Flinging Dirt In Archaeology DisputeYou can read the Stern petition here. I think it's a fair criticism that elements of it are careless. The sentence "She asserts that "the ancient Israelite kingdoms are a 'pure political fabrication'" is unfortunate. The phrase "pure political fabrication" occurs in a sentence that says that archaeologists do not regard "the modern Jewish/Israeli belief in ancient Israelite origins" to be such. That said, Abu El-Haj's syntax and argumentation are typically convoluted and roundabout in this paragraph and it takes some effort to sort out what she is trying to say. She seems to be implying that although archaeologists do not regard "the modern Jewish/Israeli belief in ancient Israelite origins" as on the same level as "Arab claims of Canaanite or other ancient tribal roots," they really ought to. This is not stated clearly (it's a good example of the argument by innuendo for which I criticized her in my review), but I don't see how else to read it in context. I have commented on the general question of Jewish vs. Palestinian cultural and genetic continuity with ancient Palestine here. Abu El-Haj's phrasing is vague enough that it's hard to be sure what she's trying to compare, but I think the most positive thing I can say is that if she means what she seems to be implying, she's wrong: they are not comparable. But I'm inclined to put the paragraph under Popper's category of being "not even wrong" -- not sufficiently clearly formulated to be evaluated critically. Still, I think Stern should have phrased her criticism more cautiously and carefully.
Some charges against Barnard professor’s tenure inaccurate; scholars divided.
by Larry Cohler-Esses
Editor-At-Large
The key organizer of a campaign to deny tenure to a Barnard College professor seen by some as virulently anti-Israel acknowledged this week that her petition against the professor may not have quoted the book accurately.
Barnard alumna Paula Stern, who now lives in an Israeli settlement community on the West Bank, acknowledged Tuesday that her petition —signed now by more than 2,500 people — incorrectly quotes from Nadia Abu El-Haj’s book in charging she is grossly ignorant of Jerusalem geography.
Stern also conceded attributing to Abu El-Haj a viewpoint that Abu El-Haj does not voice as her own in her book. The petition does so by taking a quote fragment from a section in which Abu El-Haj describes others as having the opposite viewpoint.
In addition, despite Abu El-Haj’s frequent citation of Hebrew language sources and an acknowledgment on her book’s first page thanking her Hebrew tutor, Stern’s petition asserts, “Abu El Haj does not speak or read Hebrew ... We fail to understand how a scholar can pretend to study the attitudes of a people whose language she does not know.”
The charge may stem from criticism from some scholarly quarters that Abu El-Haj’s book contains mistakes in Hebrew, indicating her skills in the language are inadequate for such complex scholarship. Other experts have defended her Hebrew skills.
“It was written very quickly,” Stern said of her petition, whose signatories include many Barnard and Columbia University alumni. “But there is a clear pattern in her book of attempting to undermine the historical connection of the Jewish people to the land.”
[...]
Stern denied she had taken out of context Abu El-Haj’s quote about political fabrication.
“She denies the ancient history of the Jewish kingdoms in many ways,” Stern said in an email about Abu El-Haj, “as when she says that Jerusalem in the times of Herod was not Jewish.”
The statement in question, in Abu El-Haj’s own voice, reads, “For most of its history, including the Herodian period, Jerusalem was not a Jewish city, but rather one integrated into larger empires and inhabited, primarily, by ‘other’ communities.”
[...]
Stern's petition also lambastes Abu El-Haj for "demonstrations of her ignorance of history and archaeology." It cites her quoting of an unnamed Israeli archaeologist criticizing a dig "in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City" as "one of the worst" in terms of method and preservation. "Somewhere in there are the complexes of the Palaces of Solomon," the archaeologist frets.
Stern notes that Solomon's palaces, if they exist, would be nowhere near the Jewish Quarter. But the archaeologist quoted was not referring to a dig there but to one on the south and southwestern slopes of the Temple Mount - near the City of David.
It is a site that, in fact, later turned up artifacts from what appear to be part of the palace grounds, said Greenberg, the Tel Aviv University archaeologist.
[...]
Blogs that comment substantively on Stern's quote, and which quote the relevant paragraph from Facts on the Ground in full, include Hit & Run (of Reason Magazine -- which is the first place I can find to raise the above criticism of Stern's petition), Greycat (in defense of Stern), and Stern's blog, Paula Says, where she responds.
I doubt that it is accurate to say that Abu El-Haj did not know Hebrew when she wrote the book. But in it she does make elementary errors that someone with a decent knowledge of the language would not have made, which raises the question whether she knew it well enough to pull off the ambitious project she undertakes in the book. Again, Stern should have put her criticism in those terms.
I don't know enough about the geography of Jerusalem (and don't have time right now to look it up) to comment on that issue.
I haven't signed either Stern's petition or the one in support of Abu El-Haj and I don't think tenure decisions should be made by petition. I wish the tenure committee the wisdom of Solomon. They're going to need it.