settle Judea and Samaria, it’s the same basically. Each area has its difficulties and its problems. But to overcome these things, is to settle the rural land, the place that is not settled yet. But it comes out from the heart. If the heart of the people, of the couple, of the individual, wants to come to new areas in Israel, areas that are untamed yet, areas with wilderness, and to overcome it, this is the spirit of settling. For Lavi, establishing a community and a winery in Samaria is also a G-d–inspired mission. He tells me that felt that G-d spoke to him and “as a gift” told him, “Go plant vineyards in the hills of Samaria.” It is this divine instruction that underpins his winemaking and his commitment to settling the land. One of his wines is named “Jozef,” in reference to the Biblical story that tells of Joseph’s bones being

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brought back from Egypt and being buried beside Shechem. A return to an ancestral homeland is thus at the centre of Lavi’s purpose. Further south, in Kiryat Arba, I meet with Eli Shiran of Shiran Winery. Shiran, who grew up in Jerusalem, tells me his family goes back at least nine generations in Israel. He is keen to remind me that Jews were making wine all throughout their history and that he is just returning to it: “From up Ramat HaGolan all the way down, you’ll see the places of winemaking, what we call in Hebrew gitot [wine presses]. You’ll see it all over the place. Our forefathers made wine all over Israel. If you go around Modi’in you’ll see it, if you go up north, if you go down south, this is what we grew on. Wine was very important to Jews all over the history. And I think we are just coming back to it, with a too long a break, but we’re coming back to it.” For the winemakers of the West Bank, winemaking is about a return not only to a place and the practices of that place, but this return is understood as the realization of a prophetic future that was promised over two thousand years ago. One of the ways this prophetic future is experienced in concrete terms is through connecting to the land. Many of the winemakers I met were keen to tell me that the communities they are actively building are not new; rather they are rebuilding their lost towns and cities. One of my trips took me south of Jerusalem on Route 60, past Hebron and into the Hebron mountains. I arrived at the settlement of Susya, in the area called Sfar HaMidbar, with a unique semi-arid microclimate that bridges the Judean desert and the Judean mountains. There, winemaker Elad Movshoviz, in his mid-thirties, following his service in the Israeli special forces, established a successful winery, named Drimia. Drimia is a tall white flower that rises from the stone and blossoms in the autumn. His mission, he says, is to return and fix what happened there in the past: “Because of hatred, the people of Israel were expelled from the land; there remained here a city, some years after the destruction of the temple, in Susya, really close to here; there, some lived for some more years; we are in fact returning to Israel, to this area, which was abandoned 2,000 years ago, and our purpose is to return and recreate the connection between the people in order to fix what happened and to honor those who left the land.” After our interview, Movshoviz takes me to visit the ancient ruins of Susya and shows me the abandoned synagogue and the ruins of the ancient buildings (figure 4.4). Although now a fenced archeological

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Figure 4.4  Elad Movshoviz (Drimia Winery) points out an abandoned synagogue in ancient Susya.

site under Israeli protection, for several decades prior the area was part of a controversial legal battle in the Israeli courts in which Palestinian villagers claimed the area as their own. When the settlers see these sites, however, it is these remnants of past Jewish communities that charge and animate their visions and ambitions for the region. They see themselves as recreating their ancient communities and agricultural practices. Indeed, several winemakers were quick to point out that wine­ making is not a novel addition to the landscape. Unlike earlier Zionist agricultural practices that attempted to mark the land as modern and settled, like the planting of pine trees,24 for example, the planting of vines is understood as a return to ancestral roots. Lior Nahum, the grandchild of Yemeni olim who worked as agriculturalists after settling in Israel, is the owner of Gat Shomron Winery in Karnei Shomron, where he has been living for forty years. His parents, he says, were one of the first families to come to settle Karnei Shomron. He explains the meaning of the winery’s name: “The name of our winery, Gat Shomron, is our connection to the place. Gat is the ancient place where wine was made, which is in the centre of the settlement.

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And Shomron, we are very connected to the ground and we have returned to our forefathers’ heritage.” The rebuilding of ancient cities, the establishment of wineries on ancient winepress sites like the one in Karnei Shomron, the sense of divine instruction, and the psychic life of the Biblical stories, combine to make settling these areas, especially when planting vines, a powerfully motivating life purpose. Yaacov Bris, the young manager of La Forêt Blanche Winery in Moshav Carmel, tells me that he feels a strong divine force brought him there to fulfill that purpose: “I felt after I joined this Israel in 2011, I felt all of a sudden like, like something is burning inside me, telling me that … it’s like my soul found a place. I can’t explain it … Every place that I’ve been I never felt that before. And here I feel that this is my place but from the soul. Not just physical, because I have a job, or because I have any other reason to be here. I really feel that it is my destiny, number one. And number two, the way I arrived here is purely animated by destiny. It’s like G-d took me from wherever I was, and brought me here and said, here, this is your place, and I actually feel it.” One way to understand these sentiments of purpose, connection, and attachment to the land, is by recognizing how the Biblical prophecies are a part of the daily consciousness and actions of the winemakers. More specifically, for the purpose of this chapter, we can attend to the ways that the prophecies are enacted as part of a “storied performance” of returning to and settling what the settlers see as the land of Judea and Samaria.

R e a l i z a t i o n o f Prophecy Shiloh Winery’s winemaker, Amichai Lourie, tells me in Americanaccented English that his work is deeply connected to the Biblical prophecies. Lourie, whose family made aliya from the United States when he was a young child, understands and experiences the daily practices of working in the vineyard as part of enacting the process of redemption: “Actually, when you’re planting a tree here in Israel, this is actually Mashiach. That means, Mashiach isn’t just a person, Mashiach is a process.” In his view, there is something exceptional about planting vines in Samaria. By actively helping to realize the ancient prophecies and bring about the Messianic era, his work is transformed from mundane labour in the dirt into a sacred, indeed pristine, act that is

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phenomenally experienced: “And you’ll see so many prophecies ­coming true. ‘Again you will plant vineyards in the hills of Samaria. The planters shall plant.’ It’s like, if you walk in the vineyards, when you plant a vineyard, when your hands are dirty with mud, you’re not dirty, you’re clean. You’re actually doing something that’s so unique. Can you imagine that a prophecy that was told two thousand years ago about planting grapes again in Israel and specifically in this area, and you’re actually doing it? And while you’re doing it, in your head, you hear the prophecy in your head, it’s amazing. It’s an amazing feeling.” Lourie is not the only winemaker who relayed these sentiments of working toward the realization of the prophecies by planting vines (such as Amos 9:14 or Jeremiah 31:5). Ari Pollack, the young American-born winemaker who made aliya after high school in the 2000s, is the owner of Tom Winery in the outpost Givat Arnon (near Itamar). He tells me: “And, you know, you read it and you get the chills. It’s amazing. And then you come back and he says, you’ll plant grapes again in the hills of the Samaria and here we’re all over here planting grapes and seeing the archaeology and seeing the wine presses and it’s uplifting and it’s magical. It is magical.” The sentiments and sense of direction that the winemakers reported to me must be understood in the broader frame of a collective project of settlement, and most winemakers were explicit about this. It is within this overarching framework of a narrative of return that the winemakers find purpose, meaning, and steadfast commitment. Without the valuating frame of historical return that is legitimated by Biblical exegesis, the production of wine would likely hold far less significance for the winemakers. Several of the winemakers mentioned, either in brief or extensively, the end goal of rebuilding the temple in Jerusalem (which was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE) and re-establishing ancient sacrificial practices.25 Wine, several told me, was sent to the temple during Biblical times for use by the priests in these sacrifices. Some of the winemakers expressed hope that they could produce kosher wine of sufficient quality and “purity” to be used for these sacrifices again in the future. One way in which this aspiration is directly indexed is the name of one of the top wines of La Forêt Blanche Winery, Ya’ar Levanon (figure 4.5), a reference to the First Temple of King Solomon and the winery’s ambition to again send wine to the temple for sacrificial purposes.

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Figure 4.5  A bottle of Ya’ar Levanon, the top wine of La Forêt Blanche Winery. Ya’ar Levanon is a reference to the First Temple of King Solomon.

Return Tura Winery is a boutique winery in the community of Rechelim, which was named in memory of Rachel Druk, a Shiloh resident who was killed in a terror attack in Tel Aviv.26 This, I discovered, was a common practice. Even tragic personal loss tends to be converted into motivation to settle the land and give meaning to settlement – in some cases, through winemaking. During my interview with Amichai Ariel, for example, the owner of Ariel Winery in Kiryat Arba, I learned that his thirteen-year-old daughter Hallel “was stabbed in the heart eight times” by a terrorist who entered her bedroom one summer morning in 2016. The next year, he tells me, the family produced a bottle of wine bearing her name (figure 4.6) and planted an important vineyard in her name. “There is something very special in this vineyard,” Ariel tells me. “The two kinds of vines that we planted are mentioned in our Talmud. In the Second Temple, these two types of vines, Gurdali and Hardali, were drunk here in Israel, and now we still drink it. It means after two thousand years, we came back.” Instead of deterring settlement or spurring withdrawal from the area, political violence and

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Figure 4.6  A bottle of wine from Ariel Winery, named in memory of Hallel Yaffa Ariel.

personal loss tend to bolster the settlers’ convictions and their commitment to living in the area and transforms loss into a divine mission to be understood in the wider frame of redemption. Another community named after a fallen resident is Givat Arnon, the location of Tom Winery. At Tura Winery, the owner is Erez Ben Saadon, a father of five and the son of an electrician and a nurse. He describes taking up agriculture like this: “To get up early in the morning, to go out to the field, to the area, to connect to the land … on one hand it is something spiritual; on the other hand, it is very romantic to connect so many things together. It connects what you do practically with your hands, what you learn in the beit midrash, and when you travel around the land, you connect to the earth, but in a different way.” He explains to me that the history of Jews in the area runs much deeper than the roots of the vines he has planted on Mount Gerizim: “We feel we are simply returning the vineyards and the grapes, and the roots of our vineyards run much deeper than us here. And we feel that we are really growing history here. We are trying to draw history out from the land, to try and be remembered, to suck it out of the land.”

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When I discuss with Ben Saadon his belief in the prophecies and the process of redemption, he has no doubt that we are seeing the process take place before our eyes: “There is no doubt that the Jews that returned to Israel, especially after the Holocaust, saw everything that is happening and developing here; everyone understood that this is the realization of the prophecies that are written in the Bible. There is no other way to look at it.” Here we can see that the Biblical prophecies are tightly entwined with the personal narratives, motivations, and goals of the wine­ makers. The prophecies of return are mobilized as explicit content in the motivations and world views of the winemakers of the West Bank, such that grapes and wine gain a special role in the storied performative of return and redemption. Wine, in this context, is both manifest proof of the process of redemption and part of the enactment and narration of return. Nir Lavi makes this point during our interview at Har Bracha Winery on Mount Gerizim. He says: “And we really are reviving the culture again. One of our slogans of the winery that I own, Har Bracha Winery, is ‘wine, land, and culture’: the wine, the land, and the culture that like a thread connects those two things together.” This slogan underscores wine’s special role in the storied performance of return to the land of Judea and Samaria (figure 4.7). Wine is imagined here as transcending the physical and the metaphysical, bridging the inanimate materiality of the land with the lively essence of the people, their history, and the imagined Messianic future. Another example of the explicit articulation of wine, place, and an indigenous identity is a Facebook post by Heart of Israel Wines, a winemarketing company that specializes in wines of Israel, with a particular focus on the West Bank (a previous name of the company was “West Bank Wines”) (figure 4.8). The post asserts that the legitimate basis of Jewish indigeneity in Judea and Samaria is not based on archeology, genetics, or an indisputable, disinterested science. Rather, it is the telling of the stories of place, longing, and belonging that underpin the generational chain of connection to the storied and performed Land of Israel. While previous studies have noted the recruitment of archeological science by state and non-state actors to stake claims to historical presence and legitimatize sovereignty in Israel/Palestine,27 and other studies have noted the commanding role of human population genetics in bolstering the imagination of natural peoplehood among populations, 28 I am

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Figure 4.7  A banner hanging over the bar at Har Bracha Winery’s visitor centre. “Wine, land, culture, and the connection between them” (Nir Lavi’s translation).

describing a different means of legitimating authentic indigenous identities. The performance of stories and the imaginations of belonging they propagate are a key facet of settler-indigeneity among the winemakers. There are two levels of significance to this phenomenon. First, the character of the settler as being indigenous is dependent upon both a narration of a return and a performance of indigeneity, for which winemaking provides a particularly powerful platform. Secondly, this storied-performance of “settler-indigeneity” is built on an unshakable ontological claim about the unitary Biblical character of the land. This ethnographic phenomenon deserves further attention, since it raises a question for ethnographic theory. The post of Heart of Israel Wines shows a photograph of a road sign for “Derech Ha’Avot” (Path of the Patriarchs), and with it the caption: “What makes the Jewish people indigenous to this land? It’s the fact that we have a story behind every rock, tree, and river in this Land … and we’ve been telling these stories for thousands of years, from generation to generation” (­figure 4.8). This emic conceptualization of what indigeneity means for Jews in the West Bank does not emerge unproblematically from a modern or naturalistic understanding of nativity by descent, of indigeneity by virtue of continuous historical presence, nor by asserting an exclusive historical relationship to the land. Rather, indigeneity is here

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Figure 4.8  Storied-performative indigeneity.

theorized as precisely the product of a living culture that entangles Biblical stories, the material substrate of the land (rocks, trees, rivers), and the living culture that performs the stories that weave the landscape into daily life and consciousness. If the question posed by this chapter is “What makes the Jewish people indigenous to this land?” one answer to the question is offered explicitly by Heart of Israel Wines: it is the telling of stories for thousands of years, from generation to generation, that renders indigeneity a lively and meaningful mode of being for Jews in the imagined Biblical landscape of Judea and Samaria.

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C o n c l u sion To write about the divine and scriptural justifications of the settlement of the contested territories is to risk blurring the line between critique and advocacy. In reading my presentation of the motivations of the winemakers and my interpretations of their justifications, one may get the impression that I am not aware of the broader conflict with the resident Palestinians, who themselves have strong motivations and justifications to be regarded an indigenous people with legitimate sovereign rights to the contested territories and who have suffered displacement and occupation as a consequence of Jewish settlement. On the contrary, the purpose of this chapter is not to advocate for the views of the winemakers, nor is it to delegitimize their beliefs and practices. Instead, the goal has been to better understand the ways in which the winemakers’ religious beliefs structure their lives and confer firm commitment of purpose to build communities and raise families in the hotly contested territories, precisely because of the high-stakes, ongoing conflict, the stark injustices, and the persistent dangers. What I have tried to show here is that if we are to understand some of the processes through which the winemakers have fashioned themselves into an indigenous people, with a deep history in the land, and with a divine purpose to settle it that is deeply felt and sincerely held, then we need to understand this process in an anthropologically sophisticated way. I have suggested here that if we think about these ethnographic phenomena within the framework of “storied performativity” developed by Blaser,29 perhaps we can recognize and help explain the potent role of the prophetic imagination in the lives of the settlers without either substantiating or impugning those claims. One of the ethical challenges of the theoretical paradigm of “storied performativity,” of course, is the resultant moral equivalence that it achieves by recognizing assertions and performances of indigeneity alongside global regimes such as international law, diplomacy, or human rights. This would perhaps be a surprising ramification of anthropological theory, since the ontological turn in anthropology arguably has its roots in a liberal impetus to deflate assumptions of Western or colonial superiority. In the context of the religious settlers, however, an ontological approach raises the status of prophecy and Biblical justifications vis-à-vis settlements in the West Bank. Another difference between investigation of settler-indigeneity in the West

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Bank and ontological discussions of other non-Western indigenous cultures is the fact that the prophecies of the Hebrew Bible are already part of the mainstream Western tradition, having been given much attention by many Jews and Christians around the world, and particularly Protestant evangelicals. The Hebrew Bible already holds great sway in geopolitics, especially when considering US-Israel r­elations and strong American Christian support for Israel,30 and notwithstanding the fact that the Biblical text itself does not possess a symmetrical degree of evidentiary weight or explicit factuality in international law or diplomacy. These are some of the ethical and political implications that must be weighed in this particular theorization of settler-indigeneity. Another consideration for the social study of religious subjects, of course, is the question of belief and the possibility for the ethnographer to sufficiently grasp or understand the meanings of religious experience as a relative outsider. In her study of evangelical Christians, Harding relays two claims often made to her by her informants. One is that “Born-again believers say that unbelievers cannot understand their faith.”31 The second is that “If you are seriously willing to listen to the gospel, you have begun to convert.”32 From an etic perspective, considering these propositions in tandem poses a problem of intelligibility, as well as a question of the politics of positionality. Without already beginning to convert to the community of belief under investigation, it is assumed one cannot understand its principles of faith. On the other hand, if one has already begun to understand the faith, one has already begun a process of conversion. Regardless of the truth or universality of these assertions of epistemic closedness, and recognizing the characteristic Christian emphasis on personal faith being perhaps less central to some of the more practical or ritually grounded halakha of Judaism, Harding’s “conditions of intelligibility” nonetheless invite a consideration of the possibility of an effective anthropology of religious experience. In relation to this problem, thinking with the frameworks of storied performativity may be helpful, by shifting the focus toward apprehending the world-building effects of subjective religious experience and by presenting them as part of a broader social-historical project, as, in this case, with settler-indigeneity and winemaking in the West Bank. A legitimate question is whether the winemakers think about prophecy and redemption on a daily basis, and the extent to which they are guided by a Biblical exegesis of the Prophets in the mundane routine

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of commercial viticulture. On this point, Yoram Cohen of Tanya Winery told me: “I have no doubt we are realizing Jeremiah’s vision … but if you live all the time under this tension, you lose the point.” This is to say that, as much as the Biblical prophecies seem to be an important theological frame for the pursuit of winemaking, it is not necessarily a daily mantra or a constant, conscious orientation of the winemakers. On the other hand, it is certainly the case that by performing the story of realizing ancient prophecies in the Holy Land, the winemakers are able to “hype” their brand and sell the story of redemption when marketing their wine, both in Israel and to overseas enthusiasts. This is not to say that the storied performance of redemption in the service of marketing renders it a less authentic or less spiritually sustaining reality, but rather the opposite. By both underpinning the winemakers’ personal motivations to settle the Biblical territory as well as by becoming a financially viable marketing platform to promulgate their story of redemption in an audience-oriented way, their winemaking transcends and integrates commerce, religion, and the practices of daily life. From an anthropological perspective, then, reading the winemakers’ assertions of belonging in the land as a “storied performance” of settling does two things: On the one hand, it raises the profile of discourses and practices that might ordinarily be regarded as “religious phenomena” that risk being sidelined in mainstream reporting on – and descriptions of – the settlement projects. Rather, this chapter has demonstrated just how powerfully the imagination of indigeneity is actualized in the everyday lives of the settler-winemakers. A storiedperformative reading of settler-indigeneity thus demands taking seriously the motivations, beliefs, convictions, and life purposes of a group of people that risk being dismissed as merely religious extremists or fanatics. On the other hand, thinking of storied performativity as one phenomenon through which settler-indigeneity is fashioned and actualized also makes it clear that any political negotiation of the future of these contested areas depends on a sophisticated understanding of the stories, practices, and concomitant beliefs and motivations of the settlers. These insights thus invite listening to, engaging with, and responding to these views and beliefs as one of many ways in which the settlement of the West Bank has become part of a storied performance of return. This, perhaps, would be essential for further dialogue across the region’s many divides, as indeed with other religious conflicts.

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Notes   1 Mario Blaser, “Ontological Conflicts and the Stories of Peoples in Spite of Europe: Toward a Conversation on Political Ontology,” Current Anthropology 54, no. 5 (2013): 548.   2 Eyal Ben-Ari and Yoram Bilu, Grasping Land: Space and Place in Contemporary Israeli Discourse and Experience (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 3.   3 Gideon Bar, “Reconstructing the Past: The Creation of Jewish Sacred Space in the State of Israel, 1948–1967,” Israel Studies 13, no. 3 (2008): 1–21; Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).   4 Nadia Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Ilan Troen and Carol Troen, “Indigeneity,” Israel Studies 24, no. 2 (2019): 17–32.   5 Ian McGonigle, “In Vino Veritas? Indigenous Wine and Indigenization in Israeli Settlements,” Anthropology Today 35, no. 4 (2019): 7–12; Daniel Monterescu, “Border Wines: Terroir across Contested Territory,” Gastronomica 17, no. 4 (2017): 127–40; Daniel Monterescu and Ariel Handel, “Liquid Indigeneity,” American Ethnologist 46, no. 3 (2019): 313–27; Daniel Monterescu and Ariel Handel, “Terroir and Territory on the Colonial Frontier: Making New-Old World Wine in the Holy Land,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 62, no. 2 (2020): 222–61; R. Vered, “Wine Is Enlisted into the Israeli-Palestinian Hummus Wars,” Ha’Aretz, 9 October 2018, https://www.haaretz.com/ israel-news/2018-10-09/ty-article-magazine/.premium/wine-is-enlistedinto-the-israeli-palestinian-hummus-wars/0000017f-e564-d62c-a1fffd7fc7e60000.   6 Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground; Nadia Abu El-Haj, The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Virginia R. Dominguez, People as Subject, People as Object: Selfhood and Peoplehood in Contemporary Israel (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); Harvey E. Goldberg, “Historical and Cultural Dimensions of Ethnic Phenomena in Israel,” in Studies in Israeli Ethnicity: After the Ingathering, edited by Alex Weingrod, 179–200 (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1985); Tamar Katriel, “Remaking Place: Cultural Production in Israeli Pioneer Settlement Museums,” in Grasping Land: Space and Place in

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Contemporary Israeli Discourse and Experience, edited by Eyal Ben-Ari and Yoram Bilu, 147–75 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997).   7 Moshe Hellinger, Isaac Hershkowitz, and Bernard Susser, Religious Zionism and the Settlement Project: Ideology, Politics, and Civil Disobedience (Albany, n y: su n y Press, 2018); Motti Inbari, Jewish Fundamentalism and the Temple Mount: Who Will Build the Third Temple?, su n y Series in Israeli Studies (Albany, ny : suny Press, 2009); Motti Inbari, Messianic Religious Zionism Confronts Israeli Territorial Compromises (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Hayim Katsman, “New Religious-Nationalist Trends among Jewish Settlers in the Halutza Sands,” International Journal of Religion 1, no. 1, special issue: Politics of Religious Dissent (2020); Hayim Katsman, “The Hyphen Cannot Hold: Contemporary Trends in Religious-Zionism,” Israel Studies Review 35, no. 2 (2020): 154–74; A. Ravitsky, Messianism, Zionism, and Jewish Religious Radicalism, translated by A. Swirsky and J. Chipman (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996).   8 Cheryl Chang and Ian McGonigle, “Kopi Culture: Consumption, Conservatism, and Cosmopolitanism amongst Singapore’s Millennials,” Asian Anthropology 19, no. 3 (2020): 213–31; Mary Douglas, “A Distinct Anthropological Perspective,” in Constructive Drinking: Perspectives on Drink from Anthropology, vol. 10 of Mary Douglas: Collected Works, 2nd ed., 3–15 (London and New York: Routledge, 2003); Haim Hazan, “Holding Time Still with Cups of Tea,” in Constructive Drinking: Perspectives on Drink from Anthropology, vol. 10 of Mary Douglas: Collected Works, 2nd ed., 205–19 (London and New York: Routledge, 2003); Ian V. McGonigle, “Khat: Chewing on a Bitter Controversy,” Anthropology Today 29, no. 4 (2013): 4–7; McGonigle, “In Vino Veritas?”; Yael Raviv, Falafel Nation: Cuisine and the Making of National Identity in Israel (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015).   9 “Israel’s Vineyards – From Strength to Strength,” accessed 12 January 2021, https://www.touristisrael.com/israel-vineyards/1336. 10 Most of the winemakers I spoke with consider “boutique wineries” to mean those that produce fewer than, or around, one hundred thousand bottles annually. Some of the wineries I visited exceed this amount but produce far less than the major commercial producers, whose annual ­output is in the range of millions of bottles. 11 A. Handel, G. Rand, and M. Allegra, “Wine-Washing: Colonization, Normalization, and the Geopolitics of Terroir in the West Bank’s Settlements,” Environment and Planning 47, no. 6 (2015): 1351–67; Monterescu, “Border Wines”; Monterescu and Handel, “Liquid Indigeneity”; Monterescu and Handel, “Terroir and Territory.”

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12 Blaser, “Ontological Conflicts”; Matei Candea, “Suspending Belief: Epoché in Animal Behavior Science,” American Anthropologist 115, no. 3 (2013): 423–36; Michael Carrithers, Matei Candea, Karen Sykes, Martin Holbraad, and Soumhya Venkatesan, “Ontology Is Just Another Word for Culture: Motion Tabled at the 2008 Meeting of the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory, University of Manchester,” Critique of Anthropology 30, no. 2 (2010): 152–200; Arturo Escobar, “The ‘Ontological Turn’ in Social Theory: A Commentary on ‘Human Geography without Scale,’ by Sallie Marston, John Paul Jones II, and Keith Woodward,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 2, no. 1 (2007): 106–11; Martin Holbraad, “Ontography and Alterity: Defining Anthropological Truth,” Social Analysis 53, no. 2 (2009): 80–93; Stephan Palmié, “Mixed Blessings and Sorrowful Mysteries: Second Thoughts about “Hybridity,” Current Anthropology 54, no. 4 (2013): 463–82; Michael W. Scott, “The Anthropology of Ontology (Religious Science?),” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19, no. 4 (2013): 859–72. 13 Tania Stolze Lima, “0 dois e seu múltiplo: reflexões sobre o perspectivismo em uma cosmologia tupi,” Mana 2, no. 2 (1996): 21–47; Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4, no. 3 (1998): 469–88; Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Exchanging Perspectives: The Transformation of Objects into Subjects in Amerindian Ontologies,” Common Knowledge 10, no. 3 (2004): 463–84; Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Cosmological Perspectivism in Amazonia and Elsewhere,” Masterclass Series 1 (Manchester: hau Network of Ethnographic Theory, 2012). 14 See also Blaser, “Ontological Conflicts”; Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Ian V. McGonigle, “Patenting Nature or Protecting Culture? Ethnopharmacology and Indigenous Intellectual Property Rights,” Journal of Law and the Biosciences 3, no.1 (2016): 217–26; Ian V. McGonigle, “Spirits and Molecules: Ethnopharmacology and Symmetrical Epistemological Pluralism,” Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 82, no. 1 (2017): 139–64. 15 Blaser, “Ontological Conflicts,” 548. 16 Ibid., 556. 17 Ibid., 548. 18 Ibid., 551. 19 Ibid., 552. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., 559.

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23 Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 24 Irus Braverman, Planted Flags: Trees, Land, and Law in Israel/Palestine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 25 On this topic, see Rachel Z. Feldman, “Jewish Theocracy at the Biblical Barbeque: The Role of Third Temple Activism and Sacrificial Reenactments in Shaping Self and State,” Contemporary Jewry, no. 40 (2020): 431–52; Gershom Gorenberg, The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Rafael Sagi, Messianic-Radicalism in The State of Israel, 22 November 2016, https://jphilosophy.biu.ac.il/en/node/1042. 26 Michael Feige, Settling in the Hearts: Jewish Fundamentalism in the Occupied Territories (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009), 212. 27 Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground. 28 Abu El-Haj, Genealogical Science; Ian McGonigle, Genomic Citizenship: The Molecularization of Identity in the Contemporary Middle East (Cambridge, ma: mi t Press, 2021). 29 Blaser, “Ontological Conflicts.” 30 In November 2020, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited the West Bank’s Psagot Winery in a stance against international boycotts of Israeli produce from the West Bank. 31 Susan Friend Harding, “Chapter One: Speaking Is Believing,” in The Book of Jerry Falwell (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 39. 32 Ibid., 57.

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5 Indigeneity after Destruction Religious Zionist Settlers in Halutza hayim katsman

On a hot summer day in August 2019, I met with a farmer from BneiNetzarim inside one of his many greenhouses. We sat on the sand, while his Thai workers picked tomatoes behind us. I asked what brought him, a devoutly religious person who previously studied Torah full-time in a yeshiva and worked as a sofer stam1 and mohel (circumcizer), to move to the Israeli desert and establish an agricultural business. The farmer said that it was his rabbi, Tzvi Thau, who told him that settling in the Halutza Sands is “the next national mission.” He proceeded to tell me about his first visit to the area: I was never here before, I didn’t know what it was, so I opened Google Maps to see what it was about. I saw fifty kilometres by fifty kilometres, these are firing zones, brother … We took a bus from Ariel and we got here to Dekel. Because everything was closed, that is where the road ended at the time. Uri Naamati [the former chairman of the Eshkol Regional Council, in which the settlements are located] met with us and said: “It will be seven kilometres from here.” It felt like kindergarten, someone drawing pictures in the sand. But suddenly one woman from our group took her shoes off on the sand and said, “We’ve come home.” I went back to Ariel and told my wife “Yalla, we’re going.” The farmer’s story epitomizes the paradox of the Halutza settlers, who attempt to create a sense of indigeneity and “coming home” in a place where they have never settled before. Settlers come to terms

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with this paradox in different ways, which I will analyze after describing the background behind the decision to establish three religious Zionist settlements. I will also examine the motivations behind the internal migration of the settlers themselves. Based on fieldwork carried out during 2019, and through the analysis of thirty-five in-depth interviews, this chapter traces the explicit and implicit efforts to feel at home in the remote, not-yet-settled desert. The paradox addressed in this chapter is not exclusive to settlers in the Halutza Sands, but rather has characterized Zionist immigrants to Palestine beginning in the late-nineteenth century and continuing after the establishment of the Israeli state in 1948. The notion of Zionist Jewish immigrants being non-indigenous to Palestine is a key theme in the scholarship that applies the settler-colonial framework to Israel/Palestine.2 Ilan Pappé describes early Zionist settlers’ feelings of estrangement and alienation from the local Palestinians and attributes the efforts to expel Palestinians and create a homogenous Jewish society to an attempt to create indigeneity in the homeland. This logic, he argues, persisted after the establishment of the state.3 The newly established State of Israel made strong efforts to “Judaize” Palestinian space physically, by establishing Jewish settlements, but also mentally, by giving places Hebrew names. This was a blatant attempt to claim the space as Jewish-controlled and symbolically rule out Palestinian return, but also forcefully to construct a sense of indigeneity for Jews, creating a feeling of walking in the Biblical homeland.4 After the 1967 war and the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the Jewish religious Zionist settlers of Gush Emunim – the religious nationalist movement that demanded the creation of Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories – faced a similar challenge. To justify the establishment of settlements in densely populated Palestinian areas and their opposition to a “two-state solution,” they framed their act of settlement as “returning home.” In some cases, these were places in which Jews have lived in recent history, like Kfar Etzion and Hebron, and, in other cases, these were places mentioned in the Bible, like Shilo and Beit Horon. However, Michael Feige distinguishes between this sort of “historic memory” to the concomitant use of “meta-historic” memory by Gush Emunim. The meta-historic memory understands settlement in the Land of Israel as a general fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham, rather than a return to specific places settled by Jews in the past. Therefore, the entire Land of Israel is a space that must be “redeemed” by Jewish settlement.5

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The religious Zionist settlers in the Halutza Sands continue to struggle with the Zionist challenge to create a sense of indigeneity in a space that was never settled before by Jews. There is no archeological evidence that Jews have ever settled in this area. Moreover, most of the settlers follow the ideology of Gush Emunim and view their settlement in metahistorical terms, as fulfilling the covenant between God and the People of Israel. However, no Palestinians are living in the land that they are settling, so there is no need to “redeem” it. Also, many of the settlers came to Halutza after facing the trauma of being evacuated from their homes in Gaza by the Israeli state. Therefore, these settlers felt the need to create a new sense of meaning and j­ustification for their decision to settle in the Halutza Sands. As I will show, the settlers in the three Halutza villages demonstrate ­different modes of indigenizing. Settlers of Naveh describe a process of spiritual indigenization through their interpretation of their acts of settlement as means to achieve religious purity and “virtuous influence.” In Bnei-Netzarim, the settlers emphasize the political aspects of indigenizing – primarily, overcoming the trauma of their evacuation from Gaza. In Shlomit, which is the least cohesive community of the three, there was no mode of indigenization shared by all settlers. However, I describe a common theme: the will to live in a place with no Arab population as a mode of indigenizing. Therefore, the analysis of this case contributes to the discussion of settler indigeneity in this volume on several levels. First, by adding to the views advocating for the erasure of the Green Line, arguing that efforts of colonization are present to this day not only in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, but also within the Israeli 1967 borders. I show that new settlers within the 1967 borders share similar efforts to construct indigeneity with West Bank settlers. Second, it demonstrates the difficulties of creating indigeneity in a place that was never settled by Jews. And finally, it highlights the unique emotional struggles of these settlers in their attempts to recreate a sense of indigeneity after being evacuated from their homes in the Gaza Strip.

In i t i a l Est a b lishment On 15 July 2001, Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon brought to the cabinet a governmental decision to establish five new settlements in the Halutza Sands. The Halutza Sands are an area of approximately 350 miles square (around 905 kilometres square), located near Israel’s southwest border with Egypt. The name Halutza was taken from the

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Arabic “Al-Khalasa,” a village originally established by the Nabateans in the fourth century bce as a station in the perfume route from Petra to the west. In the early-twentieth century, Bedouin from the Al-Azazame tribe resettled the abandoned village. The village was conquered by the Israeli forces in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, and was left abandoned afterward.6 Trying to erase the former Arab presence, Israelis named the place “Halutza,” which sounds similar to Al-Khalasa, and is Hebrew for “female pioneer.” The sands are bordered on the northeast by Route 222 between Mashabei Sade and Magen, on the southeast by Route 211 connecting Mashabei Sade and the Nitzana border crossing, on the west by the Egyptian border, and on the northwest by the Shalom settlements (figures 5.1 and 5.2). The sands are mostly unsettled (besides the three new settlements), and their main use is as military fire zones for the National Centre for Land Training located near Ze’elim and operated by the Israel Defense Forces (idf). The three settlements were planned in the northern part of the sands, just a few kilometres south of the Shalom settlements. The primary objective behind the Sharon’s government settlement decision was an attempt to prevent the evacuation of these lands as part of a future peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. The Halutza Sands are within the 1967 borders, but, due to their proximity to the Gaza Strip, the Israeli representatives at the Geneva Initiative negotiations intended them for a “land swap” in exchange for the settlement blocs in the West Bank.7 The blunt political incentive behind this decision raised opposition from several members of the Knesset (m k ), who wondered why the government did not allocate funds to strengthen the existing Bedouin desert dwellers. According to mk Taleb Al-Sana, this decision was not simply meant to prevent peace but rather was an attempt to “Judaize” space. Al-Sana mentioned the struggle of the Al-Azazme Bedouin tribe, which had requested permission to establish a permanent settlement in proximity to that area, specifically to resettle Al-Khalasa, which they were dispossessed from in the 1948 war. In the past, he said, the government objected to the establishment of an Arab settlement in the Halutza Sands for “security concerns,” claiming the area was a military “firing zone.” “When the government wants to establish a Jewish settlement, the firing zones are annulled immediately,” Al-Sana said bitterly.8 Government officials moved ahead with the planning and zoning of the settlements despite the political opposition, yet it was unclear who would eventually live there. Discussing this plan in his 2003 book,

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Figure 5.1  Location of the three Halutza settlements.

Figure 5.2  Location of the three Halutza settlements.

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Israeli geographer Elisha Efrat wrote that “there is a doubt if the Halutza Sands could provide the infrastructure for massive settlement … it seems that settlement in that area is a futile and pointless step.”9 Indeed, for years the government was not successful in attracting people to settle in the area. The solution came eventually only in 2005, just after Ariel Sharon completed the “disengagement plan,” his plan to evacuate eight thousand Jewish settlers who lived within the densely populated Palestinian Gaza Strip. Two of the uprooted communities reached an agreement with Sharon to be allowed to settle in the planned Halutza Sands settlements. The same people who were evacuated from their homes in Gaza by the decision of Ariel Sharon were also those who went on to make material his vision of settlement in the Halutza Sands. As we will see, the irony in this development did not go unnoticed. On the contrary, many residents take pride in this ironical historical development and see it as a sign of divine intervention. Today, there are hundreds of families living in three thriving religious communities in the Halutza Sands. While all three communities are religious Zionist, each has unique characteristics. The variation is a result of the different historical trajectories of their establishments, and they preserve their cultural differences through a vetting process for new members. The settlements also vary in their formal organizational structure: Naveh and Bnei-Netzarim were each established as a moshav,10 and Shlomit is officially a “community settlement” (Yishuv Kehilati).11

A r e t h e H a l u t z a Dwellers Settlers? The settlers in Halutza offer a unique perspective on settler claims to indigeneity, as these settlements are located within the 1967 borders. In contrast to the settlements in the West Bank, which had a specific political goal – taking over Palestinian land – the Halutza Sands are already controlled by Israel. This presented a challenge for some of the Halutza settlers, who have been accustomed to finding pride and a sense of purpose in where they choose to live. The following vignette illustrates this tension. In 2019, Gaza militants were sending incendiary kites and balloons over the Israeli fence, protesting Israel’s blockade of Gaza. These kites and balloons were mainly designed to set fires in Israeli fields, but some of them also carried messages to the Israeli citizens. On one of these balloons, a dual Hebrew-Arabic message was attached from

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“The Gaza Inflammatory Balloons Unit” and addressed to “The Settlers of the Gaza Envelope.”12 The letter threatened that, if the IDF did not cease murdering protesters on the border, they would use the balloons to kill the settlers and “burn the houses that you took from us.” Sara Kostiner, a Halutza settler from Bnei-Netzarim, posted a letter (figure 5.3) to the Eshkol Regional County’s Facebook group, and wrote: “Did you see? To the settlers of the Gaza Envelope. Nice. Does that mean that I am back to being a settler? Interesting. Turns out that we are all settlers, and they want to burn all of us.”13 To understand Sara’s point, we must recognize that “settlement” can translate as two different words in Hebrew. As noted by Joyce Dalsheim and Assaf Harel (2009, 230): “The verb hityashvut and the noun mityashev (settler) index secular settlement activities within the 1949 Armistice lines and carry a sense of moral legitimacy. The verb/noun hitnachlut and the noun mitnachel (settler) index Jewish settlement in the territories occupied by Israel after the 1967 war and connote moral illegitimacy.”14 Sara is arguing against a common political position of the Israeli left, which holds that the settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories are the main obstacle in the process of reaching a two-state solution for peace with the Palestinians. What Sara is saying is that the Palestinians (and Sara herself) do not buy in to that liberal Zionist distinction, and that Palestinians view all Israeli settlements as “­hitnachaluyot,” which must be destroyed. In other words, it doesn’t matter if the Jews settle within or outside the 1967 borders, because Palestinians are going to oppose the settlement violently anyway. While this is probably true, it is most likely that the person writing the message is not so versed in nuanced Hebrew distinctions, but rather that this is just a result of using “Google Translate” for the term (mustawtanat = settlements). This dual translation of the term “settlement” is not merely a linguistic matter, but rather influences these settlers’ identities and sense of meaning. Many of the Halutza settlers used to live in the West Bank or Gaza. Therefore, their move to Halutza changed their status from mitnachalim, who are (in their own eyes) fulfilling an important Zionist mission, to the benign mityashvim. While they are settlers living in a settlement, they do not enjoy the same political clout. However, some of them still believe that their settlement is fulfilling a national mission. That is why Sara was so proud about the letter from Gaza. The purpose of posting it was not only to make a point in the political discussion

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Figure 5.3  Letter from Gaza.

with the left. Sara took pride in the fact that she is once again considered a mitnachelet. In her eyes, the fact that Palestinians see her in a negative way reinforces her sense of meaning and indigeneity – as if there were no difference between her current home and the previous one. This is not the only way in which Halutza settlers strive to gain a sense of indigeneity. The fact that all these communities were just recently established enabled me to shed light on the reasoning behind the families’ decision to join them and witness their active attempts to indigenize in this unpopulated region. The families that were evacuated from Gaza had other viable options. Why, then, would a young

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family decide to move to a settlement that has not yet been built, in a remote area of the desert that is under a constant security threat?15 Some of the people I interviewed mentioned the affordability of houses as an important factor, although no one presented this as a primary consideration. Being raised in an education system that sanctifies the Land of Israel and sees the settlement as a national mission, they could not think of this decision as merely an individual matter. As a religious Zionist, you cannot just “go and live somewhere.” The place where you choose to live and build your house carries a moral weight. Almost all the community members I spoke with, in all settlements, emphasized the national significance of settling the area. Nevertheless, they differed on the precise nature of this significance. In the following sections, I will illustrate how the attempts of the Halutza settlers to indigenize their new settlements is expressed through three different modalities. In Bnei-Netzrim, indigeneity is related to restoring national unity. Suffering the trauma of evacuation from Gaza, which divided the Israeli society into two brutally opposed political camps, these settlers wanted to overcome their personal and national trauma by establishing a community that would serve the people of Israel as a united nation. As settlement and indigeneity are already perceived by them as intertwined, they have sought to reconnect to the Jewish national mission. In Naveh, we can see that indigeneity is linked to purity. Naveh is an explicit attempt to purify religion and establish a pious religious community from scratch. Their desire for purity is rooted in a mystical perception of the implications of living according to God’s word in the Land of Israel, strengthening their connection to the homeland. The third settlement, Shlomit, is different than the other two, as it was not established by a cohesive ideological group. However, I will demonstrate how settlers there are united in the desire to feel like settlers (mitnachalim), without the risks and fear of living close to Palestinians.

P u r i t y : N a v e h ’ s “ Vir tuous I nfluence” The settlement of Atzmona was initially established in 1979 in Sinai, as a protest against the Camp David accords.16 In 1982, the Israeli government evacuated Atzmona’s residents and resettled them in the Gaza Strip. In 2005, just before the evacuation of all Jewish settlements in Gaza (“Gush Katif”), some settlers from Atzmona reached a secret agreement with the government.17 According to the agreement,

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they were to evacuate their settlement peacefully and would be given the opportunity to re-establish their community in one of the intended settlements in the Halutza Sands.18 After the evacuation, there was a split within the community, and sixty-five families established a protest camp of tents near the southern city of Netivot and eventually agreed to settle in Shomriya, closer to Israel’s centre. A smaller group, of approximately thirty families, moved to temporary housing in Yated to prepare for their move to the future settlement nearby in Halutza. At the time, they say, there was nothing in Halutza. The road just came to an end, and all one could see was sand. Only after four years of intensive development was the settlement ready for the first families to move in. After Atzmona’s rabbi moved to Shomriya, the remaining community was in need of a spiritual leader. During the period in Yated, they asked Rabbi Mordechai (Motti) Hass, head of a religious institution in the West Bank settlement of Eli and a close disciple of Rabbi Tzvi Thau (head of the Har HaMor yeshiva in Jerusalem), to be the spiritual leader of their community. Rabbi Hass held a unique vision for the creation of an ideal ultra-religious Zionist community in line with Rabbi Kook’s theology, and he moved to Yated with a group of his followers from Eli with the intention of realizing it. Very soon, the original settlers from Atzmona stepped aside from the leadership (some left Naveh), and Rabbi Hass and his followers became the dominant figures in the community’s leadership. By 2019, Naveh was a moshav of approximately 130 households.19 There is a consensus among residents in the area that it is the most religiously conservative among the three settlements.20 Unlike most residents in the other settlements (and in the religious Zionist community in general), all of my male interviewees from Naveh undertook extensive religious studies in a yeshiva, at least into their late twenties. The majority studied in Rabbi Tzvi Thau’s conservative “institutions of the line” (Yeshivot HaKav).21 Although it is formally registered as a moshav, its economic structure is intended to support the residents’ Torah learning and therefore deviates from most settlements in which each farmer cultivates his own share of land. Here, the agricultural lands are not allocated to the residents, but rather are held and cultivated by a communal agricultural association.22 Naveh runs a network of religious educational institutions, most notably the Otzem Mechina (a pre-military preparatory institution).23 In addition, in Naveh, there are two religious elementary schools and two high

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schools (separate institutions for boys and girls), as well as an intensivestudy yeshiva for high-school graduates. All educational institutions are privately funded by the village, by tuition, and by private donations. and are therefore not subjected to the curriculum requirements of the ministry of education.24 The residents of Naveh are close followers of Rabbi Thau and adhere to his “statist” approach (see discussion on Bnei-Netzarim below), and the idea of settling in the Halutza Sands as part of a national mission was a common theme in their responses. The former minister of education, Rabbi Rafi Peretz, who was evacuated from Atzmona and is a current resident in Naveh, said in an interview: “I told Arik Sharon: ‘You expelled me from my house.’ He said: ‘I have a mission for you, for years now we are trying to settle the Halutza Sands and have been unsuccessful.’ I replied: ‘Mr. Prime Minister, I am going with you on this mission hand-in-hand.’”25 Nonetheless, despite the reference to themes of national unity, the significance of this settlement mission turned out to be in creating an ideal of religious purity. While residents of Naveh mentioned personal, social, and political motivations, they see their settlement first and foremost as a religious mission. To explain that point, they draw on the theological teachings of Rabbi Kook. Rabbi Kook’s Kabbalistic-mystical theology takes a dialectical view of history. A social struggle between two opposing world views creates a new synthesis that advances the people of Israel to the “next level” in the process of divine redemption. Colloquially, Kookists (i.e., ­followers of his disciple Rabbi Thau) will refer to this idea as “clarification” (berur), “sharpening” (khidud), or “ascending to the next level” (La’alot koma). The idea acknowledges the fathomless polarization between the sacred and the profane. The struggle between these two domains, they maintain, is just a veneer blurring the mystical truth that both opposites derive from the same divine unity, eventually to reveal itself. Applying this mystical framework to the Israeli reality, Kookists interpret religious Zionism as a synthesis resulting from the struggle between the nationalist-secular Zionism and the non-Zionist ultraOrthodox. However, they emphasize that there is a difference between themselves and mainstream religious Zionists. Their interpretation of religious Zionism is not a middle-ground hybrid identity that results in a compromise. On the contrary, for them, Jewish nationalism is rooted in a strong principled religious world view.26 Religious nationalism is not a benign pragmatic solution. They are nationalists because they are religious, and not despite their religion. To demonstrate that

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point, many of the settlers I interviewed referred to a quote by an ultraOrthodox (Haredi) rabbi, who stated that Rabbi Thau is “more Zionist than the Zionists and more Haredi than the Haredim.” The people of Naveh see the disengagement from Gaza not only as a trauma, but also as an opportunity. For them, the evacuation was necessary to enable the establishment of Naveh – a purification and materialization of the authentic religious Zionist vision. This idea came up in a conversation I had with a rabbi at Otzem, who explained to me what drew him to move across the country with his family to the newly established settlement: When I heard about this [idea to establish Naveh] I said “Wow! This is amazing!” Out of the rupture, from destruction – to the settlement of a new region. And this is even more challenging because it is in the desert, and it is hot, and the area was never settled before. To create a religious Zionist settlement that is more authentic, more original, more of a role model for how things should be – I want to be a part of that … But should we cooperate with the same regime to that extent?! It is Ariel Sharon who built everything here … On the contrary! Within the same vessels, the same state, we must stream new forces and push them to engage in settlement … During the year before the ­disengagement, Rabbi Thau gave lessons discussing this process, how [we should] comprehend it. This led to Halutza. At one point he pointed to the area, even before the disengagement … Among ourselves, we said that until the last moment we hope that nothing will happen, but if it will – that is a sign that we must ascend to the next level. In other words, as opposed to most settlers who merely aim to support the State of Israel by settling a necessary region or by merely re-establishing their settlement, the people in Naveh see themselves as avant-garde and the establishment of their settlement as a religious, pioneering mission. They see Halutza as the “next level” of synthesis between religion and nationalism. This is how they come to terms with their evacuation from Gaza. It is God pushing them to “clarify” and “sharpen” their synthesis of Judaism and Zionism. It is not enough to be a religious supporter of Zionism, but rather Zionism should be a national religious project. One resident explained to me how Naveh is the genuine realization of Rabbi Kook’s vision:

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Rabbi Kook saw Jewish settlement as one of the most crucial things … Why is it such a great thing? Because the whole point of the Return to Zion is the negation of the exile. In the exile, the Torah manifests itself only as the driver of the community and the family, and that is a great thing we did in the exile … In the return to Zion the Torah must be the driver not just of communal life, but of national life. As long as the Torah does not appear as the engine, the vitality of the Jewish people’s national existence in their homeland, the Torah does not reach its ideal, it is a partial appearance … That is a desecration of the name of God because it suggests that God is left out of the most central stage. This settler is explaining that building a settlement requires Jews to deal with public matters according to the way of the Torah. This could not happen when Jews lived in the diaspora, and therefore, now that Jews have a state of their own, it is time to advance to the next level. But how does dealing with public matters advance religious purity? One settler described to me how the economic dependence between the settlers, stemming from the administrative structure of the settlement of the moshav, contributes to the community’s ability to think about the place of religion in the public sphere: I think that what makes Naveh unique is that it is a group of ­people that have a strong desire to establish a village that truly ­follows the path of the Torah, of our “rabbis in Jerusalem,” Rabbi Thau, Har HaMor, etc. Can I tell you that everyone ­understands exactly what this means? Of course not. But it is a certain way, a trajectory that has in it a desire to build a full life, a practical life. We have businesses, we have agriculture … In a regular religious “community settlement” people are neighbours, they pray together, but the interconnection is limited. Once you have a shared economy, the interconnectedness among the ­people of the community is constantly present, because every decision made by a community member has a direct influence on pocket … When the economic situation is not good, it is time for ­clarifications [Berurim] – Who are we? What are we? What is the appropriate proportion between the agricultural business and the community? … Do we distribute revenues as dividends to ­families or do we balance the budget of the Talmud Torah ­[religious elementary school for boys]?

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When I pointed out that Naveh is also just a community and not the nation, one settler explained to me how a remote agricultural community can eventually have a national influence: This is something that also secular Zionism always knew. The initial cell that builds the nation is a settlement … Urban living is possible also in exile because someone else takes care of the infrastructure, the earthlier systems … You can see our influence first and foremost at the most practical level. We ­constantly draw interest. Not to mention the interest in other settlements in the area that is growing rapidly since we came. People in the regional council say this did not happen before we arrived. But on top of that, we also draw interest from ­secular, national figures. They say “This is a great project, it is amazing! We neglected this for twenty years! Greenhouses, six thousand dunams, and in such a place! We want to help, to contribute.” Tourist groups come here, religious, secular, even from abroad. It reminds them of things. On the one hand, it is nostalgic, but on the other hand, it is modern. Nice roads, nice houses, nice gardens. The establishment of the settlement is perceived as a prototype, preparing the religious-nationalist Jews to run the state in the future. It gives them experience in development and building infrastructure. However, the most important way that Naveh sees their influence on the broader Israeli society is the mystical “virtuous influence” (hashpa’a segulit): “There is also something that we call ‘virtuous influence.’ The fact that there are Jews engaged in settling the land, but out of the religious ideal of Mount Sinai, this has a great influence, a virtuous one, mystical. But this does not contradict the visible, practical influence.” Another couple from the settlement shared with me a somewhat ambivalent view of this idealist vision of religious purity. They see it as an important ideal, but at the same time narrow-minded and a potential cause for resentment. Residents who do not strictly adhere to the rules of purity dictated by the settlement’s leadership are shown the way out. The couple described to me how these high religious standards held by members of the settlement (and enforced by the leadership) sometimes lead to absurd situations. For example, they

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told me that, just the week before the interview, two secular couples in the process of getting closer to religion were supposed to visit their community for a Sabbath. However, no family would agree to host them because the women’s dresses did not meet their high standards of modesty. Surprised, I asked how they expect to influence broader populations in the Israeli society with this kind of attitude. The people of our settlement say that first, there must be one religious settlement, devout, pure, God-loving. This for itself, before I even turn outside, has the greatest influence, virtuous. That is what is called a virtue [Segula]. How much do I open myself to external influences? I will dictate the terms. Like the Haredi. Are you interested? Then come to study a course we offer. But come modestly. We will not host a woman wearing short sleeves … The spiritual world is much stronger than the material world. One Jew who studies the Torah quietly day and night is the most influential thing in the world. There is nothing superior to that. However, while they believe in the idea of devotion to religious values, they think that the people of Naveh might have taken it too far. For them, the high standards that the settlement is trying to enforce are too extreme, and therefore unrealistic in the long run. The wife says: I don’t mind that my daughter needs to wear a long skirt to school. I support that, I really do. I also don’t mind that they cannot watch movies … But this uptight attitude … It has reached a point that one girl can’t visit her friend’s house. That’s insane. There is ­hysteria … I am curious to see what will be here in ten years. Will it explode or split apart? In conclusion, the settlers of Naveh see their settlement primarily as a national mission. However, residents of Naveh emphasize the religious significance of this national mission. Their sense of indigeneity stems from their self-perception that Naveh is the ideal religious Zionist community. They intend to create a pure religious settlement that will serve as a role model for the entire Jewish society. Redemption of the land is not enough. It is what kind of settlement you create that ­matters. They find pride in the chance given to them to establish a settlement “from scratch.” They see it as a unique opportunity to create a society that adequately achieves their religious ideals. As opposed to the original sense of redemption held by Gush Emunim,

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in which the land is redeemed by Jewish settlement, settlers in Naveh expect that the establishment of an ideal religious Zionist community will have a mystical effect that will promote redemption.

U n i t y : “ F r o m Upr o o t i ng to Planting” i n   B n e i - N e t z arim Like Naveh, Bnei-Netzarim was also established because of a split within a community of evacuees from Gush Katif in the Gaza Strip. Netzarim was initially established in 1972 as a military base in the outskirts of Gaza City and was populated by temporary settlement groups. The Jewish enclave turned into a religious kibbutz in 1984 but was not able to attract many families willing to deal with the risk of living in the area. Finally, in the early 1990s, a group of students from Merkaz Harav yeshiva joined, and the kibbutz turned into a community settlement in 1992. After the Oslo Accords, Netzarim was completely isolated from the other Jewish settlements in Gaza, and travel to or from the settlement required an armoured military convoy.27 The settlers of Netzarim refused to negotiate with the government before the 2005 evacuation, hoping that the plan would not be executed. Consequently, they had no living arrangements after the evacuation and were placed temporarily in student housing in Ariel College in the West Bank. While at Ariel, a debate emerged within the community. Learning about the plans of their friends from Atzmona to establish new settlements in Halutza, some wanted to join them, while others preferred to stay at Ariel. This debate tore the community apart, and they decided to hold a vote, resulting in only a slight majority who wanted to move to Halutza. Therefore, the community decided to split (many members recall this decision as traumatic), allowing each household to decide individually if it wanted to stay at Ariel or move to Halutza and establish a new settlement. Unlike Naveh, the original settlers of Netzarim are still dominant in the community leadership, and they see themselves as a direct continuation of the original community in Gaza. Some residents told me that arguing for a certain policy because “that is how it was in Netzarim” is common in the settlement’s general assemblies. This idea of continuity is also indicated by the name of the settlement (“BneiNetzarim” is Hebrew for “children of Netzarim”). In 2019, out of forty-five families from Netzarim that initially moved to Yevul, only twenty-two were still living in Bnei-Netzarim.

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All in all, approximately 130 families live in the settlement.28 BneiNetzarim is also considered to be extremely religious, but it allows more heterogeneity than Naveh. All my male interviewees from the settlement went to “yeshivas of the line,” but only a few of them continued with their studies into their late twenties. The model in Bnei-Netzarim is closer to the original idea of the moshav, and many individuals cultivate their agricultural lands.29 My impression was that most men and women in Bnei-Netzarim are teachers, entrepreneurs, or college-educated professionals. A small minority receives a stipend for full-time Torah study. Similar to Naveh, Bnei-Netzarim operates several educational institutions. All these educational institutions are supported by the settlement, but also rely heavily on the money of Zionist donors.30 Unlike Naveh, however, in Bnei-Netzarim the gender-separated ­elementary schools are public. Therefore, they are required to accept religious students from all settlements in the regional council, and the curriculum is subjected to the requirements of the ministry of education.31 A private male-only religious high school with dormitories (Yeshiva-Tichonit) also operates in the settlement, in which students work in agriculture for half a day and study (mostly religious studies) for the rest of the day. As in Naveh, there is a yeshiva for high-school graduates. Other than the educational institutions, the settlement operates a guest house for conferences and workshops. Within the settlement, there is also a large regional health clinic, a privately owned small grocery store, a yoga studio, and some other small businesses. The establishment of all three settlements is a direct result of the evacuation of the Gaza Strip settlements in 2005. This was traumatic for the religious Zionist community for various reasons.32 First, the overwhelming majority of Gaza settlers were religious Zionists.33 Even those who were not personally affected by the decision had friends and families that lived in the settlements. Second, religious Zionists interpreted the disengagement as a political failure. They led the poli­ tical struggle but failed to gain the support of the broader Israeli community, which did not join their protests.34 Perhaps more importantly, though, was the theological crisis. Following Rabbi Kook, religious Zionists hold a strong “statist” ideology (Mamlachtiyut). They believe that the Israeli state has divine significance, being a materialization of God’s throne in the world. Therefore, any uprooting of Jewish settlements, which are a redemptive fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham, by the state itself, seemed incomprehensible.

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One prominent rabbi, Mordechai Eliyahu, even went as far as to predict that “it shall not come to pass.”35 During the struggle against the evacuation, the settlers’ leadership sought to prevent violence and keep the protests within legitimate bounds. They obeyed the military’s orders in most cases, and violence was rare and limited.36 Retrospectively, many religious Zionists pointed to the peaceful tactics as the cause of the struggle’s failure. As a response, they adopted a “post-statist” world view. The state is not intrinsically holy, they maintained, but rather holds only instrumental importance and only as long as it advances religious goals. Therefore, there is no religious imperative to abide by state laws, and further evacuation of settlements must be fought at all costs.37 This notion fuelled violence against police officers during the evacuation of Amona in 2006,38 and more recently in the phenomenon of the Hilltop Youth and “price tag” violent incidents.39 As followers of Rabbi Tzvi Thau, who was known for his opposition to direct confrontation with the state, most of my interviewees in Bnei-Netzarim rejected the “post-statist” trend.40 Rabbi Thau is considered to be one of the closest disciples of Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook and is the founder and president of the Har HaMor yeshiva in Jerusalem. Disciples of Thau are known for their ideological rigidity and strictly follow his leadership. This has given the institutions affiliated with his ideology the nickname “yeshivas of the line” (Yeshivot HaKav), suggesting that they all uncritically adhere to the same ideological line.41 During the struggle against the disengagement, Rabbi Thau called on followers not to break ties with the state, and he and his disciples refused to publicly support civil disobedience as a form of resistance.42 After the disengagement, Rabbi Thau believed that it was necessary to “settle in the hearts” of Israelis, in order to prevent future evacuations. Some interviewees told me that it was Rabbi Thau who personally encouraged them to move to Halutza, stating that it is “the new national mission.” The sense that the unity of the Jewish people must be maintained was a common theme among residents of Bnei-Netzarim. When I was talking about the 2005 events with an evacuee from Netzarim, she pointed out that I used the word “expulsion” (Gerush), which is a term used by religious Zionists, instead of “disengagement” (Hitnatkut), which is considered more value-neutral and used by the general Israeli population. Surprisingly, my interviewee said she herself prefers the word “disengagement.”

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I will tell you why I do not like the word “expulsion.” That is because that word means “something has been done to me.” Is that the problem? We? Are the eight thousand people that were evacuated really the problem?! … The biggest problem is that the People of Israel are amputating their own limb … The symbol that appeared on TV during the disengagement was a star of David, half blue and half orange, breaking apart – that is the problem!43 That is why we refused to fight, would not walk into that war plan they intended for us. This is what the struggle was truly about – Do the People of Israel despair? Are we a united nation? Is the Land of Israel part of our life or just real estate? That is the reason why we decided to ­establish a settlement here. We are not breaking the rules of the game or saying “tit for tat.” In the end, there is no us and them. It is all us. This woman sees her settlement in Bnei-Netzarim as an attempt to come to terms with the personal loss of her home and finds it helpful to view her new settlement as a mission with national significance. Her house in Halutza is merely a continuation of her lifelong devotion to the People of Israel and the settlement of the Land of Israel. While the disengagement was traumatic, settlers emphasized that they interpreted the disengagement as merely a temporary crisis (Mashber), and not an irreversible fracture (Shever). For some, the establishment of a new settlement also served to heal the personal trauma. One evacuee, who completed his military service shortly before the evacuation, described his feelings: “They broke us mentally. The way we were treated was inconsiderate, not empathetic, violent in many instances, and I think that somewhat cracked my faith in nationalism, partnership, mutual responsibility … Some of your friends still serve in the military, you meet your battalion commander in demonstrations … What’s going on here? My battalion commander is on one side and I’m on the other?!” When I asked if he felt that the crack was still there, he replied: Not as much today. It did not break. And that is actually the ­significant point after the expulsion. When we were temporarily living in a hotel in Jerusalem, me and a group of friends asked ourselves, “What now?” It was clear to us that we need a mission, to prevent a personal crisis, a much deeper crisis … Many friends

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told us we were crazy, turning the other cheek. “You were just evacuated, and now you are going to another pioneering mission?! Go live in the state’s centre, take advantage of the financial compensation you received” … The people that I came with from the Gush and went through the trauma knew how to direct it to creation and growth in the most abandoned place, at the end of the world. Both these quotes show that settlers of Bnei-Netzarim see a direct link between their evacuation from Netzarim and their decision to resettle in Bnei-Netzarim. Despite the traumatic events they experienced and the misery inflicted upon them by the state, they decided not to break ties with the state and the People of Israel. On the contrary, they see the establishment of a new settlement as a service to the People of Israel, demonstrating the unity among them. This is also what gives settlers in Bnei-Netzatrim the sense of indigeneity, even in a land that they are new to. Just like the meta-historical memory of Gush Emunim settlers, in this case as well the indigeneity is not in relation to a specific geographical space. It is the broader theologicalpolitical mission that connects them to the land. The idea that both in Netzarim and in Bnei-Netzarim they lived their lives in the service of the People of Israel allows them to see the new settlement as merely a continuation of the old one.

S h l o mit : “ O n e K h a n - Yunis I s Enough f o r a Lif e tim e” The third settlement, Shlomit, has quite a different character from Naveh and Bnei-Netzarim, and its establishment followed a unique trajectory. Shlomit was initially planned to be a small town, which would eventually settle five hundred families and serve as a social and commercial centre for the region.44 The state did not intentionally plan the settlement for a religious Zionist community.45 For a long time, the state was not able to find enough people (secular or religious) who would agree to settle this undeveloped area. Eventually, the initial Gar’in (settlement group) for Shlomit consisted mostly of graduates of the Otzem Mechina (religious pre-military preparatory institution), who were all young religious couples with one child or more. These first families moved to Shlomit only in 2011, after Naveh and BneiNetzarim were already established in their current locations.46

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In contrast to Naveh and Bnei-Netzarim, the people of Shlomit did not have a predetermined religious or symbolic vision for the settlement. Primarily, they were interested in living within a national religious community with like-minded neighbours. At first, residents hoped that secular Jews would also join the settlement, but none showed interest. Today the settlement is officially open to accepting couples from the entire range of the religious Zionist spectrum, but the majority of residents are affiliated with the more conservative Hardal (Hebrew acronym for “national-ultra-Orthodox”) subculture. In 2019, only seventy families lived in Shlomit. Due to the relatively low housing prices, it has been growing quickly, and only a few settlers moved into their permanent homes. Construction was visible all over the settlement. The members of the community in Shlomit are relatively younger than those in the neighbouring settlements (mostly under thirty-five) and consist of college-educated professionals. From a religious point of view, Shlomit is the most heterogeneous settlement among the three. All my interviewees continued their Torah studies after high school, but many of them also served in the military for the full three-year term.47 Being a “community settlement,” Shlomit does not possess any agricultural land, and its only source of revenue is donations and “community taxes” paid by residents. As a result, Shlomit lacked the means for independent development, and the public areas in the settlement were far less developed that those of neighbouring settlements. Many of the roads were not paved, and only a few streets had sidewalks. Shlomit’s synagogue was still in a temporary building and is the least impressive among the three settlements. There was one daycare in Shlomit, but older children are educated outside of the settlement, mostly in the Bnei-Netzarim elementary school. Residents of Shlomit expressed different motivations for their decision to move to the new community. Growing up in the religious Zionist community, they also viewed the settlement of the Land of Israel as a sacred ideal. Nonetheless, unlike Naveh and Bnei-Netzarim, Shlomit lacked a collective vision, and even though some residents were evacuees from Gaza, the evacuation did not seem to play a large role in their considerations. Therefore, I tried to understand why they chose Shlomit rather than some other place. The religious commandment of settling the land can be fulfilled anywhere in Israel. None of my interviewees had an ideological objection to settling in the West Bank, and some have even lived there or in Gaza settlements before moving to Shlomit. Why not settle in the West Bank, then?

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The first theme that came up was personal sacrifice. Many residents emphasized that living in Shlomit was a “mission” (shlikhut) and described the everyday hardships of living in the geographical periphery – being far from family, friends, and public services. In Shlomit, it is also common for people to describe the personal benefits of ­living in the area – low housing prices and a supportive community. However, they did not view their decision to move to Shlomit as one led only by individual interest, but rather because Shlomit is where they felt they were “needed” most. As one couple told me: “There are different kinds of religious commandments. There are commandments that there is no one else who can do. A commandment that at this point of time you can fulfill and others cannot is considered to be more valuable.” Another woman told me: “We wanted to live in a place that will be more meaningful, challenging.” However, unlike settlers in the other settlements, most residents in Shlomit described in detail the economic benefits of their decision, which led me to believe that they decided to move there primarily out of self-interest, while the “national mission” was secondary – important, but only a by-product of the initial personal motivation. Many of the residents in Shlomit used to live in West Bank and Gaza settlements, located within densely populated Palestinian areas. Interestingly, while they still support these settlements ideologically, some residents explicitly described their desire not to live among Arabs as an important consideration in their choice of Shlomit. One woman, who grew up in a small settlement near Hebron, and is married to an evacuee from Gush Katif, said: “We did not want to live in the territories. I am afraid of the Arabs.” When I said I found that hard to believe, since she lived there her entire life, she explained: “That is precisely the reason. Some things that used to be clear to me my entire life … after I became a mother, I said that I do not want to raise my children in this fear or have to look [Palestinians] in the eyes … you live with them! You take the fear with you wherever you go. My husband also said he doesn’t want to live somewhere he might be evacuated again. We wanted a place where we could build a home, but we did look for a meaningful place.” In some cases, this reasoning took a gendered form, as the husbands made a point of stating that they did not mind living in a West Bank settlement, but it was their wife who objected. One couple, both of whom did not grow up in settlements, said that they did consider l­iving in a settlement, but the wife could not bear living among Arabs: “We

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checked out some places, Har Bracha, for example. It’s in Samaria, not far from her parents. We passed through Hawara, and once she saw ‘our cousins’ [Palestinians], she said ‘No way!’” Another resident, whose wife was an evacuee from Gaza, described their considerations when choosing a place to live: “My wife told me ‘I will never again be a settler!’ Not in the Samarian mountains … She did not want to see Arabs nearby … poor woman, now because of work she has to meet them all the time at events … but she did not want to live across the Green Line. She did not want stones thrown at her. ‘One Khan-Yunis [a city in southern Gaza] is enough for a lifetime,’ she said. We did not know where to live, and then a friend told me about Halutza.” This theme is extremely interesting, because it points to the failure of Gush Emunim’s efforts to artificially create a sense of indigeneity for settlers in the West Bank. All the attempts to create new maps, to name places in Hebrew, to find archeological evidence of prior Jewish settlement, and other practices described in this volume, were not able to erase the existence of Palestinians as the true indigenous people of the land. In my interpretation, it is not merely the physical security threat that they fear, but, in a deeper sense, the existence of Arabs is a constant reminder that they are perceived as foreign colonizers. Therefore, the opportunity to settle in Halutza, where there are no Palestinians around, provides them with a sense of true indigeneity.

C o n c l u sion This chapter follows the constant struggle of settlers to create a sense of indigeneity in a new land. I showed how indigeneity is not only connected to a physical space, but also to ideas. The settlers in Halutza face several unique challenges. First, unlike settlements in the West Bank, where Jews claim to have lived in the near or distant past, there is no evidence that there was ever a Jewish settlement in Halutza. Second, the settlements in Halutza were established for communities that suffered the loss of their homes as part of the Gaza evacuation. The settlers needed to actively find ways to recreate their sense of indigeneity after the destruction of their original communities. The different modalities of indigeneity and indigenizing exemplified in these three communities, each struggling to find its unique sense of meaning, broaden our understanding of what indigeneity is, and where and how it is constructed. In Naveh, settlers understood the

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establishment of their settlement as an advancement to a higher religious level, fulfilling the authentic Kookist vision of a pure religious Zionist settlement. In Bnei-Netzarim, settlers aimed to rectify their commitment to the state and maintain the unity of the People of Israel. They considered that their settlement was fulfilling a national mission, similar to the way they understood their previous settlement in Netzarim. In Shlomit, settlers mentioned their reluctance to live near Palestinians as a primary consideration for settling in Halutza rather than the West Bank. The unique circumstances in which these settlements were established, as well as their organizational structure, produce distinct senses of indigeneity that cannot be found among settlers in the West Bank. This article also provides some trajectories for further research, which I hope will be picked up and elaborated on. Most importantly, these new forms of religious Zionist settlement offer more evidence of the mental erasure of the Green Line and the growing acceptance of a one-state reality between the river and the sea. N ot e s  1 A sofer stam is a Jewish scribe who can transcribe Torah scrolls, tefillin (phylacteries), and mezuzot.   2 Lorenzo Veraclini, “What Can Settler Colonial Studies Offer to an Interpretation of the Conflict in Israel-Palestine?,” Settler Colonial Studies 5, no. 4 (2015): 268–71.   3 Ilan Pappé, “Shtetl Colonialism: First and Last Impressions of Indigeneity by Colonised Colonisers,” Settler Colonial Studies 2, no. 1 (2012): 39–58.   4 Meron Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Noga Kadman, Erased from Space and Consciousness: Israel and the Depopulated Palestinian Villages of 1948 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015).   5 Michael Feige, One Space, Two Places: Gush Emunim, Peace Now and the Construction of Israeli Space (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2002) (in Hebrew).   6 Walid Khalidi, All that Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 (Washington, dc : Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992), 75–6.

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  7 The Palestinians rejected this proposal during the negotiations, arguing that it is desert land. The final Geneva Initiative document does not include the Halutza Sands in the areas intended for land swap. Menacem Klein, The Geneva Initiative: An Inside View (Jerusalem: Carmel Press, 2006) (in Hebrew).   8 Knesset protocol, 18 July 2001, http://knesset.gov.il/tql/knesset_new/­ knesset15/HTML_28_03_2012_09-20-03-AM/20010718@225-01 [email protected]   9 Elisha Efrat, National Planning and Development in Israel in the 21st Century (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University Press, 2003), 99 (in Hebrew). 10 Originally, the idea of moshav was conceived in the 1920s as a ­smallholders’ co-operative community. In accordance with the SocialistZionist ideology, the moshav was based on communal values. The agricultural land is collectively owned by the moshav, but each household is considered an independent economic unit and entitled to an equal share of the land, which it is expected to cultivate. Due to government economic ­policies and a general decline in agricultural income, today residents in moshavim hold various occupations, and most of them lease their agricultural land to larger farms. Since the residents of the moshav received the land in order to cultivate it, leasing it is formally illegal. However, it is a known secret and in most cases the state turns a blind eye toward this ­violation, as long as the land is not used for purposes other than agriculture. 11 A “community settlement” is a newer type of settlement, which was ­conceived and developed under the right-wing “Herut” government after 1977 in order to settle the West Bank. As a result, the community settlement is based on liberal-individualistic values and usually has no agricultural lands and no collective ownership. Nonetheless, despite the different economic models, both community types have a general assembly, an executive board, and committees that enable them to democratically reach collective decisions and preserve the sense of a community. Perhaps most importantly, these communities have an “absorption committee” (va’adat klita), which is intended to preserve social homogeneity within the community by vetting potential members. David Newman, “The Development of the Yishuv Kehilati in Judea and Samaria: Political Process and Settlement Form,” Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie 75, no. 2 (1984): 140–50. 12 A term used to describe the populated areas of Israel that are within 7 kilometres (4.3 miles) of the Gaza border. 13 https://www.facebook.com/sarale118/posts/2230965487220491.

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14 Joyce Dalsheim and Assaf Harel, “Representing Settlers,” Review of Middle East Studies 43, no. 2 (2009): 230. 15 Due to the proximity to the Gaza Strip and Egyptian border, there is a constant threat of rockets and terrorist infiltration. 16 On 17 September 1978, Israel and Egypt signed a peace agreement. According to the agreement, Israel was to withdraw its troops and ­evacuate all settlements from the Sinai Peninsula, which it had occupied since the 1967 war. 17 This is a sensitive issue among the evacuees, and I have heard various ­stories about it. Some people deny that an agreement was reached before the evacuation. 18 Some people told me that it was the farmers from the settlement who pushed to accept this agreement, because they already had agricultural land in the area. 19 Eventually, the plan is for the settlement to include 350 households. 20 Some even say it is the most conservative religious Zionist community nationwide. 21 “The line” refers to a specific tone within the Hardal subculture, which follows Rabbi Thau. The most notable institution of “the line” is Thau’s Har HaMor Yeshiva, and the yeshivas in Mitzpe Ramon and Hebron are also affiliated with “the line.” The name comes from the ideological rigidness in the institutions, which requires students to adhere to Rabbi Thau’s ideological “line.” 22 The settlement’s collective agricultural association employs workers, some of them from the settlement, to manage the collective property and cultivate the lands. This arrangement does not necessarily stem from an egalitarian world view but is rather to enable most residents to focus on the study and teaching of the Torah. 23 Otzem was initially established in Atzmona by Israel’s former minister of education, Rabbi Rafi Peretz, who currently lives in Naveh. The Mechina is considered prestigious among religious Zionist circles and draws religious youngsters who want to strengthen their religious identity before enlistment. 24 In 2011, 2013, and 2016, math proficiency tests, the boys’ elementary school was ranked in the lowest decile. 25 Interview with Rafi Peretz, Ma’ariv, https://www.maariv.co.il/elections2019/ news/Article-689490. 26 Charles Liebman and Eliezer Don-Yiḥya, Civil Religion in Israel: Traditional Judaism and Political Culture in the Jewish State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).

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27 On 4 May 1994, Israel and the Palestinians signed an agreement in which Israel would reorganize its military presence in the Gaza Strip. The new arrangement limited the Israeli military’s ability to guarantee the security of drivers on the road connecting Netzarim to the other Gaza settlements. As a result, if they wanted to visit other Gaza settlements, they had to leave the Gaza Strip completely and enter it from the other border crossings. 28 Like Naveh, Bnei-Netzarim is planning to include 350 households. 29 The settlement’s lands that were not claimed by individual farmers are leased to large agriculture companies by the settlement’s collective ­agricultural association, which generates revenues for the community. Today, individuals who want to join the settlement and claim agricultural land must go through a trial period. 30 The settlement does not accept donations from Christian organizations. A member of the community told me that once they even insisted on returning a significant donation, after retroactively finding out that it was from a Christian source. 31 This fact has caused extreme tensions between the settlers of Naveh and Bnei-Netzarim, which eventually led to Naveh’s decision to establish their own private girls’ elementary school, in which they can enforce their ­religious standards. This move stirred feelings of resentment, and residents of Bnei-Netzarim have told me that they felt personally insulted by the fact that people in Naveh do not consider them religious enough. 32 Motti Inbari, Messianic Religious Zionism Confronts Israeli Territorial Compromises (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 33 Out of twenty-one settlements, only five permitted driving on the Sabbath within the settlement. 34 Eitan Alimi, Between Politics of Connection and Disengagement (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2013) (in Hebrew). 35 Moshe Hellinger, Isaac Hershkowitz, and Bernard Susser, Religious Zionism and the Settlement Project: Ideology, Politics, and Civil Disobedience (Albany, n y: su n y Press, 2018), 202. 36 Anat Roth, Not at Any Cost: From Gush Katif to Amona: The Story Behind the Struggle over the Land of Israel (Tel-Aviv: Yediot Aharonot, 2014) (in Hebrew). 37 Hellinger, Hershowitz, and Susser, Religious Zionism; Asaf Harel, “Beyond Gush Emunim: On Contemporary Forms of Messianism among Religiously Motivated Settlers in the West Bank,” in Normalizing Occupation: The Politics of Everyday Life in the West Bank Settlements, edited by Ariel Handel, Marco Allegra, and Erez Maggor, 142–62 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017).

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38 Alimi, Between Politics; Roth, Not at Any Cost. 39 Hellinger, Hershowitz, and Susser, Religious Zionism. 40 Since then, Rabbi Thau has changed his attitude and now expresses a ­militant opposition to the state, though his objection focuses mostly on gender issues and “postmodern” influence. 41 Other than the Har HaMor yeshiva, other notable institutions identified with “the line” are the yeshiva in Mitzpe Ramon, the yeshiva in Eilat, and the pre-military academies (Mechinot) in Eli and Naveh. 42 Rabbi Thau and rabbis identified with his “line” did support “passive ­disobedience” on an individual basis, in which soldiers will say they ­cannot carry out the task and ask to be assigned to other missions. 43 During the protests, orange was the colour identified with protesters against the disengagement, and blue was identified with supporters. 44 There are discussions of extending the settlement to fifteen hundred ­families, but those plans have not yet been submitted. 45 A resident told me that the settlement was initially planned by an architect who used an urban neighbourhood as a model. Therefore, residents ­complain that the village zoning lacks plans for sufficient buildings for community gatherings, education (due to the high number of children), and synagogues. 46 https://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-4116115,00.html. 47 In the Hesder yeshivas, most students defer their service and enlist for a shortened term of sixteen months. In the “yeshivas of the line,” it is ­common for students to defer even longer and enlist only for six to nine months.

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6 Negotiating Indigeneity in Hebron Criminality, Tourism, and Liberal Settler Colonialism emily schneider

Hebron is often referred to as a microcosm of Israel/Palestine due to the ways the city amplifies underlying elements of the occupation.1 Whereas most settlements can be found on hilltops, barricaded by gates, fences, and walls, Hebron is the only Israeli settlement in which Jewish Israelis live within a large Palestinian city. This proximity between Israeli settlers and Palestinians ensures a heavy military presence in the region, which creates a congested terrain of checkpoints, roadblocks, and segregated roads. Given these dynamics, the city serves as a unique tourist destination, where Israelis and Palestinians make competing claims about the region’s history and politics. With over one million visitors touring Hebron in 2020, Hebron’s streets are often filled with a steady stream of both right-wing religious pilgrims and left-wing anti-occupation activists.2 On their respective tours, each group encounters radically different narratives of the region. For many religious and right-wing travellers, tours focus on key Biblical sites that symbolize Jewish indigeneity to the region, such as the Tomb of the Patriarchs, where Jewish teachings hold that Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebecca, Jacob, and Leah are buried. For left-wing, largely secular, tourists, Hebron provides an opportunity for travellers to confront the infrastructure of Israel’s occupation and to witness tensions between Jewish settlers, the Israeli army, and local Palestinians. Collisions between left- and right-wing tourists in Hebron are inevitable, with both anti-occupation and settler tours centring their

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itineraries around sites located within the same two-square-kilometre section of the city. Activists from both groups have sought to capitalize on this overlap with targeted interruptions, signs, and various impromptu methods to challenge opposing tours’ stances on Israeli colonialism and indigeneity. The settler community, for example, has installed billboards that detail the ancient history of Jewish life in Hebron along the routes of left-wing tours. Similarly, Palestinians have covered the stone walls of Hebron’s old city with graffiti condemning Israeli apartheid. In this context, where visitors are constantly confronted with conflicting ideologies, tourists are bombarded by narratives of indigeneity, settler colonialism, and human rights that both clash and reinforce each other. Anti-occupation tours to Hebron provide an opportunity to examine how settlers and Palestinians communicate their narratives of indi­ geneity, as well as how these narratives are incorporated into tourists’ existing ideological frameworks. In particular, they offer an illuminating lens on the ways that liberal Zionists make sense of their own relationships to Jewish indigeneity and settler colonialism in Israel/ Palestine. In order to investigate the position of liberal Zionists within the settler-indigenous binary, this chapter focuses on the experiences of young non-Israeli Jews who attend anti-occupation tours to the West Bank. This population of mostly American Jews is overwhelmingly white and of Ashkenazi descent, relatively secular, liberal, and generally from middle- or upper-class backgrounds. I focus on this population of predominately American Jews as a prism to interrogate liberal Zionism more broadly, due to the ways many Jewish-Americans extol values of human rights and universalism, while benefiting from transnational conceptions of Zionism that prioritize ancient Jewish indigeneity to the land. Even though American Jews hold relatively weak territorial ties to Israel/Palestine, they are systematically socialized to identify as members of a diaspora that centres Israel as their homeland. While political solidarity with Palestinians is growing within the Jewish-American community, especially among younger American Jews, most research suggests that the overwhelming majority of Jewish Americans hold favourable views toward Israel. A 2020 Pew Research Center study, for example, found that 82 per cent of American Jews consider caring about Israel to be either an important or essential part of their Jewish identity.3 Among those who travel to Israel, such as those in this study, these sentiments are even more pronounced. In contrast, only 2 per cent of American Jews strongly support the Boycott,

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Divestment, Sanctions (bds) movement, compared to the 34 per cent who strongly oppose it. As one of the most liberal groups in the United States, it is American Jews’ connections to both liberalism and Zionism that make them an ideal lens through which to examine how liberalism interacts with the settler-indigenous binary. Many scholars and activists maintain that Israeli settler colonialism depends upon Jews seeing themselves as indigenous to the Land of Israel. My analysis, however, reveals that liberal Jewish tourists in Hebron hold ambiguous, and sometimes even antagonistic, views on Jewish indigeneity in Israel, and instead rely on other ideological paradigms to affirm their support for Israel. Tourists are quick to reject settlers’ claims of indigeneity in the West Bank, and they often avoid discussing Jewish indigeneity in regard to Israel proper. At the same time, they tend to unconditionally accept Palestinians’ claims of indigeneity. As such, Jewish Americans appear to understand indigeneity in Israel/Palestine as a power relation rather than a matter of chronology or historical ties. This conception of indigeneity as a marker of oppression not only reveals the ways liberals tend to conflate indigeneity with powerlessness, but, more importantly, it shows how many white liberals’ conceptions of indigeneity rely on indigenous populations being ­confined to a disempowered state. Rather than attribute the rights of either Palestinians or Jews to their indigeneity, tourists instead evaluate both groups through their relative compliance with liberal state institutions, often through the lens of criminality. In this vein, tourists understand West Bank settlers as detractors of the modern nationstate, who break with the legitimate and legal components of Israeli rule. Through this contrasting of the illiberal violence of Hebron’s settlers with the “legitimate” violence of the Israeli state, tourists affirm the right of Israeli state institutions to perpetuate settler colonialism. In this way, they are able to both support Palestinians’ claims of indigenousness while simultaneously maintaining their faith in the “benevolent” colonialism of Zionism. This analysis of primarily American Jews’ understandings of both settlers and Palestinians’ claims of indigeneity expands the scholarship on liberal Zionism to account for its transnational and de-­territorialized components.4 Joyce Dalsheim5 describes the difference between liberal Israelis and West Bank settlers as rooted in seeing their connection to the land as historical versus sacred, respectively. Despite the ways that secular Israelis attempt to distinguish their own Zionism from acts of

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colonization carried out in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (opt), Dalsheim demonstrates how both groups maintain a sense of belonging and ownership of the land that depends on the racialized disempowerment of Palestinians. Through shifting the focus from liberal Israelis to predominantly American-Jewish travellers, my analysis reveals how those without territorial ties, or sometimes even a historical conception of Jewish belonging to the land, can still participate in the ideological legitimization of Israeli settler colonialism. Furthermore, by demonstrating the ways that Jewish tourists invoke the discourse of indigeneity to voice support for Palestinians, while rejecting Jews’ claims of indigeneity, I show how Zionist ideology is able to flourish and carry out its settler-colonial aims without the need to justify Jewish indigeneity. The reactions of anti-occupation tourists visiting Hebron therefore clarify that it is not only co-optations of indigenousness that lie at the heart of ideological barriers to decolonization, but an adherence to the liberal institutions and ideologies that preserve the legitimacy of settler-colonial states.

H e b r o n ’ s S e t t l e r s a n d the I sraeli S tate The first settlers in Hebron arrived shortly after the Six-Day War and Israel’s subsequent occupation of the West Bank.6 In the spring of 1968, a group of Israeli Jews, led by Rabbi Moshe Levinger, moved into the Palestinian-operated Park Hotel to celebrate the Passover holiday. After Passover ended, however, the group announced its intention to stay in Hebron indefinitely, fashioning themselves as indigenous returnees to an ancient Jewish city. Following weeks of negotiations with the Israeli government, the group of about ninety men, women, and children were eventually moved into an Israeli army compound, laying the foundations for the militarized settler colonialism that characterizes the Israeli presence in Hebron today. From the outset, the relationship of the Hebron settlers with the Israeli state has vacillated between implicit support and direct conflict.7 On the one hand, the Israeli soldiers stationed in Hebron are tasked with protecting the settlers and often maintain cordial, even familial, relationships with them. On the other hand, Hebron’s settlers frequently invoke claims of indigeneity and religious prophecy to defy Israeli military orders, drawing on Jews’ ancient connection to the land to justify displacement of Palestinians. For example, in April 2014, Israeli soldiers directly facilitated a settler takeover of a Palestinian

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building strategically located between Hebron’s old city and the neighbouring settlement of Kiryat Arba, even helping the settlers to connect the building to a water supply.8 Just a few years prior, however, Israeli troops had forcibly evicted hundreds of Jewish settlers from the same building, after a ruling from the Supreme Court upheld the government’s eviction order against them. During the evictions, settlers engaged in violent confrontations with the army that involved them throwing stones and calling the soldiers Nazis. Commenting on the clashes, Hebron’s Chief Rabbi, Dov Lior, articulated the settlers’ sense of exclusive indigeneity at the expense of Palestinians when he stated, “The purchase of a house in the Land of Israel is, for the people of Israel, the return of the city of the fathers to her sons … real peace will be when the nations of the world recognize the exclusive right of the Jewish people to this land.”9 Around four thousand Israeli soldiers are stationed in Hebron to protect the settler community, which consists of about seven hundred Jewish Israelis, who currently live inside the city.10 The majority of the settlers’ homes are concentrated around four neighbourhoods: Tel Rumeida, Beit Hadassah, Avraham Aveinu, and Beit Romano. In addition to the settlements within the city of Hebron, the much larger neighbouring settlement of Kiryat Arba has a population of about 7,326 Israelis. Despite Kiryat Arba’s roots as an epicentre of the rightwing settler movement, today it is made up of a more ideologically diverse population.11 Many Israelis, including a large number of recent Jewish immigrants to Israel, live in Kiryat Arba due to the higher quality of life and affordable housing that Israeli subsidies of West Bank settlements provide.12 In contrast to these 8,000 or so Jewish residents in the area, Hebron is home to more than 215,000 Palestinians, making it the most populous Palestinian city in the West Bank and a major Palestinian commercial hub, with several universities, hospitals, and cultural centres.13

Lib e r a l S e t t l e r Colonialism While Zionism involves ethnically based particularity and draws upon illiberal notions of primordialism and indigeneity, liberalism focuses on universalist political paradigms that, in theory, override the importance of ethnicity, religion, or other identity-based approaches to social organization.14 Apparent contradictions therefore arise as Israel attempts to present itself in the global political

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sphere as a liberal nation-state. As David Lloyd notes, however, while Zionism and liberalism may appear to be at odds with each other, most modern liberal nation-states also organize themselves along racial and ethnic boundaries that belie the universalist notions of equality that liberalism espouses.15 Numerous scholars of settler colonialism and indigeneity have drawn attention to the ways that liberalism perpetuates assimilation, racial hierarchy, and ethnic cleansing.16 As Lily Mendoza explains, liberalism forces Indigenous individuals to assimilate into dominant cultures and institutions.17 If they resist, they are relegated to categorizations of primitivism and savagery that are then used to disempower and exploit them.18 With liberalism’s supposed values of equality and tolerance, the exclusionary racism embedded within its political structures may at first appear contradictory. As Bhikhu Parekh argues however, these contradictions do not simply represent a disjuncture between theory and practice, since liberalism must be understood to be shaped by its role in displacing Indigenous people from their land, rather than as a value-neutral set of abstract principles.19 Even beyond its material results, liberal ideology itself espouses genocidal and exploitative processes.20 The core tenets of liberalism are rooted in Western conceptions of “progress” that centre utilitarianism, wealth accumulation, and the domination of nature. In this way, a curated, capitalist individualism is presented as an objective and rational approach to human organization, despite the ways it dehumanizes entire populations.21 Furthermore, in contrast to liberalism’s supposed commitment to equality, scholars note that liberal values such as “tolerance” originated as tools to secure civil peace after modern nation-states engaged in ethnic cleansing and colonial conquest.22 Given the ways that liberal ideology is embedded within settler colonialism, Mahmood Mamdani critiques approaches to justice, such as human rights, which treat state violence as a matter of crime versus politics. As he explains: “By individualizing the crime and the violence, the demand for criminal justice obscures the issues that feed group grievances and hides the constituencies that mobilize around group demands. The postcolonial crisis is first and foremost a political crisis, not a criminal one.”23 Mamdani advocates for replacing models of criminal justice to address the violence of settler colonialism with political models of decolonization. Defining colonization as “the making of permanent minorities and their maintenance through the politicization of identity,”24 Mamdani argues that decolonization

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involves the transcendence of divisive, power-laden identities. In the specific case of Israel/Palestine, he maintains that “an epistemic ­revolution” is necessary for such a process of decolonization to occur. He writes: “Phase two of the Palestinian moment will come when it is not just the oppressed who seek political change but also the ­beneficiaries of oppression. Getting there will require a new kind of political consciousness within Israel, a consciousness based on the recognition that the flourishing of Jews and Jewish life does not require Zionism.”25 Responding to such approaches to decolonization in Israel/Palestine that require Jews to renounce Zionism, this chapter interrogates American Jews’ views on Israel/Palestine during moments of witnessing Palestinian suffering in order to identify barriers to the types of ideological awakenings advocated by scholars such as Mamdani. I find that, by focusing on settlers as criminal deviants rather than ­outgrowths of a settler-colonial state, anti-occupation tourists can maintain moralistic conceptions of Israeli domination that relieve them of their own complicity in settler colonialism. Through distinguishing themselves from “ideological settlers” in the West Bank and reducing colonialism to an issue of individual morality, they are able to espouse commitments to values such as tolerance, democracy, and human rights in order to avoid implication in settler colonialism’s structural violence. These findings, in conjunction with my analysis of the ways liberals tend to conceptualize indigeneity as a power relation, extend the existing scholarship on liberal Zionism to account for its transnational components. Through this focus on liberal Jews without territorial ties to the nation, I demonstrate the ways that a symbolic approach to indigeneity, alongside a simultaneous commitment to the legitimacy of state institutions, does not undermine, but actually sustains, Israeli settler colonialism.

C a s e S t u d y : B r e a k ing the Silence a n d   W a l l s 2 Windows My analysis is based on twenty-nine interviews and over three years of participant observation of anti-occupation tours to Hebron. From 2010 to 2012, I worked at a Tel Aviv-based non-governmental organization (ngo) that brought together Israeli and Palestinian youth for dialogue and activism. During this time, I watched as the Israeli participants in the program shifted toward a deeper understanding of

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Palestinians’ oppression after visiting the West Bank. I began to wonder what would happen if American Jews also had the opportunity to witness Palestinian life in the op t . In order to create such an experience, I worked with a team of activists from Bethlehem and Hebron to found a tour program called Walls2Windows (w2w), which would expose American Jews to the occupation. While running the program, I conducted over a hundred hours of participant observation, as well as fifteen in-depth interviews with w 2w participants about how the tour impacted their understandings of the conflict. My unique position as an organizer for these tours allowed me to take field notes from the perspective of both a participant and a tour guide. In addition, being an insider to the alternative tourism industry gave me access to internal conversations around programming, messaging, and logistics, while also affording me the opportunity to steer the political content of the tours. The leadership for w 2w was made up of activists who varied in terms of their political ideologies, but we were united in a desire to raise awareness about the occupation and its impacts on everyday life for Palestinians. Rather than see this as a hindrance to my objectivity as a researcher, I used the wealth of information that this insider role provided me to enhance my analysis and to account for my own positionality.26 In addition to conducting interviews and observing participants of the w2w tours, I also conducted fourteen interviews with tourists to Hebron through an organization called Breaking the Silence (bts), a non-profit organization made up of veteran Israeli soldiers who work to generate opposition to the occupation through discourse and debate among the Israeli public.27 One of Breaking the Silence’s primary activities is gathering public testimonies from soldiers about their military service, which then provide the framework for lectures and other public events.28 The organization also offers tours to the Hebron region led by former Israeli soldiers for both international and Israeli audiences, including high-profile politicians and policy-makers. I chose to also collect data on bts, because their tours follow a similar itinerary as w2w, they frequently lead groups of American Jews, and their members are similarly comprised of anti-occupation activists. It is important to note that, unlike w2w, bts receives authorization from the Israeli military to conduct their tours in Hebron. While in theory this could inhibit b t s ’s ability to critique the military, the political messaging in bts and w2w were largely the same, because w2w tour guides based their scripts on b t s ’s narratives.

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Lib e r a l C r imi n ality Meets B ibl i c a l   In digeneity Our bts tour to Hebron begins with a winding, hour-long bus ride along Highway 60, the main Israeli artery connecting Jerusalem to various settlements throughout the West Bank. After passing through the automated gates enclosing the settlement of Kiryat Arba, the driver slows down at a quiet intersection, and we are instructed to file down an unmarked trail. Pushing aside branches and stumbling down the rocky path, the members of our group find themselves standing in a circle around a large tomb (figure 6.1). Our guide proceeds to tell the story of the American-born Hebron settler Baruch Goldstein, who murdered twenty-nine Palestinian worshippers inside Hebron’s Ibrahimi mosque.29 He recounts how, in February 1994, Goldstein entered the mosque in an i d f uniform with an army-issued rifle and proceeded to indiscriminately open fire on Muslim worshippers who were kneeling in prayer. As a result of the massacre, he explains, Jewish and non-Jewish worshippers are now restricted to segregated sides of the synagogue/mosque, which has led to increased repression of Palestinians. As the tour’s first stop, the Goldstein tomb grounds participants’ views of Hebron through a framework that generates opposition to the occupation on account of settlers’ criminality. Rather than beginning the tour with a military checkpoint or other marker of structural inequality, guides introduce tourists to Hebron through the prism of Goldstein’s murders – an individual crime. This framing implicitly encourages tourists to formulate their critiques of Hebron through the lens of individual deviance as they continue through the tour. Furthermore, by introducing tourists to the occupation through one of the most egregious and morally shocking incidents of settler violence, participants’ outrage is funnelled into conceptions of violence that consider settlers to be aberrations from the system of military occupation, rather than extensions of it. In contrast to this orientation, settler tour guides typically begin their tours with a vivid recounting of Biblical history. On a virtual tour of Hebron, Noam Arnon, a prominent spokesperson of Hebron’s Jewish community, declares “Hebron is the place where all the Jewish history began.” Guides from the settler community ground their tours in stories such as Abraham’s insistence on purchasing a burial plot for Sarah to demonstrate that the land in Hebron belongs to the Jewish

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Figure 6.1  Goldstein tomb. A bts tour group gathers around the Goldstein tombstone as their tour guide (centre) recounts the events of 1994.

people. Merging modern economic justifications with Biblical claims of indigeneity, Arnon continues, “Abraham wanted it to be his property for the nation that would rise from him.” Through connecting Biblical references to modern conceptions of property, tour guides emphasize the longevity of Jewish society in the region in order to bridge recent settlement with a sense of return.30 As Arnon proclaims upon telling the story of Jacob’s request of his sons to be returned to the Land of Israel: “The children of Jacob are the children of Israel. We are the children of Israel. We are Israel, we continue to Jacob. And when we established the state, we called it the state of Israel. And today I feel that we the children of Israel, return to Jacob, saying, ‘Father, you see, we have returned. We have come back home.’” Guides reinforce such narratives of Jewish indigeneity with archeological references. For instance, they draw the tourists’ attention to a 2,700-year-old building from the age of King Hezekiah in the settler neighbourhood of Tel Remuida. As Nadia Abu El Haj notes, Israeli archeological and planning initiatives were designed to cleanse Palestinian sites of their political features, which curates a linguistic

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and spatial narrative of Jewish nationhood that minimizes Palestinian territorial claims and emphasizes a sustained history of Jewish peoplehood.31 On another tour of the Tel Remuida neighbourhood, the tour guide pauses on a stony pathway and asks participants to visualize themselves as walking on “the same road that Abraham, our fore­ father, was walking on.” Other settler guides point out how the current Avraham Aveinu synagogue was restored as a place of Jewish worship from the 1500s, and how the Cave of the Patriarchs is still being used by Jews for the same purpose as it was two thousand years ago. As scholars have noted, these strategies reflect the ways that tour guides communicate Jewish indigeneity to the West Bank by bridging ancient Biblical history with current projects of Israeli settlement. 32 To further solidify a sense of Jewish belonging to the region, settler guides characterize the history of Jewish life in Hebron as ongoing and constant, with the only interruption being the years from 1929 to 1967. Every settler tour of Hebron solemnly recounts the details of the 1929 massacre. Through highlighting this event, guides promote two central tenets of the settler narrative: 1) the violent disruption of Jewish life in the region as a mechanism to emphasize Jewish indigeneity, and 2) the violence of the local Palestinian population as the most pressing threat to the revival of Hebron’s Jewish community. When discussing Palestinians, settler tour guides typically do not engage with questions of Palestinian indigeneity or their rights to the land.33 Rather than undermining Palestinians’ claims of being indigenous, they instead attempt to discredit them in terms of the ways they violate liberal frameworks of law and order. Tour guides often fixate on the individualistic crimes of murder and rape committed by Palestinians, drawing direct parallels with the 1929 massacre and recent terrorist attacks. As such, rather than presenting Palestinians as a group with competing nationalist claims, they portray them collectively as dangerous criminals. For example, when describing Palestinian violence, tour guides emphasize the death of children to generate moral outrage. Standing below a memorial with the image of a baby carriage in flames, a settler tour guide describes how a Palestinian sniper aimed his weapon directly at a ten-month-old’s head, killing the infant instantly. On another tour, the guide recounts a Palestinian suicide bombing by explaining how the terrorist intended to explode himself next to a group of children at the adjacent playground and, only after realizing he had been identified, decided to blow himself up next to an adult couple instead.

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These depictions of Palestinians are contrasted with proclamations of the local Jewish community’s commitment to equality and tolerance. At Beit Hadassah, tour guides point out how the hospital was established for all the city’s residents, “Jews and Arabs alike.” Guides also frequently recount how “under Muslim rule, Jews were expelled and forbidden from praying,” fixating on how Jews were allowed to pray only on the seventh step of the Ibrahimi Mosque. Tour guides are quick to contrast this restriction with the current division of the building. As one guide commented, “Under Israeli rules, everyone can pray here. It’s a free place for everybody.” As these examples show, rather than solely invoking anti-modern claims of indigeneity in their tours, settlers also employ liberal tropes of universalism and progress in their defence of the Jewish community in Hebron.34 As Feldman and Grosglik, Handel, and Monterescu describe in chapters two and three, West Bank settlers invoke themes of indigeneity, feminism, and organic agriculture to obscure settler-colonial power dynamics. In Hebron, West Bank settlers similarly exploit the political capital of espousing liberal values to international audiences in order to normalize the violence of their colonial projects and to strengthen their political power. In addition to the liberal rhetoric used by guides on right-wing tours of Hebron, individual settlers will also sometimes attempt to intervene on left-wing tours by offering counter-narratives that present the settler community as inclusive and tolerant. As one bts participant recounts, while standing at the Baruch Goldstein gravesite: “It was amazing because someone was praying at that time at his tomb, this orthodox Jew there, and another person approached us and said that he [Goldstein] was a good person, this doctor who attends to everybody here, Palestinians, Jews … someone from the government told him a lie, and for that reason he did what he did, [he was] defending others.” As seen in the encounter above, even the most extreme instances of settler v­ iolence are sometimes presented by settlers as legitimate forms of self-defence and as expressions of religious tolerance. This further demonstrates how, rather than engaging in a debate of competing indigeneities, both settlers and anti-occupation tour guides rely on liberal values of tolerance and justice to elicit support from tourists. Fusing universalistic concepts rooted in capitalism and criminal justice with a simultaneous claim to indigeneity, settlers employ modern notions of property and self-defence to fashion themselves as moral upholders of the law against a malicious Palestinian population. Groups like bts, on the other hand, largely sidestep questions of Israelis’

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indigeneity, and instead rely almost entirely on liberal paradigms of legality and human rights to characterize the settlers as criminals. Thus, while settlers emphasize the crimes of Palestinians and anti-occupation tour guides emphasize the crimes of settlers, both groups assume the permanence of the liberal settler-colonial state by conceptualizing justice through the parameters of criminality under Israeli rule. In spite of the settler community’s efforts to locate their political activities within liberal frameworks, most tourists rejected the settlers’ claims of rightful ownership, religious tolerance, and self-defence. In rejecting such narratives, American Jews still interpreted the conflict through such paradigms, but they began to shift from conceptualizing Israeli settlers as victims of crimes like terrorism to perpetrators of them. These shifts resulted in sites, like the Goldstein tomb, disrupting participants’ commitments to dominant Israeli narratives of perpetual victimhood and troubling their sense of Jews’ superior morality. As Olivia,35 a bts participant, explained: “The settlers were … not every Jew is a good person and that’s a really hard thing to learn … everybody in … your Jewish community is great … and when you go to the land of the Jews, it’s not going to be the case, there’s going to be people who steal and people who kidnap … it exists in every society. To learn that not every Jew is a good person, is a really hard lesson and I think that on that trip is when it was solidified for me, and it changed everything.” For Olivia, witnessing settlers in Hebron upset her idea of Jewish moral superiority. To process this, Olivia offered a depoliticized explanation of settler violence, noting how there are individual Jews who “steal” and “kidnap.” In this way, Olivia, like many liberal tourists to Hebron, conceptualized settler colonialism as rooted in individual acts of deviance rather than in systemic state violence. Through such reactions, participants reflect back organizers’ approach of presenting settler violence through the lens of criminality, which, in turn, legitimizes the authority of the Israeli state and directs participants’ oppositional energies away from anti-colonial critiques.

F r o m Vic t im t o P erpetrator: T h e T r u e C a s u a l t i e s of State Vi olence After visiting the Goldstein grave, participants on anti-occupation tours travel to Shuhada Street. Once a vibrant artery full of Palestinian businesses and homes, Shuhada Street now resembles a ghost town (figure 6.2). To enter the street, tourists walk down a road that has

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Figure 6.2  Shuhada Street. Ghost-town-like Shuhada Street is patrolled by Israeli soldiers.

been divided in half, with one side for Israelis and one for Palestinians. At the end of this barricade, Israeli soldiers check the identification papers of the group to ensure that no Palestinians pass the checkpoint. At this stop on the tour, guides often point out how tourists have more rights within the city of Hebron than the Palestinians who were born there. Palestinians are not allowed to walk on Shuhada Street, and its few remaining residents have been forced to create makeshift exits out of their homes so that they can exit through windows and other openings onto the Palestinian side of the city. Only the occasional Israeli settler can be spotted strolling the area’s desolate streets, and nearly all the doors of the vacated homes and businesses along Shuhada Street have been barricaded shut. Anti-occupation tour guides will stop in the centre of Shuhada Street, and, amid an eerie silence, explain how the Israeli army banned all Palestinians from accessing the road in response to rising tensions in the region. Guides describe how, in 1997, the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority signed the Hebron Accords, which divided the city into two sections, H1 and H2. Guides note that about 80 per cent of the city falls under H1, which is home to nearly two

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hundred thousand Palestinians, and that H2 remains under full Israeli control and is home to an ever-decreasing number of about thirtythousand Palestinian residents, along with several hundred Jewish settlers.36 Referring back to the Goldstein massacre, guides often remind the group that Palestinians are being collectively punished for a crime that was committed against them. Again, tour guides frame injustices against Palestinians in terms of the ways they violate liberal frameworks of criminal justice, rather than through an anti-colonial lens. In other words, tour guides do not attribute such injustices to colonization, and instead discuss them in terms of the Israeli state failing to criminalize and punish settlers as the guilty parties. As guides present this information, large professional signs that the settler community has installed along Shuhada Street hang prominently in the background (figure 6.3). As one such billboard reads: “These stores were closed by the idf for security reasons after Arabs began the ‘Oslo War’ (a.k.a. The Second Intifada) in September 2000, attacking, wounding, and murdering Jews on this road.” In these signs, settlers present the segregation and displacement on Shuhada Street as a legitimate security response to Palestinian terrorism. In this way, they attempt to communicate the legality of such modes of oppression by highlighting the support they received from the Israeli military. Through such narratives, settlers not only invoke the rhetoric of law and order in defence of their activities, but they also reposition themselves, not the Palestinians, as victims of state-sanctioned apartheid. As David Wilder, a well-known activist and tour guide from Hebron, argues: “Israel is not ‘occupying a “Palestinian” city.’ In 1967 Israel returned home to Hebron. This is where Jews had lived for hundreds and thousands of year, prior to the 1929 riots, massacre and expulsion … There is apartheid in Hebron. However it is directed at Jews and Israelis, not at Arabs. Jews have access to approximately 3 per cent of the city, while Arabs have access to approximately 97 per cent of the city.”37 Through such framings, settlers embed their claims of ­indigeneity into the liberalistic framework of criminal justice. While indigenous-rights activism typically challenges the legal structures and state power of the colonizing entity, settlers in Hebron attempt to ­fashion themselves as indigenous victims of state-based violence, while simultaneously upholding the state as a legitimate arbitrator of social control.38 Such paradoxes do more than simply reveal the hypocrisy of the settler community. Instead, these claims, and the parallel reliance of

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Figure 6.3  Settler signs. A sign installed by the settler community along the route of anti-occupation tours. The sign reads: “These stores were closed by the idf for security reasons after Arabs began the ‘Oslo War’ (aka The Second Intifada) in September 2000, attacking, wounding and murdering Jews on this road.”

anti-occupation tour guides on these paradigms, unearth the ways that Zionism invokes the imagery of indigeneity without confronting the Israeli state’s own dependence on settler colonialism. While settlers will frequently discuss their ancient connections to the land and present themselves as indigenous victims of religious violence, ethnic terror, and state-sanctioned segregation, they almost never frame themselves as victims of colonialism. This is because to do so would involve undermining the key element of Israeli rule – the power it derives from colonial settlement. Both anti-occupation and settler tour guides’ accounts of Hebron rely on a liberal form of settler colonialism that enshrines their right to dominate others through legal systems that emphasize individual rights rooted in capitalism and criminal justice over collective rights rooted in decolonization. Therefore, while groups like bts and Hebron’s settler community may appear to be at opposite poles of the political spectrum, such consistencies in their

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maintenance of liberal frameworks of criminal justice reveal the ways the Israeli state maintains its power, not through representations of Jewish indigeneity to the land, but through strengthening liberal modes of governance.

S e t t l e r Vio l e n c e a nd the Limi ts o f   C r imi nality On many of my anti-occupation tours to Hebron, Shuhada Street was the first site where tourists came in direct contact with Israeli settlers. While sometimes the two groups would pass each other without incident, more often than not, these collisions were confrontational. On one of the tours I attended, a settler rolled down his window to shout profanities at our group. Another time, a car sped by us at a dangerously high speed, nearly hitting one of the tour participants. As Daisy, a w2 w participant, recounts: “I think ... my biggest learning experience from going on the Windows tour [was that] Jews who live in Hebron … they’re insane, like they are so radical crazy. He almost ran over us! Such aggressive, disgusting people … of course, I felt so sorry for the Palestinians and their situation, but I guess the people who I could most sympathize with are the soldiers … They’re hated both ways, like they’re hated by the Israeli and the Palestinian side there, and they are just stuck there.” Being the direct recipient of settler aggression was transformative for many Jewish tourists. Whereas previously, West Bank settlers may have played a marginal role in how people like Daisy thought about Zionism, being on the receiving end of settler violence solidified tourists’ political opposition to them. As seen in the quote above, while anti-occupation tours to Hebron intensified tourists’ disdain for ­settlers, their admiration for Israeli soldiers often remained intact. Daisy even went so far as to feel more sympathy for Israeli soldiers, the enforcers of settler colonial rule, than for Palestinians, those enduring setter colonialism. As I will later argue, this reverence for the Israeli military is one of the clearest representations of the ways that American Jews claim to support Palestinian rights, but still condone the violence that sustains their oppression. Settler graffiti also evoked strong, condemnatory reactions from participants. After Palestinians are evicted in Hebron, settlers will often stamp their emptied properties with a Star of David. As Elaine, another w 2 w participant, reflected: “The graffiti about the Jewish

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star were really upsetting for me, because it was as if it was like a hate symbol toward other people. It did show me another kind of Jewish nationalism … I always thought of Palestinians only wanting the land to themselves … And then just seeing that Jewish nationalism brings the other side to the table, like pushing Palestinians away, seeing that it’s real. Jewish nationalism is like, ‘We only want Jews, there’s no space for Arabs,’ that was really upsetting for me.” Elaine previously thought of Palestinians as the only party pushing for exclusionary claims to the land, associating them with illiberal values, and Israelis with civic inclusion. As such, witnessing settlers’ graffiti in Hebron and hearing their claims of being the sole, rightful inhabitants of the land upset her conception of Jewish nationalism and its congruence with liberal ideologies of tolerance.39 Anna, who was also a participant on a w2w tour, similarly reflected on these images: “I was disgusted that my own people would do this … the “price-tag”40 ones, like “die dirty Arabs,” and that racially hateful speech that is graffitied on places in Hebron. That really disturbed me because it was just, it was so disgusting, it was so hateful. It’s like what I would expect of a white supremacist, not what I would expect of a Jewish person … We supposedly are afraid of persecution, and here we are persecuting others.” For both Anna and Elaine, seeing this type of graffiti caused them to associate Jewish nationalism with exclusion and racism. As a population who has historically been a target of white-supremacist violence, diaspora Jews are often shocked to know that “some of their own” could engage in such behaviour. In this way, the very symbols that settlers use to communicate Jewish belonging to the region fracture liberal Jews’ commitments to dominant Zionist narratives by causing them to see Jews as being on the producing, rather than the receiving, end of racial violence. As a result, markers of Jewish indigeneity, like the Star of David graffiti, did not foster identification with settlers’ claims of indigeneity among tourists. Instead such symbols generated opposition to the ways that right-wing Jewish nationalism breaks with the supposed commitments of liberal nation-states to tolerance. While these reactions illustrate the significant ideological transformations that many tourists undergo, they also demonstrate how American Jews tend to channel their outrage toward settlers through liberal paradigms of criminal justice, namely hate crimes and human rights. Tourists were primarily bothered by the ways that settlers’ activities mirrored the bigotry and lawlessness of hate crimes and obstructed principles of

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Figure 6.4  “Gas the Arabs” painted on the gate outside a Palestinian home in Hebron by Israeli settlers. It is signed “jdl” (Jewish Defense League).

human rights, as opposed to being outraged by the more systemic components of Palestinians’ dispossession. As many scholars have noted, the human-rights paradigm can function to provide moral and legal frameworks that legitimize colonial domination by turning structural inequities into matters of individual deviance.41 Rather than understanding colonial violence to be rooted in domination by a racist state, criminal-justice paradigms, like human-rights and hate crimes, leave the state’s colonialism intact by legitimizing the punitive power of its institutions. Accordingly, by locating their opposition to Palestinian oppression within ideological paradigms that treat Israeli violence as a matter of criminality, tourists implicitly condone Israel’s position as a colonial power.

L a w , P r o p e r t y , a n d D e viant Colonizers About halfway through most anti-occupation tours, groups come across a large, colourful mural depicting ancient Jewish life in Hebron. Referencing the Bible as the foundation for their indigeneity, the mural reads “Liberation, Return, Rebuilding 1967: liberation of Hebron

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and reestablishment of its Jewish community ‘The children have returned to their own border’ (cf. Jer. 31:17).” In the mural, religious Jews and soldiers can be seen marching through Hebron under the Israeli flag, again affirming the status of Jews as indigenous returnees to the land by connecting ancient Jewish life with modern Israeli nationalism.42 Also along Shuhada Street, two massive red-and-white signs hang prominently from an old bus station (figure 6.5). While the Biblical murals draw upon the imagery of ancient Jewish life and promote a more idyllic notion of indigeneity, these signs instead invoke capitalistic claims of property ownership to justify the current Jewish presence in Hebron. As one sign reads, “These buildings were constructed on land purchased by the Hebron Jewish community in 1807. This land was stolen by Arabs following the murder of 67 Hebron Jews in 1929. We demand justice! Return our property to us!” While claims of indigeneity are often used as an antidote to capitalist modes of property ownership, Hebron’s settlers fuse these two paradigms to articulate their belonging to the region. In the same way that West Bank settlers uphold the legitimacy of the state while fashioning themselves as victims of structural violence, settlers uphold the importance of private property while simultaneously presenting themselves as indigenous returnees whose ties do not depend on modern economic systems. These contradictions reveal the ways that Israeli settlerindigeneity seeks to merge notions of indigenous belonging with the power it derives from colonialism and capitalism. Unlike other indigenous populations who understand their subjugation in terms of their resistance to colonialism and capitalism, Israeli settlers attempt to position themselves as indigenous while also maintaining their status as beneficiaries of such systems. Just as tourists balked at settlers’ claims of self-defence and tolerance at sites like the Goldstein grave, they similarly rejected settlers’ arguments of private property to justify their right to settle Hebron. For most anti-occupation tourists, Hebron’s settlers’ claims of being indigenous did not override tourists’ perceptions of settlers as violent lawbreakers who relied on religious rather than legal claims to the land. When I asked Rob, a bts participant, what most surprised him on the tour, he replied, “the lawlessness.” He continued: “We have the sense that they’re … that these are authentic Jews. These are people who really believe. These are the people who really get it. I would say that there’s nothing sacred about the activity that they’re engaging in, and really, in my opinion, nothing very Jewish about it.”

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Figure 6.5  Settler Billboards. Two large signs, one in English and one in Hebrew, hang from an empty building in Hebron.

Other tourists similarly discussed their outrage over the settlements in Hebron, viewing settlers as violating nationalist ethos and legal systems. In the following quote, Salvador, another b t s participant, comments that Hebron’s settlers are not “true Israelis,” and argues that the settler movement jeopardizes Israel’s security. Like many

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other tourists, Salvador does not understand his condemnation of the occupation as contradicting his support for Israel. Instead, he preserves his Zionism by distinguishing settlers from the Israeli state. As Salvador explains: In the tours, we also had the opportunity to talk to some settlers. I remember something very strong. I remember that I said that “these people are not Israelis.” Because first, they are breaking international laws. They put Israel in a very difficult position in the international community, they don’t care about the lives of the soldiers. They don’t care about how this is bad for the economy, for the rest of the people in the state … [T]hey believe because in a book it says that this story and this story happened there, so we have the right to claim this land as property. And the world doesn’t work like that, because if you want to say that – there is no difference between you and the Islamic fanatics. Here Salvador directly links his disgust for settlers to their obstruction of Israel’s security, likening West Bank settlers to “Islamic fanatics.” Other interviewees similarly made comparisons between Hebron’s settlers and Muslim fundamentalists to articulate their opposition to the settler movement. When settlers tried to invoke anti-modern claims of indigeneity, it often backfired, causing tourists to relegate them to racialized tropes of barbarity. In such perspectives, both settlers and Palestinians are condemned for existing outside the legal and moral bounds set forth by the modern nation-state, rendering claims of indigeneity secondary, or even irrelevant, to justice. Accordingly, rather than expressing sympathy toward settlers’ claims of ownership, participants were more interested in the ways that settlers were breaking Israeli and international law. In other words, tourists were not bothered by Israel being in a position of power as an occupier or settler-colonial state: instead, they were disturbed by the ways settlers appeared to be obstructing the legal pillars of Israeli domination and control.

In d i g e n e i t y a s a P o wer Relation While tourists largely rejected settlers’ claims of indigeneity, they were much more sympathetic to Palestinians’ claims of being indigenous. In reflecting on settler graffiti and signage, Elaine explains how she

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felt receptive to Palestinians’ attempts to communicate their indigeneity compared to the aversion she felt toward settlers’ attempts to present themselves as indigenous. As she explained: “[T]he behaviour of the settlers was quite unsettling … it almost sounded like gang behaviour, attacking Palestinians. It sounded like something that in the US I think would probably be illegal … the symbol of the key [see figure 6.6], they’re [Palestinians] doing it in a way that is more enticing for people who have sympathy for the Palestinian side … the way Israeli settlers are showing their narrative is not leading people to be sympathetic.” After travelling to Hebron, participants on the Walls2Windows tours visit Aida refugee camp in Bethlehem. To enter the camp, individuals walk beneath a massive key, symbolizing the Palestinian Right of Return (figure 6.6), alongside graffiti listing the original villages and towns of the camp’s residents, which are now located in presentday Israel. These displays exemplify how, like the settlers in Hebron, Palestinians use art, signage, and other visual markers to communicate claims of indigeneity to tourists. While Elaine was disturbed by settlers’ attempts to communicate their right to the land, focusing on their illegal, “gang-like” behaviour, she described Palestinians’ creative representations of their indigeneity in more positive terms. For most tourists, Palestinian indigeneity to the West Bank was assumed and went unchallenged throughout the tour. However, even though Palestinian indigeneity was not contested by tourists, further probing revealed the complex ways that i­nterviewees grappled with the concept of indigeneity. When asked directly about settlers’ claims of being indigenous, participants typically responded like Kayla: It sets a dangerous precedent to make a religious claim to any sort of land, because what’s stopping me from forming my own religion and saying, “I own this piece of land?” People before the Israelites were living in the land. What if someone claims to have lineage back to those people? Would that mean they have the authority to push every Israeli out of the land? There were people living after the Jews were expelled and after the ­destruction of the Temple – living there for two thousand years. Does that mean they should just leave because Jews have created a political movement saying the land is theirs? I think it’s so ­complicated and it can’t be limited to one ethnicity.

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Figure 6.6  Aida Refugee Camp key. Entrance to the Aida Refugee Camp in Bethlehem with a large key representing the Palestinian right of return.

Anti-occupation tourists, like Kayla, often do not think of indigeneity as a historical fact that creates binding claims to the land. Rather than reducing indigeneity to chronology, many liberal Jews understand being indigenous primarily in terms of power relations – to be indigenous is to be colonized. Palestinian claims of indigeneity were thus more readily accepted by travellers compared to the settlers’ claims, since they found settlers’ claims of being the victims of Israeli state violence to be unconvincing. Furthermore, settlers’ claims of indigeneity were seen as more

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threatening to the tourists who ascribed to the legitimacy of the Israeli state institutions because, unlike Palestinians, settlers appeared to hold significant power over the state. In other words, while it was “safe” for tourists to consider Palestinians to be indigenous, because of their relative disempowerment, settlers’ indigeneity could not be entertained, since it would mean a disruption of the dominant social order. This contradictory tendency to celebrate Palestinian indigeneity while rejecting settlers’ indigeneity exemplifies the ways that liberals romanticize notions of indigeneity and treat decolonization as a metaphor rather than an actual political practice.43

B e n e v o l e n t Zio n ism and I ts Soldiers This treatment of indigeneity as a metaphor was corroborated by the ways that interviewees expressed discomfort with the idea of Israel being a settler-colonial state. To reject conflations of Zionism with colonialism, American Jews on anti-occupation tours often outsourced Israel’s colonial tendencies exclusively to the settlers. Eddie, for example, explained that he is offended by “the idea of the Zionist movement being a colonial movement.” As another anti-occupation tourist, Abby, reflected: Maybe one of the things that has changed [after the tour] is thinking that Zionism is colonialism. I think I had a strong ­resistance to things like that, but now I see it and it’s also ­colonialism … Like I can accept and hear that criticism of Zionism … but to say that the Jewish people don’t have a right to self-determination, that they are not a people, just a religion, that is anti-Semitic, it’s anti-Jewish … In the same way, if you said Indigenous people in Canada, like “great minorities, ethnic groups, but you don’t have your right to self-determination.” That’s what some people say, and it’s racist … So people say Zionism is a problem, but I don’t think Zionism is a problem. It’s the way it’s being carried out that is a problem. Like Abby, very few of my interviewees characterized Zionism in its entirety as a form of colonialism. Instead, participants primarily blamed West Bank settlers for Palestinians’ experiences of colonization, even invoking sympathy toward soldiers and government officials who they viewed as victims of the settlers’ colonial aspirations. As

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Tali explained: “I was just surprised by how much the army facilitates their [the settlers’] ability to be there. It’s like they’re vips and it’s because they’re colonizers. They’re part of the colonial project but I was surprised at the blatantness … and how they’re sort of the boss of the army … you’re taking this population of young people [soldiers] and using them so that settlers can come colonize.” Numerous other participants also drew clear distinctions between soldiers and settlers in terms of their culpability for colonization, often characterizing Israeli soldiers, and even the Israeli government, as being captive to the interests of settlers. As Kirk reflected: “I’m not scared of the idea of a soldier in Hebron. I’m scared of the settler.” In this way, tourists conceptualize settler colonialism as something limited to the acts of individual settlers, rather than a matter of Israeli state violence. This in turn allows them to relieve the Israeli state of its role in ongoing Palestinian dispossession. Not only did anti-occupation tourists tend to primarily locate settler colonialism in West Bank settlers’ activities, as opposed to the wider Zionist project, but they often articulated their disdain for settlers in light of the legitimacy of the Israeli state. As Colin, noted: “It’s really a tragedy and we were learning stories of many of the Israelis who live in Hebron [who] are so right-wing. They are anti the actual government of Israel itself. They’re into an independent state of Judea and Samaria … a more theocratic state if you will. And just how the army is treating Palestinians in the area like crap, but also how settlers in the area are spitting on the army because they represent the state.” Just like Daisy’s earlier comments about feeling more sympathy toward the soldiers than the Palestinians in Hebron, Colin’s statement demonstrates the ways that many tourists conceptualize their opposition to Israeli settler colonialism through ideological paradigms that legitimize Israeli military rule over Palestinians. Many participants also drew comparisons between the Israel Defense Forces (idf) and the US army, holding the United States (also a settler-colonial state) as a model for how to improve the situation in the West Bank. As Anna explained: I think that, in the West Bank, they need to not infringe on human rights, and they need to do a better job. I think that they don’t have a great partner to work with, but nonetheless, the best partner that they could have is the people themselves,

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you know, [former US Army general] Petraeus is not a great leader by any standards, but at least he understood that you need to win the hearts and the minds, and I think that Israel really needs to do that with their military, if they are going to be in the West Bank, which they shouldn’t be, they need to win the hearts and minds of the Palestinians. They need to make it so that every interaction is not such a negative thing, especially with the settler thing. While Anna expresses a passionate commitment to upholding Palestinians’ rights, her model for change does not involve decolonization or a redistribution of power. Instead, Anna advocates for greater civility and more effective military rule as a means to lessen hostility between Israelis and Palestinians, even extolling former United States Army general and director of the c i a, David Petraeus, as her model for how to address the harms of the occupation. Anna’s comments represent a common sentiment among American Jews. Rather than advocating for decolonization, participants on anti-occupation tours instead upheld the legitimacy of colonial systems of domination while channelling their opposition to the occupation toward extremist settlers. By locating Israeli colonialism solely within the settler movement and romanticizing Palestinian indigeneity, they were able to maintain a commitment to the indigeneity of the Palestinian population without having to examine their own complicity in settler colonialism, both in Israel and the United States.44 Furthermore, not only did participants ignore the settler colonialism embedded within the establishment of Israel, but they often looked to the i df as the legitimate arbitrator of law and order in the region. As such, the solution to the problem of the settlers, whom they viewed to be moral deviants, was to empower the Israeli military. In this way, tourists understand the conflict through liberal conceptions of legality that accept and even celebrate the legitimacy of Israeli military rule. This adherence to the current social order and its violent enforcers then supersedes the need for serious engagement with ­questions of indigeneity, since it assumes the permanence of Israeli domination over Palestinians. As such, both Palestinian and Israeli settlers’ claims of indigeneity were largely irrelevant to tourists’ world views. As a result, most interviewees never felt inclined to grant settlers or Palestinians the right to challenge the Israeli state based on their indigeneity. Instead, both groups were evaluated in terms of

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their compliance with the legal expectations of the Israeli state and its disciplinary institutions. As the field of settler-colonial studies has clearly demonstrated, ­settler colonialism is a form of structural violence, and it cannot be reduced to individual acts of deviance.45 For many of the tours’ participants, however, it was the settlers, as morally deficient individuals, who were perpetuating colonialism and thereby tainting an otherwise progressive country. By making settler colonialism an issue of individual deviance rather than a system of violence rooted in state power, activists direct their energies away from the institutions that actually create and sustain oppression. Furthermore, participants’ fixation on settlers as deviations from a just Israeli state demonstrates the ways that liberal Zionists can present themselves as allies in the struggle against settler colonialism while protecting the structures that are most responsible for it. For example, Kirk offered a plan to substitute the current s­ ettlers for people of “higher character,” reflecting the belief that it is morally deficient individuals that perpetuate settler colonialism, not the system itself. In this way, liberal Zionists maintain the idea of a benevolent colonialism that can be contrasted with the violent and racist colonialism of West Bank settlers. As Kirk explained: “I think somehow the State of Israel needs to come up with a regime … like a system of classifying the people you let into the occupied territories. Like, if you want to place settlers for strategic reasons in the occupied territories … choose the best people – the people with the most character, the people who will have better encounters with the indigenous population, the Palestinians.” Kirk, like many other participants, takes Palestinians’ indigeneity for granted, while condemning settlers. At the same time, Kirk expresses little investment in efforts to dismantle settler colonialism, even suggesting substituting other Israelis to occupy the West Bank for the current “ungovernable” ones. As also seen in Anna’s discussion about winning the hearts and minds of Palestinians, tourists’ perceptions of Israeli colonialism had more to do with the moral character of individual settlers than with dismantling the system of colonial domination itself. This emphasis on settlers’ personal moral deficiencies can be seen in the ways that interviewees repeatedly criticized settlers for their arrogance.46 Tourists frequently commented on settlers being rude and pompous, and they often contrasted their behaviour with what they perceived to be the legitimate authority of the idf. For example, Kirk recounted an incident from his tour in which a boy from the

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settler community told a woman wearing a hijab that she was not allowed to walk on the Jewish side of the street. As Kirk reflected: “What arrogance! … I mean it’s one thing for the soldiers to enforce it, but for the settlers, and the child, to be saying that … so shocking.” As this incident illustrates, what seemed to most deeply bother tourists like Kirk was not the system of colonization that Palestinians endured, but the fact that such colonization was being carried out by prejudiced individuals who were not authorized by the state to oppress Palestinians. By differentiating between the legitimate authority of soldiers to uphold colonial rule with the illegitimate attempts of settlers to do so, tourists maintain ideologies that protect the legitimacy of settler colonialism as a mechanism of domination. This tendency to accept the legitimacy of the Israeli military’s oppression of Palestinians by contrasting it with settler violence was apparent in the way that participants were disturbed by the disproportionate power that settlers held over the military. As Tali, a b t s traveller, explained: “It seems more like they’re super citizens and have more rights than an Israeli citizen. They were saying how the [settler] children just go into the base and hang out there and they go in there all the time and they had an automatic door to let the soldiers in and it was going during Shabbos and so one of the settlers came in and cut the wire so that the door wouldn’t open anymore, and it’s like, I can’t imagine a Canadian citizen going to an army base and just doing that, and nobody does anything … They have so much power there.” Tali contrasts the typical Israeli citizen’s rights with settlers’ dis­ proportionate power as “super citizens,” while also implying the greater respectability of Canadian settler colonialism. In this way, she glosses over the injustices of a system in which all Israelis have more rights than the Palestinian population, while legitimizing the violent e­ nforcers of such a system. What bothered Tali, and most others on the tour, was not that Israelis benefited from an ongoing project of settler colonialism that endows Jews with superior rights and privileges. Instead, it was the fact that settlers obstructed the ideal of the liberal Israeli nationstate by holding too much power and carrying out their settler colonialism in offensive and pompous ways. In other words, travellers’ objections to settlers were not rooted in a genuine opposition to colonialism. Instead, they appear to object to settlers in the West Bank because their aggression and power-laden claims of indigeneity upset the myth of the liberal Israeli state. 47

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C o n c l u sion For young, liberal Jews on anti-occupation tours to the West Bank, the legitimacy of the Israeli state is rarely derived from ancient ties to the land or a sense of return. As such, West Bank settlers’ claims of indigeneity appear to do little to change their minds when they tour sites like Hebron. In fact, settlers’ attempts to separate themselves from the state often translated into tourists’ adoption of Orientalist tropes of anti-modern barbarity, which tourists then used to conflate Israeli settlers with “Islamic extremists.” Far from accepting settlers’ claims of being the rightful indigenous inhabitants of the land, liberal Zionists who visit Hebron tend to see the settlers there as colonizers who obstruct the rights and livelihood of the indigenous Palestinian population. In response to what they see as settlers’ criminal acts of violence against Palestinians, tourists then look to the Israeli government and military – as the legitimate enforcer of law and order – to discipline the settlers. By imagining that the justice system of the colonizing entity could contain the deviant colonialism of “settlers,” such views actually sustain some of the most dangerous elements of settler-­ colonial regimes. While settler violence in the West Bank creates ongoing terror and devastation for Palestinians, it is the establishment of the State of Israel and its current military occupation of the West Bank that provide the apparatus for such violence to occur. Travellers’ persistent belief in the legitimacy of Israeli state institutions therefore reveals that these individuals are not opposed to settler colonialism itself.48 Instead, their opposition to West Bank settlers appears to be rooted in an objection to settler colonialisms that diverge from a cultivated presentation of inclusivity and progress.49 These findings do more than simply account for the transnational components of liberal Zionism. They also demonstrate that conceptualizing indigeneity as a power relation can be instrumental to sustaining settler colonialism. Numerous scholars have pointed to the ways that white liberals often romanticize indigeneity, treating it as an ideal rather than seriously undertaking decolonization as a course of political action.50 In their discussions of Palestinian indigeneity, the tourists I interviewed were eager to affirm Palestinian indigeneity as long as Palestinians remained relegated to a dominated state. In contrast to this outward celebration of Palestinians’ indigeneity, liberal Jews on anti-occupation tours typically rejected Israeli settlers’

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power-laden claims of indigeneity. Based on the ways that tourists located their discomfort with settlers’ claims within their arrogance and resistance to the Israeli state, this discrepancy appears to be rooted in a perception that West Bank settlers actually hold the power to upset the liberal order of Israeli rule, whereas Palestinians do not. In this way, Jewish Americans’ opposition to settlers is not about up­lifting indigenous rights, but is instead a protective response to the ways that places like Hebron destabilize the liberal ideologies that legitimize Israeli settler colonialism. While anti-occupation tours to Hebron evoke strong emotional reactions among travellers, and they motivate useful forms of ­activism and engagement in the struggle for Palestinian rights, they do not always facilitate the necessary conditions for decolonization. Tourists may be inclined to uphold the indigeneity of Palestinians and to condemn the colonialism of settlers in the West Bank, however, such reactions often remain contained to a political logic that preserves the legitimacy of the Israeli state’s power over Palestinians. Through maintaining such myths of a benevolent settler colonialism, and by confronting indigenous populations through a romanticized lens of powerlessness, liberal Jews can express selective outrage against West Bank settlers while securing the continued benefits of their own privileged positions within settler-colonial societies. As these contradictions suggest, it is therefore only through resisting the most powerful institutions of the settler-colonial state, particularly the military, that a true process of decolonization and liberation can occur. While such an understanding of decolonization may imply that a sense of Jewish belonging in Palestine hinders decolonization, my analysis suggests that it is actually a belief in the legitimacy of the liberal state and its disciplinary institutions that prevents many ­progressive Jews from fully supporting Palestinian liberation. As the tourists interviewed in this chapter demonstrate, Jewish travellers can express nationalistic support for the institutions that enable Israeli domination without having sacred or even historical ties to the land. This type of transnational Zionism therefore challenges the importance placed on a sense of indigeneity or Jewish belonging in Israel when understanding Zionism’s power. Furthermore, these travellers’ approaches to indigeneity reveal that rhetorical commitments to Palestinian indigeneity can coexist with, and even sustain, support for Israeli settler colonialism.

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These conclusions reinforce some of the central findings of this volume, namely that indigeneity discourse can function as a form of political capital that can be co-opted and used to promote settlercolonial aims. Yet, as this chapter demonstrates, the use of indigeneity discourse to promote settler colonialism is not limited to Jewish ­settlers claiming to be indigenous themselves. Liberals’ rejections of settlers’ claims of indigeneity and their corresponding expressions of support for Palestinian indigeneity can also mask and entrench Israeli settler colonialism. Anti-occupation tourists’ reactions to places like Hebron therefore remind us that claims of rightful ownership and historical calculations of indigeneity cannot be the sole remedy to settler colonialism. Because all identities are transient and socially constructed, decolonization requires the decoupling of identity from power.51 As Zreik argues in chapter eight, decolonization is not about “undoing” the past. It instead involves transforming Zionism from a settler-colonial endeavour of domination to one of partnership that addresses injustices against Palestinians. The ability of liberal Jews to ideologically sustain Israeli colonialism, while rhetorically prioritizing Palestinian indigeneity over Jewish indigeneity, shows that such transformations do not rely on dissolving Jews’ connection to the land. Decolonization instead requires confronting colonial violence that hides under the guise of tolerance and human rights and collectively mobilizing to dismantle the state institutions that endow racialized identities with disproportionate power. N ot e s  1 Al-Haq, “Special Focus on Hebron: A Microcosm of the Israeli Occupation,” 19 November 2015, https://www.alhaq.org/monitoring-­ documentation/6465.html; Breaking the Silence, “Occupying Hebron,” accessed 11 March 2023, https://www.breakingthesilence.org.il/inside/­ english/campaigns/occupying-hebron; Masha Gessen, “A Guided Tour of Hebron, from Two Sides of the Occupation,” New Yorker, 24 January 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/a-guidedtour-of-hebron-from-two-sides-of-the-occupation; Saree Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008).  2 The Jewish Community of Hebron, “1 Million Tourists Visit Hebron in Record-Breaking Year,” 10 January 2020, http://en.hebron.org.il/ news/1155.

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  3 Pew Research Center, “Jewish Americans in 2020,” 11 May 2021.   4 Francesco Amoruso, Ilan Pappé, and Sophie Richter-Devroe, “Introduction: Knowledge, Power, and the ‘Settler Colonial Turn’ in Palestine Studies,” International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 21, no. 4 (2019): 451–63; Rachel Busbridge, “Israel-Palestine and the Settler Colonial ‘Turn’: From Interpretation to Decolonization,” Theory, Culture & Society 35, no. 1 (2018): 91–115; Rachel Z. Feldman, “Temple Mount Pilgrimage in the Name of Human Rights: The Use of Piety Practice and Liberal Discourse to Carry Out Proxy-State Conquest,” Settler Colonial Studies 8, no. 4 (2018): 537–58; Jamil Michael Hilal, “Rethinking Palestine: Settler-Colonialism, Neo-Liberalism, and Individualism in the West Bank and Gaza Strip,” Contemporary Arab Affairs 8, no. 3 (2015): 351–62; Mahmood Mamdani, Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities (Cambridge, ma: Belknap Press, 2020); Baseem L. Ra’ad, “Appropriation: Zionist Cultural Takeover,” in Hidden Histories, edited by Baseem L. Ra’ad, 123–41 (New York: Pluto Press, 2015); Lana Tatour, “Domination and Resistance in Liberal Settler Colonialism: Palestinians in Israel between the Homeland and the Transnational,” PhD thesis, Warwick University, 2016; Teodora Todorva, “Reframing Bi-nationalism in Palestine-Israel as a Process of Settler Decolonisation,” Antipode 47, no. 5 (2015): 1367–87; Mandy Turner, “Creating a Counterhegemonic Praxis: Jewish-Israeli Activists and the Challenge to Zionism,” Conflict, Security & Development 15, no. 5 (2015): 549–74; Lorenzo Veracini, “The Other Shift: Settler Colonialism, Israel, and the Occupation,” Journal of Palestine Studies 42, no. 2 (2013): 26–42.   5 Joyce Dalsheim, Unsettling Gaza: Secular Liberalism, Radical Religion, and the Israeli Settlement Project (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).   6 Michael Feige, Settling in the Hearts: Jewish Fundamentalism in the Occupied Territories (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009); Tamara Neuman, Settling Hebron: Jewish Fundamentalism in a Palestinian City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).   7 Michael Feige, “Jewish Settlement of Hebron: The Place and the Other,” GeoJournal 53, no. 3 (2001): 323–33; Neuman, Settling Hebron.   8 Michael Schaffer Omer-Man, “A New Settlement Is Born in Hebron,” 972 Magazine, 13 April 2014, https://www.972mag.com/a-newsettlement-is-born-in-hebron.   9 Chaim Levinson, “Settlers Return to Disputed Hebron Building,” Haaretz, 13 April 2014, https://www.haaretz.com/.premiumsettlers-return-to-hebron-building-1.5244981. 10 Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out.

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11 Feige, Settling in the Hearts; James L. Gelvin, The Israel-Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years of War, 3rd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 12 The Israeli government’s subsidizing of Israeli settler communities can be traced to a number of economic and military advantages that settlements provide to the Israeli state. Firstly, Israeli settlements provide military advantages by enabling Israeli soldiers to operate from within the Palestinian territories. This physical proximity to Palestinian towns and ­villages is thought to strengthen Israel’s intelligence capacities, as well as the Israeli military’s ability to monitor and control Palestinian life through roadblocks, checkpoints, and other similar measures (Laleh Khalili, Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013]). In addition, the settlements provide significant economic opportunities (Neve Gordon, Israel’s Occupation [Berkeley, c a : University of California Press, 2008]). For example, by appropriating Palestinian land, Israel gains access to natural resources as well as the ­economic dependency of a captive source of both labour and consumers (Gordon, Israel’s Occupation). Finally, Israeli settlements in the West Bank operate as “facts on the ground.” By building more settlements, returning land to the Palestinians in a future Palestinian state becomes more costly and disruptive, giving the Israeli state a more valuable bargaining chip for peace negotiations (Gelvin, The Israel-Palestine Conflict). These “facts on the ground” also provide a basis for the continuing refinement of what Jeff Halper (Decolonizing Israel, Liberating Palestine: Zionism, Settler Colonialism, and the Case for One Democratic State [London: Pluto Press, 2021]) terms, the “matrix of control.” Through a complex web of settlements and other Jewish-only spaces, combined with an extensive ­system of walls, fences, roadblocks, military bases, and checkpoints, these various elements of Israel’s military occupation function together to limit Palestinian movement and maintain Israel’s control over the Palestinian population (Eyal Weizman, The Least of All Possible Evils: A Short History of Humanitarian Violence [New York: Verso, 2011]). Therefore, rather than simply being a matter of religious fanaticism, Israeli settlements are a fundamental element of Israeli government policy in the West Bank. 13 Neuman, Settling Hebron. 14 R.Z. Feldman, “Temple Mount Pilgrimage”; Shlomo Fischer, “From Yehuda Etzion to Yehuda Glick: From Redemptive Revolution to Human Rights on the Temple Mount,” Israel Studies Review 32, no. 1 (2017): 67–87; David Lloyd, “Settler Colonialism and the State of Exception: The Example of Palestine/Israel,” Settler Colonial Studies 2, no. 1 (2012):

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59–80; Nur Masalha, The Bible and Zionism: Invented Traditions, Archaeology and Post-colonialism in Palestine-Israel (New York: Zed Books, 2007); Stephen Pearson, “‘The Last Bastion of Colonialism’: Appalachian Settler Colonialism and Self-Indigenization,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 37, no. 2 (2013): 165–84; Baseem L. Ra’ad, “Appropriation: Zionist Cultural Takeover”; Uri Ram, “The Colonization Perspective in Israeli Sociology,” in The Israel/Palestine Question: A Reader, edited by Ilan Pappé, 58–80 (London and New York: Routledge, 2007); Jacqueline Rose, The Question of Zion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Lana Tatour, “Citizenship as Domination: Settler Colonialism and the Making of Palestinian Citizenship in Israel,” Social Science Research Network (2020): 8–39; Lorenzo Veracini, Israel and Settler Society (London: Pluto, 2006); Tatour, “Domination and Resistance in Liberal Settler Colonialism”; Turner, “Creating a Counterhegemonic Praxis”; Haim Yacobi and Erez Tzfedi, “Neo-settler Colonialism and the Re-formation of Territory: Privatization and Nationalization in Israel,” Mediterranean Politics 24, no. 1 (2019): 1–19. 15 Lloyd, “Settler Colonialism and the State of Exception.” 16 R.Z. Feldman, “Temple Mount Pilgrimage in the Name of Human Rights”; Lily Mendoza, “Savage Representations in the Discourse of Modernity: Liberal Ideology and the Impossibility of Nativist Longing,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 2, no. 1 (2013): 1–19; Bhikhu Parekh, “Liberalism and Colonialism: A Critique of Locke and Mill,” in Decolonization of Imagination: Culture, Knowledge and Power, edited by J.N. Pieterse and B. Parekh, 81–98 (London: Zed Books, 1995); Jasbir K. Puar, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (Durham, nc : Duke University Press, 2017); Tatour, “Citizenship as Domination.” 17 Mendoza, “Savage Representations.” 18 Parekh, Liberalism and Colonialism. 19 Ibid. 20 Amoruso, Pappé, and Richter-Devroe, “Introduction”; Busbridge, “IsraelPalestine and the Settler Colonial ‘Turn’”; Lloyd, “Settler Colonialism and the State of Exception”; Mendoza, “Savage Representations”; Scott L. Morgensen, “The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism: Right Here, Right Now,” Settler Colonial Studies 1, no. 1 (2011): 52–76; Parekh, Liberalism and Colonialism; Tatour, “Domination and Resistance in Liberal Settler Colonialism”; Jasbir K. Pura, The Right to Maim (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). 21 David T. Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993); Mendoza, “Savage Representations”;

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Morgensen, “The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism”; Parekh, Liberalism and Colonialism; Augustine Park, “Settler Colonialism, Decolonization and Radicalizing Transitional Justice,” International Journal of Transitional Justice 14, no. 2 (2020): 260–79. 22 Mahmood Mamdani, Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2020). 23 Ibid., 16. 24 Ibid., 18. 25 Ibid., 17–18. 26 For more on the importance of positionality in academic research see: Tara Brown, “aris e to the Challenge: Partnering with Urban Youth to Improve Education and Learning,” Education Resources Information Center 7, no. 1 (2010): 4–14; Patricia H. Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 2nd ed. (New York and London: Routledge, 2000); Teresa Córdova, “Plugging the Brain Drain: Bringing Our Education Back Home,” in Latino Social Policy: A Participatory Research Model, edited by Juana Mora and David R. Diaz, 25–53 (New York: The Haworth Press, 2004); Robert M. Emerson, Rachel I. Fretz, and Linda L. Shaw, Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes, 2nd ed. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995); Devon A. Mihesuah, “In the Trenches of Academia,” in Indigenous American Women: Decolonisation, Empowerment, Activism, edited by Devon A. Mihesuah (Lincoln, ne, and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2003): 21–40. 27 Breaking the Silence, “Breaking the Silence,” accessed 11 March 2023, https://www.breakingthesilence.org.il. 28 Emily Schneider, “Breaking the Silence,” in Conflict in the Holy Land: An Encyclopedic History from Ancient Times to the Arab-Israeli Conflicts, edited by Robert C. Diprizio, 65 (Santa Barbara: a bc -c lio, 2020). 29 Feige, Settling in the Hearts; Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out. 30 Nadia Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Kobi Cohen-Hattab, “Zionism, Tourism, and the Battle for Palestine: Tourism as a Political-Propaganda Tool,” Israel Studies 9, no. 1 (2004): 61–85; Joyce Dalsheim, “Ant/agonizing Settlers in the Colonial Present of Israel-Palestine,” Social Analysis 49, no. 2 (2005): 1 ­ 22–46; Feige, Settling in the Hearts; Jackie Feldman, “Abraham the Settler, Jesus the Refugee: Contemporary Conflict and Christianity on the Road to Bethlehem,” History & Memory 23, no. 1 (2011): 62–95; R.Z. Feldman, “Temple Mount Pilgrimage in the Name of Human Rights”; Masalha, The Bible and Zionism; Pearson, “The Last Bastion of Colonialism”;

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Ra’ad, “Appropriation: Zionist Cultural Takeover”; Tatour, “Citizenship as Domination”; Turner, “Creating a Counterhegemonic Praxis.” 31 Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground. 32 Ibid.; R.Z. Feldman, “Temple Mount Pilgrimage in the Name of Human Rights”; Cohen-Hattab, “Zionism, Tourism, and the Battle for Palestine”; J. Feldman, “Abraham the Settler, Jesus the Refugee,” 64; Nur Masalha, The Bible and Zionism: Invented Traditions, Archaeology and PostColonialism in Palestine-Israel (New York: Zed Books, 2007); Ra’ad, “Appropriation: Zionist Cultural Takeover”; Neuman, Settling Hebron. 33 Dalsheim, Unsettling Gaza. 34 Other scholars have similarly identified the ways that settlers co-opt the language of human rights and other liberal frameworks to justify settler colonialism. See, for example: R.Z. Feldman, “Temple Mount Pilgrimage in the Name of Human Rights”; Shlomo Fischer, “From Yehuda Etzion to Yehuda Glick: From Redemptive Revolution to Human Rights on the Temple Mount,” Israel Studies Review 32, no. 1 (2017): 67–87; Perugini and Gordon, The Human Right to Dominate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 35 All interviewees are referred to by a pseudonym in order to protect their confidentiality. 36 Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out. 37 David Wilder, Breaking the Lies: Revealing the Facts, Questions and Answers about Hebron (self-published e-book, 2012). 38 Hagit Keysar and Debby Farber, “Refiguring the Aerial in Human Rights Activism: The Case of the Palestinian-Bedouin Village of al-Araquib,” International Journal of Communication 14, no. 1 (2020): 5021–54; Julie Peteet, “The Work of Comparison: Israel/Palestine and Apartheid,” Anthropological Quarterly 89, no. 1 (2016): 247–81; Tatour, “Domination and Resistance in Liberal Settler Colonialism.” 39 For more on the graffiti in Hebron, see: Farzad H. Alvi, Ajnesh Prasad, and Paulina Segarra, “The Political Embeddedness of Entrepreneurship in Extreme Contexts: The Case of the West Bank,” Journal of Business Ethics 157, no. 1 (2017): 279–92; Allan C. Brownfeld, “American Jewish Groups Strangely Silent on Israel’s Growing Racism, Religious Intolerance,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs 33, no. 4 (2014): 44–5; Alexander Koensler, “Acts of Solidarity: Crossing and Reiterating Israeli-Palestinian Frontiers,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 40, no. 2 (2016): 340–56; Craig Larkin, “Jerusalem’s Separation Wall and Global Message Board: Graffiti, Murals, and the Art of Sumud,” Arab Studies Journal 22, no. 1 (2014): 134–69; Margot

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Patterson, “Hebron: A West Bank Magnet for Trouble,” National Catholic Reporter 38, no. 44 (2002): 5–6. 40 Price-tag graffiti is a term to describe vandalism committed by extremist right-wing settlers against Palestinian and left-wing Israeli targets. 41 Lila Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Need Saving? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013); Roland Burke, Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); John Charvet and Elisa Kaczynska-Nay, The Liberal Project and Human Rights: The Theory and Practice of a New World Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Costas Douzinas, The End of Human Rights (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2000); Tatour, “Domination and Resistance in Liberal Settler Colonialism”; Mamdani, Neither Settler nor Native; Perugini and Gordon, The Human Right to Dominate 42 Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground; Cohen-Hattab, “Zionism, Tourism, and the Battle for Palestine”; Dalsheim, “Ant/agonizing Settlers in the Colonial Present of Israel-Palestine”; Feige, “Jewish Settlement of Hebron”; R.Z. Feldman, “Temple Mount Pilgrimage in the Name of Human Rights”; Masalha, The Bible and Zionism; Pearson, “The Last Bastion of Colonialism”; Ra’ad, “Appropriation: Zionist Cultural Takeover”; Tatour, “Citizenship as Domination”; Turner, “Creating a Counterhegemonic Praxis.” 43 Mendoza, “Savage Representations”; Morgensen, “The Biopolitics”; Park, “Settler Colonialism”; Pearson, “The Last Bastion of Colonialism”; Eve Ruck and Wayne K. Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40; Corey Snelgrove, Rita Kaur Dhamoon, and Jeff Corntassel, “Unsettling Settler Colonialism: The Discourse and Politics of Settlers, and Solidarity with Indigenous Nations,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 3, no. 2 (2014): 1–32. 44 Busbridge, “Israel-Palestine and the Settler Colonial ‘Turn’”; Turner, “Creating a Counterhegemonic Praxis”; Fiona Wright, “Palestine, My Love: The Ethico-Politics of Love and Mourning in Jewish Israeli Solidarity Activism,” American Ethnologist 43, no. 1 (2016): 130–43. 45  Amoruso, Pappé, and Richter-Devroe, “Introduction”; Busbridge, “IsraelPalestine and the Settler Colonial ‘Turn’”; Jamil Michael Hilal, “Rethinking Palestine: Settler Colonialism, Neo-liberalism and Individualism in the West Bank and Gaza Strip,” Contemporary Arab Affairs 8, no. 3 (2015): 351–62; Lloyd, “Settler Colonialism”; Park, “Settler Colonialism”; Mamdani, Neither Settler nor Native; Morgensen,

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“The Biopolitics”; Snelgrove, Dhamoon, and Corntassel, “Unsettling Settler Colonialism”; Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor”; Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology (New York and London: Cassell, 1999); Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–409. 46 Dalsheim, Unsettling Gaza. 47 Ibid. 48 Amoruso, Pappé, and Richter-Devroe, “Introduction”; Busbridge, “­Israel-Palestine and the Settler Colonial ‘Turn’”; Hilal, “Rethinking Palestine”; Lloyd, “Settler Colonialism”; Mamdani, Neither Settler nor Native; Morgensen, “The Biopolitics”; Park, “Settler Colonialism”; Snelgrove, Dhamoon, and Corntassel, “Unsettling Settler Colonialism”; Turner, “Creating a Counterhegemonic Praxis”; Veracini, Settler Colonialism; Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology; Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native”; Haim Yacobi and Erez Tzfadia, “Neo-settler Colonialism and the Re-formation of Territory: Privatization and Nationalization in Israel,” Mediterranean Politics 24, no. 1 (2019): 1–19. 49 Dalsheim, Unsettling Gaza. 50 Tania Murray Li, “Indigeneity, Capitalism, and the Management of Dispossession,” Current Anthropology 51, no. 3 (2010): 385–441; Mendoza, “Savage Representations”; Park, “Settler Colonialism”; Francesca Merlan, “Indigeneity: Global and Local,” Current Anthropology 50, no. 3 (2009): 303–33; Morgensen, “The Biopolitics”; Stephen Pearson, “The Last Bastion of Colonialism”; Snelgrove, Dhamoon, and Corntassel, “Unsettling Settler Colonialism”; David Myer Temin, “Custer’s Sins: Vine Deloria Jr and the Settler-Colonial Politics of Civic Inclusion,” Political Theory 46, no. 3 (2018): 357–79; Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” 51 Mamdani, Neither Settler nor Native. .

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7 Dangerous Mimicry in the West Bank amir reicher

It is hard to argue against the virtues of getting to know the Other, understanding him/her, and becoming more like him/her. What could be wrong with that? What harm could there be in building a shared ground between different peoples? And yet, during my time living and conducting fieldwork in the West Bank among religious-Zionist settlers, I learned that it is precisely through intimacy, understanding, and the creation of similarities that animosity may intensify rather than dissipate. I call this dynamic “dangerous mimicry.” To put it in stark terms, this is a dynamic in which the more one identifies with the Other and becomes like him/her, the more one sees that Other as a threat. The objective of this chapter is to explicate and conceptually introduce what I see as this particular kind of settler-colonial mimicry. In what has become a growing fashion over the past decade, especially in the illegal outposts – namely frontier communities located on relatively remote hilltops that stand today at the forefront of the West Bank settlement project – second-generation settlers have begun to shape a kind of “indigenous” identity. In this process, these settlers view Palestinians as role models for how to become “connected to the land.” Whereas, in the fourth chapter of this volume (McGonigle) and the third (Groslik, Handel, Monterescu), the authors show us how West Bank settlers cultivate themselves as being of the place through their direct engagement with the soil, in this chapter, we move from wine and organic produce to see how settlers’ indigeneity is cultivated through an ambivalent relationship with the indigenous other. Following critiques of the settler-colonial paradigm, particularly its understanding of the settler-native relationship as a stable binary,1 and the recognition of how the settler-colonizer both disavows and

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desires indigenous authenticity as a marker of legitimacy,2 in this chapter I examine how practices of “colonial mimicry”3 among ­second-generation settlers in the West Bank play a part in their construction of indigeneity. Instead of looking at how the colonized mimic the colonizer, as Homi Bhabha did, I put this formulation in reverse. I focus on three settlers who personify a growing phenomenon of settlers who mimic and take on Arab and, especially Palestinian and Bedouin, attributes. These are settlers who opened themselves to Palestinian culture, learned Arabic fluently, and, to varying degrees, have maintained meaningful relationships with Palestinians. In their becoming Arab-like, what is striking is how, as they partake in the landgrab project against Palestinians, such settlers display what can be seen as “progressive” ways of thinking: they seem to act according to generally accepted notions of pluralism, cultural openness, and a keen desire to “understand the other.” In their process of self-­ indigenization, these settlers go as far as to identify with Palestinian positionality. They, so to speak, excel in the liberal command of putting oneself in “the other’s shoes.” The main issue that concerns me in this chapter is how, instead of building toward co-existence, such identification leads to a lack of faith in its possibility.

O n In t ima c y a n d Anim osity In a striking passage, we learn of Sigmund Freud’s not-so-unconscious desire for Oriental indigenization. This is what Freud had to write to his Jewish colleague Sabina Spielrein after hearing about her pregnancy: “I am, as you know, cured from the last shred of my predilection for the Aryan cause, and would like to take it that if the child turned out to be a boy he will develop into a stalwart Zionist. He or she must be dark in any case, no more towheads. Let us banish all these willo-the wisps!”4 And yet, curing himself of the “predilection for the Aryan cause,” in his Oriental fantasy of desiring a dark, Arab-but-not-quite boy to be modelled on the indigenous population living in the Levant, Freud corners himself, or rather future generations of Zionists, into another Freudian complex. In his study of the uncanny, Freud disclosed the anxiety raised by the figure of the double: a figure who, by presenting our mirror image, threatens our sense of a self-preserved ego.5 Instead of simply seeing in the double my long-waited soulmate, it is his similarity to me that arouses in me the desire to eliminate him. The original

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term Freud used to describe the uncanny feeling raised by the double – the unhomely (unheimlich) – is especially apt for my purposes in this chapter: The double, by being me-who-is-not-me, threatens my sense of being at home. Or, to turn to our concrete subject matter, as such settlers make themselves more similar to Palestinians, they on the one hand substantiate (in their eyes) their sense of being entitled to the land. At the same time, however, as they emphasize their similarity to Palestinians, they ipso facto call attention to the fact that the Palestinians are also tied to the land, just as (and in fact more than) they are. In such a manner, it is the creation of similarities and affinities that bring about the troubling question about who is the genuine native and who is merely a double and therefore can be severed from the land? Similarily, in a seminal thesis, anthropologist and literary theorist René Girard described the structure of mimetic desire: according to Girard, we desire through our mimicking of the desire of another person. Because of this doubling of desire, we are never too far from the Hobbesian state of nature in which we are locked in an inevitable competition over the things we covet.6 Addressing contemporary processes, anthropologist Anton Blok argues that, in our increasingly globalized world, which is increasingly becoming more culturally homogenous, we can expect the rise of violence between adjacent communities, rather than the creation of one globalized peaceful village.7 Finally, in a striking comparison between headhunters in Papua New Guinea and trademark disputes in late capitalism, anthropologist Simon Harrison noticed how the increase in shared cultural features can join two peoples “not in cohesion but in what might be called conflictual resemblance, fraught likeness, or disunityin-similarity (222).” Such different scholars, each in their own way, point to how, instead of difference, it is similarity, leading in its most extreme manifestation to the entry of a threatening double, that can often lead to rivalry and hostility. And yet, what these pointed observations share (especially Freud’s and Girard’s) is a certain ahistorical bent, in which politics, concrete power relations, and especially material factors are absent. In Harrison’s analysis for example, conflicts appear to revolve around the competition over symbolic property, and for Freud over innate sexual issues. And yet, in the settler-colonial context we encounter in the West Bank, we shall see how the symbolic competition over who is the real native of the land is tied to material properties – first and foremost – the land itself. Thus, the process I am depicting is not only

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a matter of psychoanalytic complexity, or a sensitivity toward issues of cultural appropriation, but a political battle waged over concrete material factors. By drawing on Bhabha’s modern-classic notion of “colonial mimicry,” I take such observations that cast the figure of the double as an intimate enemy and analyze them in a concrete settler-colonial historical setting. I also extend Bhabha’s analysis – which he conceptualized with the British colonial indirect rule in India in mind – to a particular settler-colonial project. Thus, rather than mimicry in a “classic” colonial setting, this chapter brings to light what can be thought of as settler-colonial mimicry – and specifically, a settler-colonial Zionist one. I ask: How does mimicry play out differently between the colonial and the settler-colonial situations? From which sources is it animated in the settler-colonial, compared to the “classic” colonial, sphere, and specifically in the Zionist one – and what potential effects do these practices of mimicry carry? I will argue that ultimately the symbolic identity battles waged through mimicry centre around the very immediate and concrete material battles over the possession of land. Without treating Zionism as somehow exceptional, I investigate these questions in light of the specifics of the Zionist historical case: namely, a project understood by its actors as one of homecoming, and one in which about half the settlers descend from the Arab world and share a substantial cultural background with the indigenous population.8

This chapter is based on fieldwork conducted in the West Bank between 2017 and 2020, when I lived in an illegal outpost, comprised of about thirty-five families, deep in the Judean desert. After passing the outpost’s screening committee, I moved into a prefab and lived in the community for a period of twenty-two months. The data I present here is based primarily on my relationship with three individuals – Shlomi (age fifty), Avi (age thirty-eight), and Yonni (age thirty-four)9 – who embody many of the questions about “becoming indigenous” among second-generation West Bank settlers. These three individuals are somewhat extreme examples, and yet, I argue, they crystallize the desires, practices, contradictions, and conundrums that underlie questions of indigeneity in the society to which they belong. Avi and Yonni were born in the West Bank. Shlomi, older than the other two, moved with his family when he was twelve years old to one

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of the flagship Gush Emunim settlements, a few years after its establishment in 1974. All three were raised by religious Zionist families in ultra-ideological settlements that belonged to the Gush Emunim radical stream. In stark contrast to their parents, the three learned to speak Arabic fluently, gained extensive knowledge of Arabic culture, and acquired many Palestinian acquaintances. All of them, but ­especially Yonni and Shlomi, share a genuine affection for Arab culture and people. And yet, against common-sense assumptions that ­cultural and personal familiarity are pathways to reconciliation, these settlers show how intimacy is no antidote to animosity. As another settler once told me: “We and the Arabs are not cousins but brothers … but so were Cain and Abel.”

C u l t u r e a s a B r i d ge to Where? As part of her project of exposing the ideological basis of “liberal sentimentality” that imagines political value in the “identification with alterity,”10 Lauren Berlant remarked that “popular culture relies on keeping sacrosanct this aspect of sentimentality – that ‘underneath’ we are all alike.”11 Culture, in such imagination, is often linked to a bridge one can cross to the other’s culture and realize that, at the end of the day, “we are not that different.” And so, by sharing enjoyment of music, food, or art, as we sit on the bridge of culture, enemies can meet and work toward settlement (in the sense of shared agreement). This liberal way of imagining reconciliation seems to harken back to the belief in the efficacy of magic among the “primitives,” as conceptualized by James Frazer in his classic account. According to Frazer, belief in magic rests on two primordial categories: the “law of similarity,” according to which “like produces like,” and the “law of contact,” where any objects that once touched can continue to affect each other at a distance.12 It appears as if underlying coexistence initiatives, in the West Bank and elsewhere, we find survivals of such primordial thought: the belief is that, if we meet our adversaries (contact), or if we become more like them through cultural exchange (similarity), the magic of reconciliation will reveal itself. In line with such a liberal-cum-magical thinking, especially since the deterioration of the Oslo process, there have been calls that “real peace” will be achieved only through the joint work of Israeli and Palestinian groups who are perceived as having something important in common. For instance, there have been calls that Mizrahi Jews

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(i.e., Jews hailing from North Africa and the Middle East), by virtue of their shared cultural Arab heritage, can achieve reconciliation with Palestinians in a way that Ashkenazim cannot. By focusing in this chapter on Shlomi and Yonni, both of them of Mizrahi origin, I put this thesis to the test. In a similar manner to the faith invested in Mizrahim as offering a path of reconciliation based on a perceived shared culture, there have been initiatives in the West Bank that contend peace will emerge precisely through meetings of those who are often portrayed as the main obstacles to it – the religious fundamentalists on both sides. The deceased leader of such initiatives among the settlers, Rabbi Menachem Froman, taught that it is precisely the Jewish and Muslim ultra-religious who, by virtue of their common religious extremism, hold the greatest potential for bringing about reconciliation. Like the Mizrahi activists I mentioned earlier, I hope he is right. Alas, to return to the bridge metaphor, based on fieldwork among outpost settlers, I came to see how bridges, those emblems of connection (“make bridges not walls!”), can easily turn into sites of violence. I came to see how culture functions as a narrow bridge, a space that allows a meeting to take place, and yet that meeting takes place up in the air, on a narrow structure, above gushing waters. And, the more people on the bridge, the less it seems it can hold, and the narrower the bridge becomes. At this dangerous stage, as rivals become mortal enemies, and the meeting on the bridge becomes a zero-sum conflict of life and death.

M e e t i n g t h e O t h er wi th Amit As I indicated earlier it is important to understand that the settlercolonial mimicry I describe is a growing phenomenon among settlers in the West Bank. Especially in the outposts where Shlomi and Avi live, we see communities who navigate between seeing Palestinians as enemies and as role models of how to be indigenous. Once I walked with Amit, a member of an outpost and an outdoor nature instructor, with a group he led on a hike around the outpost where I lived during fieldwork and where Shlomi lives too. The hike was partly an educational excursion, focusing on the distinctive flora and fauna of the area, and partly a political tour, in which Amit showed the group the expansion of Palestinian “illegal” building in the area and explained to them the particularities of what he called “the battle over

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land” that takes place in the area of the outpost. Although less so than our three main characters, Amit also adopts Arab-like attributes. A month before our day journey, he returned from a trip that he and his wife and their five young children took to Morocco. With much laughter, he shared how, despite them being Ashkenazi, because of their silk shirts, sandals, and his wife’s long Bedouin-style dress, European tourists did not know what to make of them, thinking “we were some weird type of locals.” Most important is that, instead of a kippah, worn by many second-generation settlers in the outposts, Amit wears a pakol, a rounded wool headcover common among Afghan Muslims. Shlomi, Avi, and Yonni wear similar head coverings. In their admiration of Oriental style, the outpost settlers I lived with recall a similar instance recounted by Rachel Z. Feldman in this volume, in which religious Jewish women in the Bat Ayin seminary observe with respect the modest attire of Palestinian women – an admiration that does not extend to respect for their claims to the land. As we were hiking from the desert back to the outpost, we passed Salim’s small compound. Salim, a Palestinian from the nearby adjacent village, built a small shack and a rustic ranch on the borderlands between the village and the outpost, where he herds his sheep. As Amit exchanged greetings with him, Salim waved his hand to the group and greeted them with “salamu alaykum,” which some answered with “wa alayjumu s-salam.” When someone in the group asked afterward whether Salim had permission from the government to build his shack, Amit responded: “Of course not. His house is illegal. And he got the money to build it from the Palestinian Authority.” Amit explained that in recent years the Palestinian Authority had begun to pay individuals to go and build in contested areas as part of the “land battle we are in.” Some of the group gasped with rage and remarked that this was, in their words “outrageous.” Quickly and subtly, Salim was transformed from a kind of noble savage – an old, friendly shepherd living in the middle of the desert – to a cynical political agitator at the centre of a strategic area. But Amit countered the growing antagonistic feelings of the group, saying “Salim is a very good man” and “I’ll let you in on a known secret: like Salim’s house is illegal, so is mine.” Amit explained that both he and Salim wanted the same thing – “to live on this land” – and both needed to overcome a political situation that did not allow them to build their homes legally. As we walked back to the outpost, passing an olive grove beneath the Palestinian village, I overheard Amit explain to a group member that “Salim and

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I are no different.” I want the reader to consider how the cultivation of this “no different” imagination is a double gesture, which carries the potential for reconciliation and shared understanding, but also sets the stage for a zero-sum conflict, in which only one character can eventually remain as the “real” indigenous figure. Near the outpost, we came to a fork. Because Amit was deep in conversation, some of the hikers reached it before he did. For a moment they were not sure where to turn. On the left was the Palestinian village, and on the right was supposed to be the outpost, and yet, from this angle, it looked very much like another Palestinian village. They froze. I arrived and told them not to worry, that the outpost was indeed on the right. A member of the group pointed to the nearest house and said, “Ha, from here this looks like a Bedouin camp.” The house she pointed to was Shlomi’s.

S h l o mi The first is the house of a Palestinian shepherd, the second, that of a Jewish settler, but it is hard to tell Salim and Shlomi’s homes apart. Like Bedouin houses scattered in camps located east of the outpost and farther out in the desert, Shlomi’s house is partially built, constructed from uncovered cinder blocks, and partly sheltered by a corrugated metal roof. Some of the walls are left exposed and are covered occasionally with tarpaulins. His floor is also partially exposed to the natural terrain. Almost everything is cloaked in a thin layer of dust. Once, when I asked him whether I could light a cigarette “inside,” he laughed and passed me his pack of Imperial cigarettes, a brand popular among Palestinians, which he buys in the nearby Palestinian village. I’ve never seen an Israeli smoke this brand. Shlomi is adored by many in the community. The location of his shack – on the edge of the outpost and closest to the Palestinian village (about three hundred metres or so) – was a deliberate choice he made, and is symbolic of his positionality – between Arab and Jewish, settler and indigenous, Occident and Oriental identities. Among the outpost members, Shlomi is known as a “real Bedouin.” This is a term of reverence, meaning Shlomi is the “real deal”: a man who is a native of the land and able to live in rustic conditions, as the original inhabitants do. At our first meeting he said, “Aha, the anthropologist that came to study us natives [yelidim]! I heard about you.” Shlomi emphasizes the “a,” saying it from the bottom of his throat, in a thick Arabic accent.

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When he speaks in Hebrew, he sounds like a Palestinian with a surprisingly rich vocabulary. By virtue of his mimicry, Shlomi is often mistaken for a Palestinian; crossing the checkpoint on the way to Jerusalem, he is often stopped by Israeli security forces. Shlomi’s numerous tales of passing as Arab are a feature in the outpost; several times on Saturday mornings after prayer, I heard him entertaining the synagogue crowd with these stories. On one of these mornings, he shared how, when he went to visit his mother in the hospital, a Palestinian nurse from East Jerusalem asked his mother about the Arab man that came to visit her: “She thought I was Hebronite.” On such occasions, the crowd often bursts out laughing. Following Doris Sommer’s analysis of the analogy between the performance of gender and the performance of nationality,13 I see how Shlomi’s stories of passing (like those of Amit mentioned earlier), are a form of drag, to use Judith Butler’s understanding of the term,14 exposing how the divide between Jews and Arabs, rather than being natural or essential, is historically and politically constructed. I think that the excess of laughter these stories aroused, a roaring and even hysterical sound, also indicates the anxiety these stories bring to the surface when the perceived difference between the outpost members and the nearby Palestinians is, at least momentarily, destabilized. Shlomi is an accomplished musician, the leader of a musical ensemble of a dozen players that performs worldwide their particular combination of traditional Maghreb and Berber music and Jewish Sephardic hymns. However, his main source of livelihood is playing the oud in the street at the Jerusalem market. During what he describes as a kind of early mid-life crisis, he “seriously considered becoming Muslim.” Once, we drove together from the outpost to his childhood settlement on Highway 60, the road crossing the West Bank. We left the outpost at six o’clock on a winter morning. As the sun was rising, we drove across the better part of the West Bank on the empty road along the central ridge of the Occupied Territories. As we were driving from south to north, out of the desert of Judea and into the hilly landscape of Samaria, Shlomi had the time, in what reminded me of Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, to reflect on his intricate life story. Now in his mid-fifties, Shlomi was born to a Moroccan-born father and a “very Ashkenazi” mother. When he was a young teenager, his family moved to the Gush Emunim flagship uber-bourgeois settlement of Beit-El, some years after its establishment. As Shlomi’s younger brother once told me: “After five minutes there, Shlomi realized we

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had reached hell: all these religious-Zionist ‘yellow’ [tzehubim] children.” “Yellow” is a derogatory term for Ashkenazi people. I often heard from Shlomi how stranded in the heart of elitist settlement society they found themselves, “surrounded by these fake ‘salt of the earth’ kind of people.” Indeed, the West Bank settlement project, especially in the past, was characterized by its predominant Ashkenazi social makeup, especially in the more elitist and ideological settlements such as the one that Shlomi’s family moved to. Hence, Shlomi’s family were outliers in the settlement (although, while some of Shlomi’s brothers say so, two of them vehemently reject the idea). Shlomi explained to me how his father belonged to “those Mizrahi people who, wanting to become part of settlement society, erased their Moroccan roots.” He also changed his surname to an Ashkenazi one. In his thirties, Shlomi retrieved his original surname. He is the only one among his siblings who did so. Tied to the Ashkenazi dominance in the suburban settlement, as a  young teenager Shlomi sensed the contradiction between the ­theological-political discourse and high talk of the Gush Emunim leaders about “connecting-to-the-land” and the truth of living in what were essentially middle-class gated communities.15 Shlomi sees this as part of the corrupting westernization of Israeli society. In a political argument we had once, Shlomi remarked that “the real enemy is not Iran, but the United States of shit.” In his desire to escape the suffocating community he found himself in, with its homogenous social makeup, out-of-place built environment, and ideological conformity, Shlomi’s attraction to Palestinian villages and desire for indigeneity recalls the desire among Puritans in early colonial America to leave their stifling New England towns for the “wilderness” of the frontier. It also parallels contemporary views, common in New Age thinking, that the native offers an “authentic” alternative to modernity.16 As we drove along Route 60, passing the red signs forbidding Israelis from entering Palestinian towns, Shlomi reflected on how, as a teenager, before the First Intifada, he used to visit Palestinian villages near the settlement, where he “picked up Arabic and made friends.” One relationship with a Palestinian peasant from the nearby village stood out: “He was a man who didn’t know what day it is, what country is this, nothing. He knew just donkeys. I loved him. I was fourteen; he taught me about donkeys and taught me Arabic.” One of Shlomi’s brothers shared with me that, when he was a young child, the other kids in the settlement mocked him about his “Arab brother with the

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donkey.” Shlomi told me, “I got into speaking Arabic and playing the oud before it was cool. Back then it seemed weird. Then, being like an Arab was embarrassing [fadicha]. Now I have every week a zillion people calling me, wanting to study kamanjā. But when I was a teenager, I was alone in this completely.” And yet, Shlomi refrains from portraying a rosy picture of his crossing into Arabness: at the same time that he was getting to know Palestinians from the area, the conflict, in his account, was always present. One day, when he was a teenager making inroads into Palestinian culture, his father was stoned by a small mob as he was driving through the nearby Palestinian village: “I felt personally hurt. These were people I knew, or thought I knew. And they tried to kill my father. It was painful. On a personal level. So, I used to walk by the village and throw stones at the houses. And after some days, I used to go there to visit friends. That’s how life was like.” Shlomi improved his Arabic as a combat soldier in Gaza during military service he describes as “crazy.” Again, he uses “personal” to describe the animosity between his army unit and the local Palestinian population. “We knew them, and they knew us. With time, we hated each other by name.” At this point on our journey, we were coming close to his childhood settlement and, a bit past Ramallah, we passed a section of the road where his uncle was killed in a shooting at the beginning of the Second Intifada. Three months later, his cousin, the son of the murdered uncle, was also killed, by another Palestinian gunman at the next crossroad we passed. Shlomi’s mother began to look after her widowed sister, and soon his parents got divorced. Shlomi says that after the killings he “tried to become leftist.” He began participating in coexistence meetings in different solidarity groups, but quickly realized “it was all bullshit.” He says: “It wasn’t real talk. It was some Ashkenazi Tel Avivian women coming to meet Arabs and telling them they are sorry for what we are doing to them. Except me, nobody there talked like we and the Arabs are part of this together. The talk wasn’t face-to-face in a real way. Those women talked like they are not from here. I was the only one there who spoke from the heart.” As Shlomi was talking, we passed the yellow gate and entered the settlement. It looked like all other Gush Emunim settlements, which means it looked like the image the reader has of a generic American suburb – private homes with red, slanted rooftops and clearly demarcated yards along tree-lined paved streets. Shlomi said that every time

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he enters the settlement a weight is loaded on his chest. For Shlomi, this settlement is like a different country from the outpost. He is a fish out of water – or like, but not quite, an Arab-Jewish settler, who in the morning left the Orient and now finds himself in the alienating, bourgeois Occident. I stopped the car on the street next to his childhood home, where his mother awaited him. Shlomi reminded me with a smile that the following week he would be hosting a celebration for the anniversary of the passing away of the Baba Sali – a renowned Jewish saint (tsaddiq) among Mizrahi and especially Moroccan Jews. “Please come.” After a moment of silence, before he left the car, he said, “You know, the thing you are doing here is of great virtue. It’s real grace (chesed). That you came to live with us like this. To try to get to know us for real, not just from books or television. You are an open person. Even though you are a leftist, still, you have great light. Show our light too, show we are a place with love and light. Show those people over there in their America.” After leaving the car, he just stood there for a moment, as if, despite being in front of the house he was raised in, he was not quite sure of where he was. Against the suburban landscape he looked totally alone, foreign, and out of place. A week later, as expected, the celebration in his shack became an all-night musical jam (erev nigunim). After Shlomi and others brought out their instruments – oud, bağlama, nei, kamancheh, qanun, and several goblet drums that were passed around – the room exploded with Arabic music interwoven with Jewish piyyutim. Sitting in the outpost with these second-generation settlers, most of them Ashkenazi, who sang Sephardic hymns wholeheartedly and accompanied Shlomi and others in performing songs by Oum Kulthum and Farid el-Atrash, I noticed how this evening, like others of its kind, pushed back against the erasure of Jewish-Arab ­culture in the Zionist project and in settlement society in particular. These second-­generation settlers were not singing “Zionist” classic songs in the style of labour Zionism, as their parents did, because their ideal image has moved on from that of pre-state “pioneers” to the image they have of their Arab “neighbours.” The evening at Shlomi’s shack, and at other all-night jams like it, indicates how the introduction of Arab culture within Zionism, and more fundamentally, the type of Arab-Jew identity that Zionism tried to expunge, no longer seems to hold the old threat it once posed.17 As different scholars have demonstrated, most cogently Ella Shohat, the existence of Mizrahi Jews threatened the Zionist European ideal-ego,

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which imagined Israel as an extension of Europe, one which is “‘in’ but not ‘of’ the Middle East.”18 But Shlomi’s – and as we shall see later, Yonni’s – life experiences indicate how, unlike in the past, the constitution of the category of the Arab-Jew now gains a virtuous quality to it, one that is congenial with hegemonic ideology. The issue is that by being “of” the Middle East, or by perceiving oneself to be so, the process of entering the Middle East, of being “in” it, is substantiated. I speculate that this shift toward the category of the Arab-Jew has to do with the historical diminishing of the legitimacy of the civilizing mission and the growing politicization of indigeneity worldwide.19 In his juxtaposition of Europe and post-colonial Africa, Peter Geschiere, for one, has shown how, with increasing globalization and seeming cosmopolitanism, people begin to make claims of nativity based on the valorization of authenticity.20 Thus, with the valorization of indigeneity, the Arab-Jew category increasingly has become less a source of anxiety for Israeli society, but a sought-after identity that is more and more celebrated.

Not to be overlooked is the difference in the ethnic dispositions among the crowd gathered at Shlomi’s house: Shlomi, with his Moroccan roots, imagines the music as a bridge to his heritage. In contrast, for many in the room, most of them Ashkenazi, the connection to Arab culture, instead of stretching to the past, is more of a bridge to the area and to an ideal future image they have of themselves as people of the land. But for Shlomi, “going native” means also to go and to reconnect with his family’s heritage, a heritage that for the most part was negated in Zionist history in general, and in the religious-Zionist stream in particular. Shlomi shows us the complexities of discussing indigenization, colonial mimicry, cultural appropriation, or Orientalism in the Zionist context: his positionality signifies how, in the case of Mizrahi Jews, or at least some of them, in connecting to their heritage they find themselves closer to Palestinians, which at the same time also puts them closer and ties them to their families’ heritage. And yet, Shlomi asserts that, despite all his affection for Morocco, he doesn’t share this “fake nostalgia” that Israelis with Moroccan heritage have for the alleged coexistence Jews and Muslims enjoyed in Morocco: “We were garbage to them, living as second-class citizens.” Shlomi often remarked that, for Muslims, Jews can never be seen as equal: “They

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can’t accept Jewish rule in the land of Israel. Here, we can only be dhimmi under them.”21 Thus, his belonging to Arabness does not mean Shlomi believes that living alongside Palestinians as equal citizens is a feasible possibility. In this sense, Shlomi finds himself in an existential trap. He is cultivating a type of identity (Arabness) based on role models of people he has concluded he cannot live with peacefully.

Avi At first, Shlomi and Avi may seem similar in their embracing of Arab identity, but their trajectories are almost opposite. While Shlomi as a teenager was seeking to reconnect with an identity (his Moroccan submerged heritage) and to escape from a place (the bourgeois settlement), Avi sought to escape from an identity (American) and to connect to a place (Hebron, where he was raised). Avi is a poster child of the Hilltop Youth movement (noar ha’gvaot). He was raised in Kiryat Arba, a settlement built on the outskirts of Hebron, and for a while in the Old City of Hebron’s ultra-extremist settlement community (which, unlike almost any other settlement, is located within the Palestinian population). Avi met his wife in one of the famous battles against the evacuation of an outpost by the i d f , and their wedding ceremony was officiated over by Avri Ran, known by many as the godfather of the Hilltop Youth movement. As a young man, Avi participated in the establishment of an outpost in the area south of Mt Hebron, and today he leads a project to build another illegal outpost in a remote area east of Hebron. It is built next to a Palestinian village and will limit the ability of the Palestinian inhabitants to expand their community. With the support of the local regional council, the illegal outpost is designed as a touristic compound and is intended to include a hotel that, so Avi claims, will host “people from all over the world.” In addition, Avi and his three partners built four widespread stone villas at the site – in the style, as Avi puts it, of “Arab sheiks” – where they plan to live with their families. From a bird’s-eye view, the compound looks like a recreated Arab village: the hotel-in-the-making is designed as a caravanserai in typical Middle Eastern style, with an enclosed roofless courtyard and vestibules under enormous arched windows. Throughout the compound there are new wells camouflaged as old; peeking inside, I see they lead to nothing but earth. Likewise, Avi and his partners brought in old olive trees, which, as Avi put it, “give the feeling that they have been

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here a long time.” I think to myself that Avi desires such trappings of longevity also for himself. The compound, like all illegal outposts, doesn’t have a security fence around it. Avi explains that there is no reason why Jewish settlements should have a fence when none of the Palestinian villages have one. “A fence,” he says, “also signals that, from this line on, we stop [appropriating land].” In Avi’s case, as can perhaps be suggested with respect to Shlomi’s shack, the mimicry of the built environment can be understood as a form of “camouflage.” That is to say, as a means to triumph over “the Arabs” in what he sees as a zero-sum game in the battle over land.22 As can be seen in Susan Sylomovics’s groundbreaking study of the Jewish art colony established in the Palestinian village of Ein Houd after the expulsion of its Palestinian population in the Nakba, in his practice of appropriating Palestinian architectural style, Avi’s action mark a continuation of long-standing Zionist practices.23 At the same time, such enchantment with indigenous design marks a radical break within West Bank settlement society. As can be seen in the suburban style of the Gush Emunim settlements, those communities were conspicuously built in order to differ from the nearby Palestinian villages. When I came to visit Avi, we usually sat at the partially built synagogue at the centre of this enormous building site. I noticed that the design and materials used to build the synagogue made it look like a miniature version of the Al-Aqsa Mosque. At our first meeting, as we sat underneath the oblique stone ceiling of the synagogue while a Palestinian worker was fixing the wall, Avi pointed to a scar on his forehead and asked me to guess who sewed it up for him when he was a child. The answer was Dr Baruch Goldstein, a Jewish settler from Kiryat Arab, who in 1994 murdered twenty-nine Palestinians in a massacre at the Cave of the Patriarchs/Al Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron.24 Avi said, “We can’t judge what he did. It was war. He was a good man.” I responded, “What the hell are you talking about? He was a murderer.” Avi laughed and in Arabic recited a proverb, which he translated: “Do you want the truth or its cousin?” He went on to say that the truth is that “we are at war with them until they won’t be here. That’s all.” Unlike many settlers today in the West Bank, Avi does not deny, and in fact is proud of, the violence involved in the expansion of the settlement project. Once we were sitting together as I was reading Ha’aretz, and I showed him an interview in the newspaper with the wife of another prominent outpost activist whom Avi knows well who

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established an outpost-farm that has appropriated hundreds of dunams in the Jordan Valley. She was telling the reporter that, despite the coverage they receive, “we are not about fighting the Palestinians” and, in her account, are removed from political motivations. Instead, they are seeking to “heal the volatile soil of this land.” She also has a dream of establishing a space “for spiritual healing” on their farm. As I was reading from the article, Avi laughed and said, “I don’t understand these people. I know as a fact that her husband broke some legs [of Palestinians] over there. Why pretend otherwise? There is nothing to be ashamed of when redeeming land.” While Shlomi, who in the past would have preferred a shared state with Arabs “so they will keep us away from America,” and has resorted out of a sense of despair to a vision that the conflict is eternal, Avi says that “even for true peace I am not willing to give up a centimetre of our land.” Once, when I attended dinner with his family, Avi said that he dreams that one day there will be no Arabs on this land. I answered that mine is to be a professor at Beir-Zeit University and have a son who will marry a Palestinian. Avi stopped eating, lowered his knife and fork, smiled, and told his children: “Take a good look at this guy here. He is what is known as a ‘leftist.’ One day you can tell your kids that you once met such a thing. By then, they will all be extinct. Take a photo with him after Shabbat ends.”

At noon there are about a dozen Palestinian workers in Avi’s touristic outpost-compound, most of them travelling daily from Hebron. Thanks to his fluent Arabic and to what I see as his wish to belong to the area, notwithstanding his views, Avi is friendly with all of them, and occasionally some of them, whom Avi has known for years, join our conversations. While relaxed, their relationship does not seem deep, and Avi is always armed with a gun tied to his belt. In his telling, Avi first picked up Arabic as a kid on the streets of Hebron. He describes sarcastically how “before you leftists brought us ‘peace’” in the Oslo Accords, Hebron was an open city, where he and his friends played with Arab kids on the street. This is a common trope employed by settlers, in which they describe a kind of ideal existence that allegedly existed before the Oslo Accords. In Avi’s telling, encouraged by his American-born open-minded father who did his doctorate in Japanese philosophy, he got to know his

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Palestinian neighbours. Avi says his father was the kind of person who, while believing wholeheartedly in “our rights on this land,” also believed in the value of “talking with all people.” In addition, Avi was influenced by a settler named Eddie Dribben, a mythological figure among extreme settlers, who was a pioneer in speaking Arabic and in maintaining close ties with the Palestinian population. And yet, at the same time, Dribben was an extremist, a violent settler who believed, so I heard, “that we should kill half the Arabs, and make peace with the half that is left.” Inspired by his biological and ­spiritual fathers and by the close proximity in which settlers and Palestinians lived in Hebron, Avi and some of his friends got to know Palestinians and even had for a while a shared, improvised children’s petting zoo where they raised donkeys together. How substantial and how long this shared venture lasted is something I never got a clear answer about. Indeed, according to his account, Avi never went to any of their houses, and he lost touch with them when they became teenagers. Avi recalls that as children they were envious of the Palestinian children: “We used to look at them working the land, riding donkeys, going to the fields.” In a conscious attempt to imitate them, Avi and his friends began to conduct donkey trips from Hebron to the town of Yatta, located about ten kilometres to the south. And later on, in his account, he emulated the Palestinians he saw around him by trying to become a farmer. From this circle of friends emerged many of the prominent activists who went on to establish the illegal outposts. Thus, from this angle, the roots of the outpost movement can be seen in a conscious attempt of secondgeneration settlers to enjoy what they imagined as the “freedom” that their Palestinians “neighbours” enjoyed, primarily their ability to be “connected to the land.” Most striking is how the more political and bellicose Avi’s speech becomes, the more it is infused with Arabic and indigenous idioms. Explaining the purpose of the tourist-compound-cum-illegal-outpost, Avi says that the role of the caravanserai (chan) is for a (Jewish) person to come and feel that he is – and here he switches to Arabic – “Ibn balad,” meaning “son of the area,” or more directly “native.” In our recurring political arguments, Avi would often assert that “we,” meaning the Jews, are “people of the land,” and yet, he would use Arabic idioms to express this. For instance, against the spectre of a leftist government, Avi said that he would have no choice but to practise “sumud,” the Arab, and especially Palestinian, term for steadfastness

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when referring to the heroic persistence of maintaining their presence on the land against Zionist invasion. While first-generation Gush Emunim settlers typically justify colonization in Biblical or realpolitik terms, a man like Avi, in addition to those classic religious Zionist arguments, cloaks his colonial arguments with indigenous idioms and imaginations – or, to use a word he likes, a “baladi,” i.e., “native” or indigenous logic. As in the case of other prominent outpost a­ ctivists, for Avi, taking on Palestinian attributes is part of the project of taking possession of West Bank land. In this way, for such people, indigenization and colonization directly reinforce each other. Avi’s case demonstrates how, in addition to the goal of settlers to exploit the labour of the indigenous population, as in “classic” colonial projects, or to eliminate them for the sake of replacing them on the land, as in settler-colonial ones, 25 in some cases as the one here, settlers also view the native as a repository of symbolic materials for becoming “the people of the land.”26 As we can see in Avi’s practices, this entails a colonial attitude that, rather than seeing “going native” as something troubling that destabilizes the colonial process,27 imagines it as a tool for its advancement.

M imi c r y a s Rejection While not entirely false, I think Avi’s stories about the ties he had as a child with Palestinians are flimsy. As I later realized, Avi’s extensive knowledge of Arabic was acquired only later in life, when he began working in the Civil Administration, and even later, when in his military reserve service he joined an interrogation unit and attended the renowned Shin Bet Arabic school. Like Shlomi, Avi speaks with an exaggerated Arabic accent even when he is talking in Hebrew, but, unlike with Shlomi, his Arabic has an ersatz quality to it. While Avi likes to frame his closeness to Arab culture and people as a product of being raised in Hebron, with time I sensed another layer. Avi admitted that “maybe, there’s a chance that it had to do with this American thing.” Looking at Avi, it is hard to remember that both of his parents are Americans who speak with a strong Brooklyn accent. Unlike Shlomi and Yonni, Avi is of Ashkenazi origin. Avi told me that perhaps he began to “get into this Arabic stuff,” for example, listening to Fairuz, because “maybe I wanted to shed [lehipater] my American heritage.” He adds that he feels he has succeeded, “except that I keep getting burned in the sun.”

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While Avi likes to emphasize the influence of his spiritual father, Eddie Dribben, the staunch nationalist settler, between the lines I noticed how Avi sees his life as a correction and a way to escape his beloved biological father’s fate. He says his father always wanted to be a farmer but never succeeded, because “in reality he was a thinker, a guy from America, who didn’t know how to work with his hands.” In a sombre mood, Avi told me how, although his father dreamed of working the land, most of his childhood he made a meagre living ­fixing “flat bicycle tires for five shekels at a time.” Although he finally found some income as an adjunct philosophy professor at Ben Gurion University, Avi, in a defeated voice went on about how his dad never accomplished his real dream: to become a farmer – that is, to become, in a way, a native. In such a manner, while Shlomi’s mimicry is animated by a wish to reclaim his heritage, Avi’s is more about rejecting one. In a way that underlies the entire Zionist European project, for Avi walking on the bridge of indigeneity is a way to burn the bridges to his past.

Yonni Avi’s efforts of self-indigenization give the impression of a highly selfconscious project. Similarly, in narrating his journey to Arabness, Shlomi includes the dramatic pivotal moment of exiting the fence of the stifling settlement and joining the natives in some form of rediscovery of his repressed roots. In contrast, Yonni’s experience points to a mellow, gradual, off-handed manner in which, among some second-generation settlers in the West Bank, the process of becoming more like Arabs does not take a lot of becoming. Born and raised in the West Bank to Israeli-born parents whose families immigrated to Israel from Morocco in the 1950s, Yonni’s mimicry illuminates two main issues. First, as with Shlomi, there is the difficulty of talking about “constructing indigeneity” or “cultural appropriation” in the Zionist context where half the population descends from the Arab world. Second, as we learn from Yonni, indigenization – in the minds of those already born in the West Bank – is a matter of the basic fact that they were born in what they perceive as their “ancestral land” – not on some theological level but in the immediate autochthonous sense. Put differently, such settlers emphasize how, unlike their parents for instance, they are of the land, thanks to the simple fact that “I was born here.” With Yonni we see what Peter Geschiere and others,

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especially in the African post-colonial context described as the troubling rise in the “discourse of autochthony.”28 What Avi indicates, Yonni completes: for him, more than theological or political matters typical of Gush Emunim discourse, the “real issue” is his connection to the area, which is based “simply” on being born “here.” However, being “simple” does not mean it is weak. As it is framed at a zero-level of meaning, it is perceived by Yonni and those like him as more fundamental, more primordial, more above and beyond anything that can undermine it. While politics and history can be matters of debate, autochthony seems less so. This quality, even more than his Mizrahi, that is his Arab-Jew heritage, is what is most powerful in Yonni’s embodiment of settler-colonial mimicry. Like Shlomi, Yonni is a renowned musician of Arab music. He leads a band that plays what he describes as “Shaabi” style, a genre popular among working-class Arabs. He is a percussionist specializing in the goblet drum, and his band performs alongside a Dabke dance group of religious Jews. Like Shlomi’s shack and Avi’s villa, amid the American-dream-style houses in the settlement in which he lives, not far from Bethlehem, Yonni’s house stands out on account of its incorporation of Arab features. His roof is flat, so “we can expand for our children when the day comes,” as Palestinians commonly do. His home is a centre for many settler musicians who play Arab music in the area (there is no shortage of those). Like Shlomi, Yonni has many stories of passing as a Palestinian. But unlike Shlomi, who embodies the very particular Arab identity of an impoverished Bedouin, and Avi’s sheik-like excessive manner, Yonni’s embodiment signals a more subtle identity. For lack of a better expression, he comes across as “a regular kind of guy,” who can seem like an Israeli or like a Palestinian by the sheer fact that between the two there is not much difference. While his upbringing is very similar to Shlomi’s – a somewhat outlier Mizrahi family in the elitist ultra-ideological settlement they lived in – Yonni, who is fifteen years younger than Shlomi, and like Avi was born in the West Bank, describes his becoming closer to Arab culture as a “natural” process. Being of Mizrahi heritage doesn’t have much to do with it in his experience. He explains that the bare fact of being born in the West Bank already gave him, without much intent, something closer to an Arab indigenous identity. “When I perform in Ireland, for example, for them, I am from the Middle East, so I play Middle Eastern music. This is where we come from.” Yonni’s recollection of how he got into Arab music captures his disposition

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well: as he tells it, it was not about connecting to his forefathers’ heritage, but from “listening since I was a child to the sound of the Muezzin coming from the nearby mosque.” He smiles and adds, “that’s the soundtrack of my life.” Although this is somewhat too pat and has the feeling of a quote he is used to giving in interviews, the point of the matter is that, while Shlomi and Avi understand themselves as being involved in a process of indigenization, Yonni understands himself as always-already indigenous. Over a cup of black coffee, as we are smoking about a million cigarettes, Yonni tells me, “I am from here. These landscapes are my childhood landscapes. Just like my Arab neighbour. And he too belongs here. Anybody saying something else is lying.”

Whe n G o i n g N a t i v e G o e s wi thout Saying In the last chapter of this volume, in a brilliant exploration, Reif Zreik investigates if and when “the settler becomes a native.” Yonni’s life experience indicates how, for a growing segment of settlers, in contrast to Zreik’s answer, this process is seen as concluded. In their world view, questions of ongoing unequal power relations between Jews and Palestinians, and of historic injustices, seem to recede in importance in face of the irreducible fact of “being born here.” After I finished my fieldwork and left the West Bank, Yonni became a minor celebrity: what started as a private joke turned into a cultural event when Yonni’s alter ego, a Palestinian labourer going by the name Abu-Tabla, became somewhat famous through Facebook videos. In them, Yonni presented, in the common mixture of Arabic and pidgin Hebrew spoken by Palestinian workers in settlements, a parodic take on settlers, from an imaginary Palestinian perspective. For a while, many viewers assumed that Abu-Tabla really was a Palestinian worker. Drawing on several appearances on national television as Abu-Tabla, when, in a dramatic moment, he switched to Hebrew to reveal his “real” identity, Yonni recently staged a show in which, performing as his alter ego, he combined music and stand-up comedy. Although an ethnographic goldmine, Abu-Tabla’s videos and performances are not what I find interesting. Far more interesting is juxtaposing these performances with Yonni’s daily life. While his onstage performances as Abu-Tabla emphasize the ethnic line, the way Yonni carries himself daily has the opposite effect of blurring this line. How so?

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Conceptually speaking, the difference between Yonni as Abu-Tabla and Yonni in his everyday life is the difference, in Judith Butler’s terms in her analysis of gender roles, between performance and performativity. While in the former, as Butler writes about theatrical production, the viewer can easily say “this is just an act” and by this “maintain one’s sense of reality in the face of the temporary challenge to our existential ontological assumptions about gender arrangements.”29 It is those everyday ongoing performativity moves that entail subversive potential. For Butler, it seems, it is doing drag when the camera is off that is the real issue. In this way, while as Abu-Tabla there is a strong sense of “putting-on-a-show” that ends in emphasizing the divide between Arab and Jewish identity, Yonni’s everyday manners, habits, and demeanour – these ostensibly delicate and nuanced displays – carry with them a greater menace for those who wish to believe in some essential ethnic difference between Arabs and Jews. The car Yonni drives, his bodily gestures, the phrases he uses, the design of his house, the silverware with which he serves his tea, the amount of sugar he puts in his tea – in an off-handed manner, all convey something profound about indigenization in the West Bank and in Zionism in general. As different scholars have pointed out in other colonial and settler-colonial projects, the temporary taking on of indigenous identity by settlers often serves to eventually emphasize the colonial boundary. 30 But Yonni’s lifestyle points to something different. Here, we learn how mimicry in the Zionist context in fact may work to traverse and erase (from the perspective of the settlers) the native/ settler dichotomy. In his study of mimicry in colonial North America, Philip Deloria describes whites “playing Indian” in a “carnival” manner during specific occasions in which the world is inverted. In this way, he argues, such performances “reaffirmed the social systems that structured the non-festive world.”31 But in the Zionist case, at root there is a different dynamic: as part of the self-understanding of the project as one of homecoming, the desired effect of mimicry is not a momentary transgression, but the transformation of subjectivity. In his everyday performances, Yonnni conveys how this transformation comes about as if naturally – seemingly, without much thought to it. From Yonni’s angle, the line between settler and native becomes increasingly slim. Hence, especially in the case of settlers already born on the frontier, we see how going native is imagined to not demand much “going.”

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In t ima t e E n emi es Like his embodiment of Arab identity, Yonni’s views of Palestinians are nuanced and difficult to pin down. About the Palestinians of the nearby village, Yonni provides an Arabic proverb, saying it first in Arabic, which he later translates: “each finger is different than the other,” meaning it is a heterogenous village. He makes a point by emphasizing how all people, Jews and Arabs, are comprised of different motivations and that, in his words, “nobody holds the truth in his hands.” Following from that, in Yonni’s view, neither Arabs nor Israelis can maintain that the land belongs to them exclusively. But, while Yonni’s views are mellower than those of Avi and Shlomi, he too reveals how going native is by no means a direct path to co­existence. About the nearby village, Yonni adds with a smile: “None of them are Zionist, let’s put it that way.” In his videos as himself, where he speaks Arabic to his Palestinian viewers, Yonni castigates in Arabic what he sees as Palestinians’ inability to reach peace and the violence inherent “in Arab culture.” Answering my question about what learning Arabic and playing music with Arab musicians and befriending Palestinians taught him, Yonni responded: “What the Israelis don’t understand, and Palestinians know very well, is that they lie all the time. When Abu-Mazen says something that sounds like a compromise, leftist like you cheer, but Palestinians here crack up. They never believe each other, but we, especially the Left, believe them. That is because we just don’t understand their culture.” And yet Yonni shares this perspective in a kind of cultural relativist vein, as if that is how Palestinians are and that there is almost nothing inherently wrong with that. Notwithstanding his friendly relationships with Palestinians, the personal affection he feels for Palestinians he knows, and the identification he has with their indigenous disposition, Yonni is highly skeptical about whether any form of political reconciliation is on the horizon – because, in his view, “deep down inside they refuse to accept us.” For example, he points out that “a Palestinian friend can come to visit me, but I can’t enter his village; his community won’t accept it; they’ll kill me, or maybe him. Not for sure, but still, fair chance they will.” He says that the only realm of reconciliation can be the personal sphere, which for him stands in contrast to the political. For a person like Yonni then, cultural intimacy is not a path toward collective political reconciliation, but a substitute for it.

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Yonni’s moral-relativistic attitude is a far cry from Avi and Shlomi’s. And yet, the attitude of the three of them – even that of Yonni, who is more mellow in his political outlook – challenges facile notions of political reconciliation based on cultural affinity. Especially important is how Avi and Shlomi’s hostility toward Palestinians exists not despite but through, based on, derived from what they experience as their personal affection, identification, and affiliation with them. In August 2019, three Palestinians murdered a teenage settler outside a settlement near the outpost I lived in. In a heated debate, Shlomi told me that “killing an Arab male is doing him a favour.” Such comments should not be taken too literally, and yet, for instance, in the last eruption of widespread violence in Israel/Palestine (May 2021), among all the people of the outpost, it was Shlomi who advocated boycotting the village and ceasing to “provide livelihood to our enemies.” Indeed, for Shlomi, there is no question whatsoever that “the Arabs” are very much “our enemies.” Shlomi’s reaction is an especially visible example of the attitude accompanying settler-colonial mimicry that I am trying to convey: the person from the outpost closest to the Palestinian village, both geographically and emotionally, is the same one who called for keeping a distance from it. Shlomi told me that he feels he wasted a decade of his life “on this coexistence story with them. I realized there is nothing to it.” With an oud in his hands, I often heard him say that “unlike Muslims, Jews are merciful by nature.” Once I told him that he was full of shit, and in response he grabbed the white galabia he was wearing and pulled down his collar to show me an insignia of two entangled swords woven into the fabric: “Look at the symbol on my robe – Jews don’t have such symbols.” Noteworthy is how Shlomi says “Jews” instead of “we” and how in his speech he emphasizes that the robe is his. He is speaking from the standpoint of the person who wears it, who feels the insignia in an intimate way on his skin. We see here in a condensed manner Shlomi’s curious positionality: a man who at one and the same time adorns himself and identifies with a symbol that he also despises. It is this contradiction that runs throughout these three individuals’ stories like a thread: personal affection intertwined with hostility. As indicated earlier, what is most dominant in Shlomi’s discourse is the centrality of the “personal” in his disposition toward Palestinians. Again and again, in different contexts, Shlomi emphasized personal

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feelings of hurt and betrayal he felt toward Palestinians, feelings which were based, ultimately, on his sense that he was, in a way, one of them (after all, one can be betrayed only by a person one feels in partnership with). Shlomi repeatedly would return to how he felt personally betrayed when his father was stoned, when his uncle and later his cousin were shot to death, when he didn’t find himself at home in coexistence circles. And, during the last escalation, when there were several stoning incidents in the village “we pass and visit every day,” this sense of personal betrayal continued to percolate. He says that today he feels he can “play music with them, sit with them, drink, eat, and laugh with them,” but, although he has a good friend from the village, that he says he would have married had he been a woman, he realized that “peace with them is impossible.” He adds that they don’t think peace with us is possible either. Shlomi’s tragic fate was that, for him, the more he got to know and identify with the indigenous – the more he lost faith in reconciliation. Likewise, while he is friendly with his Palestinian workers, Avi says that, no matter how friendly he is with them, “both of us know that in the end we are enemies.” In an account that would have made René Girard happy, he says that the more he spent time with Palestinians and learned Arabic, the more he realized that, on the one hand, “we and the Arabs are the same,” in that both want possession of the land, and on the other hand, this sameness of desires cannot be ­settled – precisely because it is of the same kind. Once, speaking about one of his workers who couldn’t hear us as he was drilling into a cement wall, Avi explained that “although personally we get along, in his heart Nabil doesn’t want me here – like I don’t want him.” Avi repeats how, at the end of the day, he and his workers have “opposite interests,” but these opposite interests emerge precisely because they share the same basic desire: to take over the land. Again, we see how Avi’s extremist political beliefs are based on an identification he feels with Palestinians. To put it simply, Avi feels he “gets” Palestinians, because he thinks like them. It is precisely from this standpoint of shared understanding that his extremism is shaped. Especially in the case of Avi, we see how these three characters find themselves in a state of dangerous doubling. The more they feel themselves belonging to the land by understanding themselves to be like Palestinians, the more Palestinians’ tie to the land becomes apparent. To put it simply: if, one thinks to oneself that “I am indigenous to the land just like the Arabs,” then, in a roundabout way, that becomes an oblique affirmation of Palestinians’ connection to the land. Such

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is the case when, for instance, Avi describes in Arabic idioms the legitimacy of the illegal outpost he is building. At these moments, he also brings to the surface the competing desires of the original inhabitants. And yet, the recognition of the “doubling” of their positionality does not open a shared political horizon I could have written about how, when Avi speaks about his indigeneity in Arabic idioms, we see a return of the repressed spectre of the indigenous. Or something along those lines. But the truth of the matter is that Avi is not troubled at all. Once, as we were driving his pickup truck around the West Bank, I told Avi that I am interested in moral dilemmas – for example, how he reconciles his affection for Arab culture with viewing Arabs as enemies. He responded with “What dilemmas, brother? My only dilemma is between an M16 and an Uzi.” Avi’s response is partially banter, but it does convey indifference to Palestinian suffering and how for him there are absolutely no quibbles regarding his efforts to appropriate land on which Palestinian live­ lihood is based: “You call it land grab, I call it land redeeming. Both of us [i.e., Palestinians and the settlers] are in war over this land.” For this trio, especially for Shlomi and Avi, it is the erasure of differences and the recognition of shared desires that shape their understanding that these desires, particularly the desire for land, as irreconcilable.

T he D a n g e r i n S e t t l e r -Colonial Mimi cry At this point, we can try to tackle our basic question from the beginning: What is the difference between mimicry in the colonial and settler-colonial situations? What structures this difference, and what does it tell us about these two related, yet distinct, formations? In sum, my answer is that it precisely has to do with difference. From Bhabha and from Partha Chatterjee, we learned that colonial rule was based on the assumed difference between the colonizer and the colonized, in which the former was constituted as superior to the latter.32 On this imagined difference, which inspired notions such as the “civilizing mission” or the “white man’s burden,” colonial rule legitimized itself. Over in the colonies then, colonial rule invested its energy in maintaining the facade of essential difference between the European colonizers and the indigenous populations. Consequently, it was the threat of erasing this imagined difference that made the mimicry of the colonizer by the indigenous so menacing. If the two become the same, then the colonizers’ legitimization to rule evaporates.

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Thus, in a colonial structure, the colonizer must maintain the difference from the colonized and, consequently, anything related to going native becomes dangerous and must be governed. But while the colonial structure is shaped by the colonizers’ wish that the colonial structure remains identical to itself, the settler-colonizer ultimately desires to transcend the settler-colonial structure.33 Prolonging rule over the colonized is not his or her essential goal. Rather, what the settler wants is to replace the indigenous: to take his land and to transform the frontier into his home. Hence the destabilizing and transcending of the settler-colonial situation is a target, not an accident, for the settler in the frontier. In this endeavour, mimicry becomes an auxiliary and intensifying power in the process by which the settler-colonizer seeks to shed his colonizer status by replacing the indigene. What makes this process of mimicry dangerous is the place land has in this structure – that is, the material conditions that are involved in subjectivity formation in the settler-colonial situation. The issue is that, in the settler-colonial structure, subjectivity formation is not merely a matter of justifying political rule, but a performance that secures access to land by constituting oneself as indigenous (that is, one who is of the land and hence can claim it). In this dynamic, the colonizer mimics the colonized as he seeks to replace him/her. And the more he sees himself in the colonized, the more the colonized appears as a legitimate contender over the possession of the land. This, ultimately, sets in motion the dialectic between identification and animosity. While symbolic identity can theoretically be extended indefinitely (in principle, there is no limitation for how many people may claim a certain identity), the competition over land is over a finite resource. The crux of the matter is that when subjectivity formation is tied to access to land, and when the battle over land in the frontier is understood as a zerosum game, then the question of subjectivity also becomes, in a corollary manner, a zero-sum game. Thus, the more the settler-colonizer likes and becomes like the indigenous other, the more that other is perceived as an existential threat.

C o n c l u sion By examining three representative second-generation settlers, we see how in the West Bank settlement project, when what is at stake is the creation of an indigenous subjectivity that makes the land its own, mimicry becomes dangerous. The growing similarities make the

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competition over land not just a spatial battle, but an existential one. It all boils down to the fact that, when the conflict increasingly becomes not one of “us” versus “them,” but of an “us” versus an almost-but-not-quite “us” – and, on a deeper level, of an “I” versus a competing “I,” when the battle is ultimately about who gets to be cast in the indigenous slot – then it is the recognition of similarity and identification that makes intimacy slide into animosity. An indigenous slot can fit no doubles. While the original encounter between Zionist settlers and Palestinians was marked by otherness – whether we are talking about the origins of Zionism in Palestine or of West Bank settlers – the present-day encounter, as played out in the frontier, is increasingly governed by the danger of sameness. Taken together, we see how, to different degrees, the three men I analyzed in this chapter (I have not yet met a female settler who is involved with colonial mimicry to the extent I describe here) undermine the deceptively attractive liberal notion that cultural and personal affinity, and processes by which strangers become more alike, are stepping stones toward political reconciliation. Instead, what we get, at least among this strand of settlers, is a case of “dangerous mimicry” in which it is precisely the manufacturing of an indigenous identity based on intimate, congenial, and seemingly friendly relationships with the indigenous that, in the eyes of the colonizers, transform the indigenous from being a radical Other to one which increasingly becomes one’s own threatening double. N ot e s   1 Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).   2 Terry Goldie, Fear and Temptation: The Image of the Indigene in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Literatures (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989).   3 Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” in “Discipleship: A Special Issue on Psychoanalysis,” October 28 (Spring 1984): 125–33.   4 Quoted in Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 271.

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  5 Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, translated by James Strachey, Pelican Freud Library 14 (Harmondsworth, u k: Penguin, 1985).   6 René Girard, The Scapegoat (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).   7 Anton Blok, “The Narcissism of Minor Differences,” European Journal of Social Theory 1, no. 1 (1998): 33–56.   8 Yehouda A. Shenhav, The Arab Jews: A Postcolonial Reading of Nationalism, Religion, and Ethnicity (Stanford, c a : Stanford University Press, 2006).   9 Because Yonni’s videoclips have made him something of a public figure, after asking him for permission, I have used his real name. 10 Lauren Berlant, “American Literature,” No More Separate Spheres! 70, no. 3 (1998): 648. 11 Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint (Durham, nc : Duke University Press, 2008), 100. 12 James George Frazer, “Sympathetic Magic,” in The Golden Bough (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1983), 14–63. 13 Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 30–41. 14 Judith Butler, “Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions,” in Routledge International Handbook of Heterosexualities Studies (New York: Routledge, 2019), 48–57. 15 Ariel Handel, “Gated/Gating Community: The Settlement Complex in the West Bank,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 39, no. 4 (2014): 504–17. 16 Shari M. Huhndorf, Going Native (Ithaca, ny : Cornell University Press, 2015). 17 Ella Shohat, “The Invention of the Mizrahim,” Journal of Palestine Studies 29, no. 1 (1999): 6. 18 Ella Shohat, “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims,” Social Text 19/20 (1988): 23–4. 19 For studies that describe the politicization of indigeneity and the rise of claims, including by settlers of indigenous status, see: Peter Geschiere, The Perils of Belonging: Autochthony, Citizenship, and Exclusion in Africa and Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Adam Kuper, “The Return of the Native,” Current Anthropology 44, no. 3 (2003): 389–402; Mahmood Mamdani, “Beyond Settler and Native as Political Identities: Overcoming the Political Legacy of Colonialism,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 43, no. 4 (2001): 651–64. 20 Geschiere, The Perils of Belonging.

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21 A complex and loaded term, Dhimmi is the legal category under which Jews and other non-Muslims can live in an Islamic state as a “­protected minority.” 22 Roger Caillois and John Shepley, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” October 31 (1984): 17–32. 23 Susan Slyomovics, The Object of Memory: Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestinian Village (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 35. 24 See chapter six by Emily Schneider, this volume. 25 Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–409. 26 Elizabeth A. Povinelli, “Reading Ruptures, Rupturing Readings: Mabo and the Cultural Politics of Activism,” Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice 41, no. 2 (1997): 20–8. 27 Stoler, Carnal Knowledge. 28 Geschiere, The Perils of Belonging. 29 Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (1988): 527. 30 Philip Joseph Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT : Yale University Press, 1998). 31 Deloria, Playing Indian, 17. 32 Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020). 33 Lorenzo Veracini, “What Can Settler Colonial Studies Offer to an Interpretation of the Conflict in Israel-Palestine?,” Settler Colonial Studies 5, no. 3 (2015): 268–71.

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8 When Does a Settler Become a Native? (With Apologies to Mamdani) raef zreik

This chapter is about decolonization in general and decolonization in Palestine in particular. One way to consider decolonization is by asking, as in the title, “When does the settler become a native?” But what kind of question is that? If it is historical, how much time needs to pass for the settler to become a native? If sociological, what changes must the settler go through to become a native? If ethical, what actions must the settler undertake to become a native? If personal, does it suffice for the settler to start feeling like he is a native? And what is the role of the native in this process? Here I attempt to look forward, without offering concrete solutions; at best, I can provide conceptual directions. In the case of Palestine/Israel, I do not advocate a definite solution in the form of a “one-state solution” or a “two-state solution.” I do not offer a clear institutional arrangement; rather, I offer an approach that aims to transcend settler colonialism as a dynamic order, and to move beyond the settler-native opposition. I take a conceptual approach, offering ways to think about the issue without committing to a clear constitutional-­institutional position. In the first section of this chapter, I raise the very basic question of the ethical duty of the colonized to theorize the status of the colonizer and to offer him solutions (for fluidity’s sake, I use the conventional generic masculine, although, as the chapters in this volume by Feldman and Reicher make clear, gender is important in colonizer-colonized relations). Must or ought the colonized offer solutions for the colonizer as well as for himself? Is it his duty to contemplate the end of colonialism as a situation, or can he focus solely on his own salvation

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and decolonization? If not, does that mean the colonized is granted a “moral discount”? Can we exempt him from certain moral obligations? Is he allowed not to think of the colonizer, or bracket the question of the colonizer’s future? Or is the colonized under the same categorical imperatives as his colonizer? In trying to answer these questions, I will juxtapose two images of the political – one stemming from Hobbes and the other from Kant. Drawing on these legacies, I will formulate opposing answers to these questions. In the second section, I address the question in the title head on, and state some basic conditions that need to be met in order to contemplate the meaning and possibility of transcending the dichotomous contrast of the settler-native opposition. What category does the settler enter when he leaves the category of the settler? In the third section, I wish to focus more narrowly on the case of Zionism and the Palestinians. What are the main characteristics of Zionism as a settler-colonial movement, and how might these characteristics influence my discussion? I will argue that Zionism is a settler-colonial project, though a unique one, and a national movement, yet a unique one as well. The aim of this section will be to address the ways in which this unique complexity may influence our discussion of decolonization. In the fourth section, I seek to address present-day issues, including the demand by Israel to be recognized as the nation-state of the Jewish people exclusively and the relevance of this demand to our current discussion. Here, I will argue that this demand offers an opportunity for Palestinians to state their vision and address the Israeli public on the status of Jewish collective existence in Palestine. While Palestinians have the right to reject this demand, they are still expected to say what they are ready to accept. The space between what Palestinians are entitled to reject and what they can accept is the space of radical Palestinian politics that can move us beyond the settler-native dichotomy and beyond the current political discourse.

1 D o e s t h e C o lonized H a v e a D u t y t o O f f er S olutions? I raise the question whether the colonized should engage with the colonizer, and to what extent. Does the former owe the latter anything when contemplating the future? In the case of Israel, how far must/ ought Palestinians engage with the new incarnation of the Jewish

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Question as it emerged in Europe? This question, which should have been answered within Europe, ended up transposed and reformulated in the Middle East in general, and Palestine in particular. The question I raise, however, is how far the victim is required to engage in theorizing the status of his victimizer and offering solutions for both of them.1 How far does he need to incorporate the victimizer within his vision of the future, or imagine the victimizer’s future status? To address this, I first develop the argument of why the colonized should be allowed to bracket and shelve the question of the status of the colonizer, focusing on his own salvation first. Then I show some of the weaknesses and flaws in this position. An argument for not theorizing the status of Jews in Palestine or their rights might run something as follows: tomorrow will take care of itself. Let’s obtain at least some power first and gain a position from which to negotiate on an equal footing, then deal with these questions of rights. Thinking of the Other – according to this logic – is something that can be done in the process of negotiations, but, to bring the other to the negotiating table, you first need to generate some level of pressure. The colonized must force the colonizer to listen to him. Without pressure, which has usually proved to be the only way to guarantee a readiness on the part of the colonizer to listen, the colonized will simply be talking to himself. Hence, the colonized must first establish himself as an empowered subject, and only then can he permit himself to engage with the status of the colonizing Other. In this logic, decolonization is one thing and reconciliation is another: these are, analytically, two separate processes that need not be collapsed. The first mission of the colonized is decolonization and not reconciliation, despite the close relationship between the two. By that, I mean that the process of decolonization aims first and foremost to grant independence, freedom, and power, allowing the colonized to regain subjectivity as an empowered self, capable of shaping his future. Only when this status is securely gained can the colonized engage in the project of reconciliation, mutual recognition, and interdependence. A process of reconciliation that starts before the stage of independence and empowerment is achieved risks perpetuating the present power relation. At this point, one might juxtapose two modes of thinking about “the political” and its relationship to the ethical. One mode derives from Machiavelli through Hobbes and is epitomized by Carl Schmitt: politics is how to rule using force and power. This tradition makes a clear distinction between the ethical and the political, with the political

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standing on its own, not parasitically to the ethical. It stresses conflict, not consensus, and will, as opposed to reason.2 Another tradition stems from the Kantian approach, all the way down to Rawls and Habermas. Here, politics appears increasingly parasitic on the ethical and moral. This tradition focuses on universality and consensus, not on conflict; on reason, not on will.3 These traditions represent modes of ruling and are complemented by equivalent theories of modes of resistance by the ruled. The first vision of politics – politics as power and conflict – has developed theories of resistance within it. Here one can find names like Karl Marx4 and Frantz Fanon.5 Class struggle aims to bring about the victory of one class over the other and, according to Fanon, the victory of the colonized over the colonizer. This is one vision of resistance. For the purposes of this chapter, let us name this view of liberation the “conflict thesis.” The other vision of resistance is one that understands politics in the shadow of ethics and includes Mahatma Gandhi6 and Martin Luther King7 as exemplars. Here, the act of liberation is inclusive, and aims to save both the oppressor and the oppressed, to overcome colonialism, not just the colonialist, and racism, not just the racist. It aims to bring society as a whole to a new stage of relationship and co-­operation. Here, the role of ethics is clearer and prominent, and there is some privileging of discourse aimed at creating consensus. Let us call this vision of resistance the “consensus thesis.” One way to demarcate the distinction would be to say that while the “consensus thesis” tries to look at the conflict and the struggle from the viewpoint of nowhere, or to take God’s view, and attempts to reach a solution for the entire problem, the “conflict thesis” sees the conflict first and foremost through the particular vantage point of the oppressed agent, forfeiting the pretense that it can speak an abstracted, position-less universal language. In fact, proponents of the “conflict thesis” might suggest that the thesis offers a different concept of universality, based on deepening the insight of each particular agent involved in the situation, instead of striving for abstraction. An example of that is the proletariat: while it is a particular class, still, according to Marxist theory, it holds a universal mission of emancipating humanity. In this sense, the universal is reached through conflict, not through evading conflict.8 These two theses are not the only ways to view politics, of course. These are ideal types or polar positions but, while they are not exhaustive, they do represent different sensibilities along a spectrum. One can find more complicated middle-ground positions, as in the case of

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Hannah Arendt9 (acting in concert in the public sphere) and Max Weber10 (the ethics of responsibility, as opposed to the mere politics of conviction), but I leave aside those middle-ground positions for the moment. First, to achieve maximum lucidity, I want to push the arguments to their limits and identify where they will lead: to the “conflict thesis” or the “consensus thesis”? Here is the argument for the “conflict thesis.” In a situation of political struggle against ongoing occupation and dispossession, as in the case of the colonized against the colonizer, and in the case of Palestinians against Israel, there is a pressing need to rally all powers against Israeli aggression. One of the factors in this rallying process is fury: moral rage, anger, even enmity. Some sense of enmity is required in political struggles, and some level of ignorance of the Other might be productive in political struggles (Reicher, in this volume, makes a case for not idealizing knowledge of the Other). Che Guevara offers a particularly distilled version of this argument in his “Message to the Tricontinental,” in which he observes that hatred is an essential element in every political struggle. Guevara takes the logic of enmity to its extreme: “[A] relentless hatred of the enemy, impelling us over and beyond the natural limitations that man is heir to and transforming him into an effective, violent, selective and cold killing machine. Our soldiers must be thus; a people without hatred cannot vanquish a brutal enemy. We must carry the war into every corner the enemy happens to carry it: to his home, to his centers of entertainment; a total war.”11 Of course, one cannot accept this logic for the same reason that Guevara tacitly gives: if we were to accept his logic that one must become a “killing machine,” then this implies that one ceases to be human. Still, this need not blind us from the core of his insight: conflict, anger, and even hate are factors in political struggle. Ideally, hate need not and should not be directed at a certain group or race, but at the particular role they play: slave masters, colonizers, exploiters, occupiers, and so forth. Clearly Guevara is an extreme case and to be rejected. He fits with the distinction that Carl Schmitt makes in his late work The Theory of the Partisan, in which he notes the distinction between the absolute enemy – the enemy that is not only to be conquered, but to be annihilated – and the real enemy, which need only be defeated and conquered. In this sense the absolute enemy is “The” enemy of humanity and is the incarnation of evil on earth.12

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Schmitt equates this distinction with that between the partisan – who considers the other as a real enemy who needs to be compelled and conquered – and the terrorist, who considers the other as an absolute enemy who needs to be annihilated. Both entail two levels of enmity. There is a third image of enmity, a less heated version, which one can find in Joan of Arc’s speech at her trial, and which Schmitt himself mentions in his book. Here the enemy need not be annihilated, nor necessarily defeated; he simply needs to leave us alone. He is the subject of our indifference. Joan of Arc is indifferent to the enemy, his status, and his future. The story goes that, when Joan of Arc appeared before the clerical court, she was asked whether she claimed that God hated the English. Her answer was: “I do not know whether God loves or hates the English; I only know that they must be driven out of France.”13 We can understand from this that Joan of Arc does not necessarily hate the English, but she does not care about them, either: she simply wants them out of France. Thus, we have at least three images of the Other to fight or struggle against: the radical, or absolute enemy of Guevara, the real enemy of the Partisan in Schmitt, and the enemy Joan of Arc is indifferent to. Assuming that we reject the first one for what appears to me obvious reasons (e.g., becoming a killing machine), we are still left with two images of enmity: the “real enemy” and the option of indifference. Let us assume that colonialism constitutes a real enemy, and it is “evil.” Are we allowed to resist it, and how? Machiavelli, on the one hand, was fully aware of this problem, and his answer was clear: if you do not resist evil, then evil will prevail, though resisting evil may commit you to do evil yourself.14 Saving your country, or the public, is more important than saving your soul. You must get your hands dirty if you insist on resisting evil. Kant, on the other hand, has a different, and complex, take on this dilemma: because resisting evil might commit you to do evil, and since you are under a categorical imperative not to do evil, Kant’s moral philosophy might leave us powerless and helpless in the face of evil and leave us without a theory of resistance.15 This ambivalence appears most clearly in Kant’s writings on the French Revolution. While he endorses its ideals and it kindles his enthusiasm, still he denies the people any right to revolution or to resist the sovereign.16 Thus, Machiavelli will allow the politician actions that Kant does not allow, unless we are dealing with very extreme cases.17

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I am not able to deal with this large question in full here. Allowing the politician to escape the moral imperative under the banner of necessity might be a dangerous carte blanche for ruthlessness, but allowing him too little might amount to a position in which he absolves himself of the results of his actions. He might behave morally, but while doing so, he allows evil to prevail. Now let’s move to the option of indifference. Can we do politics without even some basic enmity and with the overwhelming indifference that Joan of Arc hints at? No annihilation, no defeat, just indifference. Can we do politics without a minimum of indifference? How far can we incorporate the colonizing Other in our discourse of liberation? Here I am alluding to the idea that a universal duty to care for all people on earth equally might stand in tension with the very concept of borders, national units, the modern state, and the concept of the political. We might owe duties to strangers, but not in the same way we owe them to our fellow citizens.18 One may argue that to act in general, and to act politically in particular, requires some level of determination that is based on the basic idea of partiality and simply on being biased – being committed to one group and its success. In this way, the political is in tension with the ethical.19 The ethical presupposes some universal openness that requires one to stand above conflicts to adopt an impartial point of view, to be able to see the other’s perspective, and to be able to judge from the objective and impartial vantage point of nowhere. For those acting politically, this objective, impartial vantage point is either delayed, non-existent, or it can exist only as an ideal. For the political actor, it is hard to simultaneously situate oneself in the position of the accuser and the position of the judge, to create the conflict and to be responsible for resolving it. The duty to be a responsible judge in terms of finding ways to solve the conflict stands in the way of raising the heat of the conflict and inflaming it as a fighter. This tension between the openness of the ethical and the closure of the political might tip the balance in favour of bracketing20 ethical matters and shelving them for the time being. By that I mean that the political cannot be parasitic on the ethical domain, as the Kantian tradition of politics requires us to assume. The political is mainly a dynamic of power, while the ethical is a limitation on power. Politics is the playground and ethics is the borderline. In other words, ethical discourse can stand in the way of the political mobilization of the people and their attempts to gain power and change the balance in relations in their favour.

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In this understanding, the political is not, and should not, be merely a kind of applied ethics, but rather the other way around: ethical discourse is parasitic on the political. The ethical is the privilege of those who can afford it – the privilege of the powerful, who went to war and have won. Only after winning is there a gap between what one can do and what one ought to do. It is this gap between what one can and what one ought to do that lies at the heart of ethical and moral discourse. It is this ability to be free from without – to possess unconstrained physical and economic ability – but still to be constrained from within – that is, self-limitation.21 There must be a powerful self that one seeks to limit for self-limitation to be meaningful. Thus, political discourse as the site of the power relationship is antecedent to moral discussion. Power, as the ability to make choices, is the precondition for the meaningfulness of the “ought to” discourse. There is no meaning in discussing what one ought to do under certain circumstances, unless one has different options as to how to act and is asked to choose between them on a moral basis. If a weak person offers solutions to a stronger one that include self-limitations, he may not sound particularly convincing. For those who have no other option, speaking the language of moral necessity might sound little more than pitiful. Given the reality of an imbalance of power where the colonized is subjugated externally – from without – by the colonizer, would it make sense to ask the colonized to also subjugate himself internally, from within? Would that not be asking the colonized for too much subjugation? Would not ethics become just another mode of subjugation that can play a role in perpetuating the status quo of power relations? Fanon expressed this vision in very clear terms. He understood the conflict between the colonizer and the colonized not as a conflict within a unity or within a potential synthesis – and, therefore, one that need not necessarily be sublimated by mutual recognition, as Hegel thought necessary. On the contrary, this struggle is between colonizer and colonized and, instead of moving forward and upward to mutual recognition, its natural course is to spiral down toward a “struggle unto death,” where one side will win and the other will lose.22 Fanon thought of the process of decolonization as a violent event, not gradual but revolutionary. As he put it: “Decolonization is quite simply the replacing of a certain ‘species’ of men by another ‘species’ of men, without any period of transition. There is a total, complete and absolute substitution.”23 This process nowhere resembles a

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reform, but rather involves the replacement of one order by another: “Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is a program of complete disorder. But it can’t come as a result of magical practices, nor of mutual shock, nor friendly understanding.”24 One can fully grasp this image when it is compared with the other mode of resistance inspired by Martin Luther King Jr. He had a dream for America in general, and not only for his own black brothers. He dreamt of a common future for the former slaves and slave-owners, where both can live together.25 The same is true for Gandhi, who thought the struggle takes place within a common human horizon, where salvation is for both groups, not for one.26 But for Fanon – at least in some of his rhetoric – it is as if it is “us” against “them,” giving up the hope of speaking a universal language that can entail and incorporate both. That is why he speaks mainly about the decolonization of the colonized, not decolonizing the situation as a whole: “The native is an oppressed person whose permanent dream is to become the persecutor.”27 As we see, the aim here is not to put an end to the duality of prosecutor-prosecuted as situation, but rather to invert the role within the relationship of prosecution. If we were to follow Fanon’s logic, we would not find many reasons to bother theorizing the colonizer. There is also a pragmatic argument as to the limit on how far the colonized victim can be asked to engage in ethical discourse on the status of the colonizer. The argument is that, since there is no way that the colonized could reach a consensus on how the colonizer should be treated, or about the latter’s status or rights in the future vision of society, even raising the question at this early stage in the struggle will end up dividing the colonized camp and weakening its internal solidarity, cohesion, and, ultimately, its power. Why should we sacrifice our internal solidarity and divide our united front for, basically, nothing? First, we must gain power and assert ourselves as a united empowered entity; existence precedes essence, and respect precedes love. The colonized is so burdened with his problems, pains, losses, and missions that it would be obstructionist, impractical, and counterproductive to ask him to also theorize the status of the colonizer. Does that mean that the colonized/disempowered powerless person can be allowed some moral discount when he acts? Is he to be put under a more lenient ethical judgment? Can he excuse himself from the gravitational force of at least some moral questions and duties? Can we bracket the question of the status of the colonizer?

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I will leave these questions hanging, without giving them a full answer. However, I want to make a few comments as an attempt to begin dealing with the questions posed. These comments are limited to the case of Palestine/Israel and do not aim to give a full-fledged answer to the larger question. First: I do not think that Palestinians are only weak. In certain aspects – economically, militarily, and politically – they are. They are under occupation, and the movement of each, whether day labourer or president, is controlled by Israeli officials.28 There are millions of Palestinian refugees around the world and within Arab countries, many of whom lack clear political status.29 The Gaza Strip is under a collective punishment in the form of a severe siege, which is why it has often been described as the largest single open-air prison on earth.30 Palestinians of Israel are second-class citizens at best, and even their formal citizenship status is under perpetual attack.31 But in other aspects – geographically, culturally, and historically – they are not without a homeland. There are still six million Palestinians living in their historical homeland. They managed to rescue the name of that homeland – Palestine – from oblivion. Culturally, Palestinians are part of the Arab nation, with its rich history, culture, and language. Israeli Jews must win each and every war to maintain their national identity. Winning and existing are almost synonymous for most Jews in Israel. This means that winning is an existential necessity. This amounts to a neurosis, in the sense of an exaggerated feeling regarding the eminent dangers in their immediate surroundings. On the other hand, Palestinians can lose and continue to feel entirely Palestinian. Despite Palestinians’ striving for independence as a preferred future state, their present lack of independence does not negate their national identity. Thus, for Palestinians, sovereignty lies at the margin of identity, while for Zionist Jews it sits squarely at the centre. Israel has faith and feels militarily secure in the present, but it lacks existential security in the future. It is a society that lacks even a fantasy of the future.32 Second: Palestinians do not have much choice. They are stuck, together, with the Jews, in Palestine. The Jewish Question is forcing itself upon the Palestinians, and it is their fate and destiny to deal with it. The two communities are living among each other in inseparable ways geographically, despite the persistent attempts to separate them politically. To think of decolonization as simply the undoing of a past event can be dangerous, since the bodies of the two peoples are very much entangled. Israel is a unique settler-colonial project that cannot

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be undone mechanically. At the same time, despite Israel’s slow and steady sociocide and politicide against Palestinians, Israel is incapable of fully annihilating them. It probably could do so in terms of sheer military force, but I do not think that it can do it politically. First, there are no political forces that can enact such a decision in Israel politics, either currently or in the foreseeable future. Second, I do not believe that the Zionist project could maintain its unity and coherence within the local and global Jewish community if such an act were undertaken. Third, I think that, despite everything, Jews in the Middle East do bear some sense of being a minority in an open geographical space, and, despite their overwhelming power, they do not and cannot act as an imperial superpower. Given all of this, I would venture to guess that, in the long run, mutual recognition is the more – though not the only – reasonable option. In this way, the ethical and the practical collapse into each other. Third: It is true that there is a price to be paid by the Palestinians for discussing the status of the Jews, as this might be divisive internally, but there is also a price to be paid if this debate does not take place. Israel has very much capitalized on the relative absence of such a debate in the past, and continues to capitalize on it today, by alleging or insinuating that Palestinians are not considering a future for Jews in Palestine because they are bent on ensuring such a future does not take place. This reinforces the so-called “siege mentality” in Israel and enhances Israel’s habitual conflation of hegemony and survival, at home and abroad. All that said, it still does not mean that, if Palestinians do hold the debate and reach the “right” answer, all their problems will be solved and decolonization will somehow organically arrive – far from it. Palestinians are where they are now not because they are “stupid,” or because they did not propose the right answer to the Jewish Question as it was recast in the Middle East, but mainly because they are weak and lack the power to impose a reasonable solution. Nevertheless, even if I am sure that clarity alone will not be sufficient to impose any solution on Israel, I argue that a clear vision is necessary. If nothing else, there might be compelling pragmatic reasons for offering a clear answer to the question of the status of Israeli Jews in Palestine. Sometimes a coherent and consistent moral position is required for political, pragmatic reasons. In this way, there is not such a sharp division between power and ethics as one might think, so that a coherent moral vision can by itself play a role, by influencing people’s attitudes, fears, and conceptions of the self and Others. By

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arguing so, I wish to invert the dictum offered above on the relationship between politics/power and ethics, and suggest that ethics itself, can, at times, be a practice or a move in the field of power.33 Four: To win a struggle, one needs to know where it will stop, that is, the point at which the mission will be accomplished, and the goals will be achieved. This means that one must ask himself what the status of Jews will be when Palestinians win. Here, we can allow ourselves to learn from one of Israel’s most crucial mistakes – failing to set itself a clear stopping point. Zionism is an ongoing revolution that refuses to become a Rechtsstaat (a legal state), and an ethnically exclusive settlement project that refuses to settle down.34 By suggesting and offering a stopping point, you might be able to indicate to your own people the ultimate target of the struggle and signal to the Other the line between the site of conflict and the site of peace, all without relinquishing the hope and intention of forcing the Other to make choices. Five: In transforming our reality we use means that may transform us as well. France left Algeria, but the violence that was brought along with decolonization lived on for decades in Algeria. If one thinks of life as a process, there is no priority of ends over the means, or of goals over the road to the goal. All that there is is a road, and then another road. It would be a mistake to think that one can use certain means and simply discard them later on. Sometimes the mask (i.e., the means) that one puts on sticks to the face so tightly that it ends up becoming a part of the face itself. The idea that subjects can use means, deploy them, discard them, and/or change them, while keeping the identity of the subject intact is problematic. The self is in part constituted by the means it uses, in the sense that there is no a priori self that is fully constituted before the action it takes and the means it deploys. Six: The “conflict thesis” has a Janus face. Adopting it allows Israel to deploy it as well, for its own purposes. If politics is the issue of power relations first and last, then why should Israel restrain itself? All this suggests that the dichotomous juxtaposition of the two kinds of politics and between ethics and politics is probably misguided. The relationship is neither one of complete opposition, nor of convergence. Justice adds to the power of politics; powerless justice is silent. One must probably think of both at the same time. What the exact, objectively correct balance is between them is hard to tell. I now proceed, assuming that theorizing the settler is a necessity, not, in the case of Israel/Palestine, a privilege, though I am not sure that I have won the argument and managed to show that this must be

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the case. Clearly, there is more work to be done on this level. My aim was to challenge two positions, often taken for granted: the one that assumes colonized people have the same obligations as the colonizer, and the opposing position, which assumes that the colonized are exempt from obligations toward the colonizer. I hope I have managed to show the limits of both.

2 W h e n D o e s t h e Settler S t o p B e i n g a Settler? There is something unique about Palestine/Israel. Most settler-colonial cases are now over, while in Israel/Palestine the process is still going on at full force, as well as the struggle against colonization. It is evident that Zionist settlement has succeeded, but not in full. Thus, we are not able to talk about the decolonization process in the language of the past. Talking about it as it occurs means intervening in the shape that it will take, in its trajectory and in its future. This does not mean Israel does not fall within a paradigm or that there are no lessons to be learned from other, already “completed,” processes: it just keeps us aware of the limits of analogies. Most settler-colonial cases that one can think of have concluded either with the near-annihilation of the native as a collective group (as in Australia and the United States)35 or with the expulsion of the ­settlers, as in Algeria.36 Other classic colonial projects – non-settler projects – ended with the simple withdrawal of the colonial power, but those cases do not interest us here, as they are not cases of settler colonialism. The settler colonialist comes in order to stay, and his logic, as Patrick Wolfe37 convincingly argues, is to erase and eliminate the native. The means for doing so can take different forms: expulsion and physical extermination, on the one hand, and incorporation and forced assimilation on the other. In both cases, the native disappears as a collectivity. Classic colonialism, conversely, aims to exploit the local population and the resources of the land. It has a completely different logic, as it does not aim to replace the local population. Classic colonialism also does not entail a desire to become native – in fact, Britain’s classic colonialists coined the phrase “to go native” and used it in a strictly pejorative sense. The settler colonialists want to forget they are settlers and, as Lorenzo Veracini observes,38 transcend the process itself. The process succeeds when it comes to its ultimate end and buries its colonial-settler traces.

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As Mahmood Mamdani observes,39 this should not allow us to conflate the settler colonialist with the immigrant. Unlike the latter, the settler colonialist refuses to come under local laws. He is the law. He brings with himself his own law, his totality, and his terms of reference. He accepts no partners in making the law. The native can benefit from the colonialist’s arrangements as a contingent beneficiary, but he cannot be the co-author of the nomos of the land (which is of importance to my discussion of the meaning of decolonization below). In this way, there are not many similar cases to draw upon as ­models. As far as the dynamics, the technology, the settling project of taking over the land, and the relationship to the native are concerned, Zionism does fit into a paradigm. But as to the questions of how, and in what way, one can bring this process to an end – the analogies are limited. South Africa could give us an insight into a case where a settler-colonial project did not end by either the annihilation of the native or the expulsion of the settler. But this analogy is limited for many reasons that I am not able to mention in this short article.40 How and when does the settler stop being a settler? The settler can stop being a settler but cannot become a native or an indigenous person.41 To draw on Mamdani again, the moment the settler stops being a settler, the settler-native dichotomy itself implodes. The bridge between settlers and natives collapses, and with it the two banks of the bridge: the settler and the native themselves. They may remain as historical or emotional facts, as part of a story of becoming, but not as a political fact. They do not bear on every individual’s status, rights, privileges, and duties in the public and political sphere. Thus, one way to look at the decolonization process is as a process with some similarity to that of secularization. As in a secular society, where each person’s religion becomes a private issue, so too do the settler and native identities in decolonization. They are privatized or bracketed from the public sphere in the same way that religion is bracketed or privatized. But if this is the analogy, then all the critiques of secularization might be applicable mutatis mutandis to decolonization as well. Nevertheless, the question remains: how much of this past can become a private matter and how much of it must continue to be part of politics and law? But when and how does the settler stop being a settler? First, the settler is no longer a settler when he sits down and stops settling – in other words, when he stops his expansion as a settler, taking over more and more land and resources. A settler stops being

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a settler when the expansionary settlement comes to a stopping point and an ending – in other words, when it declares its victory and thus turns the moment of its cessation and defeat into a moment of triumph. That moment is also where decolonization begins, but it does not end there. Colonization is both a collective movement through space and the subjugation of the local. Both these processes must come to an end before decolonization is complete: the movement to expand – that is, the actual project of settlement – and the reinforcement of the settler’s supremacy. Second, the settler must give up all privileges, individual or collective. Practically, this means giving up his supremacy and accepting full equality with the native. This way, the settler stays but colonization goes, and when colonization goes, the settler stops being a settler because the situation is no longer one of settlers and natives. This reordering cannot change history, of course, but it can change the trajectory of the future. As an historical fact, the settler continues to be a settler, but in a political context and in practice he is a settler-no-longer. But if the settler and the native exit their categories, what do they enter? What new conceptual spaces do they occupy now? What comes after the native and the settler? What and where can they meet, and on what middle ground? The main candidate for such a political space is the old, boring cate­ gory of citizenship. The strength of the concept of citizenship lies in its abstract quality, like the concept of money. Money, as we know, has no colour. It mediates between commodities on an equal footing, and it abstracts from the use value of things, turning them all into exchangeable commodities. Citizenship, as well, abstracts us from our particularity and allows us a common denominator: we are all citizens, bearers of rights and duties regardless of race, colour, and religion.42 The trouble with citizenship is the same as its advantage: its abstraction from all that makes us what we are – our culture, our history, and, mainly, our wealth. I think the South African experience is illuminating in this regard for what appeared to be a revolutionary transformation that stopped very much on the legalistic formal level and could not penetrate deeper into more meaningful layers of people’s lives. South Africans are equal in their potentialities, not in their actualities; in what they might be, not in what they are.43 Probably one lesson to be learned is that one cannot leave it all to the formal equality of citizenship discourse, for at least two reasons. For Palestinians, injustices of the past cannot be overlooked, and the

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way the colonial past has shaped the relationship between the two communities must be tackled and unpacked.44 The formal abstractness of citizenship must thus be supplemented by a certain visibility and relevance of history, of the past. There must remain some aspects of the past that are relevant in public here and now, not only in private. How many? Which? It is hard to tell. But I think those parts of the past that leave their traces and shape fragments of people’s lives, wealth, conditions of existence, and material well-being should be allowed to figure in any arrangement and need be taken into account, at least for some considerable time. The settler cannot simply one day stop being a settler as if there is no past: past injustices and dispossessions must be settled and addressed. The collective communal and national aspect must also be taken into account for Israeli Jews. Any forward-looking solution must take the collective Israeli-Jewish identity into account and give an answer to people’s need for and interest in their culture, religion, nationality, and history. In this sense, the category of citizenship does not aim to comprehensively replace these interests, but rather to create a space where a conversation based on an equal footing can take place. Citizenship, in this regard, stands for the new “we,” based on equal terms of engagement. It does not abolish identity, but puts it in its place and tames it. The idea of citizenship that I introduce here does not aim to introduce a “one-state solution” as being “The” organizing frame and solution for the polity. Both groups – Palestinians and Israeli Jews – are very much attached to their identity, and this attachment itself is constitutive of their identity; hence, any solution must be fully attentive to this reality. Citizenship here stands for the idea of universal equality on the individual level. Each and every person between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River must bear the same rights, both as an individual and as part of a collective. However, the category of citizenship can be problematic for both groups. To be established, the category requires great effort and even concessions on the part of natives as well on the part of settlers. Citizenship discourse is a threat to both, as it imperils matters dear to each of them. For Palestinians, after decades of harsh injustices, to move forward and overcome the issues of the past is a challenge. It is true that within a structure that recognizes equal citizenship one can address many past injustices, but, for natives, citizenship is in itself a concession, because it puts them on an equal footing with settlers.

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It is important that these concessions be recognized as such. Citizenship threatens the historically privileged position of the native and the indigenous. The native sees himself as the original owner and inheritor of the land, and now he must share it. He will become a citizen – a mere citizen. This is, however, something that must be addressed by natives if they want to move forward. The same, though with differences, holds for the settler, whom the notion of equal citizenship strips of forcefully ascertained privileges and supremacy. He will become just and only a citizen, like all the others. In the case of Palestine, the case is even more complicated, for while the Jews clearly came as settlers, historic Palestine/Eretz Yisrael plays significant emotional roles in their mental structure and selfidentity. To accept the fact that they are settlers in practice, despite their spiritual and psychological ties to the land, is particularly demanding. Either way, citizenship is a risk for both groups, as it takes them far from their respective comfort zones. One of the main tensions in establishing the category of citizenship is that it assumes a certain “we” that is not yet there and is waiting to become. This becoming requires some measure of solidarity among the members of the assumed community that forms the new “we,” what it is – or rather, what it should be. This solidarity – the minimal glue – presupposes certain duties by citizens toward fellow citizens, and those citizens include settlers, at least historically. This makes the efforts of inclusion stand in tension with the requirement for corrective or historical justice. In corrective justice, the “other” is seen as a stranger, and one, to an extent, is indifferent to that stranger’s well-being. But citizenship assumes at least some degree of partnership and invites a vision of distributive justice that pulls us closer together. So, here is a paradox: to establish the category of citizenship and bring together two communities after a history of injustice and dispossession, there must be redress, but this same redress already presupposes the existence of a shared community of the “we” within which the redress is taking place. Again, there is the tension between pushing people apart, as corrective justice requires, and pulling each other closer together, as the project of citizenship demands. But despite all the problems facing citizenship discourse, one can hardly do without it. Citizenship, at the very least, has the potential of ending the monopoly of the settler project over the law. The law, in an egalitarian political setting, must represent the will and interests of the people – not the will of the settler. However, the settler must

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also be convinced that there is a way out from the settler position to the new position of the citizen. By that I mean that he must be convinced the category of the citizen is an actual one, not an illusion. The logic of Fanon – that the prosecuted wants to become the prosecutor – is hovering as a threat over the head of the settler, inspiring the fear that the category of citizenship is a sham or even a trap. It is, in part, the role of and challenge to the colonized: to give flesh and reality to the category of citizenship, which can never be created without the natives’ contribution to it.

3 Zio n ism a s a S e t t l e r -Colonial Project a n d a s a N a t ional One Zionism is not only a settler-colonial project. It is that, too, but not only that. It combines the image of the refugee with the image of the soldier, the powerless with the powerful, the victim with the victimizer, the colonizer with the colonized, a settler project and a national project at the same time. Europeans see the back of the Jewish refugee fleeing for his life. The Palestinian sees the face of the settler colonialist taking over his land. This combination, or double nature, does not necessarily make the project any less violent, but does make it more complex, and, in part, its duality is its power. By power, I mean its ideological power, which succeeds, relatively speaking, in keeping its grip over the Israeli-Jewish collective, allowing it to dispossess and feel victimized, to turn Palestinians into refugees and maintain the image of the eternal refugee for itself. Zionism combines two main aspects and trends in European thought of the nineteenth century: nationalism and colonialism. For Europe, these two trends unfold on different geopolitical domains: nationalism in Europe and colonialism beyond the sea – in India, America, Australia, and Africa. But for Zionism the site of the nation is the site of the colony itself. This intertwines the national with the colonial so tightly that it is almost impossible to disentangle them from each other. That is why, for Zionism, “being” and “being colonial” is almost the same. The national project could not be achieved without colonial practices and the dispossession of the native. Its colonial nature does not make it less national, and its national nature does not make it less colonial. Nevertheless, Zionism as a settler-colonial project was unique in two other aspects: one in terms of time, and the other in terms of space. In terms of time, it was a relative latecomer on the stage of colonialism.

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In terms of geography, it chose to settle in and within a “modern” population, compared with other settler colonies, where people and places are less equipped for resisting colonization, as in the case in North and South America and Australia. Palestinians are part of the Arab nation in terms of language, culture, history, and religion. These factors put limits on the settlers’ project and increased the power of the resistance to it. Without understanding these multiple layers, it is hard to pin down the nature of the project and the possibilities of bringing it to an end. As Patrick Wolfe reminds us, the settler-colonial aspect of a given project is a matter of structure, not intention. Zionism, in its praxis and tools, is settler colonialism. Its takeover of the land, its dream of the disappearance of the native, the importance it allocates to the frontier, its expanding nature, and the stories that it tells itself about the land as being terra nullius all match the settler-colonial paradigm to a T. Clearly, motivations might be different in different aspects of the project, and, importantly, the political imagination that has accompanied Jewish settlers is different from that of settlers elsewhere in many aspects. One such aspect is the Zionists’ self-image of coming back home to the ancient Promised Land. The other aspect is the fact that there is no clear motherland supporting the project, or for the settlers to go back to.45 These are in some ways important points of difference that bear influence on how we view the project; in other ways, these differences are not as important, or are downright irrelevant. They are not important as a matter of praxis – taking over the land, expansionism, supremacy over the natives, and so on. The settlers’ logic works regardless of the intentions and the motives of the settler. But in other aspects these differences might be relevant, and nowhere more so than in terms of how to understand the dynamic of the project, the ideological apparatus that sustains its continuation, and the intellectual processes that maintain its neat surface. Israel falls within the paradigm of settler colonialism, but as a special case. Viewing Israel as settler-colonial case allows us to see part of the processes, but not all of the truth, and like all analogies, this lens might illuminate some aspects of reality, while hiding others. But what is most important about noticing these differences lies in the way Palestinians can resist such a project, given its complex nature. Without seeing this complexity – the national with the colonial – one can easily be mistaken in the strategy one may adopt in resisting the project.

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The fact of the matter is that, over the course of decades and through the confluence of several factors, Zionism did manage to create a national group. This is a particular kind of nationalism: a settlercolonial nationalism, and, at least in part, a colonialism of refugees. The settler colonial as a category and the national as a category do not exclude each other in an absolute manner. Rather, they create a special model of settler colonialism and a special model of nationalism. Any writing or theorizing about Zionism must take these two aspects and ask: What is unique about the nationalism born out of the settlercolonial project? What is unique about a settler-colonial project that understands itself as a national project and perceives its followers as “returning,” not as immigrating, to the new land? The problem with Zionism is further exacerbated by the ethnic forming the basis of the national, and the religious, in turn, standing at the basis of the ethnic, thus combining too many categories into one. Some sociologists and historians believe that the very fact that Jews came to Palestine-Israel in order to build a national project, in the firm belief that this was their homeland, means that we should not characterize Zionism as a settler-colonial project at all.46 Others, who characterize Zionism as a settler-colonial project, insist as adamantly that this negates any description of it as a national project.47 I do not see why Zionism cannot be both.48 In this context, Palestinians have a particular role to play, as important as it is limited. Political struggles are not only a matter of unfortunate misunderstandings. Rather, they tend to be about power relations and interests. But politics is not limited to power relations alone. Israel will not reach any historical compromises without massive pressure, maybe even a war. But power and pressure alone may not suffice. There is a need to show the way out. And it is here that Palestinians might have a role. In the case of Israel/Palestine there is a need for surgery that can remove the national flesh from the settler-colonial skeleton. The challenge to Palestinians is to accept the Jewish nationalism of the here and now, while rejecting the settler-colonial aspects of Zionism. This is not an easy task, either on the analytical level or on the political one. Settler-colonial aspects manifest first and foremost in the existence of Jewish institutions that mediate between world Jewry and Israel, and which aim to settle and develop the space for the Jews (the Jewish Agency and the Jewish National Fund, among others), as if Palestine was and is the property of Jewish people all over the world. It manifests

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in the expansive settling nature of the project that perceives the land as empty and keeps appropriating it while displacing and obscuring Palestinians and while granting all kinds of exclusive privileges for Jews, either privately or collectively, over Palestinians.49 This settlercolonial aspect that grants supremacy and privileges is not to be compromised with. But given that there is a national aspect of the project, here and now, one is called upon to make a political, historical, and conceptual incision. This deep-but-salutary incision requires a sharp knife and careful surgery. It calls for a knife that cuts deep and, without a doubt, painfully, but a knife guided by a careful hand that will carry the operation through without killing the patient. Jewish Israelis cannot make this political, historical, and conceptual surgery alone. Palestinians need to take part in it as well, and their main role is to show that a Jewish nationalism that is not colonial is a viable option. This means that while the Palestinians say “no” to Jewish supremacy they can say “yes” to Jewish equality; while they say “no” to Jewish privileges, they can say “yes” to Jewish rights, “no” to Jewish superiority, but “yes” to Jewish safety. Such a “yes” can be both the ultimate triumph and ultimate defeat of the Zionist project as a settlercolonial endeavour. It is victory, because after a hundred years the project may finally manage to fully normalize national Jewish existence in Palestine-Israel. It is defeat, because the project must give up its colonial aspects, and give up all privileges and claims to supremacy. But the Palestinian can do that only if the settler gives up his settler project, recognizes his role in Palestinian dispossession – the Nakba – and takes responsibility for his actions, stands ready to offer reparation, give up his privileges, and seek partnership instead of domination. Only facing history, not running from it, will allow the settler to settle down, and allow him to move from conquest to contract.

4 T h e J e wis h - S t ate Debate One opportunity to begin moving toward such a surgery comes, unexpectedly, in the shape of the recently amplified demand by Israel to be recognized as a Jewish state, or, more precisely, as a state of the Jewish people that embodies the right of all Jews, wherever they may be, for self-determination.50 I want to argue that this demand, while galling to the Palestinians because of what it implies for their own claim to the land and their participation in its governance, might be used as the beginning of a discourse on recognition, in which the native

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has a role to play in shaping the narrative. One might have some suspicions about Israel’s motives in making this demand, and it could be convincingly argued that it is made in bad faith. For the reasons just listed above, Palestinians cannot accept it at face value. But this is not the end of it. The issue that I want to stress here is that Palestinians can use the opportunity to open a conversation about recognition and, through that, a conversation about natives and settlers.51 As it happened, Palestinians declined even to discuss the issue and rejected it out of hand.52 Their main reason was that accepting the Israeli demand as it stands would mean accepting two things that the Palestinians cannot accept: it puts a question mark over the status of Palestinian citizens of Israel and their civic status, and it would effectively mean disavowing the Palestinian right of return. While this approach is clearly one that can be defended, I still want to propose that the Palestinian response could have been something along these lines: If the representative of the Jewish people in Israel wants to talk about the rights of Jews, then let us talk. Here are our demands for a historical compromise.53 Either way, it seems that the current government of Israel wants recognition without recognizing the fact that Palestinians are able to grant recognition or, worse still, that Israel needs this recognition. This is what I call “the anxiety of recognition”: asking for recognition without recognizing the power of Palestinians to recognize. This is, in fact, what happened with the plo recognition of Israel in the Oslo Accords. Israel recognized the plo after it recognized Israel. But Israel is undecided about whether it wants recognition or not, oscillating between the logic of elimination and logic of recognition, between the logic of conquest and logic of consent. In the so-called peace talks, Israel suffered what every master can suffer from. It suffered from its superiority – the over-killing of Palestinians. The total imbalance of power had seduced – and is still seducing – Israel into thinking that it can manage without Palestinian recognition. But paradoxically, Israel also discovered that, while it can survive the conflict by force alone, it cannot transcend it solely with brute force. It cannot win by force what it can win only by love – recognition. Israel, in this sense, is the victim of its own power. It dictated the terms of the Oslo framework as if the problem was one of the 1967 occupation, as though it all started then: no refugees, no Nakba, no problem with Palestinians in Israel. But by putting limits on what kind of questions Palestinians can bring to the table, Israel has also put limits on what it can get from Palestinians in return – the

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output, after all, is a function of the input. It preached a pragmatic solution and persuaded Palestinians to stay away from questions of history, to abandon the language of rights and justice, to forget about the Nakba and the refugees, and to reckon with pragmatic arrangements. But Israel discovered that this so-called pragmatism also plays against its own existential interest. The frame of reference of the peace talks shapes and delimits what you can get out of the talks. The more deeply you define the question, the more profound, the more historical and long-standing, the solution can be. One may argue that Israel wanted to close the file of 1948 without first opening it – to buy 1948 with the currency of 1967. It wanted an historical compromise without resorting to history. But Israel became the victim of its own power. It found in the negotiations toward the final status agreement what it built into the process in the first place: that the process leads nowhere, because it does not go deep enough to deal with the roots of the conflict. It is because of this impasse that there is room to reconsider the overall structure of the relationship, to put on the table questions of natives and settlers, ways out of this dichotomy, and a consideration of the nature of Jewish nationalism in Palestine.

C o n c l u si on? This article neither offers nor speaks the language of final-status forms of political solutions (one-state, two-state solution, confederation, etc.), nor does it have a full plan for the future. The fact of the matter is that any one-state solution must grant autonomy to both groups, whether personal or territorial, given the deep cultural, religious, and national differences between them. As such, there must be a degree of separation within a united single state. On the other hand, any twostate solution must create a framework for intimate cooperation between the two entities concerning water, economy, transportation, environment, religious sites, and other related issues, thus creating unity that overarches separations. This chapter deliberately avoided all these specific, yet obviously important, questions. Instead, it took a step back to ask general questions about decolonization, the meaning of this particular brand of nationalism, what rights are associated with it, how we should view the relationship between this nationalism and this settler-colonial history, the relationship between Jews in Israel and Jews in the rest of the world, and how we can square all that with the Palestinian right

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of return. All these are questions to be answered. The aim of this chapter was not to offer answers; it was merely to create the frame in which the questions might be asked. ACKNOWLEDG M ENT S Previous drafts of this article were delivered as lectures at the Minerva Humanities Center, Tel-Aviv University, and at the Cogut Center for the Humanities, Brown University. I would like to thank the participants in two events for their comments and feedback. Special thanks to Gadi Algazi, Mahmood Mamdani, Adi Ophir, and Amnon RazKrakotzkin for reading and commenting on earlier drafts of this article, and to Avital Barak and Azar Dakwar for assisting and contributing to the entire p ­ rocess of producing this article. None of the preceding individuals is held responsible for its content, and all mistakes are mine.

 NOTE S 1 Clearly, being a victim is relational, and the victims of today can be the victimizers of tomorrow. It is also true that, in certain concrete ­situations, Jews in Palestine might have been victims of Arab-Palestinian violence. Still, my point of departure, which might be disputed of course, is that the overall picture that emerges from one hundred years of ­conflict is that the Palestinians are the victim of the Zionist settler ­project. Those who think otherwise might find this chapter either ­irrelevant, unappealing, totally misguided, or all of these things.   2 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (London: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Carl Schmitt, Theory of the Partisan: Intermediate Commentary on the Concept of the Political (New York: Telos Press, 2007); Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). For a more recent formulation of some of these ideas see Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (New York: Routledge, 2005): “I contend that the belief in the possibility of a universal rational consensus has put democratic thinking on the wrong track,” 3; “[W]hat we are currently witnessing is not the disappearance of the political in its adversarial dimension but something different. What is happening is that nowadays the political is played out in the moral register. In other words, it still consists in a ­ we/they discrimination, but the we/they, instead of being defined with

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political categories, is now established in moral terms. In place of ­struggle between ‘right and left’ we are faced with a struggle between ‘right and wrong,’” 5. Kant, in “Perpetual Peace,” makes his famous statement “true Politics can’t progress without paying its homage to morality.” Immanuel Kant, “Perpetual Peace,” Perpetual Peace and Other Essays (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1957), 135. For this conflictual view of society and politics, see Marx in The Communist Manifesto: “Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the ­common ruin of the contending classes … Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other – bourgeoisie and proletariat,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848), 1, http://la.utexas.edu/users/hcleaver/368/ 368CommunistManifestoPtItable.pdf. Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963). Mary King, “Confronting Power Itself: Mahatma Gandhi’s Campaigns and Power of Truth,” in Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr: The Power of Nonviolent Action, 9–84 (Paris: unesc o, 1999); Bhikhu C. Parekh, Colonialism, Tradition, and Reform: An Analysis of Gandhi’s Discourse (New Delhi: Sage, 1999). Martin Luther King Jr, “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” in Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (Boston: Beacon Press, 2010); Mary King, “Standing Face to Face with Power: Martin Luther King Jr and the American Civil Rights Movement,” in Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr, 85–172; Moses Greg, Revolution of Conscience: Martin Luther King, Jr, and the Philosophy of Nonviolence (New York: Guilford Press, 1997). Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, ma : mit Press, 1971). Hannah Arendt offers a unique take on politics that is not reducible to either sheer violence, Kantian moralism, or a simple rational-choice ­theory, but avoids also falling into identity and communitarian politics. Deploying the concept of “visiting” and “acting in concert,” Arendt ­developed a distinctive concept. See Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of

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Politics, edited by Craig Calhoun and John McGowan, 136 (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1997). On Arendt’s concept of “political action” and “political judgment” through her major works, see Michael G. Gottsegen, The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt (New York: s uny  Press, 1994). 10 Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited by C. Wright Mills and Hans Gerth, 77–128 (New York: Routledge, 2009). 11 Che Guevara, Guerrilla Warfare (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 21. 12 Schmitt, Theory of the Partisan, 89–91. 13 Quoted in Schmitt, Theory of the Partisan, 92. 14 For a review of Machiavelli on this point, see Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978 [1958]). Strauss reads Machiavelli as stating that “Non-resistance to evil would secure ­forever the rule of evil men,” 180. To compare Strauss’s views on this with Kant’s, see Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), session no. 8 and, in particular, 49–52. 15 The problem of resisting evil in Kant’s philosophy was recognized in the literature. See Christine Korsgaard’s attempt to defend a possible interpretation of Kant’s moral philosophy that allows the agent in a non-ideal situation to resist “evil.” Korsgaard, “The Right to Lie: Kant on Dealing with Evil,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 15 (1986): 325–49. 16 Kant’s position on revolution is consistent in his writings. His position is that under no circumstances should the people revolt, even if the sovereign acts unjustly: “From this it follows that all resistance to the supreme ­legislative power, all incitement of subjects’ activity to express discontent, all revolt that breaks forth into rebellion, is the highest and most ­punishable crime in a commonwealth, for it destroys its foundation. And this prohibition is absolute,” Kant, “On the Proverb: That May Be True in Theory but Is of No Practical Use,” in Perpetual Peace, 78. Korsgaard tries to make sense of Kant’s double position in opposing ­revolution while being enthusiastic about it. See Christine Korsgaard, “Taking the Law into Our Own Hands: Kant on the Right to Revolution,” in Christine Korsgaard, The Constitution of Agency (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 233–62. 17 For an argument in support of the inescapability of dirty hands in politics, see Michael Walzer, “Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 2 (1973): 160–80. For a more nuanced

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position and a rejoinder, see C.A.J. Coady and Onora O’Neill, “Morality and the Art of the Possible,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 64 (1990): 259–79. 18 I take John Rawls, the most celebrated liberal of the last century, to be the philosopher who admits this fact in his later writings. John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2001). 19 Here I have in mind Kantian deontological ethics, but clearly there are many other ethical and moral traditions. 20 I use the term “bracketing” in the phenomenological sense. 21 Jon Elster, Ulysses Unbound: Studies in Rationality, Precommitment, and Constraints (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 22 For the application of Hegel’s master-slave dialectics to the IsraeliPalestinian struggle, see Raef Zreik, “One State Solution? From the ‘Struggle unto Death’ to ‘Master-Slave’ Dialectics,” Social Identities 17, no. 6 (2011): 793–810. 23 Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 35. 24 Ibid., 36. 25 See, e.g., Martin Luther King Jr’s 1968 speech, “I See the Promised Land.” Accessed 11 August 2016 at http: //mid-southtribune.com/I%20See% 20the%20Promised%20Land%20by%20MLK.pdf. Or take, e.g., his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, in which he states: “I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, sons of former slaves and sons of ­former slave-owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood … I have a dream my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.” Accessed 11 August 2016 at http://www.archives.gov/press/exhibits/dream-speech.pdf. It is clear from this language that King holds a vision for all people and views the ­liberation of his Black brothers as part of the liberation of all America. 26 See, e.g., Gandhi: “Mutual trust and mutual love are not trust and no love. The real love is to love them that hate you, to love your neighbour even though you distrust him. Of what avail is my love, if it be only so long as I trust my friends? Even thieves do that. They become enemies immediately when the trust is gone.” Harijan, 3 March 1946, 254. Also: “I observe in the limited field in which I find myself, that unless I can reach the hearts of men and women, I am able to do nothing. I observe further that so long as spirit of hate persist in some shape or other, it is impossible to establish peace or to gain our freedom by p ­ eaceful effort. We cannot love one another, if we hate Englishmen. Love among ourselves based on hatred of others breaks down under the slightest

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­ ressure. “Non-violence – the Greatest Force,” The Hindu, p 8 November 1926, 265. 27 Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 53. 28 See Al-Haq report from 2012. Accessed 11 August 2016, http://www. alhaq.org/documentation/mdd-reports/item/693-monitoring-and-­ documentation-department-july-december-2012; for the increase in the level of violence in Israeli attitudes toward Palestinians, see The Power of Inclusive Exclusion: Anatomy of Israeli Rule in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, edited by Adi Ophir, Michal Givoni, and Sari Hanafi (New York: Zone Books, 2009); Ariel Handel, “Exclusionary Surveillance and Spatial Uncertainty in the Occupied Palestinian Territories,” in Surveillance and Control in Israel/Palestine, edited by Elia Zureik, David Lyon, and Yasmeen Abu-Laban, 259–75 (London: Routledge, 2011). 29 See Hasan Abu-Libdeh, “Statistical Data on Palestinian Refugees: What We Know and What We Don’t,” in Palestinian Refugees: Challenges of Repatriation and Development, edited by Rex Brynen and Roula El-Rifai, 14–29 (London: I.B. Tauris; Ottawa, 2007); Nur Masalha, The Politics of Denial: Israel and Palestinian Refugee Problem (London: Pluto Press, 2003). 30 See Sara M. Roy, Failing Peace: Gaza and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict (London: Pluto, 2007). Parts two to four cover different aspects of life in Gaza from the first Intifada until the present. For a broader overview on Gaza, see Jean-Pierre Filiu, “The Twelve Wars on Gaza,” Journal of Palestine Studies 44 (2014): 52–60. See also the Gisha report: “A Costly Divide: Economic Repercussions of Separating Gaza and the West Bank,” February 2015, http: //gisha.org/UserFiles/File/publications/a_costly_ divide/a_costly_divide_en-web.pdf. 31 Mossawa Center, “The Main Findings of the 2012 Racism in Israel Report,” accessed 11 August 2016 at http://www.mossawacenter.org/ my_documents/publication2/2012%20Main%20Findings%200f% 202012%20Racism%20Report.pdf. See Nadim Rouhana, Palestinian Citizens in an Ethnic Jewish State: Identities in Conflict (New Haven, c t : Yale University Press, 1997), for the paradigm of Israel as an ethnic state; Ilan Pappé, The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 2011); Raef Zreik, “The Palestinian Question: Themes of Justice and Power, Part 1: The Palestinians of the Occupied Territories,” Journal of Palestine Studies 32 (2003), 39–49, for an overview of the structural problems facing Palestinian citizens of Israel; Association for Civil Rights, 42–59, http:// www.acri.org.il/en/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/

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ACRI-Situation-Report-2012-ENG.pdf; Adalah, The Inequality Report: The Palestinian Arab Minority in Israel, March 2011, http://www.adalah. org/uploads/oldfiles/upfiles/2011/Adalah_The_Inequality_Report_ March_2011.pdf. 32 See interview with Amos Oz, “Amos Oz has a recipe for saving Israel,” Ha’aretz, 13 March 2015, http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.­ premium-1.646562; Philip Weiss, “‘Israel Is Becoming an Isolated Ghetto,’ Says Amos Oz,” Mondoweiss, 22 December 2014, http: //mondoweiss. net/2014/12/israel-becoming-isolated (“There is a growing sense that Israel is becoming an isolated ghetto, which is exactly what the founding fathers and mothers hoped to leave behind them forever when they ­created the state of Israel”). 33 The fact that moral discourse can be a strategy of power we already know from Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keit Ansell Pearson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). For a less cynical and more positive tone, see Martin Luther King Jr’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech: “Negroes of the United States, following the people of India, have demonstrated that nonviolence is not sterile passivity, but a powerful moral force which makes for social transformation.” In Nissim Ezekiel, A Martin Luther King Reader (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1969), 163–4. For a feminist deployment of the same argument, see Margaret Urban Walker, “Seeing Power in Morality: A Proposal for Feminist Naturalism in Ethics,” in Feminists Doing Ethics, edited by Peggy DesAutels and Joanne Waugh, 3–14 (Lanham, M D: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001). 34 Raef Zreik, “The Persistence of the Exception: Reflection on the Story of Israeli Constitutionalism,” in Thinking Palestine, edited by Ronit Lentin, 131–47 (London: Zed Books, 2008). 35 See Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven, c t: Yale University Press, 2007). 36 See, e.g., Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca, ny : Cornell University Press, 2006); and Peter Godwin, The Fear: Robert Mugabe and the Martyrdom of Zimbabwe (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2011). 37 See Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8 (2006): 387–409. 38 See Lorenzo Veracini, “Introducing: Settler Colonial Studies,” Settler Colonial Studies 1 (2011): 1–12. 39 Mahmood Mamdani, “When Does a Settler Become a Native? Reflections of the Colonial Roots of Citizenship in Equatorial and South Africa,”

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Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town, Text of Inaugural Lecture as A.C. Jordan Professor of African Studies, University of Cape Town, 13 May 1998, https://citizenshiprightsafrica.org/wp-content/ uploads/1998/05/mamdani-1998-inaugural-lecture.pdf. 40 On the analogy to apartheid and its limits, see Raef Zreik, “Palestine, Apartheid, and Rights Discourse,” Journal of Palestine Studies 34 (2004): 68–80; Abigail B. Bakan and Yasmeen Abu-Laban, “Israel/Palestine, South Africa, and the ‘One-State Solution’: The Case for an Apartheid Analysis,” Politikon 37 (2010): 331–51. 41 I owe the distinction between native and indigenous to Gadi Algazi. Algazi offers three subcategories for understanding the native category of the native-settler structure: autochthonous, native, and indigenous. Doing j­ustice to his analysis is beyond the scope of this chapter. For our purposes it is sufficient to understand the subcategory of the native as more of a personal private matter and less of a political one, whereas the subcategory of indigenous denotes a group identity and is a political category. Gadi Algazi, “From Settlers to Natives? Local Perspective,” invited talk delivered at From Native to Settlers Lecture Series, Minerva Humanities Center, Tel-Aviv University, 19 March 2014. 42 The analogy between money or commodity and the image of citizenship is very old. See Evgeny B. Pashukanis, The General Theory on Law and Marxism (London: Pluto Press, 1989); Issac D. Balbus, “Commodity Form and Legal Form: An Essay on the Relative Autonomy of the Law,” Law and Society Review 11, no. 3 (1977): 571–88. 43 See the critique of the South African model by Naomi Klein, “Democracy Born in Chains: South Africa’s Constricted Freedom,” in The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Picador, 2008); Aeyal Gross, “The Constitution, Reconciliation, and Transitional Justice: Lessons from South Africa and Israel,” Stanford Journal of International Law 40 (2004): 47–104; D.M. Davis, “Constitutional Borrowing: The Influence of Legal Culture and Local History in the Reconstitution of Comparative Influence: The South African Experience,” International Journal of Constitutional Law 1 (2003): 181–95. 44 Differentiated citizenship discourse is relevant here. See Iris Marion Young, “Residential Segregation and Differentiated Citizenship,” Citizenship Studies 3 (1999): 237–52; and Iris Marion Young, “Polity and Group Difference: A Critique of the Ideal of Universal Citizenship,” Ethics 99 (1989): 250–74. Although these articles were not written about a post-colonial situation, one can draw some fruitful analogies from them.

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45 On this point, see Maxim Rodinson, who argues that, up to a certain time, Britain could be perceived as such a motherland. Maxim Rodinson, Israel – a Colonial Settler State? (New York: Monad, 1973). 46 Alexander Yakobson and Amnon Rubinstein, Israel and the Family of Nations: The Jewish Nation-State and Human Rights, trans. Ruth Morris and Ruchie Avital, 65–82 (New York: Routledge, 2009). 47 Omar Jabary Salamanca, Mezna Qato, Kareem Rabie, and Sobhi Samour, “Past Is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine,” Settler Colonial Studies 2 (2012): 1–8; Fayez Sayegh, “Zionist Colonialism in Palestine” (Beirut: p lo Research Center, 1965), published in Settler Colonial Studies 2 (2012): 206–25. 48 Ilan Pappé, “Zionism as Colonialism: A Comparative View of Diluted Colonialism in Asia and Africa,” South Atlantic Quarterly (Fall 2008): 611–33; Oren Yiftachel, “Territory as the Kernel of the Nation: Space, Time, and Nationalism in Israel/Palestine,” Geopolitics 7 (2002), 215–48. Ilan Pappé, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), part 3; Gershon Shafir and Yoav Peled, “Being Israeli,” in The Dynamics of Multiple Citizenship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 49 For a review of the structural privileges given to the Jewish population as a settler group, see Oren Yiftachel, Ethnocracy: Law and Identity Politics in Israel/Palestine (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 2006). For the special status of the Jewish National Fund, see Walter Lehn, The Jewish National Fund (London: Routledge, 1988). For the issue of land in the Negev and the status of the Bedouin population, see Ahmad Amara, Ismael Abu Saad, and Oren Yiftachel, eds., Indigenous (In)Justice (Cambridge: International Human Rights Clinic, 2012). 50 Netanyahu has demanded that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state as a precondition for peace: “Unless the Palestinians recognize the Jewish state and give up on the right of return there will not be peace.” Barak Ravid, “Four Years On, Netanyahu Returns to Bar Ilan More Hawkish Than Ever,” Ha’aretz, 7 October 2013, http://www.haaretz.com/ news/diplomacy-defense/1.550898. 51 See Raef Zreik, “Why the Jewish State Now,” Journal of Palestine Studies 40, no. 3 (2011): 23–37. 52 See Ahmad Samih Khalidi, “Why Can’t the Palestinians Recognize the Jewish State,” Journal of Palestine Studies 40, no. 4 (2011): 78. 53 See Raef Zreik, “Not Just a Matter of Self-Determination,” in On the Recognition of the Jewish State, edited by Honaida Ghanim (Ramallah: m a d a r Publications, 2014).

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Contributors

r a c hel Z . f e l dm a n is assistant professor of religious studies at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH . Feldman is the author of Messianic Zionism in the Digital Age: Jews, Noahides, and the Third Temple Imaginary, a book that is forthcoming with Rutgers University Press and was awarded the Jordan Schnitzer first book prize by the Association of Jewish Studies in 2023. r a f i g r o s g l i k is lecturer (assistant professor) at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, in the department of sociology and anthropology. He is the author of Organic Food in Israel (Tel Aviv: Resling Press, 2017, in Hebrew) and of Globalizing Organic (Albany, n y : su ny Press 2021). ariel handel is director of the Lexicon for Political Theory project, and academic co-director of Minerva Humanities Center at Tel Aviv University. He is the editor-in-chief of The Political Lexicon of the Social Protest (Hakibutz Hameuchad, 2012), and co-editor of Normalizing Occupation: The Politics of Everyday Life in the West Bank Settlements (Bloomington, i n: Indiana University Press 2017). h a y im k a t sm a n is researcher of religious nationalism in Israel/ Palestine. He received his PhD from the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. ia n m c go ni gl e is Nanyang Assistant Professor in the division of sociology at Nanyang Technological University (n t u ). He is the author of Genomic Citizenship (Cambridge, m a: mit Press 2021).

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d a n i e l m o n t e r e s c u is professor of urban anthropology and food studies at the Central European University, Vienna. He is ­co-editor of Going Native? Settler Colonialism and Food (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). He is the principal investigator of the Gerda Henkel Stiftung grant on “Lost Cities: The Social Life of Ruins in Israel/ Palestine” and is currently completing a book on food and borders. a mi r r e i c h e r is a PhD candidate in anthropology at the cu n y Graduate Center. emily schneider is assistant professor of criminology and criminal justice at Northern Arizona University. Her research examines the intersections of liberalism, tourism, and settler colonialism. raef zreik is professor of jurisprudence at Ono Academic College and senior researcher at the Van Leer Institute. His book, Kant’s Struggle for Autonomy: On the Structure of Practical Reason, came out in 2023 from Rowman & Littlefield.

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Index

Figures indicated by page numbers in italics Abraham the Hebrew, 18, 54, 106, 108, 161–2 Abu El-Haj, Nadia, 27–8, 29, 162 Achia organic olive oil farm, 84–5 agriculture, 8, 31, 73, 100. See also organic farming; wine and winemaking Agrior, 82 agro-activism, 70 Aida refugee camp (Bethlehem), 175, 176 Algazi, Gadi, 251n41 Alliance for a New Zionist Vision (a nz v ), 63 Al-Sana, Taleb, 128 Alternative Action, 63 American Jews, 61, 62–4, ­154–5. See also Hebron; Midreshet B’erot Bat Ayin (­women’s seminary) animal sacrifices, Biblical, 31, 51–2 animosity, through similarity, 192, 193–4. See also settler-­ colonial mimicry

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anthropology, ontological, 102–3, 104, 118–19 Arab-Israeli war (Nakba, 1948), 5, 14, 128, 242, 244 Arab-Jew identity, 203–4, 210–12. See also Mizrahi Jews; settlercolonial mimicry archeology, 21, 26–8, 115, 162–3 Arendt, Hannah, 226, 246n9 Ariel, Amichai, 98, 113 Ariel Winery, 113, 114 Arnon, Noam, 161–2 Ashkenazi Jews: American assimilation, 62, 64; Beit-El settlement and, 200–1; genetic studies and, 29; intra-Jewish racism and, 16; settler-colonial mimicry and, 204, 209–10; as stereotypical West Bank settler, 25. See also sabras Atzmona (settlement), 133–4. See also Naveh (settlement) autochthony, 71, 72, 210–12. See also indigeneity baalei teshuva (masters of ­repentance), 49

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Balfour, Eve: The Living Soil, 72 Balibar, Etienne, 64 Bat Ayin (settlement), 47, 49–51. See also Midreshet B’erot Bat Ayin (women’s seminary) Bedouin, in the Negev, 6, 15, 128 Beit-El (settlement), 200–1, 202–3 Beit El Winery, 101 Ben-Gurion, David, 26 Ben Saadon, Erez, 105, 114–15 Berkman, Matt, 63, 64 Berlant, Lauren, 196 Bethlehem, Aida refugee camp, 175, 176 Bhabha, Homi, 33, 193, 195, 217 Bible. See Hebrew Bible Blaser, Mario, 98, 102–3, 118 Blok, Anton, 194 Bnei-Netzarim (settlement), 125, 127, 130, 133, 140–4, 148, 151nn28–31 Bolivia, 102 Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (b d s ) movement, 154–5 bracketing, 228, 248n20 Braverman, Irus, 31 Breaking the Silence (bts), 160, 164–5. See also Hebron Breslov Hasidism, 49, 54–5 Bris, Yaacov, 111 Brodkin, Karen, 62 Butler, Judith, 200, 213 Canaan, 18 Chabad Hasidism, 49 Chatterjee, Partha, 217 chickens, free-range, 80–1, 84, 90 Christians, 119, 151n30 citizenship, 15, 236–9 Cohen, Yoram, 104–5, 120

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colonialism: ethical duties of ­colonized, 222–3, 223–34; vs settler colonialism, 70, 234. See also decolonization; settler colonialism colonial mimicry, 33, 195, 217–18. See also settler-colonial mimicry colonial quality turn, 70, 71, 83–9 community settlements, 145, 149n11 conflict thesis, 224–5, 226–30, 233 consensus thesis, 225, 230 consumption, and identity, 30–1, 100 critical indigeneity studies, 9, 10–11 culture, as bridge, 196–7 Dalsheim, Joyce, 11, 131, 155–6 dangerous mimicry. See settlercolonial mimicry de-assimilation, at Midreshet B’erot Bat Ayin women’s ­seminary, 56–62 decolonization: beginnings of, 236; citizenship and, 236–9; Fanon on, 229–30; liberalism and, 177, 182, 183; in Palestine/ Israel, 158–9, 184, 234; vs ­reconciliation, 224; settlers stop being settlers, 34, 222, 223, 235–6, 237; transforming reality as transforming self, 233 Deloria, Philip, 213 dhimmi, 205, 221n21 drag, 200, 213 Dribben, Eddie, 208, 210 Drimia Winery, 109 driving, on Sabbath, 151n33 Druk, Rachel, 113

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Index

earthworms, 86–7, 88, 90 Ecuador, 102 Efrat, Elisha, 130 Egorova, Yulia, 30 Egypt, 150n16 Elad, 27 electrification, 26 Eliyahu, Mordechai, 142 enmity, 226–8 ethics, and politics, 224–30, 232–3, 250n33 ethnic identity. See identity evil, resisting, 227–8, 247nn14–15 extremism. See violence and extremism Fanon, Frantz, 225, 229–30, 239 farming. See agriculture; organic farming; wine and winemaking Feige, Michael, 24, 26–7, 50, 90, 126 Feldman, Rachel Z., 31 feminism, religious, 48, 56–9, 61, 64 fictive ethnicity, 64 Fischer, Shlomo, 83 Frazer, James, 196 Frenkel, Naftali, 53 Freud, Sigmund, 193–4 Freund, Matanyah (Freund organic farm), 85–6, 86, 87, 87–8, 89, 90 Froman, Menachem, 9, 197 Gandhi, Mahatma, 225, 230, 248n26 Gat Shomron Winery, 110–11 Gaza envelope, 149n12 Gaza Strip: 1994 Israeli-Palestinian agreement, 151n27; 2005

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evacuation of Israeli settlements, 130, 133–4, 140, 141, ­150nn17–18; incendiary kites and balloons from, 131, 132; Israeli control gained during ­Six-Day War (1967), 15; organic farming in, 70, 73, 74; Sabbath driving in Israeli ­settlements, 151n33; siege against, 231 Gaza War (Operation Protective Edge, 2014), 53 gender. See Midreshet B’erot Bat Ayin (women’s seminary); women genetics, 29–30, 115 Geneva Initiative, 128, 149n7 Geschiere, Peter, 204, 210–11 ge’ula (redemption), 26, 31, 105 Ginsburg, Yitzhak, 49 Girard, René, 194, 216 Gissis, Snait, 29 Givat Arnon (settlement), 114 Givo’t Olam organic farm, 80–1, 81, 82–3 globalization, 194 goats, 77, 90 Golan Heights, 5 Goldstein, Baruch, 161, 162, 164, 167, 206 Gordon, Neve, 64 grapes, 31. See also wine and winemaking Green Line, mental erasure of, 148 Guevara, Che, 226 Gush Emunim (Block of the Faithful): Beit-El settlement, 200–1, 202–3; failure of ­indigeneity-making efforts, 147; justifications for colonialism, 126, 127, 139–40, 209;

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258 Index

sabras and, 24, 50; settler ­movement and, 5, 24; suburban style of s­ ettlements, 206 Gush Etzion, 49. See also Bat Ayin (settlement); Midreshet B’erot Bat Ayin (women’s seminary) Gush Katif, 133, 140. See also Gaza Strip Habermas, Jürgen, 225 Halutza Sands communities: ­introduction and conclusion, 33, 125–7, 132–3, 147–8; ­background, 126–8, 130; ­Bnei-Netzarim settlement, 125, 127, 130, 133, 140–4, 148, ­151nn28–31; desire to be ­settlers, but without Palestinians, 127, 133, 146–7; indigenization as restoring national unity, 127, 133, 142–4; location of, 128, 129; Naveh settlement, 127, 130, 133–40, 147–8, ­150nn19–20, 150n22, 150n24, 151n31; paradox of ­indigeneity-making and settler identity, 125, 126–7, 130–2, 147; ­personal sacrifice and, 146; ­religious purity and ­indigenization as spiritual ­mission, 127, 133, 135–40; ­security threats, 133, 150n15; Shlomit settlement, 127, 130, 133, 144–7, 148, 152nn44–5 Hamas, 53 Har Bracha Winery, 101, 115, 116 Hardal subculture, 145, 150n21 Harding, Susan Friend, 119, 124n31 Harel, Assaf, 11, 131

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Har HaMor yeshiva, 142, 150n21 Harrison, Simon, 194 Har-Sinai, Dalia, 75–7, 84, 87, 90 Har-Sinai, Yair, 75–6, 77, 83, 87, 89 Har-Sinai organic farm, 75–7, 76, 78, 82, 87, 89 Hass, Mordechai (Motti), 134 Heart of Israel Wines, 115, ­116–17, 117 Hebrew Bible: ancestral crops ­mentioned in, 31; Hebron mural and, 171–2; Jewish autochthony and, 18; ­winemaking and Biblical ­prophecy, 106, 106, 108–9, 111–12, 115, 119–20 Hebron: introduction and ­conclusion, 33, 155–6, 182–4; Abraham in, 18; American Jewish tourists and, 154–5; ­anti-occupation tours, 153–4, 159–60, 161, 164–5, 165–7, 169–70, 175; Goldstein massacre and grave, 161, 162, 164, 167; Jewish settlers and relations with Israeli state, 126, 156–7; ­methodological approach to, 159–60; Palestinians in, 157, 166–7; settler-colonial mimicry in, 207–8; settler criminality and liberal frameworks, 161, 164–5, 170–1, 179; settler declarations of belonging, 171–2, 173; settler indigeneity claims within ­liberal frameworks, 167–9; ­settler tours, 153–4, 161–4; Shuhada Street, 165–7, 166, 168, 169, 172; ­tourists’ defence of benevolent colonialism vs

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Index

s­ ettler deviance, 177–81, 182; tourists on ­indigeneity as power relations, 155, 176–7, 182–3; tourists on settler violence and occupation, 169–71, 171, 172–4; tourists’ sympathy for Palestinian ­indigeneity claims, 174–7 Hebron Accords (1997), 166 Herzl, Theodore, 13 Hesder yeshivas, 152n47 Hillel, Eliav, 105–6, 107, 108 Hilltop Youth, 24, 50, 68, 142, 205 Hobbes, Thomas, 223, 224 Howard, Albert, 73 human-rights discourse, 9, 15, 158, 170–1, 184, 189n34 identity: Arab-Jews, 203–4, ­210–12; archeology and, 26–8; biological origins (genetics) and, 28–30; consumption and, 30–1, 100; sabras, 20, 24, 25, 50 incommensurability, 102 indifference, 227, 228 indigeneity: approach to, 10–11; critical indigeneity studies, 9, 10–11; Hebrew terminology for, 3, 17–18; Jewish claims, 3–4, 8–9, 18, 28, 63–4, 126; native vs indigenous, 235, 251n41; Palestinian claims, 6–8, 155, 174–7; Palestinian terminology for, 18–19; as political capital, 184; power relations and, 155, 176–7, 182–3. See also settler-indigeneity Intifada of the Knives (Third Intifada, 2014–16), 53, 66n24 Israel: 2005 evacuation of Gaza ­settlements, 130, 133–4, 140,

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141, 150nn17–18; Arab-Israeli war (Nakba, 1948), 5, 14, 128, 242, 244; Arab-Jew identity and, 203–4, 210–12; demand for recognition as Jewish ­nation-state, 223, 242–3, 252n50; indigeneity-making ­practices, 4, 8, 19–21, 24–5, 126; intra-Jewish racism, 16–17; Jewish settlers in Hebron, ­relations with, 156–7; land expropriation and Palestinian d­isplacement, 14–15, 21, 22–3, 45, 73, 74–5, 80, 81–2, 83, 87–8; Law of Return, 18; as ­liberal-settler state, 15; ­nationalism intertwined with ­settler colonialism, 239–41; nation-state law (2018), 9, 63; Palestinians, relations with, 63–4, 223, 231–3, 242–4; peace ­agreement with Egypt, 150n16; and science and technology, 25–6; settlement movement, 5–6, 24–5, 45, 131, 149nn10–11, 186n12, 206–7; Six-Day War (June 1967), 5, 7, 15, 156; Yom Kippur War (1973), 24. See also Halutza Sands communities; Hebron; Israel/Palestine; Midreshet B’erot Bat Ayin (­women’s seminary); organic farming; settler-colonial mimicry; settler-indigeneity; West Bank; wine and winemaking; Zionism Israel Defense Forces (idf), 128, 151n27, 169, 178–9, ­180–1, 186n12 Israel/Palestine: citizenship as way forward, 236–9; one-state vs

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two-state solutions, 148, 244; scholarship on and theoretical approaches to, 8, 9–10; ­uniqueness of, 234, 235. See also Gaza Strip; indigeneity; Israel; Palestinians; settler-indigeneity; West Bank Itamar (settlement), 80, 81–2 ivri (Hebrew), 18 Jabotinksy, Vladimir, 14 Jews. See Halutza Sands ­communities; Hebron; identity; indigeneity; Israel; Midreshet B’erot Bat Ayin (women’s ­seminary); organic farming; ­settler-colonial mimicry; ­settler-indigeneity; wine and winemaking; Zionism Joan of Arc, 227 Judea, use of term, 3, 100–1 Kabbalah, 98, 100 Kabir Winery, 105–6, 107 Kant, Immanuel, 223, 225, 227, 246n3, 247nn15–16, 248n19 Katriel, Tamar, 20 Kerem Navot, 73 Khdeir, Mohammed Abu, 53 King, Martin Luther, Jr, 225, 230, 248n25, 250n33 Kirk, Gabi, 8 Kirsh, Nurit, 29 Kohler, Noa, 29 Kook, Isaac, 35n7 Kook, Zvi Yehuda, 5, 35n7, 134, 135–7, 141–2 Korsgaard, Christine, 247n16 Kostiner, Sara, 131–2 Kotef, Hagar, 83

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Labor Zionism, 24, 31 La Forêt Blanche Winery, 111, 112, 113 land: emotions and, 98–9; ­expropriation and Palestinian displacement, 14–15, 21, 22–3, 45, 73, 74–5, 80, 81–2, 83, 87–8; organic farming and, 69, 71–2, 89, 91 language practices, 12, 20 Lavi, Nir, 108–9, 115 Lavie, Smadar, 17, 25 Law of Return, 18 Levi, Mario, 74, 76 Levinger, Moshe, 156 liberalism: American Jews and ­liberal Zionism, 154–6, 180, 182–4; on decolonization and indigeneity, 177, 182, 183; Israel as liberal-settler state, 15; settler criminality and, 161, 164–5, 170–1, 179; settler indigeneity claims and, 167–9; Zionism and, 157–8 Likud party, 24 Lior, Dov, 157 Lloyd, David, 158 Lourie, Amichai, 111–12 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 224, 227, 247n14 Mamdani, Mahmood, 11, 158–9, 235 mamlakhtiyut (Israeli state ­ideology), 26, 141–2 Mandatory Palestine (1920–48), 21, 26, 28 Marx, Karl, 225, 246n4 McGonigle, Ian, 30 Mendoza, Lily, 158

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Index

messianism: settlement movement and, 5, 24; Third Temple ­movement, 46, 49, 52, 53, 112; winemaking and, 111–12; women as agents of messianic future, 51, 52–5, 66n27 Midreshet B’erot Bat Ayin (­women’s seminary): introduction, 32, 45–8; Bat Ayin context, 47, 49–51; de-assimilation and reclaiming Jewish indigeneity, 59–62; methodological approach to, 48–9; mission statement, 47; religious feminism and, 48, 56–9, 64; re-racialization and, 62–3, 64; temple building and women as agents of messianic future, 51, 52–5 mimetic desire, 194 mimicry. See colonial mimicry; ­settler-colonial mimicry mitnachel (settler), 17, 131 Mizrahi Jews, 16–17, 25, 196–7, 203–4 money, 236 Moroccan Jews, 203, 204 moshav, 149n10 Mouffe, Chantal, 245n2 Movshoviz, Elad, 109, 110 Naamati, Uri, 125 Nahum, Lior, 110–11 Nakba (Arab-Israeli war, 1948), 5, 14, 240, 242, 244 National Centre for Land Training, 128 nationalism: Jewish peoplehood studies, 99–100; proposed Palestinian acceptance of, while rejecting settler colonialism,

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241–2; religious nationalism, 135–7, 141–2; tourists on ­right-wing Jewish nationalism, ­169–71; Zionism and, 239–41 nation-state law (2018), 9, 63 nation-states, 11 native: vs indigenous, 235, 251n41; vs settler, 10–11 Naveh (settlement), 133–40; ­background, 133–4; collective agricultural association, 134, 150n22; criticisms of, 138–9; education in, 134–5, 150n24, 151n31; as moshav, 130; ­religious conservatism of, 134–5, 150n20; religious purity and ­indigenization as spiritual ­mission, 127, 133, 135–8, ­139–40, 147–8; size, 134, 150n19 Negev, Bedouin in, 6, 15, 128. See also Halutza Sands communities Neocleous, Mark, 79 neo-Hasidic countercultural movement, 47, 61 neoliberalism, 24, 72, 84, 89 Netanyahu, Benjamin, 252n50 Netzarim (settlement), 140. See also Bnei-Netzarim Neuman, Tamara, 45 New Age spirituality, 24, 47, 50, 54, 201 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 250n33 normalization, 13, 32, 70–1, 85, 89, 90–1 Occupied Territories, 69, 73, 74–5. See also Gaza Strip; Hebron; organic farming; settlement movement; West Bank; wine and winemaking

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262 Index

olives and olive oil, 8, 31, 84–5 ontological anthropology, 102–3, 104, 118–19 Operation Brother’s Keeper, 53 Operation Protective Edge (Gaza War, 2014), 53 organic farming: introduction and conclusion, 32, 68–70, 89–91; Achia olive oil farm, 84–5; b ­ ackground, 73–4; c­ olonial ­quality turn and, 70, 71, 83–9; conventionalized organic ­farming, 88, 96n64; earthworms, 86–7, 88, 90; Freund farm, 85–7, 86, 87; Givo’t Olam farm, 80–1, 81, 82–3; Har-Sinai farm, 75–7, 76, 78, 82, 87, 89; land and, 69, 71–2, 89, 91; ­methodological approach to, 69; Palestinians, relations with, 77–8, 82, 83, 90; as ­place-­making, 91; as revival of Talmudic teachings, 68; ­self-­sufficiency and return to roots narrative, 76–7; settler ­colonialism and, 70–1; soil and, 69, 72–3, 75, 89, 91; territorial expansion and, 79–83; ­territory and, 69, 71, 72, 79, 89, 91; as whitewashing, 68; world view and, 73. See also wine and winemaking Orientalism, 13–14, 16, 20, 182 Oslo Accords, 140, 207, 243–4 Oslo War (Second Intifada, ­2000–05), 167, 168, 202 Ottoman Land Code (1858), 74 Otzem Mechina, 134, 144, 150n23 Palestine (British mandate period, 1920–48), 21, 26, 28

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Palestine Liberation Organization (plo), 243 Palestinians: appropriation of by Jews, 58, 198, 199, 201–2, ­205–6, 208–9, 211; citizenship and, 15, 236–8; displacement, 14–15, 21, 22–3, 45, 73, 74–5, 80, 81–2, 83, 87–8; Geneva Initiative and, 149n7; and grapes and wine, 31, 99; in Hebron, 157, 166–7; indigeneity, terminology for, 18–19; ­indigeneity claims, 6–8, 155, 174–7; Israel, relations with, 63–4, 223, 231–3, 242–4; Jewish organic farmers and, 77–8, 82, 83, 90; land of as terra nullius, 71, 74, 240; Nakba (Arab-Israeli war, 1948), 5, 14, 128, 242, 244; Orientalist views of, 13–14, 20; proposed ­acceptance of Jewish nationalism while rejecting s­ ettler ­colonialism, 241–2; Second Intifada (Oslo War), 167, 168, 202; settler tours on, 163–4; ­settler violence against, 50, 83, ­169–71, 171, 206–7; Third Intifada (Intifada of the Knives), 53, 66n24; as victims, 245n1; in West Bank, 5, 15, 99, 147; winemakers and, 118. See also Israel/Palestine Pappé, Ilan, 126 Parekh, Bhikhu, 158 Peretz, Rafi, 135, 150n23 performativity, storied, 103, 118, 120 Perugini, Nicola, 64 Petraeus, David, 179

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Index

politics, and ethics, 224–30, 232–3, 250n33 Pollack, Ari, 112 Pompeo, Mike, 124n30 post-colonial theory, 8 power: ethics and, 228–9; ­indigeneity as power relations, 155, 176–7, 182–3 “price tag” graffiti, 142, 169–70, 171, 190n40 prophecy, Biblical, and ­winemaking, 106, 106, 108–9, 111–12, 115, 119–20 Psagot Winery, 124n30 purity, religious, 127, 133, 135–40, 147–8 quality turn, colonial, 70, 71, 83–9 rabbinic Judaism, 51–2 racial science, 28–9 racism: intra-Jewish, 16–17; ­violence against Palestinians, 50, 83, 169–71, 171, 206–7 Ran, Avri, 68, 79–81, 82–3, 84, 86, 89, 90, 205 Rawls, John, 225, 248n18 reconciliation, 196–7, 214, 224 religious feminism, 48, 56–9, 61, 64 religious Zionism, 24, 35n7, ­135–7, 139–40, 141–2. See also Bat Ayin (settlement); Gush Emunim; Halutza Sands ­communities; Midreshet B’erot Bat Ayin (women’s seminary) re-racialization, 62–4 Robinson, Shira, 15 Rodinson, Maxim, 251n45

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sabras, 20, 24, 25, 50 sacrifice, personal, 146 Salaita, Steven, 6–7 Samaria, use of term, 3, 100–1 Schmitt, Carl, 224, 226–7 science and technology, 25–6, 30 Second Intifada (Oslo War; ­2000–05), 167, 168, 202 settlement movement, 5–6, 24–5, 45, 131, 149nn10–11, 186n12, 206–7 settler colonialism: citizenship as way forward from, 236–9; vs colonialism, 70, 234; Hebrew terminology, 17; vs immigration, 235; individual deviance vs ­systemic state violence, 165; intra-Jewish racism and, 16–17; native vs settler, 10–11; ­normalization goal, 13, 32, 70–1, 90–1; organic agriculture and, 70–1; proposed Palestinian rejection of while accepting Jewish nationalism, 241–2; ­settlers stop being settlers, 34, 222, 223, 235–6, 237; as theoretical paradigm, 8; violence and, 180; Zionism and, 12–14, 239–41. See also decolonization; Halutza Sands communities; Midreshet B’erot Bat Ayin (­women’s seminary); organic farming; settlement ­movement; settler-colonial ­mimicry; ­settler-indigeneity; wine and winemaking settler-colonial mimicry: ­introduction and conclusion, 33, 192–3, 194–5, 218–19; ­animosity through similarity

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and, 192, 193–4; appropriation of Palestinian practices, 58, 198, 199, 201–2, 205–6, 208–9, 211; Arab-Jew identity and, 203–4, 210–12; autochthony and, ­210–12; Avi’s story, 195–6, ­205–7, 207–9, 209–10, 216–17; vs colonial mimicry, 33, 195, 217–18; culture as bridge and, 196–7; as dangerous mimicry, 192, 218–19; as double gesture, 199; drag and, 200, 213; encountering the Palestinian Other with Amit, 197–9; as ­existential trap, 204–5; going native as natural, 212–13; ­Har-Sinai organic farm and, 77–8, 83; methodological approach to, 195–6; personal affection intertwined with ­hostility, 214, 215–17; as ­rejecting one’s heritage, 209–10; sabras and, 20; settler violence and, 206–7; Shlomi’s story, ­195–6, 199–203, 204–5, ­215–16; Yonni’s story, 195–6, 210–12, 212–13, 214, 220n9 settler-indigeneity: introduction, 4–5, 9–10, 11–12, 25, 32; ­archeology and, 26–8; biological origins (genetics) and, 28–30; consumption and, 30–1, 100; Hebrew terminology for, 3, 17–18; indigeneity-making ­practices in Israel, 4, 8, 19–21, 24–5, 126; re-racialization and, 62–4. See also Halutza Sands communities; Hebron; indigeneity; Midreshet B’erot Bat Ayin (women’s seminary); organic

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farming; settler-colonial mimicry; wine and winemaking settler peace movement, 9 Shaer, Gilad, 53 Sharon, Ariel (Arik), 127, 130, 135, 136 Shiloh Winery, 101, 111–12 Shiran, Eli, 109 Shlomit (settlement), 127, 130, 133, 144–7, 148, 152nn44–5 Shohat, Ella, 203–4 Sinai Peninsula, 150n16 Six-Day War (June 1967), 5, 7, 15, 156 sofer stam (Jewish scribe), 148n1 soil, 69, 72–3, 75, 89, 91 Sommer, Doris, 200 South Africa, 235, 236 “Sovereignty Movement, The” 3–4, 7 Steinhardt, Joanna, 61 storied performativity, 103, 118, 120 Strauss, Leo, 247n14 sun and moon Talmudic parable, 57, 66n27 supersession, 13. See also normalization Susya (Palestinian village), 76, 79 Susya (settlement), 21, 75, 76, 76, 89, 109–10, 110 Sylomovics, Susan, 206 Tallbear, Kim, 11 Talmud: organic farming and, 68; sun and moon parable, 57, 66n27 Tanya Winery, 104–5, 120 Tekoa (settlement), 85–7, 86, 87, 89

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Index

temple building, 51–2, 52–5. See also Third Temple movement territory, 69, 71, 72, 79, 80, 89, 91 teshuva (becoming religious), 46, 47–8, 52–5, 65n8 Thau, Tzvi, 125, 134, 135, 136, 142, 150n21, 152n40, 152n42 theocratic post-Zionism, 50 Third Intifada (Intifada of the Knives; 2014–16), 53, 66n24 Third Temple movement, 46, 49, 52, 53, 112. See also temple building Tom Winery, 112, 114 tourism, 21. See also Hebron Trump, Donald, 9 Tura Winery, 105, 113, 114 Tzoref, Yona, 84, 90 United States of America, support for Israel, 9, 119, 124n30. See also American Jews Veracini, Lorenzo, 12, 13, 32, 70, 90–1, 234 violence and extremism: animosity through similarity, 192, 193–4; Bat Ayin settlement and, 50; cycle of in West Bank, 99; Hilltop Youth, 24, 50, 68, 142, 205; Palestinians depicted as ­violent, 163–4; “price tag” ­graffiti, 142, 169–70, 171, 190n40; settler colonialism and, 180; by settlers against Palestinians, 50, 83, 169–71, 171, 206–7; territoriality and, 79 viticulture. See wine and winemaking

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265

Walls2Windows (w2 w) tour ­program, 160. See also Hebron War of Independence (Nakba, 1948), 5, 14, 128, 242, 244 Weber, Max, 226 West Bank: Jewish settlers in, 10, 37n35, 99; land expropriation and Palestinian displacement, 14–15, 21, 22–3, 45, 73, 74–5, 80, 81–2, 83, 87–8; Palestinians in, 5, 15, 99, 147; terminology debate, 100–1; v­iolence in, 99; wineries in, 100. See also Hebron; organic farming; s­ ettlement movement; wine and winemaking whiteness, 62–3, 64 Wilder, David, 167 wine and winemaking: ­introduction and conclusion, 32–3, 98–100, 118–20; ­boutique ­wineries, 122n10; Jewish identity and, 100, 101–2; number of wineries, 100; ­ontological anthropology and, 102–3, 104, 118–19; ­ontological conflict of, 101, ­103–4; Palestinians and, 118; as return to land and an ancient way of life, 98–9, 101, 104–5, 113–17; as rooted in land and prophecy, 105–11, 106, ­111–12, 115, ­119–20; storied performativity and, 103, 118, 120; Third Temple movement and, 112; wine and winery ­naming p­ractices, 113–14; Zionism and, 108. See also organic farming Wolfe, Patrick, 91, 234, 240

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women: as agents of messianic future, 51, 52–5, 66n27; ­de-assimilation and reclaiming Jewish indigeneity, 59–62; land annexation in West Bank and, 45; in nationalist ­movements, 45, 48; religious ­feminism, 48, 56–9, 61, 64 World Zionist Congress, 8, 63 yedi’at ha’aretz (knowledge of the land), 21 yelidim (indigeneity), 3, 17–18 Yesha Council, 6 “yeshivas of the line,” 134, 141, 142, 150n21, 152n41, 152n47 Yifrah, Eyal, 53 Yom Kippur War (1973), 24

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Zionism: Arab-Jew identity and, 203–4; archeology and, 27; as both nationalism and settler colonialism, 223, 239–41; failure to set clear stopping point, 233; indigeneity-making and, 19–21, 99, 126; Jewish American tourists and, 154–6, 177, 180, ­182–4; Labor Zionism, 24, 31; liberalism and, 157–8; modern political Zionism, 38n45; origins of and settler colonialism, 12–14; on Palestinians, 13–14, 20; racial science and, 28–9; religious Zionism, 24, 35n7, 135–7, ­139–40, 141–2; theocratic ­post-Zionism, 50; winemaking and, 108

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