Access Denied: Temporal Mobility Regimes in Hebron

Any history is partial, and therefore necessarily perspectival. Histories by their nature are stories that order time in particular ways, highlighting some events and skipping others altogether. In this sense, presenting a history, or a timeline, enacts the very processes of power and structuring that a focus on temporality and temporal mobility seeks to lay bare. This section, which provides necessary background on Hebron, is no different. In deciding which moments and movements in time to draw attention to, I relied on understandings of people closest to the situation. I collected the perspectives of Palestinian residents of Hebron and Israeli soldier-activists who did tours of duty in Hebron, through interviews, textual analysis of formal testimonies, and ethnographic engagement. I also encountered Israeli settlers in Hebron regularly during my fieldwork but living immersed with Palestinians meant I rarely spoke with them. I have reconstructed a settler’s understanding of which dates and historical events matter in Hebron’s history from material the settlers publish online, from broader Zionist discourse prevalent in Israeli society, and from secondary sources. The brief history I lay out in this section is important to understanding temporal mobility regimes in Hebron because it lends meaning and emotional weight to contemporary behaviors, even as the events I describe are used to justify and legitimize diverse political positions.

In the 1920s, during the fallout of World War I and the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, Palestine came under British control. The British Mandate Period in Hebron and broader Palestine was politically tumultuous and marked by rising Arab nationalism and anti-colonial sentiment. This time also saw a marked spike in Jewish immigration to the region—part of the broader settlement efforts of the Zionist national liberation movement that aspired to establish a sovereign Jewish nation for Jews living as minorities around the world (Halamish, 2018). During this time, a small group of Lithuanian Ashkenazi Jews relocated to Hebron, seeking to avoid new conscription laws that would force them to serve in the Lithuanian Army.

This emigration may also be understood in the context of pogroms and anti-Semitic violence that swept Eastern Europe at the start of the 20^th century.

Israel’s founding in May 1948 sparked an unprecedented refugee crisis as inhabitants of Palestine were forced to flee their homes in light of the sudden change in political circumstances. The founding is celebrated today by Jewish Israelis as ‘Yom Ha’aztmaut’, or Independence Day, and mourned by Palestinians as ‘Dhikra an-Nakba’, or Catastrophe Day. With the nation’s creation, Hebron, like most of the West Bank, fell under Jordanian control.

Hebron actually came under exclusive Jordanian control only in 1950, after an unusual period of shared sovereignty, known as the ‘Dual Era’, in which both Egypt and Jordan ruled the city and courted Hebronite elites in a complicated context of early pan-Arab nationalism. For more on this period, see Kimberly Katz (2015).

A subsequent landmark event in Palestine’s history was the 1967 ‘Six Day War’, in which Israel decisively defeated a coalition of Arab forces, consolidating their control of the land. In victory, Israel moved across the Green Line to occupy Hebron and the West Bank. It imposed military law that gave Israeli area commanders full legislative, executive, and judicial authority, setting up a military government to administer what became known internationally as the ‘Occupied Palestinian Territories’ (Israel Defense Forces, 1967). Just one year after the start of this Occupation, new Jewish settlers arrived in Hebron—despite having been denied permission to take up residence there by the Israeli Government. The group, led by Rabbi Moshe Levinger, timed their arrival to coincide with Pesach, or Passover. To circumvent logistical complications associated with moving illegally, they checked into the Park Hotel in Hebron’s old city, near the neighborhood where the community of Lithuanian Jews ran the yeshiva in the 1920s. After several weeks in residence, it became clear to the hoteliers that the group intended to remain as squatters; the Israeli military intervened to prevent their violent removal.

Rabbi Levinger’s brashness, and the Zionist zeal it represented, became highly politicized in Israel. Amidst the tensions, the settlers negotiated a deal with the Israeli government to leave the hotel in exchange for State permission to settle permanently in Hebron. The settlers were given land that had been in recent use as an Israeli military outpost, while the government, flouting international law, broke ground on a large, planned settlement just northeast of the city center. The settlement was named Kiryat Arba and was situated within easy access to Hebron’s most holy site and the core of the old city. The city—one of the oldest urban centers in the world—is loosely centered around a site known to Muslims as the Ibrahimi Mosque (Abraham’s Mosque) and known to Jews as the Tomb of the Patriarchs, or the Cave of Machpelah. The mosque is built on the site of an ancient cave—a burial ground that Abraham is said to have purchased as a family funeral plot from Hittites over 3000 years ago.

A religious edifice has been on this site for millennia, but it has not always been a mosque: during the Byzantine era, it was a basilica; under the extended Islamic empires it was a mosque; in the 12^th century, the building was used as a church under the control of Christian Crusaders; it was reconverted to a mosque when Egyptian Salah ad-Din took Palestine back from the Crusaders in 1187.

Harnessing the power of durable immobility, Levinger’s settlers relied on the strategy of illegal squatting a second time to enlarge Jewish territorial claims on Hebron.

Levinger’s actions may also be understood in the broader political context as a settler colonial strategy to create ‘facts on the ground’ that present obstacles to a future partitioning of Israel from broader Palestine. The takeover of Beit Hassadah occurred shortly after the 1978 Camp David Accords, brokered by U.S. President Jimmy Carter, in which Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat negotiated a peace treaty (without participation of the Palestinians). During the discussions, President Carter sought a ‘land for peace’ agreement, in which Israel would return the territory it took after the 1967 Six Day War. Such relinquishing was anathema to conservative Israelis, including the settlers in Hebron.

Two additional key moments in time: in 1994, Muslim Ramadan celebrations and the Jewish holiday of Purim overlapped, leading to palpable tension when a large group of Jewish settlers sought access to the Ibrahimi Mosque at the precise time when Muslims were assembling for the maghrib prayer. The day after the public standoff, on February 25, Muslims knelt for the al-asr prayer when gunfire exploded. Baruch Goldstein, a Brooklyn-born, Orthodox Jew who immigrated to Israel to settle in Kiryat Arba, opened fire in the mosque with an assault rifle, killing 29 and wounding 125 more. A crowd of survivors beat Goldstein to death when his bullets ran out. Goldstein’s mass murder ushered in a period of strict control over Palestinians. Three years later, in 1997, the government of Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization signed the ‘Hebron Protocol’, as part of a series of agreements that emerged from the U.S.-led Oslo process. The Hebron Protocol divided Hebron into two zones, designated as Hebron 1 and Hebron 2—or ‘H1’ and ‘H2.’ H1 was put under the control of the new Palestinian Authority and consisted of approximately 80 percent of the developed urban area. H2, which comprised the old city center (designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2017), the Ibrahimi Mosque, and the traditional economic core of the city, as well as the new, illegal Jewish settlements, remained under full Israeli military control and occupation—a situation that continues to the present day.

A historical overview, particularly one that chronicles slow dispossession, reminds us that it takes time to get anything done—and that as living beings, we each have a finite amount of time to accomplish our goals. Some aspects of our time we control as individuals; some timings are imposed on us. Whether we accept given schedules or historical retellings as legitimate or illegitimate often depends on the degree to which they are naturalized into our daily rhythms and routines. Yet regardless of the degree of hegemony achieved by everyday temporal regimes, they represent patterns that have evolved from arrangements of power (a fact that becomes patently obvious when the regime is at odds with the practices of the population). It might be argued that one of the key functions of any state is the organization of time in the service of enabling collective social life, establishing rule and order, and maintaining control. The ‘shape’ or flow of time often aligns with foundational assumptions about values and public goods. It is for this reason that new regimes have sometimes sought to implement whole calendars and measuring systems that enact their specific ideology in real time. As Elizabeth Cohen has noted, the value inherent in time renders it inextricable from the realization of any vision of political justice; indeed, injustices occur when ‘similarly situated people’s time is not treated as having similar value’ (Cohen, 2018, p. 1–4). Thus focused on questions of justice and social control, this section explores movement and time in terms of shifting tactical military maneuvers, tracing the contours of a securitized temporal mobility regime that has, in diverse ways, structured conditions of political possibility and phenomenological experience in Hebron.

The Israeli military Occupation of Hebron began in 1967—fifty-five years ago and counting, making it the ‘longest belligerent military occupation in the modern world’ (U.N. Special Rapporteur S. Michael Lynk, 2019). The ostensible purpose of the Israeli military in Hebron is to safeguard the Jewish population settled illegally in the city and the West Bank, and to ‘keep the peace’ between Palestinians and Israelis. Almost all the tactics deployed in this effort involve various modes of curtailing mobility, of fixing bodies in space and time, rendering them immobile, or channeling their mobility in specific flows. The conspicuousness of physical control—transparently obvious in the presence of armed soldiers patrolling streets, metal turnstiles inserted crudely into Mamluk-era stone walls, photographs and videos of concrete barriers that circulate globally—belies a second, equally critical mode of control embedded in the military maneuvers: an under-recognized temporal component that wreaks equal, if not more, havoc on Palestinian lives. Each physical implement of spatial control may be understood as a timing device as well. One Hebron resident put it this way:

The worst are the flying checkpoints, or the sudden checkpoints. With the permanent ones, people will take into consideration, for example when they make appointments and so on, the average time needed to pass a checkpoint. But with a flying checkpoint you don’t know what will happen and so people’s hearts start beating, they get nervous. What could these soldiers be doing, what are they looking for…are they looking for something, or just delaying people? Because sometimes, you know, a checkpoint does not necessarily mean they are looking for something. It’s more, let’s say, a penalty. A delay for the people.

This understanding traces in stark relief the dual function of a checkpoint, rendering it a consummate instrument of the securitized temporal mobility regime. Other instruments position time even more centrally as part of the regime of control. Among these, jail and curfews feature prominently. Jail time, meted out by a sovereign state as punishment for a crime and imagined as proportionately matching the magnitude of that crime, is a relatively straightforward instantiation of temporal mobility control. But jail time carries costs and continues to enact punishment (and disciplining effects) well after the designated period of incarceration and immobility has passed.

The long-term effects of jailing are detrimental at any age, but they may be seen as particularly devastating to children, given the outsized impact on their life. Human rights organizations estimate that the Israeli military arrests approximately 700 children annually, mostly boys between the age of 12 and 17 (Defense for Children International Palestine). The most common charge brought against children is stone throwing, for which the maximum sentence is 20 years (Reuters, 2015). UNICEF’s 2013 Committee on the Rights of the Child report, based on 10 years of data, concluded the ‘ill-treatment of Palestinian children in the Israeli military detention system appears to be widespread, systematic, and institutionalized’, and cited the prevalence of practices that violated international laws, including blindfolding children and tying their hands, interrogation using physical violence and threats, and coerced confessions, among numerous other offenses (UNICEF, 2013).

At 14 years old, Obaida Adram Abdurahman Jawabra was accused of throwing stones and arrested. During his detention—in the time before he was acquitted and released without charge—he claimed his hands were bound with plastic cords, he was blindfolded, and beaten. Six months later, Jawabra was arrested a second time, accused of throwing stones, and, this time, a Molotov cocktail. He agreed to a plea deal and was sentenced to prison for four months by a juvenile military court.

Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, which has documented child detention in Israeli military prisons, finds that the vast majority of minors agree to plead guilty as part of a plea bargain after a coercive, often physically violent interrogation design to elicit a confession. They note, children ‘sign it so that they can resume their normal lives as soon as possible…’ (B’Tselem, 2018).

Israeli forces detained Jawabra a third time, in 2019, and he was again released without charge. Jawabra was a few weeks shy of his 18^th birthday when Israeli soldiers shot and killed him as he approached the entrance to ar-Arroub refugee camp, where he lived, just north of Hebron. Such a series of events, in such a short life, calls into question the very notion of ‘childhood’—a temporal bounding of a particular phase of life that is imbued with diverse meanings and associations across cultures. Jawabra spent the last four years of his short life in and out of Israeli military prisons, a period of time that amounted to almost 30 percent of his total lifetime. His efforts outside of jail to recuperate lost time—to remobilize—to ‘catch up’ on what he had lost, had life-changing effects, putting him on a vocational track and causing him to make life choices in a reaction to his jail time experiences (‘to show that prison will not affect me now’). In Jawabra’s life, the physical immobility of jailing intersected with a temporal immobility that put Jawabra out of sync with other children and ‘regular’ life rhythms.

Jailing, and jail time, is closely connected with curfews—a third rudimentary technique of temporal mobility control. Under curfew, people are fixed in place, usually at home, for a period of time. This may be a defined period, but as a strategic element of the securitized temporal mobility regime in Hebron, the duration of the curfew is frequently unspecified. One Khalili vividly remembered military vehicles driving through the city in the 1990s with a loudspeaker mounted on top, from which a soldier shouted, ‘Residents of Hebron! Curfew is imposed on you, from now until further notification! Anyone who violates it will get shot!’ (interview with Hebron Resident 1, 2016). Yet jailing and curfews are not identical; one major distinction lies in the indiscriminate nature of curfews. With this technique of temporal mobility control, entire populations are targeted and subjected to arbitrary whims of a military rule. Another Khalili resident described it in the following terms:

I feel like my entire life has been lived under curfew, in a way. For example, 1987 was the longest curfew; it was normal. We were spending our time at the house, playing cards and sitting. When the curfew was lifted every three or four days for two hours at a time we would go out and shop. We would use those two hours to get basic things for the house. And then we’d come back and close the door on ourselves again. That’s it. But mostly we spent our time playing cards…stuck inside the house for 10, 20, even 25 days…it depended on [the IDF’s] mood, honestly. In the beginning of the second intifada, in 2000, they issued a curfew for three consecutive months. We were using the roofs of the houses to go get something to eat or drink. (Interview with Hebron Resident 2, 2016.)

During the second intifada, the approximately 30,000 Palestinian residents of Hebron’s Old City lived under a near-permanent curfew. During the brief times the curfew was lifted, the military imposed a vehicular ban, forcing residents to hand-carry all supplies when they re-stocked homes for an unspecified amount of time. A 2001 Human Rights Watch report characterized the use of curfews as a ‘textbook example’ of collective punishment (Human Rights Watch, 2001). The punitive nature of this securitized temporal mobility regime is all the more obvious with the understanding that curfews apply only to Palestinian residents of H2; Israeli settlers, living illegally in the same space, retain free range of the city. Even when violence originates with the Jewish settlers, Palestinian residents are the targets of governmental control. For example, in the fallout of the 1994 massacre at the Ibrahimi Mosque, when Goldstein murdered Muslims at prayer, it was Khalilis, and not settlers, who were put under curfew with the justification that collective house arrest would preempt retaliatory attacks. Between 2001 and 2003, Palestinian Hebron was under curfew for 377 full days (interview with Yehuda Shaul, 2018).

In Hebron, the securitized temporal mobility regime amounts to what Cohen has aptly called ‘time theft’, a form of political violence and injustice that misappropriates the time of entire groups of people and largely escapes notice as a technology of power and state control (Cohen, 2018, p. 5). In valuing the time of Jewish settlers and Palestinian residents of Hebron differently, the Israeli military creates a system of temporal apartheid which renders ‘normal’ life impossible for Palestinians. Julie Peteet and Yael Berda have each documented in rigorous detail the power inherent in bureaucratic delay—yet another site where time is weaponized to the disadvantage of Palestinians and further contributing to understandings of how ‘highly disparate temporalities exist side by side’ (Peteet, 2018, p. 46; Berda, 2017). Sara Roy, in her analysis of Gaza, has shown the economic effects of temporal disordering, pointing to devastating financial losses, unemployment, and the disruption of entire economic networks through the disconnection of agricultural rhythms, market demands, and physical access to traditional city-farm networks (Roy, 1987). In the securitized temporal mobility regime, time works together with physical technologies such as checkpoints and jail to control and regulate movement in the immediate, kinetic sense, but also in terms of life cycles and generations. Palestinians are aware of the longer threat:

I am afraid for our children’s’ futures, honestly. Because we lived the Occupation; we lived 50 years of it. Yanni, our whole lives passed under Occupation. I am 48. I have spent 48 years under Occupation. But I am afraid of the Occupation for our children and our children’s children who will suffer from it. I mean, that’s what scares me: the future.

More often than not, for Khalilis, temporal ‘regulation’ takes the form of chaos, rather than predictability, leaving them unable to plan for the long-term, unable to concentrate, constantly reacting to immediate problems at hand, and robbed of the host of political and social activities that require time.

If the securitized temporal mobility regime of the first movement relied on comparatively short-term spatial practices and modern infrastructures of urban militarism, the second movement, referring to an organized effort to attain an end, adopts a longue-durée approach. This section examines efforts to usher political projects into being and to coopt power through the crafting of timing narratives and discourses based on selective historical references, or what I term ideological temporal mobility regimes. Here, movement, or mobility, is represented less as physical or tactical shifts; rather, mobility may be understood in terms of a concerted effort over time, manifesting as slow diaspora, exile, return, sequencing, and gaps in connection with territory and space. In this regime, historical framings and periodizations play out in on-the-ground practices that, as in the security framework, structure political outcomes.

Cohen has noted that the composition of a citizenry is often determined by the bond (or lack thereof) between a territory and a people at the moment of the state’s founding. She writes: ‘the existence of temporal boundaries reminds us that rights derive not just from who we are and where we are but also from when we are. The temporal boundaries that circumscribe states are as stark and significant as the territorial boundaries on which so much current scholarship focuses’ (Cohen, 2018, p. 5). Scholars who study the origins of European nations may find this an uncomplicated premise. Yet the case of Palestine, and the modern State of Israel’s origin as a political solution for Western Allies after World War II and haven for Jews in the wake of their violent persecution in Europe, problematize this notion.

The Balfour Declaration, signed in 1917, enshrined the premise that the future Jewish State in Palestine was intended for Jews worldwide, and not only for those located in Palestine at the time of the state’s creation.

Indeed, in 1948, only 35 percent of the 650,000 Jews who lived in the area of Mandatory Palestine were native-born. And Jews residing in the fledgling state amounted to only six percent of Jewish people worldwide. See Aviva Halamish (2018).

But redefining or displacing a category of people does not make them vanish. If the early years of Israeli statehood gave birth to demographic shifts and nationalist excitement among diasporic Jews through the Law of Return, so too did it spawn a reciprocal Palestinian movement around the nearly eponymous notion of the ‘Right of Return’—the principle that Palestinian refugees and their dependents have a right to the property they were forced to abandon in 1948 in what is now Israel. This means both groups share a moment in time that sharply defines their collective self-understanding and has palpably impacted their historical patterns of mobility. Both groups harness these narratives in the service of present day attempts to instantiate ideological temporal mobility regimes—treated in this section in turn.

In her 1995 book Recovered Roots, Yael Zerubavel traced the contours of the now mainstream Israeli narrative, offering trenchant insights into the nationalist reinterpretation of specific historical events. Zerubavel demonstrates how the Zionist periodization of Jewish history foregrounds the primacy of the contemporary bond between people and land, and refashions a coherent national community in the modern era by dividing the past into two essentialized periods: Antiquity and Exile.

In this framing, Jewish communal identity and connection to Palestine (then Canaan) begins with the story of Abraham and his descendants, the Israelite Exodus from Egypt and return to Canaan, when they took over land ‘promised to them by God.’ The annual Jewish holidays of Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot each commemorate aspects of this origin story, and the modern Israeli State emphasizes this narrative as well: Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs website, for example, shows the territory of the twelve tribes of Israel in 1200 B.C. superimposed onto a contemporary map of Israel, the West Bank, and Jordan. See https://mfa.gov.il/MFA/AboutIsrael/Maps/Pages/The-Twelve-Tribes-of-Israel.aspx. The period of Exile, in contrast, covers the subsequent eighteen centuries when Jews lived as religious minorities dispersed among other peoples across the globe. Exile is characterized a bounded period of disconnection and loss—loss of both land and of a unified Jewish polity. The founding of Israel in 1948, is heralded as the end of the exilic period. For more detail, see Zerubavel (1995, pp. 13–36).

This Zionist narrative and the simplified timeline it presents has powerfully shaped much of how contemporary Israel is understood by its own citizenry, within the enduring Jewish diaspora, and within international and foreign policy discourses. The ethos of fulfilling a destiny and heroic return it conveys has likewise been central to many of the Israeli settler movements that have pushed beyond Israel’s 1948 and 1967 borders to forge communities inside of the Occupied Palestinian Territories—to include the community of settlers in and around Hebron. The actions of the Jewish settlers in Hebron starkly illustrate how something as seemingly abstract and academic as timing, or periodization, may be harnessed to enact a mobility regime in an organized effort to attain long-term political goals and ideologies.

One sphere in which this plays out prominently in Hebron is in the context of religious holidays. Settler communities of Hebron capitalize on these commemorative days to host celebrations for residents, but also for Jews from Israel and beyond who assemble in large groups to visit Hebron and tour sites associated with a Jewish past in the city. In staging these large-scale, spectacular, events, the Jewish settlers of Hebron access a global audience, live-streaming aspects of their celebration, or otherwise sharing audio, video, and photography online, as well as organizing events for upwards of 50,000 visitors over the course of major holidays. Orchestrating events around a shared holiday taps into annual rhythms of collective Jewish experience worldwide, bringing disparate peoples together in cyclical celebration. Holidays present a timing platform by which settlers broadcast their version of Hebron’s past; a recurring opportunity by which to propagate and disseminate their unique vision of Hebron’s future; and, significantly, an occasion to impose their political vision in the present moment. Holidays usher in a temporal mobility regime that reinforces pan-Jewish connections to Hebron via reference to biblical-era events and places.

The October 16 – 24, 2016, Sukkot holiday in Hebron marked one such event. The settlers of Kiryat Arba and the smaller settler outposts in Hebron’s city center organized a series of activities to celebrate. In Jewish tradition, Sukkot commemorates God’s protection of the tribes during the long and dangerous desert journey from Egypt to Canaan. Believers rejoice with food and construct small huts, or tents, that symbolize the precarity of life and their dependence on God. In Hebron, the settlers organized a religious, family-friendly music festival; opened the Tomb of Machpela (the Ibrahimi Mosque) to Jewish visitors; organized a six-hour ‘Harvest Festival’ march from Kiryat Arba to Hebron; and ran various city tours, including visits to the Tomb of Otniel Ben Knaz located in Palestinian-controlled H1. Mordechai Ben David, among others, performed on an elaborate outdoor stage with the Herodian-era wall rampart of the Ibrahimi Mosque/Tomb of Machpela serving as the dramatic backdrop. Among the songs performed, ‘Hevron’, registered as a crowd favorite. The lyrics of the refrain (translated from Hebrew) follow: Hebron, Hebron is ours by the right, the right of our fathers as promised to our fathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob

Hebrew to English translation by George Jacubovits: http://hebrewsongs.com/?song=chevron.

Sung in present tense, the song’s refrain reiterates the Zionist periodization, collapsing time between Antiquity and the contemporary moment and justifying Jewish presence in the West Bank via reference to religious belief and a specific interpretation of ancient history.

In Settling Hebron, Tamara Neuman makes the case that the practices contemporary Jewish settlers of Hebron pursue differ qualitatively from the original, more mainstream, Zionist narrative. While the Zionist periodicity of Antiquity and Exile remains central, present-day settlers of Hebron have adopted a literal and place-based interpretation of Judaic tradition that eschews the transmutability of religious practice. This settler interpretation of Jewish history, Neuman claims, reimagines particular spaces and places as sacred and uses literal readings of Jewish religious law, or halakha, to justify, and indeed demand, Jewish habitation in modern-day Palestinian territories. See Tamara Neuman (2018).

For the Harvest Festival parade, busloads of Jewish tourists entered H2. Strolling through Palestinian neighborhoods for hours in loose groups, they were guarded by heavily armed soldiers who stood with their backs to the walls of the narrow streets, holding guns at the ready. Tour guides stopped at buildings along the route, pointing out architectural features they claimed indicated the structure’s Jewish origins, and narrating present-day Hebron in terms of a superimposed biblical landscape. The Palestinian shopkeepers who chose to stay in defiance of the closure, to sit outside their shuttered shops to protect them from vandalism, were largely ignored. In the context of the quotidian life of the city, the imposition of the settlers’ ideological temporal mobility regime also caused Palestinian time to ‘stop.’ The militarized, hypermobility of Jewish settler events take place in sites throughout H2 and H1 often literally on top of Palestinian residences and public spaces. Palestinians, immobilized and confined to their homes by virtue of being denied access to the streets for the duration of the events, watched the movement from their windows.

The ritual enactment of sovereign possession of land through intertwined practices of mobility and selective historical narratives underscores the ongoing nature of the Nakba and Palestinian dispossession (Jamal, 2016, p. 370). Palestinian exile was not a single historical event, bounded in time at Israel’s founding, but rather an ongoing process—one that is revealed cyclically in Hebron, as well as in the experiences of Palestinian refugees living in purportedly ‘temporary’ camps who cling to the idea of the Right of Return. The continual interjection of soldier and settler activities in the Old City, the continued existence of Fawwar and Arroub Refugee Camps in Hebron Governate, and the persistent state of emergency that rationalizes the ongoing military Occupation, all testify to a seemingly endless ‘temporariness’ of Palestinian experience, even as they bring with them protracted periods of physical immobility or stasis. In their practices of resistance, Palestinians are forced to walk a fine line between acting in ways that might improve their day-to-day experience, allowing them to cope with their subjugation, and adopting a posture that normalizes or accepts a political reality they oppose. In the absence of physical or military power, the narrative power of an ideological temporal mobility regime—a future time in which displaced Palestinians may return to their homes—has been enough to sustain the collective movement.

Ideological temporal mobility regimes frame longue-durée understandings about civilizational movements and rely on present-day references to these movements to authorize a politics of mobility, immobility, and sovereign control. The relationship between people and place is established in real time through temporal mobility practices that reference an exclusive ethnonational history and culture. When these achieve hegemonic status in a society, their ideological nature often fades from view. The next movement considers an ethnoreligious temporal mobility regime that has been normalized in Hebron, such that its interruption, or absence, marks the point of contention.

On the first night Ramadan, April 13, 2021, while Palestinian residents of the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in Jerusalem battled to stay in their homes, a squadron of Israeli police officers across town entered the renowned Al-Aqsa Mosque and, pushing the Palestinian attendants aside, cut the cables to the loudspeakers that broadcast prayers to the faithful from the four medieval minarets that crown the mosque. Israeli President Reuven Rivlin was giving a speech at the Western Wall, adjacent and below the mosque, and Israeli officials were concerned that the prayer call, or adhan, would drown it out. Just under one month later, Israel launched a massive bombing offensive against Gaza in challenge to missiles fired into Israel. The New York Times quoted Sheikh Ekrima Sabri, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, saying that the act of cutting the cables was a turning point that triggered the most recent breakout of fighting (Kingsley, 2021). A short while later, in June 2021, Khalilis organized a peaceful demonstration to protest the continued prohibition of the Muslim prayer call from their own Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron.

Written correspondence with Hebron Resident 4, June 2021.

Disciplining social time and orchestrating the movement of bodies in correspondence with particular rhythms takes place across disparate scales. Mobility and routines in Hebron, like in the rest of Palestine and much of the Muslim world, might be understood as governed by quotidian keynote sounds that give rhythm and meaning to different parts of the day, month, and year, and in so doing, usher in an ethnoreligious temporal mobility regime. The Muslim call to prayer, or adhan, constitutes one such rhythmic marker. It would be difficult to argue that the call to prayer does not hold a place of considerable importance in Muslim faith and Arab cultures. It is the audial summons to the performance of prayer, a pillar of Islam and one of its most salient foundations. Asking Khalilis about the significance of the adhan often resulted in astonishment at the question itself:

How much is the adhan important to me? What!? It is our tradition! From my first moments of awareness of this earth I heard this [Ibrahimi] adhan. And on the days that they prohibit the adhan—because there are days when they prohibit the call from the Ibrahimi Mosque—I really miss that sound. It reminds us to pray, first. But second, the sound of the Ibrahimi Mosque adhan is part of our history; part of our legacy. And if we don’t hear it, it makes the day strange, and there is something that we lost on that day.

As a sound that heralds the passage of time, the adhan calls out the cadence of everyday movement and political economy.

For a theoretical grounding on how sound is implicated in modes of production and political economy, see Jacques Attali (1977).

If we understand the ritual prayer call as a practice that was canonized over decades and centuries, rather than one materializing instantaneously in the wake of divine command, the adhan takes on additional historical significance. As Muslims grew in number, this sound served as part of the mechanism that reformed diverse, unsystematic prayer into standardized practice that accorded with the central authority of the Prophet and subsequent Islamic leaders. It did so in part by organizing time and bodies in space. Thus, in addition to branding identity and territory, the call framed a way of being in the world, foundationally shaping civilizations as Islam spread.

This supplementary function may be traced in the evolving duties of the muezzin: as the community expanded over the next 1000 years and the ritual prayer call was formalized, skills beyond vocal talent came to be required. By the 1300s, it was expected that a muezzin be able to calculate the proper astronomical time via his thorough understanding of the lunar mansions and the stars therein. Greater import came to be placed on prescribed prayer time and thus, on the muezzin’s capability to accurately determine the correct window for prayer both at day and night. Over time muezzins began to work closely with expert astronomers, called muwaqqit, and wealthy mosques hired such specialists as part of their general staff. For more detail, see David King (2005, p. 21).

Upon hearing the call, practicing Muslims are supposed to undertake specific actions and move in specific ways. These include repeating the words of the adhan after the muezzin (this may be done silently or quietly) as they proceed calmly toward prayer, ideally at the mosque. The call introduces an interval in which Muslims prepare themselves physically and mentally for prayer, to include performing ritual ablutions and setting aside banal quotidian concerns. Thus, the periodic adhan launches a temporal mobility regime comprised of private and collective ritual movements that temporarily orient participants away from the secular and toward God. This sonic trigger, and the audial-physical process that follows it, ushers in a brief, sacred, time out of time: a pause, in which believers are invited to consider alternative sovereignties and systems of reward. Understood in cultural terms, this open-air, symphonic ‘movement’ reveals the distinct and structured temporal mobility of Palestinian public life and exhibits its own rhythms and associated logics.

Hebron has many mosques, and at prayer times the muezzin calls sound out over the city basin in competing cadences until the entire valley seems to resonate. But the pre-eminent mosque in the city remains the Ibrahimi mosque in H2. Since Baruch Goldstein’s mass murder of Muslim worshippers in 1994,

Hebron-based Palestinian human rights organizations such as Human Rights Defenders have recently begun commemorating the Goldstein Massacre by organizing annual street demonstrations to coincide with the event—an act that may similarly be understood in terms of an ideological effort to control the historical narrative.

When the mosque was bisected, Muslim access to the minaret was cut off. While the entrance to the minaret remains in the Muslim section, the minaret itself falls on the Jewish side, and a metal gate was installed to prevent through passage. This means that under the current partition, the mosque official who performs the prayer call, or muezzin, must pass through a security check and obtain a military escort each time he calls the adhan. This arrangement puts the power to permit or silence the adhan in the hands of the Israeli military—five times daily. The results are erratic and sometimes arbitrary. The imam at the Ibrahimi Mosque, Sheikh Hevthri Abu Sneineh, described a situation where the muezzin is forced to arrive up to 30 minutes in advance of the call and wait in the hopes that the soldier on duty will have remembered the time, will have thought to bring the key, and will not object to opening the gate. Restricting physical access to the minaret and the microphone puts the muezzin, and mosque officials more generally, in a position of supplication each day, subjecting the Muslim prayer call to the mercy of the Israeli military. The al maghrib adhan is frequently prohibited on grounds that it interferes with Jewish sunset prayers. The dawn, or fajr, prayer is often dropped because soldiers on duty are sleepy and miss the window altogether. Sheikh Abu Sneineh notes:

In the beginning they stopped us from announcing the Maghrib [prayer]. They claimed settlers were praying inside the mosque at that time and that it disrupted their prayer. Then, they declared Saturdays a Jewish religious day and prevented us from performing the adhan on that day altogether. And the muezzin has to wait in front of the gate, practically begging, for a soldier to show up and admit him or tell him no, there will be no adhan because of the settlers. Claiming that the settlers can pray and we cannot, it hurts my soul. It is our right to announce the adhan. I am surprised and shocked that these words—the adhan is finished in two minutes—could disrupt the Occupier. What is inside it [what do the words signify] that is so dangerous?!

Since 2007, the Hebron waqf, or charitable endowment that oversees mosques and religious properties, has recorded the frequency with which the Israeli military prohibits the adhan at the Ibrahimi Mosque. Mosque officials mark the incidents in a notebook and forward the aggregated numbers to the legal arm of the Hebron Rehabilitation Committee. These instances of silencing are published in a newsletter alongside the list of human rights violations that take place monthly in Hebron. Mosque officials see the prevention of the call to prayer as both a human rights violation and the obstruction of religious freedom—more broadly, they perceive it as yet another mechanism of subjugation, dispossession, and territorial claiming that represents, in their eyes, the main objective of the Occupation.

Figure 1

The data show a relatively consistent rate of suppression over the years. Hebron Rehabilitation Committee officials understand the regular proscription of the adhan in the following terms, noted monthly in each report:

Continuing to apply their policy of Judaization of the Ibrahimi Mosque and obliterating its identity as a religious and historical landmark for Muslims, the Occupation Forces prevented the call for prayer 47 times during the month of May. The Israeli occupation authorities justify their refusal to raise the calls of prayer by claiming they are an inconvenience to Jewish settlers who forcibly take over the greater part of the Mosque

In Palestinian Hebron, the Muslim call to prayer represents an ethnoreligious temporal mobility regime that has acquired widespread legitimacy among the population, rendering its disciplining faculties less prominent and enabling it to be understood primarily in cultural and religious terms. Yet the presence of Jewish settlers who oppose the call and the Israeli military who enforces settler preferences over the wishes of the Palestinian majority undermines the hegemony of this regime and foregrounds its original political aspects. As such, it becomes yet another site of contention between the two communities, and yet another lever by which Israel further instantiates an exclusively Jewish environment and further enacts its de facto sovereignty over the land.

Time and mobility interrelate to function jointly as a particular configuration of power that deserves greater theorization. This ‘temporal mobility’ has particular salience in the political sphere because of the way time and movement embed freedoms, social values, and questions of justice when analyzed empirically in individual and collective life. Arranged in three movements, this article traces three coinciding and overlapping temporal mobility regimes that govern political life in contemporary Hebron, thereby pinpointing potential cites of political negotiation and change. It identifies securitized, ideological, and ethnoreligious temporal mobility regimes to reveal how Israeli control in Occupied Palestine extends beyond spatial and physical technologies to dominate populations and territory through far-reaching temporal dynamics as well. In so doing, the article also implies that a concerted attention to heterotemporality may open new arenas of commonality and spaces for reconciliation, revealing alternate possibilities for intergroup behavior, and thus paving a route toward an alternate politics.

While the notion of introducing small scale, physical changes to environments as a strategy of conflict resolution might seem trifling to the point of irrelevance, the idea for micro-level changes in everyday behavior, especially in places beset by intractable conflict, has precedent in conflict studies. For a recent proponent of such a micro approach, see Roger MacGinty (2021).

In the securitized temporal mobility regime, time and mobility are harnessed in the service of logics that undergird State and military objectives. These may take shape as banal, everyday tactics such as the imposition of delays at checkpoints, or they may have long-lasting impacts on individual lives as when people spend a significant portion of their life immobilized in prison. The ideological temporal mobility regime exploits sequence, periodicity, and duration to craft a historical narrative in accordance with a specific doctrine and set of beliefs. Here, interpretations of historical events, facts, and movements are superimposed onto the present moment, such that earlier political realities are remade in real-time. Such a purposive ‘reincarnation’ obviates extant realities that contradict this particular vision. Finally, ethnoreligious temporal mobility represents the often forgotten, or naturalized, ways in which timing mechanisms interact with daily movement, space, and practice in a given culture or society. They differ from ideological regimes primarily in terms of their contextualized use. Ethnoreligious temporal mobility regimes no longer seem ideological because they have been widely accepted. In H2, Palestinian daily routines and rhythms are increasingly embattled as ethnoreligious temporal mobility regimes come under attack (United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, 2021).

Understanding Israeli Occupation in Hebron in terms of temporal mobility regimes sheds light on the magnitude of Israeli aggression by revealing both the prolonged scale of these tactics and the totalizing invasiveness of the strategies. The temporal mobility regimes identified here belie the notion that Israel is acting on the basis of preemptive security concerns, or on the basis of self-defense, in Hebron. This case suggests that temporal mobility regimes represent a form of political and state violence that deserves more sustained interrogation and theorization, in Palestine as well as in other conflict settings.