The Petition.(Nadia Abu El-Haj's Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society)

In 1990, when Nadia Abu El-Haj was a graduate student at Duke, three years into her coursework in anthropology, she started thinking about a field-work project. She was not much moved by the prospect of adding a village study to the school's cartons of dusty monographs. Like other American anthropologists of her generation, she was interested in epistemology; she wanted to examine knowledge as a social construct, strongly connected to time, place, politics, and identity, and she wanted to do it in a culture where the status of common knowledge was being contested, even violently contested. She considered working on Palestine--her father was born there--but she ended up in Israel, learning Hebrew, poring over British-mandate and Israeli archives, and eventually moving into the field to document, and in many ways challenge, the claims and practices of Israeli archeology in the creation of the country's historical imagination and its contemporary self-description. She was not the first anthropologist to do this. Israeli social scientists had been debating the politics of archeology for years. But she was arguably the first with a name like Abu El-Haj.

She received her doctorate in 1995, and turned her dissertation into a book called "Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society," which was published in 2001 by the University of Chicago Press. In 2002, it won a Middle East Studies Association award for scholarship. The book looked at the role of archeology in what was essentially a political project: the Biblical validation for Jewish claims to what is now Israel. Specifically, it traced the history of a persistent "grammar of biblical recovery . . . increasingly recast within the terms of Jewish national revival and return," and the ways in which that grammar had produced a particular "reading" of ancient stones, potsherds, inscriptions, and even bones by the scientists who unearthed them--or, as one member of the Jewish Palestine Exploration Society put it, in the nineteen-forties, "Pottery is not pottery, it is Eretz Yisrael."

The book was praised by colleagues who responded to the critical tropes that were Abu El-Haj's legacy from scholars like Michel Foucault, Ian Hacking, Bruno Latour, and Edward Said, and dismissed by colleagues with a theoretical or a political or simply a turf interest in dismissing it. She says she expected that. But whatever controversy she imagined then was, at most, an exchange of letters in the kind of scholarly journals no one outside the academy reads. "I had given the book my best shot," she told me, when we started talking last fall. "I had got a lot of support for the project. I had grants, fellowships--I was turning down fellowships--so hundreds of people must have reviewed my work and liked it. But I'm not a public intellectual. I'm drawn to archives, to disciplines where the evidence sits for a while. I don't court controversy."

When "Facts on the Ground" appeared, Abu El-Haj had been teaching for four years at the University of Chicago. The anthropologist John Comaroff, her friend and mentor at Chicago, told me, "She was one of our stand-out hires, our youngest member, but at the same time the one everybody trusted. She brought to the place a sense of civility and repose." The book, by all accounts, gave her every chance of tenure, but she didn't stay. Hoping to join her husband, a hedge-fund manager based in New York, and start a family, she applied for a job at Barnard, the women's college at Columbia. In the fall of 2002, after a year at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, beginning research for a new book, she formally joined the Barnard faculty. In April of 2006, she filed for tenure there.

No one in her department doubted she would get it. She was known on campus for having an original and scrupulous mind--"a delightful mind," Judith Shapiro, Barnard's president and a fellow-anthropologist, calls it. She was fair-minded and collegial. Her courses were popular: Race and Sex in Scientific and Social Practice; Anthropology of Science; History and Memory. Shapiro described her to me as a "passionate, committed teacher," and the anthropologists across Broadway at Columbia, who had just made her their director of graduate studies, clearly agreed. Over the next year, her tenure file passed the scrutiny of three committees, which read everything written by and about Abu El-Haj, and recommended her for tenure. By the end of the spring semester in 2007, all that remained was the approval of a fourth committee known on campus as "the ad hoc"--five professors appointed case by case by Columbia's provost, Alan Brinkley. The ad hoc received Abu El-Haj's file in May and scheduled it for review last fall.

On August 7, 2007, a petition entitled "Deny Nadia Abu El-Haj Tenure" was posted on petitiononline.com. By the end of the month, it had found its way onto a number of e-mail lists and Web sites and been signed by nearly nineteen hundred people, many of them Barnard and Columbia graduates who in all likelihood had never heard of Abu El-Haj before. The petition described her as a scholar of "demonstrably inferior caliber" who indulges in "knowing misrepresentation of data"; denies Israel's historical claims to the Holy Land; "asserts that the ancient Israelite kingdoms are a 'pure political fabrication' "; "does not speak or read Hebrew"; and is "patently ignorant about the subject of her only book." It said that her "use of evidence . . . fails to meet the standards of scholarship that are expected of Columbia and Barnard undergraduates."

The author of the petition was a Barnard alumna (class of '82) named Paula Stern. She owned a small technical-writing business in Israel, and lived in Ma'aleh Adumim, a settlement three miles east of Jerusalem on the West Bank--which, to her mind, was not occupied territory but "Israel for forty years." (She describes herself as a middle-class Jewish girl from Teaneck, New Jersey, who had an epiphany in junior high school reading Leon Uris's "Exodus.") Stern told me that, by the end of a few pages of "Facts on the Ground," she knew that Abu El-Haj was "dangerous" and "wrong." "I was horrified, because what Abu El-Haj was saying in her introduction was just what Ahmadinejad is saying" is how she explained it, though she might have been hard put to cite the Iranian President's views on, say, First Temple Period archeology. She didn't think a "Palestinian" like Abu El-Haj could be expected to write objectively about Israelis any more than an Israeli like her could write objectively about Palestinians--that nationality was a "red flag," and carried the strong likelihood of prejudice. By her own standards, she was right.