Solomonia has been providing ongoing coverage of Barnard College's consideration of tenure for this woman. You can read Sol's reports here, here and here.
From Sol's 11/2/06 post:
At Barnard College they are forming a committee to consider giving tenure to a young Palestinian anthropologist who advocates destroying archaeological sites for political purposes, and who has decided -- without regard to evidence -- that the ancient Israelite kingdoms were mere "myth."
Observers believe that she is very likely to receive tenure.
Abu El Haj rejects the right of the Jewish people to have a state. She vilifies Israel as an illegitimate, "colonial settler" enterprise. She has urged Columbia to "divest from all companies" that sell even defensive military supplies to Israel. In 2002 she condemned Israel in advance for an "ethnic cleansing" of Palestinians during the Iraq war -- an event that was never planned and never occurred.
Her bid for tenure will be based on a single book, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society. In it she denies that the ancient Jewish or Israelite kingdoms existed.
(links in original omitted) In addition to the reviews that Sol quotes at the end of that essay, see also Hugh Fitzgerald's critique at Front Page.
It's indeed chilling to think that this is what passes for scholarship at Columbia University these days. More and more, it seems as if our institutions of higher learning are being turned into indoctrination tanks, preparing the next generation to accept and embrace the dhimmitude that surely awaits them. Those who fight back are attacked and branded as "racist," "intolerant" and "fascist," words that always push buttons but that are being turned on their heads and used to mean pretty much the opposite of their original signification.
The calculated revision of history, the deliberate and systematic obliteration of the well documented historical roots of an entire people and two global faiths, now appears to be a legitimate anthropological tool, if by anthropology we mean politics dressed up as ideological charity for "oppressed peoples." And this "charity" includes not only trying to erase the history of one civilization, but inventing another and fabricating evidence of a past it never had -- or, rather, assigning to it the past of another people long gone who won't notice.
Just last week I caught a brief segment of a recycled History Channel show called "Archaeology and the Bible." It's part of their "Digging for the Truth" series, and the part I saw was rooted firmly in the absurd premise that there is a direct chain of descent from the "Canaanites" of Biblical times to the palestinian Arabs of today. The message was that archeology proves that the "palestinians" were there first and, moreover, had a superior culture to that of the Israelites. More newly invented myth and fiction masquerading as "archeology" and "anthropology," delivered fresh to your TV with no disclaimer necessary.
This claim has actually been bandied about for a while now by Yasser Arafat and other palestinian propagandists, but to the extent it bears any resemblance to reality, the same could be said of palestinian Jews. In other words, if the "Canaanites" (a loose term with very different connotations depending upon whether you're an historian, archeologist, anthropologist, ethnologist or biblical scholar) are indeed part of the genealogical mix of the indigenous peoples in what is now Israel and the territories, palestinian Arabs and palestinian Jews could both arguably claim descent from them (although I think the Lebanese have a better shot). But the Canaanite connection is very much in dispute in any event, and as it totally ignores the last two thousand years of history in the region, as well as the ongoing aspirations (and lack thereof) of the respective claimants to the land, the whole argument is specious and irrelevant.
Nevertheless, that won't prevent it from being presented as "scholarship" and used to support revisionist libels by the likes of Nadia Abu El Haj. It remains to be seen whether Columbia will lend further sanction to this insidious campaign by granting her tenure.
