Fracas Erupts Over Book on Mideast by a Barnard Professor Seeking Tenure

The New York Times ^ | September 10, 2007 | KAREN W. ARENSON

[Cincinna]

A tenure bid by an assistant professor of anthropology at Barnard College who has critically examined the use of archaeology in Israel has put Columbia University once again at the center of a struggle over scholarship on the Middle East.

The professor, Nadia Abu El-Haj, who is of Palestinian descent, has been at Barnard since 2002 and has won many awards and grants, including a Fulbright scholarship and fellowships at Harvard and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. Barnard has already approved her for tenure, officials said, and forwarded its recommendation to Columbia University, its affiliate, which has the final say.

It is Dr. Abu El-Haj’s book, “Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society,” that has made her a lightning rod, setting off warring petitions opposing and supporting her candidacy, and producing charges of shoddy scholarship and countercharges of an ideological witch hunt.

Judith R. Shapiro, Barnard’s president, who is also an anthropologist, said in a statement that the tenure process was “one of the linchpins of academic freedom and liberal arts education,” and that despite the passions, it must be conducted “thoughtfully, comprehensively, systematically and confidentially.” She added, “This case will be no different, both in its rigor and its freedom from outside lobbying.”

The fracas is one of a growing list of bitter disputes over the Middle East in academe, including charges a few years ago by Jewish students at Columbia that they were being intimidated by professors of Middle Eastern studies. A university investigation found no evidence of anti-Semitic statements by professors, but it criticized one professor for becoming angry at a student in his class in a discussion of Israel’s conduct

[Cincinna]

ISRAEL AND ARCHAEOLOGY PING LISTS PLEASE COPY.

This professor at Barnard accuses Israeli archaeologists of forging research she claims is used to justify Biblical claims of Jews on “Palestinian” territories.

“Dr. Abu El-Haj says Israeli archaeologists searched for an ancient Jewish presence to help build the case for a Jewish state. In their quest, she writes, they sometimes used bulldozers, destroying remains of other cultures, including those of Arabs.

She concludes her book by saying the ransacking by thousands of Palestinians in 2000 of Joseph’s tomb, a Jewish holy site in the West Bank, “needs to be understood in relation to a colonial-national history” of Israel and the symbolic resonance of artifacts.”

[Tainan]

This should be a direct link to the story:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/10/education/10barnard.html?ref=education

[Inverse]

You have really hit the nail on the head with those quotes.
They say all anyone needs to know about her.

[paristwelve]

Here’s more - Barnard’s Shame
and Columbia’s Dirty Deal - http://www.nadiaabuelhaj.com/barnardsshame.html

[Born Conservative]

Judith R. Shapiro, Barnard’s president, who is also an anthropologist, said in a statement that the tenure process was “one of the linchpins of academic freedom and liberal arts education,”  the reason that Liberalism is so pervasive on college campuses

[SJackson]

www.DiscoverTheNetwork.org	Date: 9/12/2007 8:28:15 AM
NADIA ABU EL-HAJ
Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College Anti-Israel Author of Facts on the Ground: Archeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society   Nadia Abu El-Haj, an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College, is listed among the members of the MEALAC (Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures) faculty at Columbia University. A graduate student at Duke University, she turned her doctoral thesis into a book: “Facts on the Ground: Archeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society.” One admiring reviewer (from the University of Chicago) said the book offers “an anthropology of colonialism and nationalism, which follows Foucault and [Edward] Said” in which “she points to the convergence of archeology’s project with that of colonialism.” Others have not been so kind. For this book is not really about archeology at all. Rather, it is a relentless attack on how and why Israelis, Jews really, have done archaeology in the land they have the audacity to call Israel. For in El-Haj's view, the past, like the present, is merely a cruel and daring fiction foisted on the world at the expense of Palestinians, a social construction, as the orotund phrase has it. As El-Haj sees it, Jewish archaeologists, ignoring or destroying whatever got in their way, have been relentless in their pursuit of the Jewish past to claim the land and its history for modern Israel, and to dispossess Palestinians and their “claim” to the past. But El-Haj, it seems, is not really an archeologist. There is not the slightest evidence that she has ever seen the work of Israeli archeologists, ever visited a dig, ever studied the history of the development of Israeli archeology, ever inquired as to how Israeli archeologists choose the sites they do choose for digs. She appears not to have any record of the kinds of artifacts the Israeli archeologists, often working with Western, non-Israeli and non-Jewish colleagues, have discovered, catalogued, and meticulously studied. Shabby or pseudo or nonexistent scholarship disguises a naked political assault. In El-Haj's estimation, Israel is guilty. Its crime: daring to dig, under the soil of Israel, on land where Jews lived from perhaps 1000 BCE until this very day. And built temples, and wrote on pottery and left scrolls on parchment, and fashioned menorahs, and cups for drinking, and dishes for eating – in short, a rich variety of artifacts for uses sacred and profane. But El-Haj and her ideological kin believe that to demonstrate a connection between Jews past and Jews present is unacceptable, an abuse of archaeology, serving the cause of a “construct,” a Western imperial falsehood. That is, a Jewish state.  Entirely left out of El-Haj’s account is the fact that Israeli archaeologists have studied artifacts from every period, and not only those of the Jewish past. They have, often with foreign colleagues, discovered Roman coins and mosaic floors and temples, have uncovered Byzantine artifacts, and those of the Islamic conquest, both of the Arab period and of the period of Ottoman rule. Many of the Islamic artifacts have, in fact, been meticulously and scrupulously catalogued, studied, and preserved – all serious students know about the Islamic Museum in Jerusalem and its exceptional collection. Does Nadia El-Haj? El-Haj seems to think that the study of the Jewish past by Israeli archeologists, observing the highest professional standards, known for the meticulousness, is an outrageous political act, an act of “Jewish settler-colonial nation state-building.” El-Haj’s political fulminations may attempt to hide behind the rhetoric of “scholarship.” Is there a single example of attempts by Israeli archeologists to either hide the past, or destroy the past, or to create a false past? If so, she has failed to mention it in her book – which relies entirely on quite recent, English-language publications, as critical reviewers have noted. And since she is a Palestinian nationalist, how does her charge sheet compare with the treatment toward ancient sites by the Palestinian Arabs and by the Arabs more generally?  As is well known, in Islam there has been an almost total indifference to the non-Islamic or pre-Islamic world. Many of the artifacts of that world have been destroyed over 1350 years of Muslim conquest and subjugation of Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, Hindus, Buddhists. In India, the Muslim conquerors destroyed as much of the Buddhist and Hindu heritage as they could, sometimes in order to quarry the stone, sometimes to destroy statuary. The Indian historian K.S. Lal has provided a meticulous list of tens of thousands of identified Hindu temples destroyed by the Muslim invaders, for example. The recent destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas was not an aberration; those Buddhas were virtually the last remnants of the Greco-Buddhist civilization that Afghanistan had once possessed.  The systematic assault by the Palestinian Arabs on all sorts of significant sites, some of them regarded as holy, was on display again in 2002, when the complete destruction of Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus (that destruction can be seen on-line) took place. This was no aberration. But El-Haj justified it as the uncharacteristic but understandable reaction of desperate people, brought to the end of their collective tether by the diabolical behavior of the Israelis.  In Egypt, members of the Muslim Brotherhood even muttered about destroying the Pyramids, but cooler heads prevailed. It was not out of Egyptian nationalism, save among the Copts and a small sliver of the Egyptian elite, nor out of any respect for the pre-Islamic past, but rather the fact that too many Egyptians depend for their livelihood on tourist dollars, that managed to prevent attacks. Similarly, the tourist attraction of Petra seems safe, precisely because it is a money-maker, not out of some deep conviction that these Roman-era ruins are otherwise of note. In Iraq, the old Sunni elites, trained by Gertrude Bell and others, did acquire a certain taste for preserving the pre-Islamic artifacts, and that seems to be the one exception – and an exception only among a very small sliver of Iraqi society – to the general indifference to any artifacts except those representing the time of Islam, not that of the pre-Islamic Jahiliyya.  Indeed, many Muslims oppose even Muslim sites which would distract from worship of Allah. When the Wahhabi under Abdul Aziz ibn Saud conquered Mecca, they razed to the ground virtually every old building then standing. An old Ottoman fort was one of the few buildings spared. In 2002, overnight, that Ottoman fort was also destroyed.  Like her distant mentor, the presiding genius domus over so much of Middle East matters today, Edward Said, El-Haj seems incapable of understanding that other societies, the representatives of other civilizations, are capable of studying the past as something other than a political project, and in Israel, as something other than working hand-in-glove with “Jewish settler-colonial nation state-building.”   This profile is adapted from an article titled "Crisis at Columbia: Nadia Abu El-Haj," written by Hugh Fitzgerald and published October 10, 2005. Fitzgerald wrote this piece for Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum, which is designed to critique and improve Middle East Studies at North American colleges and universities. It is part of a series of analysis addressing Columbia University’s Middle East Studies faculty. We invite you to read Fitzgerald's introductory essay, and the entries in alphabetical order.

[SJackson]

If you'd like to be on this middle east/political ping list, please FR mail me.

High Volume. Articles on Israel can also be found by clicking on the Topic or Keyword Israel. or WOT [War on Terror]

----------------------------

[facedown]

Said, Chomsky and Zinn. The pseudointellectual hat-trick of American academe.

[Lucius Cornelius Sulla]

I suspect that Jews are just as guilty of that practice now as they were two thousand years ago.

So it is your position that Moses, David, and Solomon never lived, and the entire Old Testament was NOTHING but fiction, that there was NEVER a Kingdom of Israel, and that it is perfectly OK to destroy any archaeological evidence that would be contrary to this point of view. In addition you have the idea that 2000 years ago there was a science of archeology, in which people destroyed proof of the existence of other cultures to make an ideological point. I assume the the Holocaust never happened either??

[Biggirl]

Would it suprise you that the Isreali Jews have been pretty good about preserving Bible archology findings?

[Biggirl]

The truth is that archaeological digs is a big pastime in Isreal.

[Lucius Cornelius Sulla]

And your point is??

[Biggirl]

Since Isreal is a treasure trove of history, a lot of it major, doing archology digs is a big thing.

[joebuck]

I guess Josephus was part of the cospiracy. He forsaw the coming of Islam 600 years in advance and created a phony history of the Jews in Palestine to nip Muhammed in the bud.

[Lucius Cornelius Sulla]

doing archology digs is a big thing

Naturally, and the reason you posted it to me was ?

[Lucius Cornelius Sulla]

Not only that, the Pharoah who wrote about the Kingdom of David around 900 BC was only doing it to spite the Arabs who would destroy his country and enslave his people 1500 years later!!

[xJones]

“Dr. Abu El-Haj says Israeli archaeologists searched for an ancient Jewish presence to help build the case for a Jewish state. In their quest, she writes, they sometimes used bulldozers, destroying remains of other cultures, including those of Arabs.

What a lie, the Israelis are the most meticulous of archeologists, the only thing they bulldoze is orchards providing cover for Arab terrorists and the homes of Palestinian homicidal bombers. The Israelis know their country has quite an historical past, which includes other ancient tribes. Unlike the Arabs recklessly excavating under Al Asqa, they're not trying to destroy the past, they're trying to make a cohesive whole picture of the regional history.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks Cincinna.

also:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1881639/posts?page=2#2