Facts on the Ground

Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society is a 2001 book authored by Nadia Abu El Haj based on her doctoral thesis for Duke University.

In the book, Abu El Haj uses anthropological methods to study the relationship between the development of scientific knowledge in Israeli archaeology and the construction of the social imaginations and political orders in the Israeli State and what she characterizes as the, "formation and enactment of its colonial-national historical imagination and...the substantiation of its territorial claims".. She argues that facts generated by archaeological practice have fashioned cultural understandings, political possibilities and 'common-sense' assumptions.

In her introduction, Abu El Haj explains that she "reject(s) a positivist commitment to scientific methods” and that instead, her methodology is “rooted in ... post-structuralism, philosophical critiques of foundationalism, Marxism and critical theory and developed in response to specific postcolonial political movements.”

In Facts on the Ground, Abu El Haj describes a bitter debate between Israeli archaeologists Yigael Yadin and Yohanan Aharoni during the 1950s over how to reconcile and interpret the results of their excavations with respect to the Biblical account of the conquest of Canaan by the Israelites. She writes that they "shared more than they disagreed about: the historicity of the biblical tales, the 'fact' of an Israelite nation that entered Palestine during the Bronze Age/Iron Age transition"; she describes this assumed "social collectivity" of the ancient Israelites as "a tale best understood as the modern nation's 'origin myth' ... transported into the realm of history."

The book has been praised by some scholars and criticised by others.

Controversy over the book intensified five years after its publication, after news emerged in 2006 that Abu El Haj was under consideration for tenure at Barnard College where she serves as an assistant professor. Barnard alumnae mounted a campaign to deny tenure to Abu El Haj that centered around the book's alleged anti-Israel bias, prompting a counter-campaign in support of the book and Abu Al Haj.

Reception

Facts on the Ground was recognized by the Middle East Studies Association of North America as one of the winners of the 2002 Albert Hourani Book Award, which recognizes outstanding publishing in Middle East studies.

Edward Said cited Abu El Haj's work in a lecture he delivered at the University of California in 2003, sponsored by the Burkle Center for International Relations (BCIR) entitled "Memory, Inequality and Power: Palestine and the Universality of Human Rights"[2] and cited the book in his own scholarly works.

In his 2003 book Freud and the Non-European, Said gave the following assessment of el-Haj's work:

".. I am greatly indebted to the work of a young scholar, Nadia Abu el-Haj, whose major book is entitled Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society. What she provides first of all is a history of systematic colonial archaeological exploration in Palestine, dating back to British work in the mid-nineteenth century. She then continues the story in the period before Israel is established, connecting the actual practice of archaeology with a nascent national ideology - an ideology with plans for the repossession of the land through renaming and resettling, much of it given archeological justification as a schematic extraction of Jewish identity despite the existence of Arab names and traces of other civilizations. This effort, she argues convincingly, epistemologically prepares the way for a fully fledged post-1948 sense of Israeli-Jewish identity based on assembling discrete archaeological particulars -scattered remnants of masonry, tablets, bones, tombs,....." p.47 [3]

Writing in Inside Higher Ed, Scott Jaschik reported Campus Watch's claim that: “The book's aim is to undermine the historic connection between the Jewish people and Israel... The critique of Israeli archaeology is poorly researched and written, and ... the author's anti-Israel bias undercuts her work.”

James Gelvin, however, has described the book as 'probably the most sophisticated presentation of Israel's archaeological obsession and its relation to nationalism and "colonial knowledge"'.

Positive Reviews

Sociologist Elias Zureik of Queen's University wrote that, "the use of the sociology of science as a perspective in her research is both clever and refreshing. It further elevates research about Palestine to new heights, by placing it squarely in current social science literature and debates. We need more such studies."

Anthropologist Apen Ruiz of the University of Texas at Austin writes, Facts on the Ground offers a unique and pioneering approach to examine the politics of archaeological research". He writes that, "Inspired by cultural and social studies of science, El-Haj puts archaeology under an ethnographic lens and examines its practices: excavating, surveying, cataloguing, naming, mapping, and exhibiting," and states that this, "focus on archaeological practices as the main object of study," is the, "primary contribution of the book" He states that, "Nadia Abu El-Haj highlights the continuities between the colonial and the national periods in terms of archaeological reasoning, and claims that there is a 'dynamic relationship between empiricism and nationalism ... and the former gave credible form to the latter, not just in narrative, but, even more powerfully, in material cast... ."

Keith Whitelam, professor of religious studies at the University of Sheffield and the author of The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History told a newspaper reporter that Facts on the Ground was a "first-rate book," that made "a very fine contribution" to the study of "how national identity is constructed and the assumptions which are then built into academic work on history and archaeology."

Mixed Reviews

In her review of Facts on the Ground, Anthropologist Kimbra L. Smith of University of Colorado at Colorado Springs criticized Abu El Haj's methodology, writing that “Abu El-Haj speaks not with archaeologists who are excavating, but with archaeologists on tours given in conjunction with international archaeological congresses," She concluded: “Abu El-Haj provides an important and timely look at some of the politics of self-representation behind the Israeli government's public face... However, I reiterate that her failure to present either official Palestinian or public Palestinian/Israeli opinions and attitudes within the context of Israel's (settler) nationalist-archaeological discipline means that answers to the excellent questions she raises are never made clear.”

Negative reviews

Jacob Lassner, Professor of history and religion at Northwestern University, argued that, " Abu el-Haj misrepresents the Israeli passion for archeology. Its purpose is not to legitimize the national ethos. To the contrary: archeology appeals to Israelis because it offers a visual dimension to a past otherwise firmly anchored in oral and literary traditions. For professionals and amateurs alike, the archeology of the land of Israel is not a vehicle to authenticate the nation's existence or its distinctively Jewish character or the passionate attachment of Israelis to the land they claim as their state.

Archaeologist Aren Maeir of Bar Ilan University calls the book, "a highly ideologically driven political manifesto, with a glaring lack of attention both to details and to the broader context." Regarding Abu el-Haj's criticism of methodology in Israeli archeology, Maeir writes, that in contemporary archeology in Israel, "only marginal elements act in accordance with or identify with the non-scientific agendas that she attempts to delineate," and argues that the major reason for the lateness of Israel to adopt modern techniques was not a "hidden colonial agenda" but rather a result of the "European classical archeology" it developed from. He calls her failure, "to note relevant and parallel phenomena in other Middle Eastern, Western and non-Western] societies...inexplicable", and calls her, "failure to even mention the wanton destruction of antiquities on the Temple Mount/Haram esh-Sharif by the Muslims in Jerusalem...quite strange." Maeir questions the scientific rigor of el-Haj's work, nothing that she, "quotes anonymous archeologist to support her contentions" and "quotes a tour guide's explanation of how an excatation is run and subsequently interpreted." He states based on her "simplistic" discussion of carbon 14 radiometric dating" "her own understanding of archeological method is inadequate" Maeir cites a lack of balance in el-Haj's book, writing that, "she gives ample space to quotations of the view of extremist groups in Israeli society without giving the ratinal or scientific opinions on the same topic sufficient representation.

Archaeologist Alexander H. Joffe of State University of New York at Purchase wrote that "at the heart of [Abu El-Haj's] critique is an undisguised political agenda that regards modern and ancient Israel, and perhaps Jews as a whole, as fictions... Abu El Haj's anthropology is undone by her ... ill-informed narrative, intrusive counter-politics, and by her unwillingness to either enter or observe Israeli society... The effect is a representation of Israeli archaeology that is simply bizarre... In the end there is no reason to take her picture of Israeli archaeology seriously, since her selection bias is so glaring..."

Historian Diana Muir and Avigail Appelbaum, a graduate student in archeology, wrote that “the huge amount of evidence and scholarship demonstrating that ‘an ancient Israelite social collectivity emerged,’ becomes in her hands ‘a tale best understood as the modern nation’s origin myth ... transported into the realm of history.’”

Archeologist William Dever, Retired professor of Middle Eastern archaeology at the University of Arizona "described her scholarship as 'faulty, misleading and dangerous' in a newspaper interview.

According to British historian Ralph Harrington "Nadia Abu El-Haj’s distorted picture of Israeli archaeological practice is not simply a matter of confusion over technical terms, but a conscious strategy of ideologically-motivated misrepresentation. The essential point is that Abu El-Haj’s target is not Israeli archaeology at all, but the existence of Israel itself... Israel, for Abu El-Haj, is an invention, an artificial colonial enterprise driven by an ideology...Facts on the Ground is devoted to her argument that the nationalist archaeological tradition of the Jewish State since 1948 has played a fundamental role in inventing and sustaining the interrelated fictions of ancient and modern Israel. It is as a symbolic epitome of that claim, rather than for itself, that her notion of ‘bulldozer archaeology’ is important to her argument; and on those grounds the archaeological bulldozers of her imagination must be dismissed as an ideologically-driven fiction themselves." http://www.greycat.org/about.html

Alan F. Segal, a professor of religion and Jewish studies at Barnard, criticized Abu El Haj for her failure to examine primary sources in Hebrew, for relying on anomyous sources, and for lack of breadth in her review of scholarship to date. He said that she focuses her attention on the "extreme conclusions" of "biblical minimalists" who, he said, constitute "no more than a handful of scholars" out of "thousands at work (in Biblical scholarship) in the world "uncritically as proof that Israelis tell us more than the archaeological record shows". He pointed out that "none of the minimalist scholars she relies upon for this purpose is actually a working archaeologist," and that "pretty much every other one of the virtually countless theories about Israelite settlement in First Temple times would disprove her hypothesis about Israeli archaeology." He said that she "does not tell her readers about" these fields, "why they are necessary", or, "how decisions are actually made in biblical studies". "It’s a calumny," Segal said of Abu El-Haj’s work. "It’s simply not true. It’s slander."

James Davila, Head of the School of Divinity, Principal of St Mary's College, Dean of Divinity and Reader in Early Jewish Studies at the University of St Andrews, wrote that "Facts on the Ground makes some interesting observations about how nationalism and politics have fed into and fed off of Israeli archaeology. But these observations are offered in the context of an extreme perception of Israel as a colonial state, and I suspect that, whatever readers think of this viewpoint, the book's tendenz is so transparent that no one's mind will be changed one way or another by reading it. When it talks about things I know about, it consistently slants the presentation of the evidence according to this tendenz so that the conclusions are predictable and not very interesting. This book makes no contribution to the archaeology of ancient Palestine or what it can tell us about the history of ancient Israel. Others can decide whether the book makes a contribution in some other area."

Controversial content

One controversy related to the book came from a passage in Facts on the Ground in which Abu El Haj wrote that during a dig in Jezreel in which she participated, Israeli and British archaeologists used “bulldozers ... in order to get down to earlier strata which are saturated with national significance, as quickly as possible,” a practice she described as "the ultimate sign of 'bad science' and of nationalist politics guiding research agendas." She wrote that the incident took place "a week after [she] stopped participating in the excavations" and attributed the account to "several participants, both archaeologists and student volunteers."

The dig in question was led by David Ussishkin of the University of Tel Aviv, who denied the accusation in an open letter published on the internet in December 2006.

In September 2007, Professor Aren Maeir, in an opinion column in the Columbia Daily Spectator, accused Abu El Haj of slandering Ussishkin. "In her book she attacks, harangues, vilifies and slanders respected archaeologists in the field. In particular ... Abu El-Haj accuses David Ussishkin of 'bad science,' of using bulldozers 'in order to get down to earlier strata which are saturated with national significance, as quickly as possible' and in such a way that 'the remains above it were summarily destroyed.'" Maeir wrote that Abu El Haj's assertions concerning Ussishkin were "analogous to accusing a surgeon of deciding whether to use a scalpel or a hacksaw according to the patient’s ethnic 'identity'" and "an attempt to prevent him from doing his work."

See also

• Biblical archaeology
• Israeli-Palestinian history denial
• Ancient Near East
• Pre-history of the Southern Levant
• History of ancient Israel and Judah
• History of the Jews in the Land of Israel
• History of the Levant
• History of Palestine

References

• Nadia Abu El Haj (2001). Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  • Archaeology and National Identity in Israel, p. 1-2, 24-25, 45-48, 73-76, 99-100, 130-131, 163-164, 201-202, 239-240, 277
  • Archaeology and National Identity in Israel Excerpted from pages 99-105
• Said, Edward (2003). Freud and the Non-European Verso Books, ISBN 1859845002
• Gelvin, James L. (2005). The Israel-Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years of War. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521852897