Crossing Boundaries: New Perspectives on the Middle East

http://web.mit.edu/cis/www/mitejmes/

Nadia Abu El-Haj

Facts on the Ground. Archeological Practice and Territorial Self Fashioning in Israeli Society.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001

Reviewed by Elia Zureik[1]

Is archeology a form of "cultural survival," as was remarked by the late Albert Glock (1995), an American archeologist who taught and directed the Institute for Palestinian Archeology at Bir Zeit University until his death in 1992 is still unsolved murder case? Is it a "vendetta," as noted by British historian Sir Mortimer Wheeler (in Weatcroft 2001)? Or, is it "a science" as anthropologist Nadia Abu El-Haj treats it in Facts on the Ground, the title of the book under review? If one takes science to mean the production and acceptance of stable and uncontestable facts, then clearly archeology is not science in this standard definition of the term. But this does not mean that it is either culture or vendetta. Is it all of the above? To a large extent, it depends on who does the digging and naming. If one adopts the perspective that science is socially embedded, it is incumbent to discover the nature of this social imbrication, without having to slide into infinite relativism in the construction of scientific facts.

This is what Abu El-Haj does well in her book. In the first and tenth, and concluding chapter of her book, Abu El-Haj draws upon the sociology of science, in particular actor-network theory, to argue that a better way of understanding the nature of scientific activity (in this case archeology) is to move away from discourse analysis, which has characterized postcolonial studies, to examine the way scientists actually practice their craft - in other words, to consider science (archeology) as action rather than as discourse. This enables us to do two things. First, it permits us to view scientific practice as a contingent activity that depends on the mobilization of various actors, including local and everyday actors. Second, by assuming local character, scientific knowledge is portrayed as heterogeneous and amenable to transformation.

Rather than see it as a form of unified colonial discourse, archeology in the Israeli case emerges as a discipline that has undergone significant changes over the last half century since the establishment of the Israeli settler state. Demography and land appropriation are two central preoccupations of any settler society, and Israel is no exception. What is explored less in the literature is a third dimension, that of archeology. Where does archeology fit into the equation of one group claiming and legitimating its title to a land that is already inhabited by other people? Abu El-Haj sets out to understand the role of archeology, Israel's "past time," "in the formation and enactment of its colonial-national historical imagination and in the substantiation of its historical claims" (p. 2). She covers a period stretching from the late 19th century, when Zionist colonists first arrived in Palestine, through the 1950s following the creation of Israel, to the period of further colonial expansion in the aftermath of the 1967 war. "This study," she says, "is best understood as an anthropology of science that meets an anthropology of colonialism and nationalism" (p. 2). Studying archeology this way makes it possible for Abu El-Haj to understand how "Palestine" was remade into "Eretz Yisrael" (The Land of Israel). Thus, archeology has to do with creating space, with establishing presence by making connections with the past, and with gathering material-symbolic facts through excavating and renaming of the terrain in order to render visible Jewish connection to the land - a connection that predates 19^th-century Zionist colonization of Palestine. Over the centuries, many curious sojourners made their way to Palestine and wrote travel books, memoirs and landscape descriptions of the country.

It wasn't until the late 19th century, through the efforts of the London-based Palestine Exploration Fund, that concrete plans were undertaken to extend Britain's colonial experience with cartography in order to survey the country and prepare reliable maps, which would satisfy "the grand curiosity of Christendom," according to the Fund's mission statement (p. 22). As noted by Abu El-Haj, territorial knowledge and statistical techniques, which were developed in the second half of the 19th century, became essential tools to further Britain's imperial project of ruling. If mapping was intended to satisfy the requirements of empire, excavating was intended to corroborate biblical texts about Palestine through retrieving artifacts from the ground. The Fund's efforts were thus seen as an example of putting science in the service of religion. By the time the Ottoman Empire collapsed, Britain had already completed mapping the area west of the Jordan River, which the League of Nations authorized it to administer in 1922. Why did these boundaries, covering 6,000 square miles, come to define Palestine and not others? This is a familiar story in which colonial Britain parceled out territory and drew up boundaries in the Middle East and elsewhere to suit its political objectives. As Abu El-Haj remarks, the demarcation of Palestine's boundaries were the outcome of "ideological commitments and practical compromises" (p. 29).

British surveyors had to rely on local knowledge by the fellahin (peasantry) to check the biblical names and locations of various sites. In the words of Paul Carter, the "act of naming" becomes essential for it "symbolizes the imperial project of permanent possession through dispossession" (p. 35). In order to establish link between the fellahin and biblical text, the Fund's ethnographers recorded the language, manners and customs and concluded that the fellahin are not Arabs. Thus, the peasant population that was overwhelmingly Muslim "was seen to embody and to remember a history understood as a Judeo-Christian one" (p.35). Palestine's peasantry became the carrier of the Judeo-Christian past - but not for long. With the creation of Israel in 1948, the power of naming took on new turn with the aid of a nationalist ideology, passion for digging and the use of the bulldozer - which over the years became an all-familiar symbol of Zionism's settlement projects (see Rosenblum 2002; Abu El-Haj p. 153).

During the pre-1948 period the Yishuv set up the Jewish Palestine Exploration Society, whose first conference was held in 1943 in Jerusalem, and whose title yedi'at ha-artez (knowledge of the homeland) captured the essence of Jewish archeology in Palestine. Through its educational functions, the Society aimed to bring science to the general (Jewish) public in order to instill awareness of the Jewish connection to the land. But it is important to note that the field of archeology, which was overseen by the Department of Antiquities in Mandatory Palestine, was not about producing universal knowledge about the past; it involved demarcating the purview of such knowledge. "The landscape of Palestine was divided up into discrete zones: historical and modern, archeological and non-archeological, secular and sacred. And in the context of the practices of colonial archeological traditions, shaping the scientific field entailed configuring the colony, writ large" (p.72) This tradition was not reflective of those who inhabited Palestine, but of the (Judeo-) Christian world according to which Arab and Islamic presence fell outside its contours. Thus the British sought to educate the Arab and Muslim populations about Palestine's artifacts and its landscapes in order to preserve and protect material culture of value to the Christian tradition, and not in order to shed light on Arab connection to the land. As remarked by Silberman, commenting on British attitudes,

"The Arab residents of the country were seen not as independent peoples who had undergone a long and complex historical development, but rather as quaint fossils of biblical customs and lifeways. Likewise, the local Jews of Jerusalem were not seen as a community possessing viable alternative historical traditions, but as fossilised New Testament Pharisees" (2001: 493).

There were stark differences between the two communities. Right from the outset, it seems, the imbalance in knowledge and social organization between the Arab and Jewish population in Palestine advantaged the latter, who with the creation of Israel, the thrust of archeology shifted from the Christian to the Jewish past. The Arab and Islamic past of Palestine was defined after 1948, and reinforced after 1967, as a field of lesser importance compared to the Jewish past. Although the pre-state period was protonationalist and Jewish archeologists focused their efforts on the Diasporic period covering the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E., as a symbol of ancient Jewish presence in the country, it was British and American archeologists who made discoveries dating to the First Temple. These non-Jewish discoveries prompted Jewish archeologists to revise their focus in order to make "visible" an earlier connection to the land dating back to the First Temple, if not to time immemorial.

In a delightful fourth chapter titled "Terrains of Settler Nationhood," Abu El-Haj presents a fascinating treatment of the debate surrounding the adoption of names in Palestine. For the Zionists, it was archeological "facticity" in the positivist tradition that counted in the struggle (with the British) over the naming of places, and "was intrinsic to formulating and substantiating the distinctive settler-colonial imagination of a nation 'returning home'" (p.85). Abu El-Haj goes on to note that this facticity represented a form of scientific certainty in naming that "typified the Jewish political project of exploration, settlement, and the ultimate dispossession of most of the land's indigenous population" (p. 85). Over the objections of native Palestinians, the British Mandatory authorities referred to Palestine in its Hebrew name Palestina, and next to it there appeared on the stamps of the Mandate period the letters E.I. (referring to Eretz Israel). The use of Arabic and Hebrew names for localities, depending on whether their majority was Jewish, Arab, or mixed towns, was not good enough for the Yishuv leadership who insisted on using the name Eretz Yisrael for the country, and on using Hebrew names even if the locality was overwhelmingly Arab. For example, a Jewish committee of experts submitted to the Mandatory government a proposed list of Hebrew names in which Nablus, a town known for its Arab nationalist past to this day, would be labeled by the biblical Hebrew name Shechem. Even in places that did not have a corresponding Hebrew name, the committee of experts headed by Ben-Zvi, who later became Israel's president, recommended that Arabic names be adapted to a Hebrew version. For example, instead of using the name "Dair Aiyub" to refer to an Arab village, the committee suggested using the name "Deir Job" (p. 89).

By recourse to linguistic arguments, Hebrew Biblical texts, and the use of experts, the Yishuv presented its project of ethnic naming as based on science. It was not coincidental that immediately upon the establishment of the state, which was accompanied by the expulsion of around 800,000 Palestinians and the destruction of more than 400 villages, that David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, appointed a Governmental Names Committee to symbolically Judaize the country through the use of Hebrew names. With the departure of the British Mandate, Israel perceived its task as that of "political decolonization" in which a "settler colony" became almost overnight a "settler nation". Abu El-Haj points out that "on seizing power the project of geographic-linguistic transformation and standardization was officially pursued, erasing remainders of an Arab past - not just materially, but also linguistically" (p. 92). With the establishment of the state, Israeli archeology experienced a paradigm shift, a term that Abu El-Haj borrows from physicist-cum-historian of science Thomas Kuhn. Thus instead of just accumulating facts in a pre-paradigmatic fashion, as is the case with Kuhn's "normal science," Israeli archeologists began to arrange these facts into a paradigm of "problem solving" which would entertain controversies and scientifically demonstrate continued Jewish presence in the country (p. 100). Armed with scientific certainty, (Jewish) archeologists set out to ethnicize the country through naming. The "politics of naming" (p. 118) re-emerged in a more forceful manner in the context of identifying pottery shards in the major excavation of the 1950s, which took place in Hazor, Upper Galilee. At the center of this "epistemic" debate was the precise manner and date in which the Israelites succeeded the Canaanites in settling Palestine. Abu El-Haj examines the confrontation between Yigal Yadin and Yohanan Aharoni, two central figures in Israeli archeology, to demonstrates the nature of scientific controversies surrounding Israelite settlement in Palestine: did it happen through "peaceful infiltration" by the Israelites into Canaan, as subscribed to by Aharoni, or was it through a military defeat of the Canaanites at the outset by the Israelites, which was Yadin's position? It is too simplistic to argue, Abu El-Haj points out, that these two modes of explanation reflect the social background of the two actors - Yadin being a military man and the first Chief of Staff of the Israeli armed forces, while Aharoni came from a kibbutz. The conflict between the two schools should be understood through puzzle-solving over "texts, pots, and dates," (p. 104) and by looking at the relationship between empiricism and nationalism, and how the former was deployed in order to "give credible form to the latter, not just in narrative, but even more powerfully in material cast" (p. 100). It was a question of "details" which pitted one archeologist against another. While part of the debate focused on dating Israelite settlement in Upper Galilee (was it the fifteenth, thirteenth or twelfth century B.C?), the crucial point to emerge was that on the larger issue of Israelite settlement in Upper Galilee there was general agreement. If the ethnic label "Canaanite period" came to designate the Bronze Age, the "Israelite period" stood for the Iron Age. It is with this background that Abu El-Haj remarks, "[t]hese ethnic-chronological distinctions, in turn, were the lens through which archeological data would be made to make historical sense" (p. 107).

Thus "The Israelite [italics in original] period, after all, denotes not simply a temporal range, one that could, quite easily be labeled something else, (i.e., the Iron Age). More fundamentally it signifies a cultural-political ontology essential to classifying and interpreting its archeological remainders" (p. 107). As I remarked earlier, El-Haj's theoretical sophistication is apparent throughout the study. In chapter 7, "Excavating Jerusalem," she makes the point that archeological work is "theory laden". A "prior historical story" as per the Bible, Talmud and other sources guided the collection of facts, and in turn interpretation of facts was used to validate the textual source. The theory-ladeness of archeology in Israel results in tautology, which means "that the discipline's Jewish nationalist commitment is both presupposed and made" (p. 131). Abu El-Haj singles out this circularity in the mode of operation during the 1968 Jerusalem excavation. Thus, archeologist Benjamin Mazar, who led the excavation on the slopes of Jerusalem's Haram El-Sharif (Temple Mount), to determine Israelite settlement in the city, relied on biblical sources to carry out the excavations, while textual sources were deductively validated by interpreting the archeological evidence as a proof of the validity of the historical record (p. 135). The textual sources "determined where to excavate, what to look for, and through which they were able to identify and name what it was that had been found in the first place" (p. 136). The outcome of this practice is that it foreclosed raising other questions and interpreting the data differently. The meta-narrative of the city's history as conceived by Israeli archeologists left "little place for a sustained curiosity about other kinds of questions that one could imagine asking about the city's past" (p. 140). Evidence that contradicted biblical accounts was ignored (p. 140). By the same token, she remarks that anthropological and social historical questions about the daily lives of people in the city were not entertained. Abu El-Haj questions the inference that the Roman Legion burnt the city in 70 C.E. "How does one determine that a specific historical event is causally linked to physical [italics in original] remnants of fire?" The story of the Roman destruction is "much more in keeping with nationalist historiography" (p. 145). Other "equally plausible accounts," for which there is ample evidence could be that the fire "was evidence of class or sectarian conflict within Jewish society" which erupted prior to the Roman entry. At the time the Jerusalem excavations began in 1967, "the century-long tradition of the wider field of biblical archeology had already delimited the parameters of inquiry and debate for the study of ancient Jerusalem" (p. 132). And by the time the First and Second Temple were destroyed, Jerusalem had passed through the Iron Age, the Persian, Hellenistic, and early-Roman periods. If the excavations in Upper Galilee supported claims of Israelite settlement in Palestine, the Jerusalem excavations intended to provide rationale for Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem. Taken together, Israelite settlement, expansion, and the labeling of Jerusalem as the capital city, the mythical "Israelite state" came into being.

Abu El-Haj notes that in excavating the Old City Israeli bulldozers leveled several Islamic monuments, but that this was not a sweeping destruction of the Islamic past. Certain Islamic remains from the Umayyad period (660-750 C.E.) were not bulldozed. How is this to be explained? Here Abu El-Haj downplays those explanations that seek to personalize this anomaly in terms of the politics of the archeologists in question. Instead, she opts for a broader explanatory paradigm according to which Israeli archeologists acknowledged Ummayad presence in Jerusalem as long as this did not clash with demonstrating earlier Jewish presence in the city. By endorsing the broader context of archeology as a scientific discipline, Israeli archeologists were keen to remain and be seen by the world community of archeologists to operate within established scientific norms. But these practices were worked out within a biblical historical meta-narrative.

Political criteria were invoked when past and future claims to the city conflicted with the Jewish "story". For example, when the Jewish Quarter was rebuilt in 1967, and was fashioned in such a way so as to naturalize its presence in the city along with other adjacent quarters, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that priority in settling in the rebuilt Jewish Quarter should be given to Jews over non-Jews. Whenever archeology came face-to-face with politics, mainstream archeologists in Israel, who define themselves as secular, rejected any association between the two. For example, Abu El-Haj demonstrates in Chapter 8, titled "Historical Legacies," how Israeli archeologists objected to having right-wing settlers lead the march to enter the newly opened exit for the Western Wall Heritage Tunnel. The approval of this project in 1996 by then Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was a political act designed to strengthen his standing with the settler community. The opening of the Tunnel led to large-scale riots and violence in Jerusalem and the occupied territories. Israeli archeologists are not as scientifically neutral as they wish to portray themselves. In a recent article, Israeli historian Tom Segev (2002) discusses the role of the Israeli archeological establishment in the "service of the nation" and in furthering the Zionist project. According to the article, Aharon Shay, a professor of History at Tel-Aviv University, sought information about the destruction of the more than 400 Palestinian villages in 1948. He approached the Israel Land Administration, the Jewish National Fund, and the Israeli army for relevant information, and they all refused to make their archives available to him. He decided to interview some of those who were involved in the destruction of the villages. His interviews led him to the archives of the Society for Archeological Research (established in 1964 and was primarily funded by the Israel Land Administration) at the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem. It turned out that the Society researched and approved the destruction of 100 villages, by advising the Israel Land Administration that their destruction had no bearing on archeology. The same procedure was also implemented in 1967 in the destruction of uprooted Palestinian villages, as well as deserted villages on the Golan Heights.

I mention the direct role of Israeli archeology in the obliteration of Palestinian presence for two reasons: first, to underscore the connection between archeology and politics in Israel; second, to point out that just because archeology uses the vocabulary of science, this does not mean that there are no grave political consequences for these acts. While Abu El-Haj alluded to this connection, it could have been highlighted more forcefully. However, she is right in concluding that Israeli archeology did not drive its bulldozer through Palestine to destroy everything in sight that is not Jewish. Science was used to fashion Israeli presence in Palestine. The 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.

I am sure we will be hearing more in the future from Nadia Abu El-Haj, who is at the start of what looks like a promising academic career. In the meantime, Palestinians will do well to digest her words and, as she remarks in the concluding chapter of her book, to acquire the scientific tools in order to study and preserve their past (p. 274). As pointed out by Silberman in his comments on the archeology of Jerusalem, "Palestinian intellectuals were drawn primarily to the intangible heritage of folklore and literature," (496) hardly the sort of tools with which to successfully crystallize the Palestinian nation on the ground.

References

Glock, Albert, "Archeology as Cultural Survival: The Future of the Palestinian Past," Journal of Palestine Studies, 1995, XXIV, No.2, pp. 70-84. Rosenblum, Dorn, "Our Friend the Bulldozer," Ha-Aretz, 20 September, 2002 [Internet English Edition].

Segev, Tom "Where are All the Villages. This is How the Country was Cleansed from the Leftovers of the War of Independence; Archeology in the Service of the Nation," Ha-Aretz, 13 September, 2002 [Internet Hebrew Edition].

Silberman, Neil Asher, "If I Forget Thee, O Jerusalem: Archeology, Religious Commemoration and Nationalism in a Disputed City, 1801-2001," Nations and Nationalism, 2001, Vol. 7, No. 4, pp. 487-504.

Wheatcroft, Jeoffrey, "Who Killed Dr. Gluck," New Statesman, August 6, 2001.

[1] Elia Zureik is a Professor at the Department of Sociology, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada