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)

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

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.