60 Comments

This was a remarkably polite discussion, for a thread about support for israel. I'd like to think it's a sign of good things to come.

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Do as you please, This is my last post

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Matija, what evidence of bias do you find in my question? And why should I take any notice, given your declaration that getting facts right rather than wrong is a waste of your time?

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I really shouldn't be more precise, in this case it is a great waste of time, no academic will ever get a tenure arguing against Israel, except of course in Iran. Secondly who the hell knows what that book was about, and I am pretty sure nobody on this blog read it. And this posting of your is beautiful example of bias: “I'm guessing that you have some other explanation in mind, but the only candidates I can think of seem to be clearly worse explanations than these. Would you like to enlighten us?”

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_Assessing the work in the controversial but extremely well documented field of Israel's archaeology and ancient history should be done by those leading and internationally acknowledged experts "who can be expected not to be too biased" - regardless of their ethnic background or religious belief._

It should be done by the worker's peers, unless there's reason to think they would be biased.

Once again, in this particular case it is not a work of israeli archeology but a work about the influence of israel's archeology on israeli society and vice versa. A work about the biases of israeli archeologists should not necessarily be judged by israeli archeologists who are not necessarily experts about their own bias.

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"In each case we'd want experts who can properly judge the material but who can be expected not to be too biased."

OK. So let's agreed that James Miller's ethnic cleansing of the peer review process is not such a good idea after all. Assessing the work in the controversial but extremely well documented field of Israel's archaeology and ancient history should be done by those leading and internationally acknowledged experts "who can be expected not to be too biased" - regardless of their ethnic background or religious belief.

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In Jewish elementary school, I learned that "6 million Jews died in the Holocaust". The "6 million" figure was repeated over and over; for example, there was a computer counting up to 6 million as a way of emphasizing how many people died. You really didn't hear many figures like "11 million" (the number of *human beings* who died in the Holocaust) or "50-100 million" (estimated casualties of WWII).

(I'm sure it's far worse in the madrassas.)

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Matija, the word "Holocaust" occurs a total of 11 times, in 7 comments (not counting yours in either case). If you're going to be quantitative, you should take the few seconds required to get it right. The reason why it's mentioned here and the fact that the USSR lost a lot of people in WW2 would presumably be not only that (as J Thomas says) that it's an "emotional trump card" but that (1) a discussion of Zionism and the Jews tends for obvious reasons to remind people of the Holocaust more than of other incidents in which lots of people died, and (2) the Holocaust, unlike the death of 20 million citizens of the USSR in WW2, resembles Middle Eastern politics by being a subject that attracts overheated controversy; it's therefore a possibly useful analogy here.

I'm guessing that you have some other explanation in mind, but the only candidates I can think of seem to be clearly worse explanations than these. Would you like to enlighten us?

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Matija, at the Cretaceous extinction more than 50% of *species* went extinct, and well over 90% of species of large animals. I don't see that mentioned either.

And I think the reason is that it isn't something that people can use as an emotional trump card.

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Amazing, holocaust is mentioned 25+ times in this article, But USSR lost more than 20,000,000+ people in the war and I don't see it mentioned.

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Benny Peiser, did I say something that reminded you of the proposals you're rejecting?

At this point my suggestion is in general that work should be judged by experts in the same field, and when the work is particularly controversial in that field it might instead be judged by people in a closely-related field where it is not so controversial.

By that standard it should be fine for El-Haj's work to be judged by middle-east studies experts, but not by religious-and-jewish-studies experts. Because that's her field, where her peers are. But if she was doing something that was controversial in middle-east studies but not so controversial in jewish-studies, a closely related field, then perhaps it might be judged by them instead.

In each case we'd want experts who can properly judge the material but who can be expected not to be too biased.

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"She isn't doing archeology. She's doing history of archeology. Jewish archeologists wouldn't be competent to judge that."

Do you suggest to exclude only Jewish archaeologists from the review panel or any scientist of Jewish descent? What if you have a Jewish grandmother - would that be acceptable? And which science organisation do you think should check and scutinise the reviewers' ethnic, religious and ideological background?

Are you also advocating that American researchers should no longer assess controversial work on American history, or that atheists should no longer review research on the history of religion?

I'm beginning to wonder whether "overcoming bias" may turn out to be a cure that is even worse then the maladie.

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CG, at this point I see no credible evidence that there was ever a demand not to let non-israelis jews judge her work.

That story came from a colleague in the religion and jewish studies department who was determined that she not get tenure. The university has denied it.

But I haven't looked at everything published on the topic; I could easily have missed something.

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"She isn't doing archeology. She's doing history of archeology. She's studying israeli archeology in terms of what it means to israelis, how it affects their politics and self-image and such.

Jewish archeologists wouldn't be competent to judge that, any more than being a new guinea tribesman studied by anthropologists makes new guinea tribesmen into anthropology experts."

Even accepting the premises of your argument, how does it logically follow to not let non-Israeli Jews judge her work?

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Benny, you can read the first 6 pages of her book on Amazon.

She isn't doing archeology. She's doing history of archeology. She's studying israeli archeology in terms of what it means to israelis, how it affects their politics and self-image and such.

Jewish archeologists wouldn't be competent to judge that, any more than being a new guinea tribesman studied by anthropologists makes new guinea tribesmen into anthropology experts.

Clearly she should be judged by her peers, experts in middle east studies. Not by the subjects of her research.

On the other hand, if she was doing research that tended to bring her the contempt of middle-east studies experts, then maybe it would make sense for her work to be judged by the experts of a neighboring discipline -- perhaps israeli anthropologists or whoever. Someone whose work is similar enough that they'd understand the methods and materials, but who wouldn't be particularly biased due to the subject material.

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Are you seriously suggesting that El-Haj be imprisoned for her writings?

Far from it. What I am saying is that if the world's leading archaeologists whose expertise on Israel's ancient history is widely regarded as world-class by the scientific community are excluded from peer review on grounds of their ethnic, national or religious background, you are opening Pandora's box: you kill science as we know it and get science trials instead. Which is more or less what you have in many Islamic countries that are based on Sharia or Sharia-like laws.

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