The Hebrew Bible is a fairy tale. Ancient Israel is a fiction. All the shards of pottery, the houses, the stone walls, terraces, grain storage silos and tombs in the hill country, forget about them. None of them speak, and none can be clearly linked to the Jewish people. Moreover, the Jews of modern-day Israel have no genetic or other real connection to the land they have illegitimately occupied in the modern age.

Or so Nadia Abu El-Haj would have you suspect. In her 2001 book, "Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society," published by the University of Chicago Press, the Barnard assistant professor of anthropology accused Israeli archaeology of making it all up simply to justify the existence of the Jewish state.

Five years later, this book is back in the news. That’s because El-Haj is up for tenure, and a number of Barnard alumnae are not pleased...

...El-Haj is not a practicing archaeologist. She hardly knows the Hebrew in which many Israeli archaeological debates are conducted. She has taken part in very few actual digs. Yet she confidently condemns Israeli archaeology as a tool of the Zionists. With only gossip to go on, she accuses one archaeologist of bulldozing non-Jewish strata to get to the levels that might offer details about ancient Israel. Bizarrely, she then concludes her book by reversing herself on such desecration, asking us to "understand" sympathetically the Palestinian mob that destroyed Joseph’s Tomb on October 8, 2000. I guess it all depends on whose narrative is being bulldozed...

...Lately, she has also embarked on genetic ancestry testing among Israel’s Jews in order to explore "race, diaspora and kinship." Will she seek to prove that Israelis today have no genetic link to the ancient Israelites and therefore no claim to their Jewish homeland?

If this is her intent, I have a personal reaction. My forebears came to America in the 1890s from Latvia and Poland. The Declaration of Independence, however, was written by upper crust WASPS. Nevertheless, it is still every bit as much a part of my proud identity and heritage as anyone else’s. So also are the lands of Israel and the Hebrew Bible. For hoping to erase the Jewish historical presence in Israel, for embracing a genetic concept of Jewish identity, and for further turning Palestinian and Jew against one another, Nadia Abu El-Haj’s book is a pure polemic. If Barnard grants her tenure, it will be rewarding a polemic, not scholarship.