Hannah L. Assadi & Lamya H. Al-Kharusi

arnard’s decision to grant tenure to Anthropology Professor Nadia Abu El-Haj has been mired in controversy. A host of contentious matters such as academic freedom, the tenure process, and Israel’s right to exist, have been raised in the process. Interestingly enough but perhaps not so surprisingly, these questions mirror ones that arose in the Spring of 2005 when the David Project produced a documentary called “Columbia Unbecoming.” This documentary featured recent graduates who issued accusations against certain Columbia professors for what they believed to be anti-Semitic beliefs as well as stifling conversation on the subject of Israel and Zionism. While evidence of overt anti-Semitism was never actually conceded by the Columbia administrative investigation into the matter, what was shown is that engaging with Israel and Zionism has been heightened to the level of ‘controversy’ in our academic environment. A series of attacks and defenses on the subject of “academic freedom” followed from both parties—a scene not altogether new to our campus.

Similarly, the attacks on El-Haj’s book, Facts on the Ground, are rooted in worries about the ramifications of its research for Israeli society and the existence of the Jewish state rather than critiques of Abu El-Haj’s research and theoretical framework. What is being construed as controversial is the fact that she reveals how a “scientific practice” (i.e. archaeology) was used by Israel to support its claim to contested lands. It is not so much that there is a lack of understanding of El-Haj’s work, but that Segal and other academics are reading her work through their concern with its implications on Zionism and Israel.

Segal criticizes El-Haj for raising the point that there was no evidence of Israelite occupation in certain Palestinian areas currently under Israeli occupation. This criticism is a concern for Segal because it de-legitimizes the political behavior of the Israeli state. His criticism is rooted in the controversies her research addresses in undermining the archeological and historical premises of the continuing occupation and enduring displacement of the Palestinian people. However, his claim does little to expose the faultiness of her research. Instead, it illumines his own political agenda in attacking her work.

Moreover, Segal does not ground his criticism in the book’s theoretical framework. Segal’s attack, which is more personal than academic, seems to revolve around his inaccurate claim that El-Haj does not speak Hebrew, made in his Columbia Spectator article on September 21, 2007. This claim was nullified in the Spectator on October 16th when the statement of the source he used, Lisa Wedeen, was rectified. In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Wedeen not only testified to Abu El-Haj’s knowledge of Hebrew, but praised her work as being “replete with Hebrew sources, both written and oral.”

Furthermore, if one were to examine the theoretical underpinnings behind Facts on the Ground, a necessary investigation in order to understand her work, one would see that Professor El-Haj is approaching not solely the practice of archaeology in Israel as problematic, but more fundamentally, the practice of archaeology throughout history and across the world. Most significantly, she shows that this “scientific practice” is often used for political and social ends. Her work is very much rooted in a Marxist and Foucauldian methodology. For El-Haj, archaeological practice can not be dissociated from national and historical narratives, where, in her own words, “land [is] the object of material reconfiguration, symbolic reinscription, and (colonial) desire.” Following from this basic precept it is clear that her work is not about forwarding an argument for the destruction of the Jewish State, as has been claimed, but about critiquing the problematic applications of archeological practice as manifested in the State of Israel.

Likewise, the claims made by the external petitions and blogs alleging that El-Haj’s recognition for tenure is based on a “flawed book” reveals how minimal their knowledge of her scholarship is. There is no mention of the numerous articles she has written in journals including The Annual Review of Anthropology, American Ethnologist, and Israel Studies. That Barnard recommended her tenure to Columbia administration is evidence enough that her scholarship is sound.

Moreover, the sources that attack her for not speaking Hebrew and having faulty research never address a primary concern of El-Haj’s work: the undeniably inhumane applications of Israeli archeological practice- how it “erased other geographies” in its narrative, primarily “effac[ing] Arab/ Palestinian claims to and presences within the very same places” (18). The late renowned scholar Edward Said, who not only read her work, but also understood her work on its theoretical level and in terms of its greater implications, said in Freud and the Non-European, “I am greatly indebted to the work of a young scholar, Nadia Abu El-Haj” as it provides “a history of systematic colonial archaeological exploration in Palestine, dating back to British work”, which continued in the period of Israel’s establishment, and was characterized by “a schematic extraction of Jewish identity despite the existence of Arab names and traces of other civilizations” (47). The failure to address the Palestinian “traces” that El-Haj’s work seeks to uncover, suggests most poignantly the political agenda lurking in the singularity of the petitioner’s complaints. Attacking the work for its implications for the State of Israel is much easier when one ignores the content she most centrally addresses in her work, what the practice of archaeology in that State has done in relation to the history of the Arab/Palestinian inhabitants of the land.

Lastly, it is apparent that the controversy surrounding El-Haj’s tenure has been largely governed by voices external to Columbia, just as the David Project, based in Boston, whose mission statement claims to “counter the ideological assault on Israel”, did in producing “Columbia Unbecoming” two years ago. Instead of hearing about what the Columbia/ Barnard Tenure Process Review Committee, a medium of internal Columbia/ Barnard student debate on the subject have to say about her work, we have been bombarded with the onslaught of opinions from the Solomonia Blog, Democracy Project, The New York Sun, and Campuswatch.com. Yet it is only with the scholarly attention that will be given in such an internal and rigorous review that her work can duly be evaluated rather than merely subjected to slander, slander that ultimately promotes another, albeit veiled political agenda. As Barnard President Judith Shapiro pointed out in an exchange with Phil Orenstein of Democracy Project, the fact that “many of the communications I have received on this case [El-Haj’s tenure] have come to me anonymously is especially ironic, since one of the main criticisms these nameless people are making of Professor Abu El-Haj’s work is that she cites anonymous sources” (5.28.07).

The faults for which these outside instigators are so virulently attacking El-Haj are the very things they are guilty of themselves, if not doubly so. From an academic perspective, there is nothing inherently controversial embedded in her work. In fact, they are projecting their own politics onto her work, setting their agenda against the implications, and significantly not the agenda of her work, and worse, in so doing, fabricating a hysterical atmosphere of controversy on our campus. These external attacks are so hyped up that no one has been able to sensibly discuss or argue the findings of her scholarship, in terms of the scholarship, itself. This intellectual bullying is a threat not only to academic freedom, but to the progressive ideas that should be a mainstay of university life and the university in the greater world.