Reflections on Archaeology and Israeli Settler-Nationhood

Radical History Review

Volumn 2003, Issue 86, 2003, Pages 149-164

  El Haj, Nadia Abu ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 84998058528     PISSN: 01636545     EISSN: 15341453     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/01636545-2003-86-149     Document Type: Note

References (46)

1. Qol ha-’Ir, February 7, 1992, 37.
2. See Nachman Ben-Yehuda, The Masada Myth: Collective Memory and Mythmaking in Israel (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995); and Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
3. See Ofer Bar-Yosef and Amihai Mazar, “Israeli Archaeology,” World Archaeology 13.3 (1982): 310–25; Magen Broshi, “Religion, Ideology, and Politics and Their Impact on Palestinian Archaeology,” Israel Museum Journal 6 (1987): 17–32;
4. Amos Elon, “Politics and Archaeology,” in The Archaeology of Israel: Constructing the Past, Interpreting the Present, ed. Neil Asher Silberman and David B. Small (Sheffield, U.K.: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997), 34–47;
5. Shulamit Geva, “ha-Arkheologiya ha-miqra’it be-reshit darkhah” [Biblical Archaeology at its Beginning], Zemanim 2.42 (1992): 92–103;
6. Aharon Kempinski, “Hashpa`ata shel ha-arkheologiya `al ha-ḥevra ve ha-tarbut ha-yisraelit” [The impact of archaeology on Israeli society and culture], unpublished manuscript; Yaacov Shavit, “Archaeology, Political Culture, and Culture in Israel,” in Silberman and Small, The Archaeology of Israel, 48–61;
7. Neil Asher Silberman, A Prophet from amongst You: The Life of Yigael Yadin: Soldier, Scholar, and Mythmaker of Modern Israel (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1993); Yaacov Shavit, “ ‘`Emet me-eretz tismaḥ’: Qavim le-hitpatḥut ha-’inyan ha-tsiburi ha-yehudi be-arkheologiya (‘Ad shnot ha-shloshim)” [“Truth will rise from the earth”: Points in the development of the Jewish public interest in archaeology (until the 1930s)], Katedra 44 (1987): 27–54.
8. It is far more historically accurate to understand Zionism as a colonial project, which articulated in a particular way with a nationalist one, than to occlude the colonial question altogether. To argue, by way of contrast, that Zionism was not a colonial project but, quite simply, just a nation-state building project requires subscribing to one or more of the following assumptions. First, Zionism was a nationalist movement seeking to establish a sovereign state in what was legitimately, as established in the ancient past, the Jewish national homeland. This assumption makes sense only from a nationalist perspective: one has to believe that Jews, in contrast to all other nations, are a historic nation, with a historic national territory of their own to which they returned. There is an extensive literature on the modern origins of nationalism that challenges such nationalist claims. See, for example, Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991); Craig Calhoun, Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). There is, of course, the attendant theological commitment to this land as given by God to the Jews, which, like the nationalist commitment, is a belief, but is not analytically viable as a social scientific or historical argument. Second, one could argue that the state of Israel cannot be considered a colonial state because of the historical circumstances that led to its creation: European anti-Semitism, and more specifically, the Holocaust. But there is nothing about moral foundations that lies at odds with colonial projects. Indeed, many settler-colonies were founded by communities escaping (religious) persecution. The reasons for settling a country do not change the historical and political realities of colonial power, most fundamentally, the power of a European population to settle a country (in this instance, under British colonial dominion) whose indigenous population is subsequently displaced. Third, it has often been argued that Israel was not a colonial state because it was not built on the exploitation of indigenous labor. Settler-colonies, however, did not always rely on indigenous labor. Many displaced, or fought genocidal wars against, indigenous populations. For a discussion of this question vis-à-vis Labor Zionism and Palestine, see Gershon Shafir, Land, Labor, and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914 (1989; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
9. Andrew Pickering, The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 14.
10. Nadia Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
11. See Bruce Trigger, “Alternative Archaeologies: Nationalist, Colonialist, Imperialist,” Man 19 (1984): 335–70;
12. Russel G. Handsman and Mark P. Leone, “Living History and Critical Archaeology in the Reconstruction of the Past,” in Critical Traditions in Contemporary Archaeology: Essays in the Philosophy, History, and Sociology of Archaeology, ed. Valerie Pinsky and Alison Wylie (Albequerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1980), 117–35;
13. Philip L. Kohl and Clare Fawcett, Nationalism, Politics, and the Practice of Archaeology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); and Michael Shanks and Christopher Tilley, Reconstructing Archaeology: Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). For sustained engagements with the nature of archaeological argument and evidence, see Alison Wylie, “The Constitution of Archaeological Evidence: Gender, Politics and Science,” in The Disunity of Science: Boundaries, Contexts, and Power, ed. Peter Galison and David J. Stump (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 311–46. For a discussion of method, see Lester Embree, “The Future and Pasts of Metaarchaeology,” in Metaarchaeology: Reflections by Archaeologists and Philosophers, ed. Lester Embree (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991), 3–50.
14. Shanks and Tilley, Reconstructing Archaeology; Christopher Tilley, “Archaeology As Socio-political Action in the Present,” in Wylie and Pinsky, Critical Traditions in Contemporary Archaeology, 104–16; Handsman and Leone, “Living History.”
15. See Trigger, “Alternative Histories”; Wylie, “The Constitution of Archaeological Evidence.”
16. Pickering, The Mangle of Practice, 6.
17. Ian Hacking, Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 150. See also Peter Galison, How Experiments End (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); and Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
18. Hacking, Representing and Intervening, 167.
19. Ian Hacking, “The Self-Vindication of the Laboratory Sciences,” in Science As Practice and Culture, ed. Andrew Pickering (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 29–64.
20. Hacking, Representing and Intervening.
21. Karin Knorr-Cetina, “The Couch, the Cathedral, and the Laboratory: On the Relationship between Experiment and Laboratory in Science,” in Pickering, Science As Practice and Culture, 113–38, 115.
22. See Hacking, Representing and Intervening, 226; see also Karin Knorr-Cetina, Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 26–45. In my discussion of experimentation and laboratories, I have skirted over many of the complexities of the issue. As both Peter Galison and Karin Knorr-Cetina argue, experiment is not a unitary thing: what counts as an experiment (and as an empirical fact) differs both between different sciences (or scientific subfields) and within a particular science over time. See Galison, Image and Logic; Knorr-Cetina, Epistemic Cultures.
23. Hacking, Representing and Intervening, 225–26. See also Galison, Image and Logic; Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987); Knorr-Cetina, “The Couch, the Cathedral, and the Laboratory”; and Knorr-Cetina, Epistemic Cultures.
24. Knorr-Cetina, “The Couch, the Cathedral, and the Laboratory,” 115.
25. Michael Dietler and Ingrid Herbich, “Habitus, Techniques, and Style: An Integrated Approach to the Social Understanding of Material Culture and Boundaries,” in The Archaeology of Social Boundaries, ed. M. Stark (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998).
26. For an extended analysis of the excavations in which I explicate the paradigms of archaeological practice and not just the social interests that guided this work, see Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground, 130–62. The history sought was not simply coterminous with the history produced. For a discussion of the work of building the new Jewish Quarter, its architectural design, and the politics of Jewish settlement in the Old City, see 163–200. For a discussion of tourist practices in Jerusalem’s new Jewish Quarter and the work of interpreting the past and present for the public at large, see 201–38.
27. Ronald Suny, “History,” in Encyclopedia of Nationalism, ed. Alexander J. Motyl (San Diego, CA: Academic, 2001), 335–58.
28. See Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985).
29. Leszek Kolakowski, The Alienation of Reason: A History of Positivist Thought, trans. Norbert Guterman (New York: Anchor, 1969), 54.
30. Galison, Image and Logic, 785.
31. See Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground, 22–44.
32. See Geva, “ha-arkheologiya and miqra’it be-reshit darkhah.”
33. See Bruce Trigger, A History of Archaeological Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
34. Nahum Slousch, “The Excavations around the Monument of Absalom,” Proceedings of the Jewish Palestine Exploration Fund, 1.2–4 (1925): 1–30, 8.
35. See Benjamin Mazar, Beth-She’arim: Report of the Excavations during 1936–40 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1973). For an extended analysis of this work of fact collecting in relation to the project of settler-nationhood, see my Facts on the Ground, 73–98.
36. For an extended discussion of the Israelite settlement debate as it helps to empirically ground the national imagination, see Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground, 99–129.
37. Barbara Shapiro, A Culture of Fact: England, 1550–1720, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000).
38. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
39. Arising in the late 1800s and early 1900s, Labor Zionism consisted of a number of groups and political parties committed to developing socialism—broadly defined—in Israel. Divided into three main streams, the movement was united in its understanding of “the Jewish problem” (in Europe) as being intimately entwined with the deleterious effects of capitalism. The solution to both was to be a classless (national) society built, as it was ultimately formulated, on the foundation of Jewish labor.
40. Eyal Ben Ari and Yoram Bilu, eds., Grasping Land: Space and Place in Contemporary Israeli Discourse and Experience (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997).
41. Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots, 29.
42. On the ways in which “presence” has created “a situation whereby the territorial expanse is settled and ‘facts’ are established on it,” see Baruch Kimmerling, “Sovereignty, Ownership, and ‘Presence’ in the Jewish-Arab Territorial Conflict: The Case of Bir’im and Ikrit,” Comparative Political Studies 10.2 (1977): 155–78, esp. 157. I would also like to thank Tamara Neuman for her insights on questions of presence and the Judaization of land.
43. Zeev Herzog, “Ha-Tanach: Ayn mimstaim ba-shetaḥ” [The Bible: There are no finds in the territory], Ha’aretz, weekend supplement, October 29, 1999.
44. Adam Zertal, “Mount Sinai Revisited,” Ha’aretz, English Internet ed., December 11, 1999. While this article is not framed as a direct response to Herzog, it is a challenge to the “extreme of the biblical deniers,” a category into which Herzog would fall.
45. Hershel Shanks, “Nor Is It Necessarily Not So,” Ha’aretz, English Internet ed., November 5, 1999.
46. See “Teguvot” [Responses], Ha’aretz, weekend supplement, November 5, 1999.