the greycat blog

Jane Kramer’s New Yorker article about Nadia Abu El Haj is a piece of one-sided puffery in which Abu El Haj is depicted as a martyr to the dark forces that threaten scholarly freedom of inquiry and expression in the academy, and any notion that there might be serious criticisms of her work based on scholarship rather than politics or ideological bias is dismissed out of hand. The less than even-handed approach taken by Kramer to Abu El Haj’s work is made clear from the outset, in passages such as this, discussing the responses to Facts on the Ground:

The book was praised by colleagues who responded to the critical tropes that were Abu El-Haj’s legacy from scholars like Michel Foucault, Ian Hacking, Bruno Latour, and Edward Said, and dismissed by colleagues with a theoretical or a political or simply a turf interest in dismissing it.

So those who liked the book were scholars engaged with the intellectual movement of which it was part; those who didn’t were acting from motives of bias or vested interest.

Perhaps the most striking and questionable aspect of the article, however, is its depiction of Abu El Haj as an innocent abroad, a high-minded scholar taken aback by the very idea that anyone could see her work as controversial in any way that goes beyond ‘an exchange of letters in the kind of scholarly journals no one outside the academy reads’. Kramer quotes Abu El Haj’s description of herself as ’not a public intellectual. I’m drawn to archives, to disciplines where the evidence sits for a while. I don’t court controversy’. Perhaps she is sincere in saying that: after all the view that Israel is a repressive illegitimate colonial state is hardly controversial within the academy. On the contrary, it’s Middle East Studies Groupthink 101. It’s when people outside her own inward-looking peer group start to challenge the things she says - pointing out, perhaps, that she certainly didn’t let ‘the evidence [sit] for a while’ in her sympathetic account of the violent destruction of Joseph’s Tomb in Facts on the Ground - that she finds things uncomfortable. If you write books containing that kind of thing, and publish them, and have people buy them and read them, controversy will find you out. If you don’t like it, perhaps you are in the wrong line of work.

The account given by Kramer of how Nadia Abu El Haj came to be working on Israel is rather touching. If we are to believe what Kramer tells us, Abu El Haj was this close to devoting herself to the anthropological study of Palestine: ‘She wanted to figure out the place, the issues, the source of nationalism there’. But her dissertation adviser at Duke University changed the current of her studies by suggesting that she look at Israel instead: ‘you need to understand the institutions that have the power - the institutions of Israeli nationalism’. And that was that. This promising young scholar would henceforth devote herself to the study of Israeli national identity and Israeli institutions of power. What a radical choice to make. Picture the scene:

Dissertation Adviser: So, you want to analyze and critique the sources and nature of Palestinian nationalism and national identity?
Promising Young Scholar: Yes, that’s right. Palestine needs serious study. I want to figure out the place, the issues, the source of nationalism there.
Dissertation Adviser: Nah. Power’s the thing. Israel has the power. Study Israel.
Promising Young Scholar: Gosh, could I? That had never occurred to me. I bet hardly anyone ever critiques Israeli nationalism.
Dissertation Adviser (thinks): Booya! Another victory for intellectual diversity in the academy.

It’s hard to see what good Kramer’s article, with its patent biases, will do: it doesn’t inform, it doesn’t analyze, it doesn’t investigate, it doesn’t question. Written as it is in the dead-in-the-water prose that characterizes so much American big-title journalism, it doesn’t even entertain. It fails to engage with any of the serious criticisms of Nadia Abu El Haj’s work, and barely acknowledges their existence. It seeks to relate the Facts on the Ground controversy to the wider issue of the politicization of Middle East Studies, but does so in a way so skewed and blinkered that what it tries to say is rendered worthless; how seriously can you take someone who quotes Rashid Khalidi as an authority on academic ethics, and does so apparently with a straight face?

On the plus side, this being The New Yorker, there are some good cartoons in there.

Jane Kramer on Nadia Abu El Haj: further reading
‘The Petition’: link to the original article in PDF format
Phoebe Maltz: A balanced account
Orthodox Anarchist: The New Yorker takes aim at the Zionist thought police
Solomonia: The New Yorker dances to Nadia’s tune
The Bwog: Nadia Abu El-Haj speaks
Martin Kramer: Are Columbia’s Palestinians … Palestinian?

A terrorist suicide bombing attack today has killed one Israeli civilian and injured at least six more in the southern town of Dimona. One of the two terrorists was killed by police before he could detonate his bomb. This is the first such bombing in Israel for over a year, and the emphasis in the BBC’s headline is on how unusual such attacks are these days: ‘Rare suicide bombing hits Israel’. The implication is clear: these things are rare, nobody should worry too much about them. Presumably if there were to be such an attack in London tomorrow the headline would be ‘Rare suicide bombing hits London’.

[UPDATE: the headline has been changed to ‘Israeli killed in suicide bombing’. The earlier versions with the ‘rare suicide bombing’ reference are preserved by the News Sniffer.]

Elsewhere, the Associated Press, in a report oddly headlined ‘1 Killed by Israel Suicide Bomber’, reveals itself as unable to spell ‘Mediterranean’.

For good updated coverage of the terrorist attack at Dimona, including the Gaza connection, see this post at Israellycool.

… but not by the international press, for whom this 360km² strip of land seems to hold more fascination than the rest of the Middle East put together. Everything that happens there is much worse than comparable things happening elsewhere: hunger, illness, poverty, overcrowding, unemployment, even darkness is much darker there. The BBC, naturally, has been in the forefront of keeping the world up to date with just how unspeakably ghastly everything is, serializing an aid worker’s Gaza diary (’Poverty is deepening here, as is stress and despair, especially among the most vulnerable, women and children’), reporting on power cuts (’At least 800,000 people are now in darkness’), and making it clear where the blame lies (’Israel closed Gaza’s borders last Thursday’).

However, it turns out that the place has a border with Egypt too, and the BBC has been forced to adjust its usual choice of Gaza map - which didn’t mention Egypt at all - to one which accords more closely with reality. This isn’t a problem, though, for in the looking-glass world of the BBC, Egypt sealing its border with Gaza forms part of Israel’s blockade:

At the time of Israel’s “disengagement” or withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, an international agreement launched new policing of the Rafah border.

Essentially, a combination of CCTV cameras providing live pictures to the Israeli authorities and a team of EU monitors at crossing points was intended to ensure proper control, and protection against the smuggling of guns and explosives which could be used to launch attacks against Israel from Gaza.

Those arrangements broke down progressively, partly after Hamas won the parliamentary elections in Gaza of January 2006, and totally after the final seizure of all power in Gaza by Hamas in 2007.

The EU teams withdrew. The border closed.

It has become part of Israel’s blockade of Gaza, which Israel says is a necessary response to rocket attacks from Gaza which kill and injure Israeli citizens.

Meanwhile the stage-managing of Gaza’s blackouts, the careful planning of the ’spontaneous’ breaching of the border, Hamas’s fabrication of Gazan ‘food shortages’, and the fact that Israel at no time has left Gaza deprived of electricity, are among the aspects of the situation disregarded by the BBC in favour of propaganda like this:

The border was destroyed by Hamas militants after an Israeli blockade of Gaza led to a shortage of food, fuel and other vital supplies.

Israel said the blockade was aimed at preventing rocket attacks by Palestinian militants on its settlements near the border.

So it’s all down to the Israeli ‘blockade’. Surely never in history has a state withdrawn from a territory that its critics had spent years demanding it withdraw from, only to find that it is still, by those very same critics, held to be responsible for everything that goes on there. Israel is expected to provide food, fuel and power to the very people who are dedicated to its destruction, and is savaged by the international community when it reduces (never cuts off, only reduces) that support.

Meanwhile, whatever Gaza’s hardships, the local manufacture of rockets never seems to be interrupted, and those deadly missiles continue to rain down upon the towns (not ’settlements’ as the BBC would have it) of Israel. Presumably they are putting them together by candlelight.

For more on the media’s delusions of Gaza, Cinnamon Stillwell’s ‘Pallywood’s latest attractions’ is strongly recommended. Read Cinnamon’s post, and follow her links.

UPDATE 30 January 2008: Der Spiegel has published a grimly fascinating article on the Gaza rocket industry, ‘A visit to a Gaza rocket factory’, in which engaging Gazan rocket-builder ‘Abdul’ (a geography student by day) shows off his propellant-making skills to reporter Ulrike Putz. Some highlights of Abdul’s cheery chatter: ‘Fertilizer for the rocket fuel … we get it in Israel’; ‘The Israeli blockade doesn’t affect us; it’s just intended to plunge the people into misery’; ‘If we kill soldiers, then we are more than happy. If it hits a child, then naturally we are not happy’. Naturally. (Information about this article came via Solomonia’s post ‘Why should Israelis continue to support this?’ - why indeed? Acknowledgements and thanks.)