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since Wed, 26 Dec 2007 20:04:17.
"Pay No Attention to that Man Behind the Curtain!"
by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)
Jesse Walker supplies an article worth reading at the Reason Magazine website. The title is "The Case of Nadia Abu El-Haj" and the URL is http://www.reason.com/blog/show/122022.html . Walker references an even more thorough article from Richard Silverstein's blog. It is entitled "Pro-Israel Campaign to deny El-Haj Tenure." It's URL is http://www.richardsilverstein.com/tikun_olam/2007/08/17/rightist-jewish-campaign-to-deny-nadia-abu-el-haj-tenure/ . Both articles missed the negative role that David Project operatives like Alexander Joffe have played in the controversy, which could well be the handiwork of David Project agent Rachel Fish. (See http://eaazi.blogspot.com/2007/06/removing-islamophobe-soapbax.html and http://angrywhitekid.blogs.com/weblog/2005/01/columbia_unbeco.html .)
Aren Maeir has complained that Nadia Abu el Haj is insensitive to the changes that have taken place in Israeli archeology. While there have always been a few Israeli archeologists whose goal is to elucidate the past as Mark Lehner does in Egyptology, the reports of the excavation at Herodium and the reaction of the Israeli Jewish public indicate that the goal of Israeli archeology for many Israeli archeologists and for the larger part of the Israeli public remains verification of scriptural text. Such is the context in which Nadia Abu el Haj and Yael Zerubavel have written their books (Facts on the Ground: Archeological Practice and Territorial Self-fashioning in Israel and Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition, see http://eaazi.blogspot.com/2007/08/nadia-abu-el-haj-and-yael-zerubavel.html ).
As one would expect from the history of Zionist colonization since the late 19th century, the archeologists did not worry at all whether they had any right to carry out digs in the Palestinian Occupied Territories, and the Israeli public interpreted the discovery as yet more proof of the Jewish claims to the land in a sort of Pavlovian non-sequitur because Herod, who ruled a mixed population of Judeans, Galileans, Idumeans, Nabateans, Greeks, Samanians and others, was three quarters Nabatean and one quarter Idumean by ancestry.
Neither Zerubavel nor Abu el Haj addresses the issue, but Herod's subjects were almost certainly the ancestors of modern Palestinians and certainly not of any modern Jewish population (except perhaps for a subpopulation of historically Arabic-speaking Jews in the Syro-Palestinian region) while Eastern European and Southern Russian archeology as well as Geniza and other texts of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages show that modern ethnic Ashkenazim are descended almost entirely from various Eastern European and Southern Russian populations that adopted some form of Jewish or Judean practices at various times.
The ethnogenesis of Palestinians and ethnic Ashkenazim are interesting topics, and I recommend The Myth of Nations by Patrick Geary for anyone interested in such questions, but the issue of the origin of modern populations does not appear in either Zerubavel's or Abu el Haj's book. Zerubavel is describing the sociological relationship of modern Israelis to their past while Nadia Abu el Haj is analyzing how Israeli archeology functions internally and in relationship to Israeli society.
If the vandalization of the Bruno Schulz historical site by Yad Vashem (see http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FB0A17FB3E540C778EDDAF0894D9404482&n=Top%2fReference%2fTimes%20Topics%2fPeople%2fS%2fSchulz%2c%20Bruno ) had occurred earlier, Zerubavel would probably have discussed it in her book because it supports her analysis of the role of shlilat hagalut and shlilat hagolah in Israeli society. Removing the Schulz murals from the Ukraine can be tangentially related to the reworking of topography to fit Zionist conceptualization according to Abu el Haj's analysis.
When I read Abu el Haj's book in 2003, I was reminded to some extent of Boswell's Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality, for I had the impression she was providing an in-depth under-the-surface look at the Zionist high priesthood. She gives insight into the integration of nationalist doctrine, permissible doctrinal debates, ritual practices, and Zionized non-Jewish history into the public and the academic consciousness that Israeli archeologists fashion.
A lot of the membership of the Catholic church was uncomfortable with Boswell's work just as many Zionists have rejected Abu el Haj's approach to Israeli archeology, but neither scholar's results are any less important or any less valid on account of such reactions. Nadia Abu el Haj definitely deserves tenure.
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