Nadia Abu El Haj: The argument over her use of the words "pure political fabrication"

Of all the controversial passages in Nadia Abu El Haj's Facts on the Ground, few have been so chewed over and have provided such fuel for polarized debate as this one, from her chapter 9,"Archaeology and its aftermath", page 250:

While by the early 1990s, virtually all archaeologists argued for the need to disentangle the goals of their professional practice from the quest for Jewish origins and objects that formed an earlier archaeological project, 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. That commitment remained, for the most part, and for most practicing archaeologists, fundamental. (Although archaeologists argued, increasingly, that the archaeological past should have no bearing upon contemporary political claims). In other words, the modern Jewish/Israeli belief in ancient Israelite origins is not understood as pure political fabrication. It is not an ideological assertion comparable to Arab claims of Canaanite or other ancient tribal roots. 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).

The text as given above is precisely as it appears in the book,* complete with footnote numerals, italics, brackets, and typographical error (that full stop after the bracketed phrase ending" contemporary political claims" should be inside the closing bracket).

Most of the attention this paragraph has received has focused upon the phrase, or rather fragment, ‘pure political fabrication’. Critics of Nadia Abu El Haj have taken the words as indicating that the author is arguing that that ’the modern Jewish/Israeli belief in ancient Israelite origins’ is a ’pure political fabrication’, sometimes reproducing the author’s original emphasis, sometimes not (herearesomeexamples). In response to these charges, others have argued that the words ‘pure political fabrication’ have been taken out of context and misinterpreted, and that Nadia Abu El Haj is saying precisely the opposite, that Israel’s ancient history is not a pure political fabrication (exampleshere).

Paula Stern, author of the anti-tenure petition and a persistent critic of Nadia Abu El Haj, has just revisited this passage with a trenchant rejection of such claims: ‘”Pure political fabrication.” that is how Nadia Abu El Haj describes the “modern Jewish/Israeli belief in ancient Jewish origins”.’ This posting has been picked up by Solomonia, where the point is amplified:

The critics say that when El Haj writes “The  modern Jewish/Israeli belief in ancient Israelite origins is not understood as a pure political fabrication”, she’s crediting Israeli archaeologists for not doing so (and agreeing that they should not, i.e. that it is not a “pure political fabrication”). Taken in context, however, contra the El Haj defenders, she is specifically not doing so: [the colon is followed by a lengthy quote from Stern]

This one may well run and run, but it really shouldn’t, because Nadia Abu El Haj’s meaning in this passage (if not her syntax) is perfectly clear. In short, Paula Stern and the other critics are right: Abu El Haj’s position is that ‘the modern Jewish/Israeli belief in ancient Israelite origins’ should be ‘understood as pure political fabrication’, as an ‘ideological assertion’ and, as Stern correctly notes, she is being critical of Israeli archaeologists for not accepting that: they ought to, she thinks, but they don’t. What makes it worse, the reader is encouraged to conclude, is that Israeli archaeologists were in denial about this as late as the 1990s, a fact that undermines the claim of modern Israeli archaeology to be a truly scientific enterprise.

You really need to read the whole book to understand what Nadia Abu El Haj is doing here and to appreciate the full impact of her claims, rather than relying on the fragmented chunks made available via Amazon Reader or, even worse, taking at face value what other people choose to quote or misquote.

For me the most interesting part of this passage is not the ‘pure political fabrication’ bit but the portion slightly further on, where Nadia Abu El Haj is discussing Magen Broshi’s unwillingness (as she represents it) to accord the ‘Arab claims of Canaanite or other ancient tribal roots’ the same status as the ‘Jewish/Israeli belief in ancient Israelite origins’. Reading to the end of the paragraph, with his or her mind prepared by what has gone before, the reader might reasonably be excused for coming away from this sentence …

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.

… with the impression that intellectual commensurability exists between the two sets of ‘origin tales’, and that the conferring of ‘facticity’ upon one rather than the other is arbitrary and ideologically determined. For structurally similar must mean similarly reliable, surely?

Of course not. Consider two claims I might make about how I came to be living at my present address. The claims ‘I moved into my present house after buying it from the previous occupants, who are now living abroad’ and ‘I moved into my present house after murdering the previous occupants, who are now buried in the cellar’ are structurally similar, but only one is a reliable description of reality.** The fact that things are structurally similar tells you nothing about their accuracy, verifiability or evidential base.

It’s clear, however, that for academics of the postmodern persuasion a ’hierarchy of credibility’ in which competing claims are compared with the evidence is something to be distrusted. I imagine that if presented at the end of the month with the competing (but structurally similar) claims ‘your salary has been paid into your bank account’ and ‘your salary has been paid into the bank account of a random stranger’ even the most skeptical professor would be pretty keen to erect a ‘hierarchy of credibility’ in which ‘facticity’ is conferred upon the interpretation that sees her getting paid. But of course our imaginary postmodern professor’s suspicion of ‘facticity’ would almost certainly manifest itself in a highly selective way. Generally speaking such skeptical critiques are fine when applied to other peoples’ lives, but really won’t do for one’s own.

* The reference to ‘Broshi’ in the passage from Facts on the Ground is to Magen Broshi, ‘Religion, ideology and politics and their impact on Palestinian archaeology’, Israel Museum Journal, vol. 6 (1987), pp. 17-32. Footnote 9 refers the reader to Ze’ev Herzog, ‘Deconstructing the walls of Jericho’, Ha’aretz (English edition), 29 October 1999; footnote 10 to Meron Benvenisti, Conflicts and Contradictions (New York: Villard Books, 1996). The final citation is to Frederick Cooper & Ann Stoler (eds.), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997).