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  • Settling Hebron: Jewish Fundamentalism in a Palestinian City by Tamara Neuman
  • Amalia Shahaf (bio)
Settling Hebron: Jewish Fundamentalism in a Palestinian City, by Tamara Neuman. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. 256 pages. $69.95.

The story of the city of Hebron—a city of extremes, violence, and unresolved conflict—wallows in a social, political, and ethnic explosive quagmire. In her six-chapter book, Settling Hebron, anthropologist Tamara Neuman delves into the roots of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in an attempt to understand the origins of the fire that fuels the violence between the city's Israeli and Palestinian residents.

More than 215,000 Palestinians live in Hebron, while approximately 7,000 Jewish settlers live in the adjoining settlement of Kiryat Arba', and about 700 Jewish adults and children reside in Hebron's old city itself. Their story can be read as reflecting an ethos of pioneering spirit, redemption, and homecoming. Alternatively it could be seen as a tale of colonialism and inequality, in which an extremist Jewish minority settles amid a Palestinian indigenous population in the heart of an occupied city. Indeed, Neuman's ethnographic study bears witness to the latter.

Hebron, known as al-Khalil in Arabic, is located about 20 miles (32 kilometers) south of Jerusalem. The Cave of the Patriarchs, one of the holiest sites in Judaism and Islam, is situated in the middle of this ancient city. In the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, known widely as the Six-Day War, the Israel Defense Forces conquered the city. Following the war, the Israeli government initiated the establishment of Jewish settlements that were designed to enhance its control over the Occupied Territories. Right-wing Religious Zionist activists were quick to seize the opportunity.

Having failed to purchase houses in Hebron, a group of families that wanted to renew the Jewish community in Hebron, which had been exiled after a massacre in 1929, rented the Park Hotel in the city on the eve of Passover in 1968. By the end of the holiday, however, they refused to leave. A few weeks later, the Israeli government decided to relocate them to expropriated land to the east of the city, separate from its Palestinian residents.

In her book, Neuman focuses on settlements that were built in the wake of the 1967 war in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The author tells us that she chose to conduct her fieldwork in Hebron because the settlement in that city was the harbinger of later Jewish settlements in the Territories. To a large degree, the Hebron settlement is conceived as the spearhead of Israel's extremist religious right.

In Settling Hebron, Neuman analyzes the Israeli settlement movement's rhetoric, values, and practices, which are essentially premised on the preservation and reproduction of the existing power relationships in the chaotic space of Hebron. She distinguishes between different kinds of settlers: "ideological" settlers, motivated by nationalist/religious convictions like those living in Hebron and Kiryat Arba', and settlers who moved to the Judea and Samaria District (as the West Bank is officially referred to by Israeli authorities) for economic and quality-of-life reasons.

In 1994 the anthropologist moved into a small apartment in Kiryat Arba' in order to study the place, its inhabitants, and their daily life. This was a tumultuous year for Hebron, Israel, and the Middle East: on May 4, the Gaza-Jericho accord was signed in Cairo; on October 26, the Jordanian-Israeli peace treaty was signed; while in Hebron, on February 25, a Jewish medical doctor from Kiryat Arba' named Baruch Goldstein massacred Muslim worshippers at the Cave of the Patriarchs; and, throughout the year, Israel experienced a wave of terrorist attacks.

In her ethnography Neuman relies on observations, interviews, and encounters with local Israelis and Palestinians as well as on historical records of the ongoing gory conflict between them. She examines the features of the "ideological" settlers' ideology, rituals, and practices in light of questions such as: what is the ideology behind the settlement movement? What are their space-conquering practices? What ignites and fuels the incessant violence? [End Page 324] And how does the settlers' colonialism find expression in the alleys of occupied Hebron? In addition, she...

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