...Since the book closes with a paean to the destruction of a site of traditional Jewish veneration - Joseph's Tomb in Nablus: "In destroying Joseph's Tomb Palestinian demonstrators eradicated one ‘fact on the ground'" - I assume that Ms. Abu El Haj might very well like to eradicate all of the ancient Hebrew ostraca and other artifactual evidence of an ancient paleo-Jewish presence as well. Lacking that power, she demands that the presence of ancient Israelites in the Land of Israel be deconstructed.

Since there is no evidence for Arab/Muslim national-cultural continuity in the Land of Israel dating to before the Arab conquest of the seventh century, this young woman demands that we level the playing field by pretending that evidence of Jewish national-cultural continuity does not exist either. The modern Jewish/Israeli belief in ancient Israelite origins" becomes a "pure political fabrication," to be understood as an "ideological assertion comparable to Arab claims of Canaanite or other ancient tribal roots." This eliminates the "hierarchy of credibility" (here she follows Cooper and Stoller, 1997, Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World) in which "facticity" is conferred only upon the former.

Unfortunately, Ms. Abu El Haj's approach also eliminates the standards of evidence upon which scholarly work is based...