Posted on 10/10/2005 5:25:53 AM PDT by SJackson
Nadia Abu El-Haj, an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Barnard, is listed among the members of the MEALAC faculty at Columbia. 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 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 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. Ignoring or destroying whatever got in their way, Jewish archaeologists have been relentless in their pursuit of the Jewish past to claim the land and its history for modern Israel, and of course 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 (do they get instructions from the Jewish Agency? The ZOA? The Mossad?). 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. 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 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.
Is it surprising, is it illegitimate, is it deplorable, that in once again having a restored Jewish state, that the Jews of Israel should not have dug into the earth, not attempted to study the past, including – and this must be emphasized for it is left entirely out of El-Haj’s account – artifacts from every period, and not only artifacts of the Jewish past? Israeli archeologists 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 Jerusalemand 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” (that phrase itself deserves analysis, for the hysterical confusion of its English).
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, by the way, relies entirely on quite recent, English-language publications, as critical reviewers 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 systematic and complete destruction of Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus (that destruction can be seen on-line), took place. This was no aberration. Even El-Haj had to mention the matter in her book (knowing that if she omitted it altogether, reviewers might notice), but she 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 Belland 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.”
That such a book was written, and published, is a disgrace. That its author was, at a time when hundreds or indeed thousands of worthy graduate students in this and related fields cannot find employment, was given a job at Columbia, is deplorable.
With the suffix "El Haj" attached to her name, what else could you expect from her "scholarly work" on the topic?
>>“an anthropology of colonialism and nationalism, which follows Foucault and Said”
That's where I stopped reading. If it follows Said, it's anti-Western drivel, all dressed up for academe, and full of hate.
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Fascinating post SJackson. The muslims have this in common with the socialists: they not only murder people, they murder history as well.
The once proud academic reputation of the University of Chicago is fast falling to the anti-Semitic, anti-American, and PC BS of its northeastern counterparts. The hysterical attack on the US forces accusing them of sacking the Bagdhad museum by the director of the Oriental Institute on campus, the publishing of the immature, statistical hack-piece of Freakonomics, and, now, praising this pseudo-academic 'analysis'. I wonder how much the UC campus Hillel Society donates to the Palestinean Authority?
Multiculturalism run amok. Columbia should hang its head in shame.
Isn't it fascinating that a supposedly leading American University is so willing to abandon the concept of Truth upon which our universities and our Nation were founded. It seems to be the case that in the name of a sacred "diversity" they are willing to adopt the Islamofascist concept of truth, that is, that which serves Islamofascist conquest by the sword of oil and propaganda.
From the school of the Discovery Chanel's darling, Zahi Hawass. This is the kind of thinking that uncovers ancient synagogues and insist they were centres of arab entertainment and culture, and says there were no Hebrew slaves in Egypt. Soon they'll teach this drivel to our kids who will ask at Pesach, "from where did Moses lead us" --- drivel. And it's coming to the mainstream near you.
The land of Israel belongs to Israel. It was given to them in perpetuity by the Owner Of The Earth. He has a right to throw them out and the right to bring them back, both of which He has done twice.
End of subject.
Oh great, I have to submit a review Said's Orientalism for class next month...
oh well, the way this semester is going why should I be suprised at more lefty drivel?
What's this? Frontpage mag's Hugh Fitzgerald stoops to politcal correctness?
As the good people of the world hope against hope that Europeans will awaken from denial in time to save themselves, they also hope for a generalized Jewish awakening that will repudiate and reject the Left once and for all.
There are many similarities between Islamic fanaticism and the Left. If they could sort out the rhetoric, they could combine.
There is nothing liberal about the Left.
The decadence that has infected American academia, journalism, Hollywood, and the Democrat Party have and deserve the utter contempt of clear thinking, benevolent, wise and liberal people everywhere.
There could be no more obvious a manifestation of the decadence and depravity of the Left than its disgusting, horrifying, and obviously Naziesque anti-Semitism.
It's like The Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Those infected with it intend to spread the infection with the singlemindedness and fanaticism of mad Ahab. If the people of the West are foolish enough to let them have their way, their fate will be that of the Pequod.
Warning! This is a high-volume ping list.
Ping!
They lost me at BCE as well.
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