Politicizing Tenure Continues with Attack on Barnard's Abu El-Haj

Denying Norman Finkelstein tenure was, it seems, just the start.

Nadia Abu El-Haj, an assistant professor of anthropology at Barnard College, is now the target of a petition (with over 1200 signatures) to deny her tenure, on the basis that her book Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self Fashioning in Israeli Society, "fails to meet the standards of scholarship that are expected of Columbia and Barnard undergraduates."

The book was published by the University of Chicago in 2001. The back cover of the edition I have includes praise from Timothy Mitchell of NYU, who calls it "a brilliant study of the interplay of scientific method, cultural imagination, and political power," and Michael Herzfeld of Harvard -- "a sophisticated study characterized by meticulous scholarship and even-handedness."

The petition's points of disagreement, as in the case of Finkelstein, have little to do with scholarship and everything to do with politics and the stifling of more open and diverse debate on issues of Israel and Palestine in the United States.

The petition: "We fail to understand how a scholar can pretend to study the attitudes of a people whose language she does not know."

Really? So every American scholar on the Middle East is fluent in Arabic, or Farsi? Every anthropology professor speaks the language of his or her localized areas of study?

The petition's signatories ought to supply a short list of who in their minds are "acceptable" scholars on history and anthropology, to see how many academics, under their own criteria, are unworthy of tenure.

Not only should Abu El-Haj have the freedom to critique Israeli archaeological practice (at least, one would hope at such highly regarded institutions as Barnard and Columbia), but, as anyone who has read the book critically would understand, Facts on the Ground does not center on such a blanket critique.

Rather, it is a well-grounded, relatively fair and entirely academic critique of archaeology as a science, as traditionally understood. Abu El-Haj posits, convincingly, that archaeology is less an objective science in today's societies than a forum upon which current politics and national and religious aspirations leave their marks.

Obviously, Barnard's consideration of their professors' tenures suffer wildly under these same influences.

The coming battles over Abu El-Haj's and fellow Columbia professor Joseph Massad's tenure suggest not only a decline in the standards of free and diverse academic inquiry, but a dangerous encroachment of politics and (financially powerful) interest groups on the America's college campuses.

There is a counter-petition in support of El-Haj's tenure.

Comments

[Kattey]

I have studied the history and archaeology of Israel/Palestine for years, and I can tell you there are no traces of the ancient Arabs having settlements there, unless perhaps there are some who might have come to the area and converted to Judaism. In Genesis when God gave the land of the water to the Jews, He also gave the Arabs (through Ishmael) a huge amount of land spreading across the Levant. In addition Allah tells the Muslims that Israel is the Land of the Jews. (Quran, chapter 17, 100-104).

Ms Haj seems to be part of a group, that no matter what history and archaeology say, they will not believe it. These people use "Arab/Muslim" history to refute the accepted facts agreed upon by scholars all over the world. They claim Adam and Eve were Muslims but I can't see how one can be before one was. They have no credibility.

Let Ms Haj name the archaeological sites which prove her assertions. She can't do it. She is the David Irving of Holy Land scholarship and does not deserve tenure.

[Lon]

There is probably no way for someone not steeped in the relevant litterature, as I am not, to judge the merits of El Haj's tenure claim. But I read the Joffe critic which according to the comment above is the best academic review on the subject. And it appeared that the central aspect of the critique is that the author does not approve of schools of thought about the nature of science which are quite popular and have not generally been a bar to people getting tenure.

Reading it I did get the sense that the real objection there was that El Haj is applying this techniques critically to Israeli practice. And that certainly should not be the basis for a denial of tenure.

Questions about how Israel uses archeology in supporting its foundation story are not just legitimate ones, but compelling ones. And the traditions that the review puts her work in are ones that have the kind of acadmic seriousness that do not make them good grounds for a denial of tenure. So the review seems to do more to support the post above then undercut it. It sounds like the criticisms of her work would be better suited to academic argument rather than attempts to harm a career.

But then maybe her work is crap and she has done nothing since her dissertation. But the case for that should not be that her thesis does not support Israel.

[Emmet1]

You mischaracterize the book. This is an effort to deconstruct the relationship between modern Jews and ancient Israel for the sake of "proving" that Israel is an illegitimate, colonial intrusion on the Middle East by people (Jews) with no ancient connection to the land.

In Facts on the Ground Nadia Abu El Haj denies the existence of the ancient Israelite kingdoms, those kingdoms area a pure political fabrication, "a tale best understood as the modern nation"s origin myth." She also denies the connection of contemporary Jews to any ancient Jewish people in the near east - however defined, and even states that Herodian Jerusalem "was not a Jewish city."


A substantial literature on the El Haj book exists in cyberspace, much of it intemperate.

Readers looking for evidence and rational discussion might start with these: phdiva.blogspot.com/2007/05/nadia-aby-el-haj-and-use-of-evidence.html
http://www.greycat.org/papers/archaeo.htm
http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/25976.html

two recent news articles:
http://www.jta.org/cgi-bin/iowa/news/article/20070814ElHajbarnard.html
http://chronicle.com/daily/2007/08/2007082005n.htm

The best academic review of the book is
Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society, Alexander H Joffe. Journal of Near Eastern Studies. Chicago: Oct 2005. Vol. 64, Iss. 4; p. 297
It can be found at: http://www.solomonia.com/blog/archives/008510.shtml