Facts on the Ground
Archaeological Practice and Territorial
Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society
Reviewed by Jacob Lassner
Middle East Quarterly
Summer 2003
The peoples of the Middle East have long
waged battles to co-opt history. Since ancient
times, communal polities, ranging from small
tribal configurations to vast empires, and from
closely knit ethnic groups to more inclusive
modern nations, have turned to the past to
legitimize the present. Abu el-Haj, an
anthropologist at Barnard College of Columbia
University, explores in this interesting study
how archeology has shaped the social and
political imagination of Israel and served the
aims of the state. The blurb on the back cover
of the book by Talal Asad, another
anthropologist, succinctly captures Abu el-Haj's
project: "She presents the first critical
account of Israeli archeological practice while
tracing the dynamic relationships among science,
colonization, nation-state building, and
territorial expansion."
Practice or Malpractice?
For Abu el-Haj, archeology as practiced in
Israel reflects an overwhelming need to
legitimize the national ethos. She holds that
the scholarly discipline of Israeli archeology
defers, intentionally or otherwise, to the needs
of contemporary nation-building. This is a
weighty charge. Does Abu el-Haj substantiate it?
To begin with, discussion of "Israeli
archeological practice" is rather sketchy, and
understandably so. There is much ground to cover
here. However one defines "archeological
practice," writing about it calls for an
understanding of archeological method, an
ability to interrogate technical reports, and
the perusal of numerous publications in which
archeological data is used to reconstruct actual
states of the past. In sum, writing about
archeological practice calls for considerable
familiarity with the techniques of field
archeology and the burgeoning historiography of
the ancient Near East.
In particular, discussing Israeli archeology
as a cultural phenomenon requires an in-depth
understanding of Israeli society and, above all,
a working knowledge of scholarly Hebrew. Abu
el-Haj indicates she studied Hebrew in a
desultory fashion, and although her bibliography
and footnotes do contain references to Hebrew
publications, she appears to have invested
lightly in the multitude of Hebrew sources that
could have informed her study and made it
compelling.
As it stands, Abu el-Haj's reading of Israeli
academic culture and its relationship to the
politics of statehood politicizes the work of
Israel's scholarly establishment in a way that
can be misleading. Even when granting certain
Israeli archeologists their academic integrity,
she tends to describe their findings as bent by
the state for its own political purposes. This
is inaccurate. In fact, Israeli archeology is
characterized by lively discussion that values
independent scientific inquiry and often
undermines conventional wisdom, be it the
previous wisdom of peers or that of the nation's
foundational narratives. Both the print and
electronic media give extensive coverage to
archeological digs and displays. The broad
outline of that lively debate is well known
among those many Israelis who follow
archeological developments.
Given her interest in cultural studies, it is
not surprising that Abu el-Haj casts an
exceedingly wide net, and that leads to
problems. Her discussion of archeological
practice conflates the statements of tour
guides, the claims of museum displays, the
design of archeological parks in Jerusalem, and
the assertions of Israeli political
figures—particularly those politicians with
strong links to the settler movement—with the
research and writing of a highly demanding
scholarly discipline. To be sure, scholarly
debate is sometimes vulgarized for Israeli
public consumption, but that is part and parcel
of the way scholarship is made accessible in all
cultures.
One has always to appreciate the distinction
between the academic study of material remains
and the manner in which the evidence of
archeology is put to use for more narrowly
defined political or even commercial interests.
Abu el-Haj does not make this distinction
sufficiently clear. Quite the opposite. This is
a book about the politicization of the academy.
Her very title is revealing. One would expect a
book on archeology to be titled Facts in the
Ground, but her title is Facts on the
Ground, a reference to Moshe Dayan's
description of newly created Jewish settlements
on Arab territory captured during the 1967 war.
As this suggests, her focus is less the
"archeological practice" she stakes out in the
subtitle and more the political uses of
archeology, that is "territorial fashioning."
The author is seemingly aware that one can
draw distinctions between archeology as a
scholarly enterprise and archeology as a
national discourse, but she seems unwilling or
unable to find the proper balance in analyzing
the two. Instead, she prefers the all-embracing
"archeological practice," a term well suited to
her attempt to boil all aspects of Israeli
political culture in one discursive stew.
I find her least persuasive when her analysis
turns to cultural and postcolonial studies. The
references to that broadly ranging and very
fashionable literature might help establish her
credentials among social scientists and literary
scholars who stress the discursive power of
scholarship. But these references to theory tend
to interrupt the flow of her exposition while
adding little to an understanding of the
interplay between the formation of Israel's
modern nation-state and its real or imagined
past.
In the end, Abu el-Haj misrepresents the
Israeli passion for archeology. Its purpose is
not to legitimize the national ethos. To the
contrary: archeology appeals to Israelis because
it offers a visual dimension to a past otherwise
firmly anchored in oral and literary traditions.
For professionals and amateurs alike, the
archeology of the land of Israel is not a
vehicle to authenticate the nation's existence
or its distinctively Jewish character or the
passionate attachment of Israelis to the land
they claim as their state. All that is taken for
granted by Israel's Jewish citizens and by most
of the world as well. Rather it is only those
who deny Israel's right to exist or contest the
legitimacy of its current borders who deny
altogether or compromise Israel's links to the
historic past.
Post-1967 Developments
Archeology has played an indirect role in the
politics of the Arab-Israel dispute. The
strength (and also weakness) of Facts on the
Ground lies in its presentation of
archeological activity following the war of
1967, during which Israel conquered the West
Bank of the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan. That
conquest allowed Israeli archeologists to
explore the highlands that were the political
and demographic center of biblical Israel and
its post-biblical successors. Denied access by
the Jordanian authorities during the nineteen
years that the West Bank was ruled from Amman,
Israeli archeologists began extensive field
studies throughout the areas subsequently named
by Israelis "Judea and Samaria," after the
Hebrew toponyms of biblical times. Similarly,
the reunification of Jerusalem led to
large-scale archeological activity around and
within the holy city, including areas controlled
previously by the Jordanians. As a result of
this activity, scholars working on the holy city
have been able to recover specific sites of an
ancient past extending from Greco-Roman to
Islamic times.
The unification of Jerusalem also brought
about enormous changes in the city landscape.
Areas adjacent to the Old City on the western
side, which had become a slum before the war,
were leveled and rebuilt according to a master
plan. Within the Old City itself, the Jewish
quarter has been rebuilt and resettled by Jews;
its ancient synagogues, reduced to ruins
following the Arab conquest of the quarter in
1948, have returned; archeological gardens are
found throughout the city; the ancient Roman
Cardo, the main commercial thoroughfare of the
city in Greco-Roman times, has been restored and
lined with modern shops; and the ancient Jewish
cemetery, which had been desecrated by the
Jordanian army, was restored. In addition, what
is likely to have been the first Islamic
government complex in Jerusalem has been
excavated and opened for public viewing.
As Abu el-Haj reminds us, a good deal of this
activity gave rise to controversy, and not only
between Jews and Arabs. Authorities considered
it natural to restore the Jewish quarter and its
synagogues and once again make it the place of a
living Jewish community. One may argue that the
design of the quarter reflects relatively good
taste; in any case, it is certainly not
offensive.
Elsewhere, the wholesale changes were more
problematic. The Arab houses behind the Western
Wall of the Temple Mount, the holiest shrine of
the Jewish people, were leveled to make way for
an enormous plaza over which fly many flags of
the Jewish state. The wall itself, traditionally
a place of private prayer, was transformed into
a massive open-air synagogue that has given rise
to various disputes among Jews. An ancient
tunnel extending from the outer wall of the city
to the plaza was opened in 1996 to facilitate
traffic but drew Arab rioters who assumed that
the plan was to undermine the foundations of the
Temple Mount's Muslim holy sites. Ultra-Orthodox
Jews complained that archeological digs around
the city might compromise ancient Jewish burial
sites; secular Jews complained about a lack of
integrated planning and excessive kitsch. It is
difficult, however, to find in all this a
submergence of archeology to the interests of
the state.
A more nuanced case for the melding of
archeology and state policy can be made,
however, for excavations on the West Bank, where
upwards of 200,000 Jews have set down roots in
predominantly Arab lands. Jews who have taken to
the West Bank armed with the Hebrew Bible are
well aware of the various digs that connect the
highlands with ancient Jewish settlements. They
have established a modern map of settlement to
reclaim the homeland of their forefathers.
Israelis have replaced Arab place names
bearing the remotest relationship to biblical
toponyms with similar sounding or entirely
different Hebrew names, both within Israel
proper after the fighting of 1947-9 and after
1967 in the West Bank. In a sense, where Jews
have come to rule, they have reversed the
Arabization of historic Palestine that began
with its conquest by the Muslim armies nearly
1,400 years ago. Given these circumstances, it
is not surprising that Arabs are determined to
preserve the memories of Arab Palestine and to
use the past as an agenda to reclaim their land.
Abu el-Haj's book is part of this enterprise.
More broadly, even were Israelis guilty of
Abu el-Haj's charges, they would still have no
monopoly in manipulating the past. The
Palestinians, whose Arab ancestors crossed the
Arabian frontier and conquered the Holy Land in
the seventh century C.E., celebrate as their
progenitors the varied peoples of ancient
Canaan, the inhabitants of "historic" Palestine
more than a thousand years removed from the
initial Arab-Muslim incursions. A study of the
Arab uses of the ancient past would be a welcome
and even essential companion to Abu el-Haj's
book.
Jacob Lassner, professor of
history and religion at Northwestern
University, has written extensively on the
political uses of architecture and city
planning in the Islamic Near East.
