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Archeology and the Propaganda War Against Israel
[History News Network-George Mason University] Richard L. Cravatts - Nadia Abu El-Haj's book, Facts on the Ground: Archeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society, posits that "the modern Jewish/Israeli belief in ancient Israelite origins" is a "pure political fabrication." The problem with coming up with a book of archeology which defies logic and history, as El-Haj has done here, is that one would have to condemn or marginalize the work of all archeologists in the field whose work had formed the basis of the historical record she is determined to negate. "At the heart of this...is a monstrous lie," says professor of Classics at Cal State Fresno, Bruce Thornton, "the airbrushing of Jews from the history of Jerusalem, an Orwellian rewriting of history started by the Arabs and abetted by some politicized Western scholars." That is the core problem with Facts on the Ground - it is ideology parading as scholarship; it is the work of a dilettante who is not an archeologist and has never visited a dig. The true facts on the ground shape the uninterrupted 3,000-year Jewish presence in the land that became Israel.