Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society is a 2001 book by Nadia Abu El Haj based on her doctoral thesis at Duke University.
[1] Controversy over the book intensified five years after its publication, after news emerged in 2006 that Abu El Haj was under consideration for tenure at Barnard College where she served as an assistant professor.
[4] The book argues that archeology plays a fundamental role in the construction and reaffirmation of Israeli national identity, focusing on the observation of material facts and empirical evidence.
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..."[9]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.
"[10] Apen Ruiz, at the University of Texas at Austin, writes in H-Net that "Facts on the Ground offers a unique and pioneering approach to examine the politics of archaeological research."
[11] 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."
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.
[12] 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'".
"[15] 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".
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."
"[17] 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.
[18] 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.
"[19] One controversy related to the book came from a passage in Facts on the Ground in which Abu El Haj wrote that during a dig in Jezreel, British and Israeli archaeologists used "bulldozers ... in order to get down to the earlier strata, which are saturated with national significance, as quickly as possible."
[21] The dig in question was led by David Ussishkin of the University of Tel Aviv, who responded to Abu El Haj's characterization in an open letter published on the internet in December 2006.