And here's more El Haj commentary, from this week's Jewish Advocate [there's an editing error here as Reinharz refers to the piece by Hugh Fitzgerald without introducing him first...you'll see -- article not blockquoted for readability]:

Truth, lies and tenure at Barnard

By Shulamit Reinharz

I did not go to my 40th Barnard College reunion last month, although friends and the college development office urged me to attend. I chose not to go because I could not get an answer to a question I was asking concerning the tenure case of assistant anthropology professor Nadia Abu El-Haj.

According to information on the Web, El-Haj is a Palestinian. I was unsuccessful in my efforts to find exactly where she was born, a topic that interested me because I am not sure if she identifies as a Palestinian as a consequence of being born in what some people now call Palestine or because she identifies with Palestinians and was born elsewhere. I couldn’t find the facts.

This issue is significant because El-Haj has a strong opinion about what constitutes a fact. Evidenced by her 2001 book, “Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society,” which is based on her doctoral thesis at Duke University, El-Haj cares about facts in a strange way. As she writes on her Barnard faculty Web page, “Historical sciences generate facts.” This stands in contrast to the view that facts are phenomena that are independently verifiable. Her view is that facts are manufactured and exploited for political purposes. In other words, to her mind, intellectual work consists of constructing facts to support certain points of view. This is a completely cynical perspective on “research.” I’m not sure that ultimately El-Haj really believes it. Because if she did, she would recognize that her very book is a political treatise and thus need not be accepted as true.

The purpose of El-Haj’s book is to undermine Israeli archaeology, which she claims is bent on destroying evidence about Palestinian presence and substantiating Jewish presence. She accuses Israeli archaeologists of being dishonest, unscientific, and politically motivated.

In the Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Alexander H. Joffe, a lecturer in archaeology at Purchase College, State University of New York, and a participant in several archaeological seasons at Meggido, says: “At the heart of her critique is an undisguised political agenda that regards modern and ancient Israel, and perhaps Jews as a whole, as fictions.”

Does El-Haj have the credentials to do a study that would make such an attack credible? Apparently not, according to Fitzgerald and many others. El-Haj is “not really an archaeologist. There is not the slightest evidence that she has ever seen the work of Israeli archaeologists, ever visited a dig, ever studied the history of the development of Israeli archaeology, ever inquired as to how Israeli archaeologists choose the sites they do choose for digs,” Fitzgerald writes. There is no evidence that she knows Hebrew.

Aren Maeir, professor of archaeology at Bar Ilan University and lead archaeologist at Tel es Safi/Tel Gath (Gath of the Philistines), writes: “This book is the result of faulty and ideologically motivated research. One can only wonder how the 1995 dissertation on which it is based was authorized at Duke University and how a respected publisher like the University of Chicago Press could have published such unsubstantiated work.”

In his critique, Fitzgerald points out that El-Haj’s work is an example of what I call “the other way around” attack. To wit, it is not Israelis who have destroyed Islamic evidence, but the other way around. “In Islam there has been an almost total indifference to the non-Islamic or pre-Islamic world,” Fitzgerald writes. “Many of the artifacts of that world have been destroyed over 1,350 years of Muslim conquest and subjugation of Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, Hindus, and Buddhists. In India, the Muslim conquerors destroyed as much of the Buddhist and Hindu heritage as they could, sometimes in order to quarry the stone, sometimes to destroy statuary.” Most of us know that between 1948 and 1967, when Jordanians controlled parts of Jerusalem, they utilized Jewish gravestones as paving blocks.

Fitzgerald goes on to say, “The systematic assault by the Palestinian Arabs on all sorts of significant sites, some of them regarded as holy, was on display [and now is on-line] … in 2002, when the systematic and complete destruction of Joseph's Tomb in Nablus took place.” To this El-Haj provides what I call the “Israelis are guilty for Palestinian crimes” defense: “El-Haj … justified it as the uncharacteristic, but understandable reaction of desperate people, brought to the end of their collective tether by the diabolical behavior of the Israelis,” Fitzgerald writes.

As a Barnard alumna, I am understandably interested in the way my alma mater builds its faculty and teaches current students. Thus, I inquired repeatedly if El-Haj had received tenure. At first, I was told I should not meddle. I was not meddling, just asking a question, but my ivory tower was turning into an ivory fortress. Finally, I learned that a decision will be made in the fall. I’ll be watching.