Nadia Abu El Haj and ‘pure political fabrication’
Of all the controversial passages in Nadia Abu El Haj’s Facts on the Ground, few have been so chewed over and have provided such fuel for polarized debate as this one, from her chapter 9, ‘Archaeology and its aftermath’, page 250:
While by the early 1990s, virtually all archaeologists argued for the need to disentangle the goals of their professional practice from the quest for Jewish origins and objects that formed an earlier archaeological project, the fact that there is some genuine national-cultural connection between contemporary (Israeli-)Jews and such objects was not itself generally open to sustained questioning.9 That commitment remained, for the most part, and for most practicing archaeologists, fundamental. (Although archaeologists argued, increasingly, that the archaeological past should have no bearing upon contemporary political claims). In other words, the modern Jewish/Israeli belief in ancient Israelite origins is not understood as pure political fabrication. It is not an ideological assertion comparable to Arab claims of Canaanite or other ancient tribal roots.10 Although both origin tales, Arab and Jewish, are structurally similar as historical claims, Broshi’s argument betrays a “hierarchy of credibility” in which “facticity” is conferred only upon the latter (Cooper and Stoler 1997: 21).
The text as given above is precisely as it appears in the book,* complete with footnote numerals, italics, brackets, and typographical error (that full stop after the bracketed phrase ending ‘contemporary political claims’ should be inside the closing bracket).
Most of the attention this paragraph has received has focused upon the phrase, or rather fragment, ‘pure political fabrication’. Critics of Nadia Abu El Haj have taken the words as indicating that the author is arguing that that ’the modern Jewish/Israeli belief in ancient Israelite origins’ is a ’pure political fabrication’, sometimes reproducing the author’s original emphasis, sometimes not (here are some examples). In response to these charges, others have argued that the words ‘pure political fabrication’ have been taken out of context and misinterpreted, and that Nadia Abu El Haj is saying precisely the opposite, that Israel’s ancient history is not a pure political fabrication (examples here).
Paula Stern, author of the anti-tenure petition and a persistent critic of Nadia Abu El Haj, has just revisited this passage with a trenchant rejection of such claims: ‘”Pure political fabrication.” that is how Nadia Abu El Haj describes the “modern Jewish/Israeli belief in ancient Jewish origins”.’ This posting has been picked up by Solomonia, where the point is amplified:
The critics say that when El Haj writes “The modern Jewish/Israeli belief in ancient Israelite origins is not understood as a pure political fabrication”, she’s crediting Israeli archaeologists for not doing so (and agreeing that they should not, i.e. that it is not a “pure political fabrication”). Taken in context, however, contra the El Haj defenders, she is specifically not doing so: [the colon is followed by a lengthy quote from Stern]
This one may well run and run, but it really shouldn’t, because Nadia Abu El Haj’s meaning in this passage (if not her syntax) is perfectly clear. In short, Paula Stern and the other critics are right: Abu El Haj’s position is that ‘the modern Jewish/Israeli belief in ancient Israelite origins’ should be ‘understood as pure political fabrication’, as an ‘ideological assertion’ and, as Stern correctly notes, she is being critical of Israeli archaeologists for not accepting that: they ought to, she thinks, but they don’t. What makes it worse, the reader is encouraged to conclude, is that Israeli archaeologists were in denial about this as late as the 1990s, a fact that undermines the claim of modern Israeli archaeology to be a truly scientific enterprise.
You really need to read the whole book to understand what Nadia Abu El Haj is doing here and to appreciate the full impact of her claims, rather than relying on the fragmented chunks made available via Amazon Reader or, even worse, taking at face value what other people choose to quote or misquote.
For me the most interesting part of this passage is not the ‘pure political fabrication’ bit but the portion slightly further on, where Nadia Abu El Haj is discussing Magen Broshi’s unwillingness (as she represents it) to accord the ‘Arab claims of Canaanite or other ancient tribal roots’ the same status as the ‘Jewish/Israeli belief in ancient Israelite origins’. Reading to the end of the paragraph, with his or her mind prepared by what has gone before, the reader might reasonably be excused for coming away from this sentence …
Although both origin tales, Arab and Jewish, are structurally similar as historical claims, Broshi’s argument betrays a “hierarchy of credibility” in which “facticity” is conferred only upon the latter.
… with the impression that intellectual commensurability exists between the two sets of ‘origin tales’, and that the conferring of ‘facticity’ upon one rather than the other is arbitrary and ideologically determined. For structurally similar must mean similarly reliable, surely?
Of course not. Consider two claims I might make about how I came to be living at my present address. The claims ‘I moved into my present house after buying it from the previous occupants, who are now living abroad’ and ‘I moved into my present house after murdering the previous occupants, who are now buried in the cellar’ are structurally similar, but only one is a reliable description of reality.** The fact that things are structurally similar tells you nothing about their accuracy, verifiability or evidential base.
It’s clear, however, that for academics of the postmodern persuasion a ’hierarchy of credibility’ in which competing claims are compared with the evidence is something to be distrusted. I imagine that if presented at the end of the month with the competing (but structurally similar) claims ‘your salary has been paid into your bank account’ and ‘your salary has been paid into the bank account of a random stranger’ even the most skeptical professor would be pretty keen to erect a ‘hierarchy of credibility’ in which ‘facticity’ is conferred upon the interpretation that sees her getting paid. But of course our imaginary postmodern professor’s suspicion of ‘facticity’ would almost certainly manifest itself in a highly selective way. Generally speaking such skeptical critiques are fine when applied to other peoples’ lives, but really won’t do for one’s own.
* The reference to ‘Broshi’ in the passage from Facts on the Ground is to Magen Broshi, ‘Religion, ideology and politics and their impact on Palestinian archaeology’, Israel Museum Journal, vol. 6 (1987), pp. 17-32. Footnote 9 refers the reader to Ze’ev Herzog, ‘Deconstructing the walls of Jericho’, Ha’aretz (English edition), 29 October 1999; footnote 10 to Meron Benvenisti, Conflicts and Contradictions (New York: Villard Books, 1996). The final citation is to Frederick Cooper & Ann Stoler (eds.), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997).
** It’s the first, in case you were wondering.
October 24th, 2007 at 10:35 pm
This argument is very difficult to follow for someone who is neither an archaeologist or an anthropologist, such as myself. However, in reading the original book review on HNN, Silverstein’s critiques, this response, all after reading an HNN piece about this matter (the link for which is no longer valid) I can say that it seems that Silverstein is doing followers of the dispute a favor by pointing out that critics of el Haj seem to be as biased as they accuse her of being. At this point, the best that can be said about this dispute-at least from my limited reading-is that it is an argument between pro-Israeli and pro-Arab nationalists, each seeking to subvert history to their own ends. That may not be accurate, but that’s the impression I get. That is truly unfortunate, as a debate between scholars should seek to illuminate truth and fact, not disguise and hide biases and assumptions.
October 25th, 2007 at 08:39 am
I assure you that neither Paula Stern nor most of Abu El Haj’s critics have read the book as you have urged. That’s why I’m surprised that you praise Stern’s interpretation of this passage.
The fact is, whether Abu El Haj MEANS what you and Stern claim she does (& you haven’t convinced me that she does), you must do violence to the actual words she’s written (what you call her “syntax”) in order to get to the interpretation you get to. You can say what you THINK SHE MEANT, but that’s not what she wrote.
I’ve often thought that perhaps the asterisks which surround the word “pure” may mean that she’s claiming that the claim of ancient Israelite origins is not PURE fabrication, but perhaps a partial fabrication. You could read the asterisks perhaps in that sense. But this type of nuance is way beyond Abu El Haj’s critics who merely remove the “not” from the passage because it stands in the way of their motives of villanizing her.
October 25th, 2007 at 09:27 am
Richard, I’m not ‘praising’ Stern’s interpretation of this passage, I am simply saying that in this respect her interpretation seems to me to be right, on the basis of my reading of Nadia Abu El Haj’s text. That doesn’t mean I agree with Stern’s characterization of the book as a whole. I don’t believe I have had to ‘do violence’ to Abu El Haj’s own words do draw the conclusions I have, but if I have then please do show me where and how I’ve gone wrong. I’m happy to have my views challenged; unlike some I am not in this simply to have my own biases confirmed at every turn.
October 29th, 2007 at 06:30 pm
What exactly did she mean? I’ve translated the snippet into English from academese. My conclusion is that she did *not* say what she is accused of saying, but nevertheless she is making an unsound argument.
————————————–
> While by the early 1990s, virtually all archaeologists argued for the
> need to disentangle the goals of their professional practice from the
> quest for Jewish origins and objects that formed an earlier
> archaeological project,
Before the 1990’s and post-Zionism, Israeli archaeologists tended to use their discipline to argue for Jewish provenance in the Holy Land. Now they are too sophisticated to do this.
> the fact that there is some genuine
> national-cultural connection between contemporary (Israeli-)Jews and
> such objects was not itself generally open to sustained questioning.9
But even after this, people continued to believe that there was a connection between the artifacts of the biblical period and contemporary Jews.
> That commitment remained, for the most part, and for most practicing
> archaeologists, fundamental.
Even archaeologists believed this.
> (Although archaeologists argued,
> increasingly, that the archaeological past should have no bearing
> upon contemporary political claims).
But more and more archaeologists have started to reject the political argument that Jews have a right to live in Israel because their ancestors may have. [pay attention, this is important — vic]
> In other words, the modern
> Jewish/Israeli belief in ancient Israelite origins is not understood
> as /pure/ political fabrication. [’pure’ was in italics — vic]
It is not /entirely/ a political fabrication, because there was an archaeological tradition that it was true, and — even after post-Zionism — archaeologists continued to believe it.
> It is not an ideological assertion
> comparable to Arab claims of Canaanite or other ancient tribal
> roots.10
The Arab claims, on the other hand, really are just made up.
> Although both origin tales, Arab and Jewish, are
> structurally similar as historical claims, Broshi’s argument betrays
> a “hierarchy of credibility” in which “facticity” is conferred only
> upon the latter (Cooper and Stoler 1997: 21).
[So she concludes that] although neither the Jewish nor the Arab claim is scientifically valid, Jewish archaeologists still treat it as if it is.
——————————
Now, why is this a poor argument? The important premise is that the Jewish claim to a historical connection to the land via the ancient residents of Judah and Israel is no better than the Arab claim of Caananite descent.
But she does not establish this! All she can say is that in the 1990’s, Israeli archaeologists stopped arguing for a *political* right of the Jews to the land on the basis of the historical connection — not that the historical connection did not exist.
And she admits that the Arab claims *are* pure political fabrications!
The job of the archaeologist is not to make political claims, but only historical ones. And they have not disproved the historical connection between today’s Jews and the ancient land — they have only stopped using it to make political arguments.
We can leave that to politicians and Zionists.
So Paula Stern was wrong, but Abu-Haj’s reasoning depends on a non-sequitur.
–
Vic
http://fresnozionism.org
October 30th, 2007 at 11:40 pm
Vic,
I gave your arguments serious consideration, and the relevent pages a careful re-reading.
I cannot agree with you.
the problem, of course, is that this is not the kind of book that defines anything with presicion. At many points it reads more like she’s trying for ambiguity.
In this passage , the word that may confuse some is Israelite.
Israelite is not confined to the pre-monarchic period. Archaeologists and historians use the word for every period up to 586.
After the return form Persia, most switch to Judah and, often, to the awkward sounding Judahites.
But turn back a page and you will see el Haj citing broshi on the excitement over the “Beth alpha synagogue mosaic and the great blocks of the Third Wall” this is followed by a “Contrast that with Broshi’s discussion of Arab Ideologies and Archaeology.
here, too, there is confusion about precisely what Palestinian archaeologists are claiming.
But it seems clear to me, well, as clear as anyting in this book, that she is denying all of Israelite history : form Judges to Josiah.
(a colleague who has also read the book tells me that he believes that she is deliberately obfuscating her assertions, making claims by innuendo so that readers will take away the impression that the ancient Israelites are a political fabricaiton witouth actially writing a clear statement to that effect. He may well be correct. Given that her thesis is said to be written in an entirely different, straightforward style, he’s probably correct)