Security and the Holy Places of Jerusalem: The ‘Hebronisation’ of the Old City and Adjacent Areas

Abstract

It is an old adage that armies can conquer but they cannot hold territory. Or, at least, as the experience of the United States in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan attests to, not without great human, financial and political cost. The prolonged control over space requires further phases in an occupation: the invader’s presence needs to be consolidated and embedded. There are two main ways in which expanding polities, such as empires and states, have sought to carry out this incorporation of space and territory. The first is the assertion of control indirectly through local allies and other proxies who are both more knowledgeable of the terrain, of the strengths, weaknesses and concerns of the subject population and who, if furnished with funds and arms, are more able to co-opt them, and who are also able to channel the resources of the occupied territory to the metropole. The second is the direct assertion of control through government agencies which become vehicles for the extraction of resources, the regulation of movement and the use of space. These agencies are complemented by a colonisation programme which implants settlers from the metropole and creates settlement enclaves which function as monitors, guardians and enforcers of the metropole’s policies. A common feature of direct control is the displacement of the indigenous population and the transfer of property titles from the subordinate group to the dominant one. In contrast, then, to the indirect forms of control, there is a much greater rupture with the past.