“Pure political fabrication.” that is how Nadia Abu El Haj describes the “modernJewish/Israeli belief in ancient Jewish origins.”
A blogger named Richard Silverstein says I’m making this up. He says I’m lying. That if you quote the full sentence:
“The modern Jewish/Israeli belief in ancient Israelite origins is not understood as a pure political
fabrication.”
In reality, Nadia Abu El Haj is faulting Israeli archaeologists for their thought crimes. Put more simply, El Haj believes they are at fault because “The modern Jewish/Israeli belief in ancient Israelite origins is not understood as a pure political fabrication.”
Read the whole paragraph (p. 250) and see what she really says.
“While by the early 1990s, virtually all archaeologists argued for the need to disentangle the goals of their professional practice form the quest for Jewish origins and objects that framed an earlier archaeological project, the fact that there is some genuine national-cultural connection between contemporary (Israeli-)Jews and such objects was not open to sustained questioning. That commitment remained, for the most part, and for most practicing archaeologists, fundamental. In other words, the modern Jewish/Israeli belief in ancient Israelite origins is not understood as a pure political fabrication. It is not an ideological assertion comparable to Arab claims of Canaanite or other ancient tribal roots. Although both origin tales, Arab and Jewish, are structurally similar as historical claims, (Israeli archaeologist) Broshi’s argument betrays a “hierarchy of credibility” in which “facticity” is conferred only upon the latter.”