We Should Discuss, Not Silence Professors

I was truly shocked to read some of the leading letters and reviews used in this campaign against Nadia Abu El-Haj tenure. While in Israel her work has been discussed with depth and seriousness (even if critically) in academic seminars, in the United States one witnesses a crude attempt to silence this perspective. In the literature now flooding the Internet, I could not find one single sentence that would describe the work with any degree of accuracy. I wondered if the people involved had really read the book or were deliberately distorting its context. Moreover, even sentences placed in quotation marks are not to be found in the book itself. These facts alone would suffice to demonstrate the weakness of the arguments thus deployed. They become astonishing when considering that they are the doing of individuals who repeatedly claim to grounding their intervention on the “bad quality” of her work. Such individuals have simply given up on the minimal standard for making an argument, namely, that one discuss the work itself.
But perhaps Facts on the Ground is so disturbing precisely because it is convincing, and provides a penetrating and insightful analysis of Israeli archeological discourse. Perhaps it is disturbing because it provides a most illuminating framework for the discussion of Zionism, one that has been already recognized as a remarkable contribution. Some of the reviewers themselves admit as much. The only explanation for the hysteria around the tenure procedure is the anxiety that emerges when addressing the observations made in the book. Such pathological reactions are dangerous and they should be the focus of the discussion here.
Facts on the Ground is a controversial book, and that is exactly the reason why Nadia Abu El-Haj deserves to be tenured in any distinguished institution of academic learning. Bad scholarship could never provoke such a violent reaction. El-Haj has contributed a penetrating and revealing description and analysis of the emergence of Israeli archeology from previous Christian projects, its becoming a practice of prominence in the shaping of Zionist identity, as well as a tool in the destruction of the land’s past and present. She is not the only scholar to study critically Israeli archeological practice. Similar efforts have been pursued lately by Israeli archeologists themselves and by social scientists. One does not have to agree with all the arguments in order to admit the serious and necessary challenges it raises. Such criticism must be taken seriously, as is always the case in academic discussions. The purpose of denying this discussion can therefore be nothing else but a political attempt on the part of embattled individuals to prevent a thoughtful inquiry. Nadia Abu El-Haj neither hides nor flaunts her Palestinian identity. Yet anyone would recognize that a Palestinian perspective is essential for any discussion of the history of Palestine.
I am therefore confident that the academic leadership of Columbia University, including the leading scholars in Jewish studies, will ignore this crude and biased campaign.
It would be beneficial if the false accusations were replaced by a serious discussion. I believe that the future of Israeli society depends on its ability to address the perspective of its victims, and to realize that such perspective contributes to the objective work of analysis that is and must be done. As for the extremist militants seeking to silence Palestinian academics (Nadia Abu El-Haj is not the only target, a similar campaign has been conducted against Joseph Massad, another most significant scholar)—it brings up bad memories of dark ages. And even more so when one considers it from a Jewish point of view. One can only feel sadness and astonishment when hearing that members of the Jewish community are active in such nefarious attempts of silencing voices.

The author is a professor of Jewish history at Ben-Gurion University.