A Hot Field in Hebron: Ta’ayush and the Gleaners

Jon Simons has gracefully woven the pastoral and rather romantic image of gleaners (think of Agnes Varda) and its tie to the recent holiday of Shavuot into his discussion of this activity that took place last weekend by Ta’ayush. But of course, it was not Shavuot but rather a harvest-time Shabbat when settlers felt an urgent need to pray on a Palestinian field. Something similar happened last year. My friends whose Ta’ayush activity took them here at harvest time recounted how the settlers prayed under a canopy in the middle of the field where they were working. Soldiers who surrounded the worshippers declared the area off limits to Palestinians. In these routine practices of everyday intimidation settlers, with the cooperation of soldiers, put performative and otherwise visual religious practices – here routine praying on Shabbat, elsewhere the construction of eruv borders (see here), – to use in the service of land expropriation. It is one of the more sobering of common sights. It is also highly photographable. Perhaps next year I will be able to portray this religious practice in photographs. Even better, perhaps next year it will not happen and the lovely vision that Simons evokes at the end of his essay will have come to pass.

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