This isn't right. Since when do we reward a lack of knowledge, a positive refusal to acknowledge history, with a tenured professorship at a respected university?

Beyond that - the implications for the Jewish people are horrifying. I frankly do not see the role of the university as a political player but in this case - it's especially important that a center of learning and civil discourse remain exactly that.

It appears instead as though Columbia and now Barnard, are actually attempting to harm not only Israel, but the history of the Jewish people, already under literal fire in the Middle East.

Coming on the heels of the Holocaust Cartoon Contest this is more than an insult. There are constant threats to physically annihilate millions of Israelis - the Holocaust is mocked, denied, yet simultaneously held up as a mirror of the "genocide" of Palestinian Arabs - a ridiculous inversion of reality.

I can't believe this is happening in America.

It is quite clear that Ms. Abu el-Haj possesses all the salient qualities required to gain tenure at Columbia.

In spades.

the administration at barnard--president judith shapiro, in particular--needs to do the right thing--and a hard thing. She has to make sure that the outside scholars who evaluate el-Haj's dossier are respected people in their fields who have a reputation for being able to put aside politics and ideology in judging the quality of scholarship. If el-Haj's work is driven from the top-down by her anti-Zionist agenda--and is not properly responsive to the real facts of the case--they will see it.

If Shapiro appoints such outsiders, though, she runs the risk of an uprising from el-Haj's supporters--many of whom, like el-Haj herself, do not believe that anyone can or should make an unbiased and apolitical judgment of the quality of the scholarship.

If Shapiro doesn't appoint such outsiders, then Barnard will most likely end up with a self-perpetuating dept of anti-Zionist ideologues.

But the decision is Shapiro's--she cannot pass of this responsibility. The buck stops with her.

oh come on guys do you need to perform a witchhunt on every non-zionist academic who puts forth some new ideas? i read her book cover to cover and thought it was provocative reading. theres no use arguing about ancient history but the ancient israelites shared the land continuously since their invasion with the original canaanite inhabitants. do you really think all those Tells and pottery shards were Israelite/Hebrew creations? furthermore, the majority of recent major archeological discoveries in Israel have been mostly related to Byzantine pre-islamic Palestinian period.

Actually, the Columbia faculty is filled not only with non-Zionist academics but also with many anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic academics. Yes, dear, there are a number of members of the Columbia faculty who simply dislike Jews.

No one, for example, has objected to Bashir Abu Manneh, a man who is both an anti-Semite and an anti-Zionist, although he is also up for tenure this year at Barnard in English.

The objection to El Haj is not tht she is a racist, althgh she is. Not that she is an anti-Semite, although she is, Nor that she is an anti-Zionist. It is that her book is demonstrably shoddy and unscholarly.

the comments here - and the passion that underscores them - is exactly what el-haj is talking about, and frankly, the response she likely hoped for. Let's face it: she is not the first to assert that scientific knowledge, whether in the form of archaeological digs or genetic technologies, is put to political use and is embedded in social and cultural realities. That her critique is of Israel is what most of you seem to be upset about. Your anger only seems to prove her point - the right to (re)settle Israel is rooted in the authenticity of historical/archaeological evidence and this evidence is essential to legitimacy of the state.

If you really want to attack her - or any other anthropologist, for that matter - on scholarship that critiques scientific knowledge and the political uses to which it is put (and by which they are informed)... you should ask why post-structuralism in the form of discourse analysis is the primary mode by which the critique is done. Is it all about the subtext, intertext, and power regimes? What is obscured in this type of analysis?

I don't think her claim is necessarily what should be refuted. But the nuance that enhances work like this would be better derived from other methods.

If Nadia had simply writeen a book asserting that "scientific knowledge... is put to political use and is embedded in political and cultural realities" I , for one, would not be taking the time to criticize her.

but that is a very odd description of facts on the ground. This is a book in which the author accuses archaeologists digging in Israel, collectively and as named individualy, of deliberately destroying data. A book in which she denies the reality of the ancient Israelite kingdoms. A book in which she justifies the deliberate destruction of ancient Jewish shrines by Palestinian political activists out to score poloitical points. And a book in which she repeatedly makes assertions of fact based on conversations with unnamed archaeologists.

Poststructural analysis aside, you simply cannot go about getting as many facts wrong as Abu El Haj does, and expect to be taken seriously as a scholar.

Adia asks "what is obscured" by El Haj's post-structural analysis. Interesting question. The answer is, the post-structural verbiage obscures the fundamental dishonesty of the book.

El Haj dismisses the “connection” between the ancient Israelite kingdoms and “the modern Jewish nation” as a matter of mere “belief.” And accordingly questions the attribution of finds to Hasmonean, Israelite or other specifically Jewish periods.

Standard post-structuralist rhetoric.

However, when an Israeli archaeologists attribute a find to the Umayyad (early Arab) period, Abu El Haj suddenly becomes a positivist, accepting the Arab narrative as simple fact.

Similarly, we hear a great deal about the Israeli use of bulldozers to deliberately destroy Islamic strata, While the waqf and Palestinian Authority are held up as patterns of responsible historic site conservation. this ignores large scale, deliberate destruction of archaeological sites by the waqf and PA. El Haj then describes one example of such destruction, the pulverization of Joseph's Tomb, with enthusiastic approval.

For El Haj, post-structuralism, it seems, is merely a tool to attack the Jews.

The tradition in which she truly writes is much older than post-structuralism. Lying and distorting the evidence in order to score political points is probably as old as language.

aida... is that a pseudonym for Nadia?

Whether or not it is, the problem with this book is that the post-structuralism is a mere screen for Temple Denial. Temple Denial is the modern tactic of denying that the Jews emerged in Eretz Israel in ancient times, and that they had kingdomes, produced the Bible and Mishna, etc. in the land of Israel.

anti-Semites (including secular and Islamist Muslims and far-left wing Westerners) deny these simple facts in order to deny the right of the Jews to live in the Jewish homeland. Arguing that the Jews had no right to return after so many centuries is different form denying that the ancestors of the Jews once lived in Judea, as Nadia does.

In the minds of many historians, the single silliest passage in Facts on the Ground is the one where Nadia asserts that maybe the fires of the year 70 were not caused by the Roman destruction of Jerusaelm, according to her it was probably an accident or a Jewish class conflict, those revolting lower classes, don't you know. On almost the same page she asserts that first century Jerusalem was not a Jewish city because Herod wasn't Jewish.

Here Nadia mixes galactically lousy scholarship, Temple Denial, and political polemic.

Herod was, indeed, not entirely Jewish. the Jews, moreover, didn't like him very much then or now. Jerusalem, however, was an almost entirely Jewish city (small communities of Roman functionaries and foreign merchants did live there.) But to say that Jerusalem was a non-Jewish city in the Roman period because the King was not Jewish is as silly as to assert that England ceased to be English on 11 June 1727 when they put a German on the throne.

I wish that this book were merely silly. It is dangerous because Nadia's position on the Barnard faculty appears to give the weight of the college's great prestige to the absurd mistatements of fact that riddle Facts on the Ground.

"...is as silly to assert that England ceased to be English on 11 June 1727 when they put a German on the throne."

I agree with the main points in the last comment. This is just by way of a historical correction.

"Honestly Anonymous" is referring to the accession of the Hanovers to the throne of Britain in the early 18th century. But that happened at the death of the last Stuart monarch (Queen Anne) in 1714, when George I ascended the throne. And George I was German with a vengence. He didn't even speak English. It was his son, George II, who became king in 1727.

Honestly Anonymous's point is still well taken, however.

Many of the negative reviewers of this book do not seem to have read it. It is claimed that she does not speak Hebrew, but in fact she cites Hebrew sources, and her Hebrew teacher is thanked in the acknowledgements. The main thread uniting all the criticisms is that she is anti-Zionist. If you believe anti-Zionists have no right to publish scholarly material, then you are politicizing academia.
Further, the book received excellent reviews from numerous scholars, which should also be quoted here in order to give readers an idea of how the book was received.

Professor Nadia Abu El-Haj - Today, Jews are here 5768 years. Here are just 30 years of modern history - The League of Nations - Mandate for Palestine.
Historically, before the Arabs fabricated the concept of Palestinian peoplehood as an exclusively Arab phenomenon, no such group existed. This is substantiated in countless official British Mandate-vintage documents that speak of the Jews and the Arabs of Palestine – not Jews and Palestinians.
In fact, before local Jews began calling themselves Israelis in 1948 (when the name “Israel” was chosen for the newly-established Jewish State), the term “Palestine” applied almost exclusively to Jews and the institutions founded by new Jewish immigrants in the first half of the 20th century, before the state’s independence.
Some examples include:
• The Jerusalem Post, founded in 1932, was called The Palestine Post until 1948.
• Bank Leumi L’Israel, incorporated in 1902, was called the “Anglo-Palestine Company” until 1948.
• The Jewish Agency – an arm of the Zionist movement engaged in Jewish settlement since 1929 – was initially called the Jewish Agency for Palestine.
• Today’s Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, founded in 1936 by German Jewish refugees who fled Nazi Germany, was originally called the “Palestine Symphony Orchestra,” composed of some 70 Palestinian Jews.
• The United Jewish Appeal (UJA) was established in 1939 as a merger of the United Palestine Appeal and the fund-raising arm of the Joint Distribution Committee.
Encouraged by their success at historical revisionism and brainwashing the world with the “Big Lie” of a Palestinian people, Palestinian Arabs have more recently begun to claim they are the descendants of the Philistines and even the Stone Age Canaanites. Based on that myth, they can claim to have been “victimized” twice by the Jews: in the conquest of Canaan by the Israelites and again by the Israelis in modern times – a total fabrication. Archeologists explain that the Philistines were a Mediterranean people who settled along the coast of Canaan in 1100 BCE. They have no connection to the Arab nation, a desert people who emerged from the Arabian Peninsula.
As if that myth were not enough, former PLO Chairman Yasir Arafat also claimed, “Palestinian Arabs are descendants of the Jebusites,” who were displaced when King David conquered Jerusalem.
Arafat also argued that “Abraham was an Iraqi.” One Christmas Eve, Arafat declared that “Jesus was a Palestinian,” a preposterous claim that echoes the words of Hanan Ashrawi, a Christian Arab who, in an interview during the 1991 Madrid Conference, said: “Jesus Christ was born in my country, in my land,” and claimed that she was “the descendant of the first Christians,” disciples who spread the gospel around Bethlehem some 600 years before the Arab conquest. If her claims were true, it would be tantamount to confessing that she is a Jew!
Contradictions abound; Palestinian leaders claim to be descended from the Canaanites, the Philistines, the Jebusites and the first Christians. They also “hijacked” Jesus and ignored his Jewishness, at the same time claiming the Jews never were a people and never built the Holy Temples in Jerusalem.

Nadia Abu el-Haj is a Nazi fascist in Arab clothing. Fascists and their apologists and propagandists, like Nadia Abu el-Haj, are finding that they can get away with murder, with making the most outrageous, deceitful, and totally bullshit claims, and they can still get tenure, because of all the multi culti bullshit other academics are afraid of offending the Arab, Muslim, sensibilitiies, even if the particular Muslim happens to be a psychotic liar who belongs in an asylum or better yet a prison cell. Nadia Abu el-Haj is a propagandist for terrorism and the murder of Jews, in the same way that "Dr" Goebbels was a propagandist for the murder of Jews.
The big lie, repeated ad nauseum, can be effective, exactly as Geobbels and Hitler discovered. The thing is that the Jewish community is under attack by people who want to kill us and their
mouthpieces, such as Nadia Abu el-Haj. She delights in every murder of a Jew. She provides motivation for the terrorists to murder Jews, and , for that matter, she promotes the murder of Christians and any non Muslims in the middle east, and anyone else who challenges her fabrications, and the fabrications of her associates, like the poisonous professor Edward Said, who died in a lot of pain, which says something about his karma catching up to him. Said was another person who openly advocated the murder of Jews and provided propaganda egging on the murderers and the Jew haters. Why are we being so polite with scum like Nadia Abu el-Haj ? This person does not deserve to walk down the street and breathe the same air as civilized people. She should be in jail with her compatriots the Aryan brotherhood and other goon squad psychopaths. She should be spit on whenever she dares to show her face in public. Actually spitting on her is barely sufficient, smearing shit on her face would be more appropriate. She should be shouted down at every class and every public forum. She should be treated exactly the way Arab students treat speakers they do not like when they visit Concordia and other campuses like UC Berkeley. In other words, use their tactics, against them. Throw shit at them. Throw bags of urine at them. Shout them down every time they try to speak. Lets see how the Arabs and Palestinains like it when we treat them, the way they are treating us. Nadia Abu el-Haj deserves a really shitty life and burning in hell in the hereafter. Forget about trying to challenge her through wimps like the Barnard administration. Fight fasicsts the way they are asking to be fought, don´t wimp out and write letters to spineless administrators !!!! Nadia Abu el-Haj writes books are full of obscene lies , lies like Hitler used as a pretext to murder Jews, and these books should be expunged from every library.

I would like to make it clear that I am against the smearing of feces in all its forms.