Letter From The Editor

In a 2008 interview with The New Yorker, Barnard anthropology professor Nadia Abu El-Haj asserted that she was “not a public intellectual.” As an anthropologist, she was drawn to deep dives in the archives rather than contemporary events; the majority of her work on epistemology, settler colonialism, and Israeli and Palestinian nationalisms was confined to JSTOR and Sage Journals. After the fall of 2023, Abu El-Haj’s writing took on a different form. 

On Oct. 26, Barnard President Laura Rosenbury sent an email to the student body extending her sympathy for the tragic loss of life in Israel and Gaza, announcing an increase in public safety and crisis support on campus, and condemning hate speech on campus. Rosenbury expressed feeling “appalled and saddened to see antisemitism and anti-Zionism spreading.” Not two days later, Abu El-Haj, a member of the Barnard academic freedom faculty committee, responded in an open letter condemning Rosenbury’s conflation of antisemitism and anti-Zionism. She argued that Rosenbury’s email “made imminently clear that Palestinians, in particular, and many others—Arabs, Muslim, Jewish students, and anyone else that does not sign onto the email’s politics—are welcome at Barnard only if they align with a particular political ideology.” Since then, Abu El-Haj’s scholarship has informed public writing in support of Palestinian liberation and academic freedom through  open letters, public articles, and op-eds from her coalition with the Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine. 

Born in New York to a Columbia alum, Abu El-Haj is one of few Palestinian American scholars with tenure at Columbia. When she began her academic career, Abu El-Haj was one of the first Americans to look at Zionist epistemology as a settler-colonial project that shapes Israeli identity and nationhood. Her work—which has sought to illuminate how the non-neutral disciplines of archaeology and genetic history have contributed to Israeli self-fashioning—earned her a respected place in the Palestinian academic canon. It also earned her a place on countless combative Zionist websites as she endured criticisms of her work and petitions against her tenure, ultimately awarded in 2007. Referring to the scrutiny Abu El-Haj has faced, former Barnard President Judith Shapiro commented in 2008: “Nadia is quite an example of grace under pressure.” Today, her leadership extends beyond the classroom as students face arrest, suspension, and censorship following protests for Palestine and divestment from Israel. Abu El-Haj is the vice president and vice chair of the board at the Institute for Palestine Studies in Washington, the co-director of Columbia’s Center for Palestine Studies, and a familiar face on Columbia’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment. We spoke about her career and current events on April 11. We focused mainly on academia, but Abu El-Haj is adamant about maintaining focus on Gaza.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

The Blue and White: You started doing research on Israel and Israeli geographical identity formation before the BDS movement gained traction on college campuses. What academic and political atmosphere were you operating in at the time in relation to your work about Israel and Palestine? 

Nadia Abu El-Haj: The first book [Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society] came out in 2001, so I started in the ’90s. It was a different time on campuses, not just vis-à-vis BDS, but the conversation on Palestine was much more shut down at that point. I was in grad school and I wanted to do this project on archaeology and the transformation of landscape and common sense and, basically, how do you render a settler colony a national home. I got funding for it because it was a certain moment—this was the rise of postcolonial anthropology. But it certainly was a moment where critical conversations, scholarly conversations about Israel and Palestine were much more constrained than they are now. Now they’re a flash point and, whether they’re scholarly or political conversations, can become very explosive.

B&W: At the time, I know that you were encouraged to look at Israel because to understand Palestine, you need to understand the institutions that have power. How did this decision to study Israeli archaeology inform your research and your understanding of the region? 

NAE: I had gone to grad school assuming I would work in Palestine, and I thought I would really work on Palestinian communities, families in Jerusalem. But as I worked more through my first several years of graduate school, I decided that I wanted to flip the gaze. There’s an enormous amount of Israeli scholarship in anthropology and sociology on Palestinians in Israel, particularly citizens of Israel. And I wanted to think about, rather than just studying the “marginalized communities,” how do you think about the construction of a national home at this hegemonic center?

Archaeology is well-known. I did not invent this or claim it as a central practice in the early decades of Israeli statehood and a nationalist practice. People had written about that. So, it became a heuristic for me. How do I see the building of the Jewish nation state and the transformation of Palestine—how do I see that on a large scale? And one could think about that through the practices of archaeology.

The argument wasn’t that it was a nationalist practice, we knew that. It was how, if you looked very carefully at the discipline and some of its major digs and its imbrication with architecture and landscape; how could you think about how it became such a powerful discipline in terms of a kind of ideological and political transformation of Palestine into Israel?

B&W: I wanted to talk a little about the nuances in how conversations are shut down. You, Edward Said, and Rashid Khalidi have each been targeted for your identities and political beliefs in relation to your work, as well as the intellectual content of the scholarship itself. How have you seen research by Palestinians be delegitimized?

NAE: I don't know if there’s one technique. Obviously, the accusation of bias is all over the place. You’re biased, you have an ideological or political mission, okay, but why does that comparable accusation not tend to get levied against Israeli, Jewish Israeli, or for that matter Jewish American scholars who dominated for decades the field of Middle East studies? So part of it is: Against whom does the accusation get levied?

In my case, there were a lot of questions about why I wasn’t, in the book, self-reflexive about being a Palestinian working on Israeli society, and my decision to do that wasn’t an oversight. That demand was being made of me, and it would never be made of an Israeli Jewish scholar working on Arabs or Palestinians. It’s very much a kind of personal attack. And when the noise about my tenure came up, I was clearly not a reliable witness. For example, ethnography came up as a big thing: “Well you know ethnographers, they don’t write anything down, they can say anything.”

The entire discipline’s been built on ethnography, but I wasn’t trustworthy because they immediately label me as a Palestinian scholar, not a scholar. Of course the same thing happens with everybody, which is that you’re just a bad scholar.

So Edward’s Orientalism (1978) gets taken on as not being historical and being inaccurate. For me it’s similar: I didn’t know Hebrew, I’d never been on an archaeological dig, I’d spent two weeks there. I mean, none of that was true. But, you can’t separate the accusation of shoddy scholarship from the identification of the scholar as Palestinian and thereby unreliable to begin with.

B&W: I’m wondering how the boundaries between tenured and untenured professors have been redrawn, specifically in the last few months, with regards to protest and freedom of speech on campus.

NAE: In general, if you’re not going to get tenure for political reasons, people don’t take you down on political accusation. You go through the tenure process and one way or another the scholarship isn’t good enough, or it isn’t enough, or you get taken down in a kind of side-angle way. 

If you’re on multi-year contracts, contracts can be eliminated for any reason, right? It’s like New York state law. As a tenured faculty member, technically, you cannot be fired. Which is why Edward would always say don’t write about Palestine until after you’re tenured. But I was like, I’ll find another career. That’s what I wanted to write. 

For the first time in my career, I would not rule out the possibility of firing tenured professors. Because I think, well, you can use Title VI and accuse them of antisemitism, which would be the grounds of firing. I would have said, 10 years ago, that’s not going to happen, but we’re in a very different political moment. It’s very different not just because of Palestine and the ongoing slaughter, and the way that has reshaped the power of donors, campus politics, etcetera, but national politics, because this is just the wedge that the Republicans needed into higher ed. This isn’t about Palestine. They want to go after DEI and they want to go after gender and sexuality studies and they want to go after race, critical race studies, right? 

B&W: Columbia has taken increasingly draconian measures toward both its faculty and its students. Tell us a little bit about the work that Faculty for Justice in Palestine has been doing. Is there a way in which organizing capacity as a professor is limited?

NAE: At this point there’s so many faculty who are just done that they’re willing to take the risk. There’s an extraordinary amount of limit to faculty organizing. So, the point of FSJP, it was started as part of a national movement as the complement to SJP. And the focus was very much on the politics of educating about Palestine and teach-ins. Of course, we also knew we were going to have to fight campus politics, the administration, in a certain way. And the immediate founding was not unrelated to that. So, after President Rosenbury sent her email that declared anti-Zionism was effectively antisemitism, I had written a letter. I went public, and then I reached out to a few people. And they were like, oh, we should just start an FJP. In the fall, there were a lot of events, teach-ins, lectures. But honestly, there’s been a lot of battling the administrations in defense of students. 

I think the real issue is there’s so much going on on campus that we have spent an inordinate amount of time putting out fires. I feel a little—more than a little—frustrated: Can we get the ball back on Gaza? So it’s a political organizing goal, which has both an educational mission, that’s what FSJP is, right, and an activist mission of divestment. But to even get there, I feel like we need to be able to have a moment to breathe and on this campus, we just really haven’t.

It’s really trying to get the administration to back off the students. The other piece is faculty governance. We just don’t have any faculty governance [at Barnard]. So the limits of organizing, we really cannot stop the administration from doing anything it wants to do. On the other side of the street, the [Columbia] Faculty Senate is set up as a faculty governance. They have more pull, but they’re still advisory. I mean, Barnard faculty are on the University Senate, but the Barnard administration is not answerable to it at all, whereas the Columbia administration, at least in terms of a tradition of decades, they have been responsive.

Since 1968 when a lot of this was set in place, a lot of the rules and regulations and cops weren’t allowed on campus without University Senate approval, etcetera. You know, since ’68 they’ve always consulted the Senate. And then the rule changes in the fall did not consult the Senate.

So, there’s limits to what we can achieve. Because I think sometimes students think we have more power than we do. So it’s not that people aren’t fighting, but these administrations are not answerable to faculty anymore. Quite clearly.

B&W: I wanted to return to something you said earlier that it’s been frustrating, right, that the conversation has not been about what’s actually happening in Palestine. More generally, why are our administrators incapable of naming or talking about Gaza? What are they scared of?

NAE: They’re scared. They’re under enormous pressure from the board of trustees and from very wealthy alumni who are absolutely convinced that the problem on this campus is that Jewish students either feel or are unsafe. [Shafik] appointed the Task Force on Antisemitism entirely in response to pressure that there is an epidemic of antisemitism on campus. [But] it requires an assessment of what actually is antisemitic, [and] what actually is pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist.

And feeling unsafe, I mean, I’ve asked students, even Palestinian students, I want you to parse that word. When you’re doxxed, you’re unsafe. When you’re sprayed with chemicals, you’re unsafe. But a lot of the rest of the time, you’re uncomfortable. It’s symptomatic of what’s happened to American politics, right? I mean, it’s the legacy of a certain progressive politics that didn’t think through the dangers of talking about feeling safe, right? Which was, who’s really going to be able to mobilize that accusation and make institutions respond to it?

B&W: What do you think about the way many universities have used academia and formal research to frame the discourse about Palestine as a spirited intellectual debate? There’s been a Day of Dialogue on campus, and the Dialogue Across Difference initiative in which they’re bringing academics to speak on balanced grounds.

NAE: The ones on Barnard’s campus, not a single one of us who actually works on Palestine was consulted. They brought in people I don’t know on what basis, but it was accompanied by, you know, not giving [us] rooms for events—actually literally banning, until the night before, the showing of Israelism.

There is a question, to me, about what do we mean by dialogue, right? I think we really have to think about when dialogue is demanded, and when it’s not. Dialogue Across Difference on the other side of the street, Bruno Bosteels, because he was running it, he actually ended up taking a much more complicated approach. He didn’t do what the whole thing here did, in which you have to have one Arab or one Muslim or one Palestinian as if it’s all the same thing, and one Jew every time. He didn’t assume that our identities were going to be coterminous with our politics. So he created conversations that were real conversations.

B&W: I was at a talk of yours a couple of weeks ago where you spoke extensively with Maya Wind, who wrote Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom (2024). You spoke about the domino effect of an academic boycott. I was wondering what an academic boycott in Israel would look like and how it would affect other Israeli institutions that endorse apartheid. 

NAE: I mean, the academic boycott is the BDS movement. Obviously sanctions, but divestment. Divestment materially is the most important thing. And of course sanctions in particular of not sending arms. The academic boycott occupies a symbolic field that is extremely important. Israeli academia sees itself as part of the Western academy. People are trained, largely, in England or the U.S. To get tenure, you have to write in English. So, the academy is materially tied to the Western academy in an important way. But that aside, it sees itself as heavily part of this Anglo and American university system. A real sense of separation would be saying, no, you’re not one of us. 

Now, this particular boycott, unlike the South African boycott, is not blanket. So, the South African boycott boycotted individuals. [Now] individuals are not subject to the boycott, but institutions are. And most research grants are, right, if you got an NSF here, the institution controls it. So it would have consequences, but, largely I think it’s symbolic. In the same way that artists are calling for people not to go to concerts in Israel. It’s the symbolic cultural isolation of a country that sees itself as constitutively related to the West.

The thing about the boycott conversation I think has been almost most important in the last 10 or 12 years is it’s kept the question of Palestine in the conversation because there’ve been so many arguments about, how can you do this? So it’s kind of forged open this space. It’s not a lot here, but in Europe there’s more than there was. 

B&W: Do you think BDS has impacted the reception of Palestinian scholarship, given that the movement really brought the discourse on Israel and Palestine into the space of the college campus?

NAE: I think there’s a wider audience for that scholarship now. There’s a lot of conversation across Indigenous studies and Palestine studies. There’s a lot more comparative and cross-disciplinary and cross-regional conversations about Palestine than there were 20, 25 years ago. And I think, again, is BDS the cause? Is it a symptom? Is it a little bit of a dialectic? 

It’s easier to have a substantive, analytic conversation without it devolving into being yelled at, which used to happen to me all the time. I think it’s part of this whole shifting trend that BDS both has fed, but has fed on. 

B&W: I’m curious about how we can bring it back to Gaza and to Palestine. We’ve spoken so much about the academy even in this conversation, because it’s what we’re most familiar with and also the most direct line of attack for us here in the West. How can we do that now and specifically talk not just about Gaza and genocide, but about liberation and beyond? 

NAE: I think that the bigger political and scholarly project is how do you change the terms of the conversation?

Again, as academics, we do it one way. More public writing, less scholarly writing is important at this point. Can we reframe why is it so hard to call this a genocide? How do you have that conversation? And I think there’s both the public-facing piece of that—of what it means to write and give lectures and hold teach-ins rather than constantly fighting the administration—because it’s a kind of losing battle. And not only that, in the end, we’ve got to get the focus back on Palestine.