NADIA ABU EL-HAJ, TENURED BARNARD PROFESSOR….PLESE READ
Nadia Abu El-Haj is Associate Professor in the Departments of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University, and the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Columbia University. She is the author of Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society, which won the Middle East Studies Association’s Albert Hourani Annual Book Award in 2002. She is also author of the forthcoming book, The Genealogical Science. Phylogenetics, The Origins of the Jews, and the Politics of Epistemology.
Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society
In the book, Abu El Haj uses anthropological methods to study the relationship between the development of scientific knowledge in Israeli archaeology and the construction of the social imaginations and political orders in the Israeli State and what she characterizes as the “formation and enactment of its colonial–national historical imagination and…the substantiation of its territorial claims”. She argues that facts generated by archaeological practice have fashioned “cultural understandings, political possibilities and ‘common-sense’ assumptions”.
In her introduction, Abu El Haj sympathetically cites critics who reject “a positivist commitment to scientific method whereby politics is seen to intervene only in instances of bad science,” favoring various approaches such as “post-structuralism, philosophical critiques of foundationalism, Marxism and critical theory” with “a commitment to understanding archeology as necessarily political.”
Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society is a 2001 book by Nadia Abu El Haj based on her doctoral thesis for Duke University. The book has been praised by some scholars and criticized by others.
Controversy over the book intensified five years after its publication, after news emerged in 2006 that Abu El Haj was under consideration for tenure at Barnard College where she served as an assistant professor. Barnard alumnae mounted a campaign to deny tenure to Abu El Haj that centered around what they described as the book’s anti-Israel bias, prompting a counter-campaign in support of the book and Abu El Haj. The University ultimately granted Abu El Haj tenure in November 2007.
In her review of Facts on the Ground for American Ethnologist, Kimbra L. Smith professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, writes that “Abu El Haj provides an important and timely look at some of the politics of self-representation behind the Israeli government’s public face, within a broader argument about science’s capacity for political involvement and for maintaining and even advancing colonialist policies. However […] her failure to present either official Palestinian or public Palestinian/Israeli opinions and attitudes within the context of Israel’s (settler) nationalist-archaeological discipline means that answers to the excellent questions she raises are never made clear.”
Aren Maeir, professor of archaeology at Bar Ilan University, writing in Isis, calls the book “a highly ideologically driven political manifesto, with a glaring lack of attention both to details and to the broader context.” Regarding Abu El Haj’s criticism of methodology in Israeli archeology, Maeir writes, that in contemporary archeology in Israel, “only marginal elements act in accordance with or identify with the non-scientific agendas that she attempts to delineate.” Maeir argues that the major reason for the lateness of Israel to adopt modern techniques was not a “hidden colonial agenda,” but rather a result of the “European classical archeology” from which it developed.
James Gelvin, a UCLA historian, describes Facts on the Ground in his book The Israel-Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years of War, as “probably the most sophisticated presentation of Israel’s archaeological obsession and its relation to nationalism and ‘colonial knowledge'”.
Alexander H. Joffe, an archaeologist and past director of the academic watchdog organization Campus Watch, writes in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies that “Abu El Haj’s anthropology is undone by her […] ill-informed narrative, intrusive counter-politics, and by her unwillingness to either enter or observe Israeli society […] The effect is a representation of Israeli archaeology that is simply bizarre.”
Keith Whitelam, professor of religious studies at the University of Sheffield and author of The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History, told a New York Sun reporter that Facts on the Ground was a “first-rate book,” which made “a very fine contribution” to the study of “how national identity is constructed and the assumptions which are then built into academic work on history and archaeology.” In the same article, William Dever, a retired professor of Middle Eastern archaeology at the University of Arizona, describes Abu El Haj’s scholarship as “faulty, misleading and dangerous”.
Alan F. Segal, a professor of religion and Jewish studies at Barnard College, has been a vocal critic of the book. In the Columbia Daily Spectator, he writes that Abu El Haj’s work is tainted by a failure to examine primary sources in Hebrew, a reliance on anonymous sources, and a lack of breadth in its review of scholarship to date. According to Segal, Abu El Haj focuses her attention on the “extreme conclusions” of “biblical minimalists” who constitute “no more than a handful of scholars” out of “thousands at work (in Biblical scholarship) in the world“. Segal writes that “none of the minimalist scholars she relies upon for this purpose is actually a working archaeologist,” and that “pretty much every other one of the virtually countless theories about Israelite settlement in First Temple times would disprove her hypothesis about Israeli archaeology.” He adds that she “does not tell her readers about” these fields, “why they are necessary”, or, “how decisions are actually made in biblical studies.”
Biblical Minimalism
Biblical minimalism (also known as The Copenhagen School) refers to a tendency in biblical exegesis which stresses the primacy of archaeology in establishing a history of Ancient Israel and Judah. It arose beginning in the late 1960s from the need to deal with the increasing contradictions between the findings of Syro-Palestinian archaeology and the Bible’s version of history.
According to the Copenhagen School, by historicizing the biblical text, the traditional approach to Biblical scholarship created a false “Israel” which fails to fit into the archaeologically established context of Iron Age Syria and Palestine (the term “Palestine“ was first created by the Emperor Hadrian in the second century A.D. – DMG). The Biblical history as seen by Minimalism is in fact more comparable to Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: the play is based in real history, but was not written for the purpose of retelling that history. In recognizing that the historical narrative of the Bible is literature rather than as history, with a plot, a set of characters, and a theological theme concerning the nature of the covenant between the people of Israel and their God, Minimalism treats “biblical Israel” as in fact a literary construction rather than an objective reality.
Scholarly hypotheses which are strongly associated with Minimalism include dismissing the entire united Israelite monarchy period of David and Solomon as fictitious and completely unhistorical; and positing that few if any books of the Hebrew Bible date from before the 4th-century BC (while many may be later still).
Key scholars associated with this school of thought (although they do not necessarily consider themselves to be part of any unified movement) include Thomas L. Thompson, Keith Whitelam, Niels Peter Lemche, and Philip Davies.
Review of :
The Invention of Ancient Israel
The Silencing of Palestinian History
by Keith Whitelam
Reviewed by Benjamin D. Sommer
Northwestern University
Middle East Quarterly
March 1998
Whitelam presents two theses: that ancient Palestinian history should be separate from Biblical studies; and that Western scholarship “invented” ancient Israel while silencing Palestinian history. The first thesis is viable, for the region extending some hundred miles east from the Mediterranean encompassed many peoples in ancient times, but Western scholarship emphasizes those peoples and texts connected to the development of Judaism and Christianity.
The second thesis, however, flounders badly. An ethnic, political, and religious group called “Israel” is a recognizable entity in various ancient documents, including the Hebrew Bible. Scholars debate when this entity came into existence, but to describe the idea of ancient Israel as a modern one is bizarre at best. Arguing that Palestinian history has been “silenced,” Whitelam chides modern scholars for referring to ancient inhabitants of Palestine as Canaanite and Amorite rather than Palestinian. Yet the former are appropriate designations given that they (unlike Palestinian) were used in the late Bronze and Iron Ages; Palestine first came into use in Roman times. Whitelam condemns any term that does not explicitly link ancient Canaanite-speakers with contemporary Arabic-speakers in the same area. While it is not wrong to call ancient inhabitants of that area Palestinians (in the same way that ancient peoples of the Western hemisphere can be called Americans), Whitelam’s refusal to see the rationale behind any other term evinces the political agenda that dominates his book.
The author devotes much space to establishing that many modern scholars are interested in Palestine because of its significance to Judaism and Christianity. True enough: but precisely why Whitelam finds this shocking is not clear. He seems to believe that uncovering a motive for scholarship discredits it. He makes valid observations regarding the political and theological settings in which Western scholars operate, but these hardly demonstrate that those scholars deny the existence of Palestinian history. To take one example: Does it make sense to say that Norman Gottwald “fails” to write a Palestinian history because of his “distraction” with ancient Israel, given that the Hebrew Bible is Gottwald’s topic?” Focusing on matters Biblical does not in itself quash the history of non-Israelites.
Whitelam’s point regarding the silencing of non-Israelite voices from ancient Palestine is particularly rich with irony. Twentieth-century histories of ancient Israel are distinguished from their predecessors precisely by their attention to the literature of inhabitants of ancient Canaan/Palestine, who were hitherto known only from tendentious portraits in Biblical and other sacred texts.
Most importantly, Whitelam confuses distinct meanings of the word Palestinian, which refers geographically to anything connected with the region northeast of the Sinai or ethnically to a group of contemporary Arabs. The Canaanites—and David Ben-Gurion, for that matter—were Palestinian in the former sense though not the latter. Whitelam aggressively entangles the two meanings for his political purposes. In the end, he attempts to silence Israelite history in order to invent an ancient Palestine.
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