Long Version of Tenure Wars

A Battle in the Gramscian War to Control Academic Discourse
Joachim Martillo
ThorsProvoni@aol.com

May 28, 2007, Morningside Heights, New York City, Phil Orenstein of the Neoconservative Democracy Project posted excerpts of correspondence with Barnard College President Judith Shapiro. He implored Shapiro to do the right thing and deny tenure to Palestinian American Professor Nadia Abu El Haj.

PO: ... An open forum in Manhattan hosted by the American Jewish Congress dealt with these issues of the hostile climate of intimidation at Columbia revealed in the documentary Columbia Unbecoming which incidentally was initiated by Barnard students. Several professors testified that any Columbia faculty member who openly supports Zionism is marginalized, ostracized and denied tenure. I trust that you are also aware of this phenomenon. That said, I'm pleased that you'll be meeting with Candace, and I look forward to some productive discussions taking place.

JS: To clarify and provide some additional information: I do not myself believe that the people who are getting in touch with me anonymously truly need to do so. Nadia Abu El-Haj has also received death threats from those opposed to her work. I might also note, since you invoke the David Project, that I have not received a single student complaint about her teaching, advising, mentoring, or anything that has gone on in the classroom. There are indeed places where Jews or Zionists are endangered and marginalized, but Morningside Heights in the year 2007 does not happen to be one of them. Given the strength of the Jewish community at Barnard, it is, in fact, unbecoming - to use a familiar word - for members of the Jewish community to cast themselves in the role of victims here.

Orenstein's material was dutifully disseminated by Daniel Pipes' Campus Watch and the Solomonia Blog, which generally represents the David Project in the blogosphere. The New York Sun has also covered the controversy.

The correspondence described above is the latest salvo of the tenure wars that have included attacks on university professors, who do not follow the Israeli narrative on Palestine. University faculty and staff that have experienced such attempts at academic assassination have included Columbia's faculty members Rashid Khalidi, Georges Saliba, Joseph Massad, and Hamid Dabashi, as well as Harvard University's Hillary Rantisi and University of Michigan's Juan Cole, to whom Yale was considering offering a professorship. Recently, a campaign led by Alan Dershowitz resulted in the denial of tenure to Norman Finkelstein at Illinois's De Paul University.

Neoconservative, Zionist, Israeli and Jewish groups have targeted Nadia Abu El-Haj because of her book, Facts on the Ground: Archeological Practice and Territorial Self-fashioning in Israel (University of Chicago, 2002). This book analyzes the role that archeology plays in Zionist intellectual and political culture. It notes that Israeli archeologists have rather tautologically used the Bible as an interpretive framework to analyze data that then "proves" the Biblical narrative.

In addition to Orenstein, the assaults on Abu El-Haj's anthropological analysis have come during the last few months

• from the Israeli archeologists Ussishkin and Maeir,
• from Jewish blogger and Barnard alumna Paula Stern,
• from the website of independent archeologist Dorothy King, who defends British retention of the Elgin Marbles,
• from Neoconservative National Review blogger and Frontpage Magazine contributor Candace de Russy, who wrote to Shapiro as agent of the Vaad haEmet (Truth Organization) of some Israeli academics, and
• from Neoconservative Jewish convert to Islam Stephen Schwartz, who takes extreme offense that Abu El-Haj ignores common popular beliefs about the ancestral ties of modern Jews to the residents of ancient Palestine.

The last complaint is particularly unfair because the issue of modern Jewish ancestral connections to Palestine is irrelevant to the book's topic. Respected Jewish studies scholars like Harvard Professor Shaye Cohen, who study the origins of modern Jewish communities, generally consider the connections of modern Jews to Greco-Roman Judean, Galilean, or Edomite populations to be tenuous at best.

Other criticism of the book has included Abu el-Haj's use of anonymous testimony even though named sources would invariably have suffered vituperation and possible retaliation from Abu El-Haj's critics. Candace de Russy's letter faults Abu El-Haj's interpretation of Hebrew names that include the word tel. Abu El-Haj suggests that this noun appears in Zionist place names in order to fabricate a connection to ancient settlements. According to the Vaad HaEmet tel is also a Hebrew term for hill, and a name like Tel Aviv simply means Hill of Spring. Defenders of Abu El Haj's book point out

• that using tel instead of giv`ah for hill is Modern Israeli slang,
• that Tel Aviv is located in the coastal plain, and
• that Old-New Land, the title of a book written by Zionist leader Theodor Herzl to advocate the colonization of Palestine, was rendered into Hebrew as Tel Aviv
.

Abu El-Haj's analysis follows the tradition of scholars like Max Weinreich, who have studied the use of geography and archeology in the class of Central and Eastern European political movements to which Zionism belongs. Israeli academics, who generally study Palestinians as objects, are unused to being the object of anthropological study by a Palestinian American scholar working at a prestigious American University.

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