Facts On The Ground (book) - Reception - Academic Reviews (chronologically-ordered)

Academic Reviews (chronologically-ordered)

In the MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies, Elia Zureik, a professor of sociology at Queen's University, writes that Abu El Haj's "use of the sociology of science as a perspective in her research is both clever and refreshing. It further elevates research about Palestine to new heights, by placing it squarely in current social science literature and debates. We need more such studies."

Edward Said wrote of being "indebted" to the book and work of Abu El Haj, in Freud and the Non-European (2003), offering that:

What she provides first of all is a history of systematic colonial archaeological exploration in Palestine, dating back to British work in the mid-nineteenth century. She then continues the story in the period before Israel is established, connecting the actual practice of archaeology with a nascent national ideology - an ideology with plans for the repossession of the land through renaming and resettling, much of it given archeological justification as a schematic extraction of Jewish identity despite the existence of Arab names and traces of other civilizations. This effort, she argues convincingly, epistemologically prepares the way for a fully fledged post-1948 sense of Israeli-Jewish identity based on assembling discrete archaeological particulars -scattered remnants of masonry, tablets, bones, tombs..."

In her review of Facts on the Ground for American Ethnologist, Kimbra L. Smith professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, writes that "Abu El Haj provides an important and timely look at some of the politics of self-representation behind the Israeli government's public face, within a broader argument about science's capacity for political involvement and for maintaining and even advancing colonialist policies. However her failure to present either official Palestinian or public Palestinian/Israeli opinions and attitudes within the context of Israel's (settler) nationalist-archaeological discipline means that answers to the excellent questions she raises are never made clear."

Aren Maeir, professor of archaeology at Bar Ilan University, writing in Isis, calls the book "a highly ideologically driven political manifesto, with a glaring lack of attention both to details and to the broader context." Regarding Abu El Haj's criticism of methodology in Israeli archeology, Maeir writes, that in contemporary archeology in Israel, "only marginal elements act in accordance with or identify with the non-scientific agendas that she attempts to delineate." Maeir argues that the major reason for the lateness of Israel to adopt modern techniques was not a "hidden colonial agenda," but rather a result of the "European classical archeology" from which it developed.

James Gelvin, a UCLA historian, describes Facts on the Ground in his book The Israel-Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years of War, as "probably the most sophisticated presentation of Israel's archaeological obsession and its relation to nationalism and 'colonial knowledge'".

Alexander H. Joffe, an archaeologist and past director of the academic watchdog organization Campus Watch, writes in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies that "Abu El Haj's anthropology is undone by her ill-informed narrative, intrusive counter-politics, and by her unwillingness to either enter or observe Israeli society The effect is a representation of Israeli archaeology that is simply bizarre."

Keith Whitelam, professor of religious studies at the University of Sheffield and author of The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History, told a New York Sun reporter that Facts on the Ground was a "first-rate book," which made "a very fine contribution" to the study of "how national identity is constructed and the assumptions which are then built into academic work on history and archaeology." In the same article, William Dever, a retired professor of Middle Eastern archaeology at the University of Arizona, describes Abu El Haj's scholarship as "faulty, misleading and dangerous".

Alan F. Segal, a professor of religion and Jewish studies at Barnard College, has been a vocal critic of the book. In the Columbia Daily Spectator, he writes that Abu El Haj's work is tainted by a failure to examine primary sources in Hebrew, a reliance on anonymous sources, and a lack of breadth in its review of scholarship to date. According to Segal, Abu El Haj focuses her attention on the "extreme conclusions" of "biblical minimalists" who constitute "no more than a handful of scholars" out of "thousands at work (in Biblical scholarship) in the world". Segal writes that "none of the minimalist scholars she relies upon for this purpose is actually a working archaeologist," and that "pretty much every other one of the virtually countless theories about Israelite settlement in First Temple times would disprove her hypothesis about Israeli archaeology." He adds that she "does not tell her readers about" these fields, "why they are necessary", or, "how decisions are actually made in biblical studies."

In the fall 2007 issue of The Current, there was criticism of Abu El Haj from three different scholars. First, David M. Rosen, professor of anthropology at Fairleigh Dickinson University asks, "How can a work that apparently demonstrates an impaired understanding of the archeological sciences be regarded as good anthropology?" Answering his own question, he offers that while in the contemporary political climate, "One hardly needs to be Braveheart to be openly antagonistic to Israel at a meeting of anthropologists," the more serious problem lies in the tradition of post-colonial studies, where anthropologists like Abu El Haj can "construct their analyses with little concern for empirical or logical connectedness. Like mythology, they are masters of the found object, and pull in anything to create a story. This methodology has no connection to science. Its power lies in its politics and its aesthetics, and not in such boring ideas as validity and reliability." In the same issue, Jonathan Rosenbaum, paleographer and President of Gratz College, suggests that Abu El Haj's "personal agenda" is "the furtherance of her own nationalistic ideology at the expense of decades of careful excavations and rigorous publications" establishing the historicity of much of the Biblical narrative. Finally, James R. Russell, a professor at Harvard University, describes Facts on the Ground as a "malign fantasy" designed to demonstrate the "colonial essence" of Zionism by denying the history of ancient "Jewish sovereignty and long historical presence."