JULIA M. O'BRIEN has recently visited Israel and the West Bank and has reflections on Biblical Scholarship and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict at Bible and Interpretation. She is quite right that solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian issues must be political ones and that uncritical use of the Bible and ideological use of the archaeology of the area are entirely unhelpful. That said, I was disappointed that she completely ignored the Islamist ideologies that are very much in play and which try to deny any historical connection between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel/Palestine, often resorting to Orwellian dismissal of the historical evidence (as with the persistent denial that there was a Jewish Temple on the Temple Mount). Scholars need to combat both trends so that the politicians can proceed without distraction by historically worthless ideologies. PaleoJudaica spends a good deal of time on this problem.
UPDATE (5 February): Related thoughts here.
