The Truth About El-Haj

I lived with Nadia Abu El-Haj in Jerusalem while we were conducting dissertation research. Hers was on the topic of the politics of Israeli archaeology, and mine was on the Israeli military court system in the West Bank and Gaza. We first met the day before we started an intermediate-level ulpan (an intensive language course in Hebrew) at Hebrew University. Nadia continued to study Hebrew for the next two years while she was conducting her research.
Nadia Abu El-Haj interviewed dozens of Israelis, spent many months reading Hebrew documents in the archives, going to museums, and taking countless archaeological tours, including those conducted in Hebrew for Israeli tourists. Herein lies the first of my critiques of the critics of Nadia Abu El-Haj’s qualifications for tenure at Barnard/Columbia. The allegations that she does not speak Hebrew and that she did not conduct extensive research are lies. The allegations, false though they are, have fueled support for the “deny Nadia Abu El-Haj tenure” petition.
Contrary to one of the central allegations of her critics, Nadia Abu El-Haj does not claim that there was no Israelite historical presence in the land, as anyone who actually reads her award-winning book Facts on the Ground would know. To write a scholarly book about the politics of Israeli archaeology is, by definition, to engage very seriously with the history of Jewish presence and the contemporary interpretation of that presence in the so-called Holy Land. She is not an archaeologist writing the history of the early Israelites. She is an anthropologist studying the discipline of Israeli archaeology and its cultural and political importance in Israel, particularly in the early decades of statehood. The point of her work is to engage with contemporary knowledge and debates about the historical record and to analyze the work of archaeological practitioners, particularly as that work has helped, whether intentionally or not, to inform Israeli state policies and Jewish national claims.
One could go point by point and dispute the “facts” of the case against Nadia Abu El-Haj. I could point to the many malicious misreadings of her argument or to the repeated instances of quotations taken out of context. But that, perhaps, would be to take her critics far more seriously than they deserve. It is not Nadia Abu El-Haj who has been partisan and unscholarly. It is those engaged in an all out assault on her character, her scholarly credibility, and her tenure.
What does all this mean in the larger scheme of things? Nadia Abu El-Haj will probably get tenure, as she well deserves, and the signatories of the “deny tenure” petition will probably write angry letters to the administration threatening to withhold donations. C’est la vie. If that is the price that respectable universities have to pay to maintain the integrity and autonomy of the tenure process, so be it. The perpetration of lies and falsehoods to try to influence the outcome of this process is the real academic scandal.

The author is the chair of the Law and Society Program at University of California, Santa Barbara.