Thursday, October 25, 2007
The blogger at Greycat has chimed in on the "pure political fabrication" mini-controversy with regard to El Haj's book. He's...shudder...actually read the whole thing and agrees that she clearly said exactly what she's been characterized to have said:
...This one may well run and run, but it really shouldn’t, because Nadia Abu El Haj’s meaning in this passage (if not her syntax) is perfectly clear. In short, Paula Stern and the other critics are right: Abu El Haj’s position is that ‘the modern Jewish/Israeli belief in ancient Israelite origins’ should be ‘understood as pure political fabrication’, as an ‘ideological assertion’ and, as Stern correctly notes, she is being critical of Israeli archaeologists for not accepting that: they ought to, she thinks, but they don’t. What makes it worse, the reader is encouraged to conclude, is that Israeli archaeologists were in denial about this as late as the 1990s, a fact that undermines the claim of modern Israeli archaeology to be a truly scientific enterprise.
You really need to read the whole book to understand what Nadia Abu El Haj is doing here and to appreciate the full impact of her claims, rather than relying on the fragmented chunks made available via Amazon Reader or, even worse, taking at face value what other people choose to quote or misquote...
He has more to say beyond that.
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