Nadia Abu El Haj is a young professor at Barnard College. She is the author of a single book, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society.  Since this is her only offering to justify such a prestigious honor, and the book itself has major flaws and inaccuracies (see Academic and Peer Reviews), a controversy has developed over the question of whether Nadia Abu El Haj’s work merits the honor of tenure at Columbia.

 

Facts on the Ground is best understood as a post-modernist effort to deconstruct the existence of the ancient Hebrew kingdoms and nullify the connection between modern Jews and the ancient Hebrew people. Put simply, for Abu El Haj, if you can deny the ancient Jewish connection to the land of Israel, you can delegitimize the current Jewish presence there. This, and not truth and research, is her goal.

 

In Facts on the Ground, Abu El Haj asserts that the ancient Israelite kingdoms are nothing but a  “pure political fabrication" and "a tale best understood as the modern nation’s origin myth.” Despite all evidence to the contrary, Abu El Haj puts forth the notion that the ancient Jewish presence in the Land of Israel is not a matter of history, but a mere “belief,” a “tale or historical myth,” and that Herodian Jerusalem was “not a Jewish city,” it was “inhabited primarily by ‘other’ communities.”

 

Scholarly criticism of Abu El Haj’s methodology, especially her deliberate omissions and distortions of the archaeological evidence, has been severe.

 

This web site is the result of an effort by a group of Barnard and Columbia alumnae/i to persuade the University to deny tenure on the basis of poor scholarship. Just as Abu El Haj denied the real facts on the ground and failed to live up to the standards and requirements of academic integrity...so too should Columbia now deny her tenure application. On this site, we offer you substantial evidence of the lack of facts in Facts on the Ground.

 

2007 Copyright: Deny Abu El Haj Tenure Committee