...Nadia Abu El Haj is a young Palestinian-American academic beautiful enough that in a different era she might have gotten work as a magician’s assistant. You know, the girl who stands on the stage looking so good that you watch her and miss the sleight of hand that lets the magician make a rabbit vanish into thin air. In this enlightened era, we allow young women to become magicians in their own right. Abu El Haj has been appointed Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College where she writes within a scholarly tradition that “Reject(s) a positivist commitment to scientific methods…” and is “rooted in… post structuralism, philosophical critiques of foundationalism, Marxism and critical theory… and developed in response to specific postcolonial political movements.”

This post-modern approach empowers Abu El Haj to vaporize the positivist notion that the Jewish people lived in Israel in ancient times. Making such a well-documented fact disappear requires an intellectual sleight of hand of monumental proportions. To Abu El Haj, pulling off such a magic trick is apparently worth the effort since denying that Jews are indigenous in Judea enables the redefinition of Israeli Jews as colonizers; foreign settlers with no legitimate right to the land. Or perhaps the post-modern rhetoric Abu El Haj employs with such facility is mere window dressing covering a far older tradition, that of deploying the scholarly paraphernalia of footnotes and arcane language to make a political assertion appear as responsible scholarship. By either interpretation, Abu El Haj’s first book, Facts on the Ground; Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society, derived from her doctoral thesis, is part of a wider intellectual effort intended to persuade the world that Israel is illegitimate, a European outpost with no indigenous roots in the Middle East, and, therefore, that the Israelis deserve to be driven out of Israel much as the French were driven from Algeria.

The problem, of course, is that those ancient Jews existed. Almost two millenia before an Arab army conquered and occupied the land of Israel, the place was a sovereign, indigenous Jewish or proto-Jewish state. Unlike Algeria, where there was not much doubt that the French were nineteenth-century arrivals in an ethnically Arab land, the Middle East is contested by two peoples, each with a claim to indigeneity. Unless, of course, the claim of one of these peoples can be delegitimized by the politically targeted use of post-modern scholarship...