Archaeology in a Time of Violence: Response to “Decolonizing Archaeology” Forum, vol. 12.1

When we published Archaeology, Nation, and Race (ANR), just two years ago, it was in the hope that our dialogue would spawn further discussions in the archaeological community. We are therefore grateful to the editors of the Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology and Heritage Studies for taking us at our word and offering a platform for discussion and response, and to our interlocutors—Neil Silberman, Anne Duray, Louise Hitchcock, Ianir Milevski, and Sandra Scham—for going on record on matters that are too often avoided (JEMAHS 12 [1]: 93–114; for other discussions of ANR, see Greenberg and Hamilakis 2023b; Bowman 2023; Christopoulos 2024; Havstad 2023; Lambropoulos 2023; Nakassis 2023; Gazi 2023; Papagiannopoulos 2023; Rizvi 2022; Gori 2023).Our book was conceived during a time of converging crises—the COVID-19 pandemic, the Black Lives Matter protests, and the rise of authoritarianism in the US and Europe—and was in no small measure a response to those events, pointing to convergences between colonialism, nationalism, and racism and the epistemic foundations of archaeology and their deployment in the national discourse in Greece and Israel. But our discussion has now been overtaken and charged with a greater sense of urgency by the shocking events of October 7, 2023, and their aftermath in Israel and Palestine, events that have led the ICC prosecutor to charge both sides with war crimes and the International Court of Justice to investigate whether the widespread destruction of Gaza by Israel answers the legal definition of genocide.Clearly, the themes of ANR—including several points of contention raised by our discussants—intersect with the war in Gaza and with the emergence of the international pro-Palestine movement. We therefore take these recent events as the context and setting for our response. As we have done elsewhere, our discussion will continue through dialogue, highlighting our individual perspectives, whether complementing or divergent.RG: I would like to begin by citing from a preface that I wrote for the recently published Hebrew edition of our book, during the darkest days of October 2023.I am not sure if the importance of linking race, purity, archaeology, and colonialism has been sufficiently appreciated by our respondents. It is not that expanding kingdoms or nations never invoked transcendent destiny to resettle regions and countries before colonialism or that noncolonial ethnostates haven’t tried to ensure their ethnic majority through force, but it is a peculiar characteristic of European colonialism that tied together race and “manifest destiny” and then linked them to foundational ideologies of rational enlightenment and Judeo-Christian morality (a Christian, not a Jewish, concept, it must be stressed!) embedded in the antiquities of Athens and Jerusalem (see Greenberg 2021). Using a circular logic, the antiquities were cleansed of any accretions that were deemed extraneous, then used to anchor an essential and eternal moral superiority.When Zionism adopted the European conceptions of national self-determination and state-building, it also attached itself to European concepts of supremacy, despite the antisemitism embedded in them. In a paper I recently published with Gideon Sulimani, we illustrate how deeply imbricated concepts of whiteness have been, first in colonial, then in Israeli archaeology (Greenberg and Sulimani 2024). It is not that Israelis are ethnically or racially homogenous—clearly, they are not. But regardless of the internal contradictions in Israeli society described by Scham and also mentioned by Hitchcock, the political and academic elite have accepted European definitions of the value of specific kinds of antiquity—from prehistory, through biblical times and into classical and Christian antiquity, to the evolutionary-progressive narrative of modernity—while adopting the language and practice of purity and cleansing from the European milieu from which they were excluded.This willingness to stand in for Europe—a willingness that can and must be superseded because, in fact, most of its inhabitants are neither Christian nor European—is what cements Israel’s role as a crypto-colony. It is clear to me that the uninterrupted supply of arms from the US and Europe to Israel continues, even as the ICJ warns of impending starvation in Gaza, because Israel—under any leadership, even one supported by fascist elements in Israeli society—is perceived by the West as a buffer and bulwark of Europe against the forces of Islam, just as Palestine is perceived as the buffer and bulwark of the East—Islamist Iran and its allies— against the West. The procession of Western leaders who have offered support for Netanyahu, the potential war-crimes indictee, continues: “We fight your wars because we are fundamentally on the same side,” he tells them, often using civilizational tropes rooted in antiquity and their representation (Yilmaz and Norieson 2022; Netanyahu 2023).In ANR I tried to plot the continuity between colonialist and Israeli purification projects. In contrast to Milevski, who seems to view coloniality as a matter of geopolitics and economic interests, I tried to identify the thread that connects the invisibility of local communities to early scholars of biblical historical geography, the British project of purification of antiquities by removal of “modern” accretions, and the Israeli project of replacement, enacted in tandem by the archaeologized renaming of the countryside and by the attendant destruction of Palestinian houses and villages. This is an unrelenting program of material and symbolic violence that amounts to a multipronged and continuous denial of Palestinian history; one of many forms of dehumanization enacted by Israel that has engendered a correspondingly dehumanizing response.Beyond what we discussed in ANR, my ongoing work on the depopulated and destroyed village of Qadas has brought home the repetitive character of destruction in the ongoing Nakba: The stone piles that we encounter, the product of the kind of annihilation that characterizes super-modernity (González-Ruibal 2019: 43–46; Gordillo 2014)—characterizes hundreds of Palestinian villages and now thousands of Gazan homes. It is so salient a characteristic of Israel’s attempt to establish its dominance that it has acquired the epithet of “domicide,” the conduct of ethnic cleansing by means of widespread and complete destruction.Although I resist a monolithic view of Zionism—for many Jews, especially before the state of Israel came into existence, Zionism was a way of being Jewish; a form of self-creation and cultural agency that was not necessarily colonial or compassed by political sovereignty—I concede that its realization as a political project in Palestine adopted the colonizing position of whiteness and Western supremacy, and that archaeology had no small part in the process.I find an affinity between our attempt to describe both Hellenic and Israeli colonialities as multilayered and sometimes self-contradictory with Mamdani’s (2020) political analysis of the “post-colonial” condition and Eghbariah’s recently published historical-legal analysis of the condition of Nakba, which he sees as an ongoing process of fragmentation and displacement, compounded of elements of settler colonialism, apartheid, and genocide, but not encompassed by any of them (Eghbariah 2024). Though they differ on the efficacy of legal redress, both offer a path forward for all the present inhabitants of Israel/Palestine, based on abandoning the concept of nation-state, with Mamdani calling for decolonization from within, through “epistemic revolution” (Mamdani 2020: 326), and Eghbariah noting that “statehood and liberation are not synonymous” (Eghbariah 2024: 990). Decolonizing archaeology complements these paths and might even be said to be a necessary condition for their realization. YH: It is bewildering that we are finding ourselves in this moment of tragic irony: only a year after the publication of our ANR book, many of the phenomena we were talking about gained such a depressingly palpable topicality. The October 7, 2023, events and especially the ongoing genocidal war proved once again that what we were writing about were not purely matters of historiographic or broadly epistemic interest; rather, they are matters, literally, of life and death for so many people, in the region and beyond. I experienced this moment, teaching at Brown, in the belly of the bigger beast: the country that constitutes the most important political and material, economic, military, and ideological supporter of a regime that has been now described by many organizations and people inside and outside the country as one of apartheid. This condition allowed me to reflect on the global ramifications of the situation, the brutality and dehumanization you have described but also the hopeful signs of resistance, witnessed in the global support and solidarity movement. American campuses in particular have since October 2023 experienced nothing less than a student revolt, spearheaded by a broad alliance made of people of diverse background, including many students of color and students from the Global South. But a key component of this alliance has been Jewish American students who are now revolting not only against the complicity of university administrators and establishment politicians but also against their elders, the previous generations of Jewish Americans who mostly identified with the State of Israel. The educational roles were reversed, our students taught us and continue to teach us lessons of courage and passion, but also lessons of cogent and insightful scholarly analysis: “Palestine is our working condition,” declared the graduate worker and doctoral candidate, Sherena Razek, at a recent rally. She was pointing to a phenomenon we hardly touched on in ANR and one that needs further reflection: the ongoing Nakba as a global phenomenon and one that cannot be dissociated from the global regime of and global and The of my as is the with many in the and elsewhere, is in this regime and it from the ongoing for But that is not this a of and and with no in race and in the that were in in recent years and any into the of are now and the against this is used as the We were in ANR that the Judeo-Christian a component with of the of the Global The war made such Palestine is a global in the same way that the Black Lives in the of which our book was was never just about Americans but about the of the the of as an of the Global and its is a global since it the civilizational of global find what you are about Zionism especially in the all people who are of This us with to the of Zionism as a and I would with you like it was never I am not a on the of but I am it just a matter of an project that at the moment of its realization a project of and this not of a of a political and ideological project that of and colonialist and in and by European who not from that that of and European were from the at in the and of its most important and the who the of our book, (see Bowman Eghbariah 2024). for at the first in in which was by the a to to for a Jewish state in he Jews, in for Palestine, would the and for Europe we form a against and a of to the of the a of that the Jewish state in Palestine would a buffer country for the a key of the as we in the continues: am sure that the are even than are of in Palestine, and I have on my and in that It is that in and the the the kind of the they is not their but is that can be said on this with the European and their and but other by and other have led many Bowman Eghbariah to that Zionism was to be from the a colonizing and and even who were described with tropes especially in its and early through the and colonial of European at the same 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cleansing and but also Zionism as one of the of as I that the people who are the most now are the people in Palestine but also the people in and I would never the of students and (a diverse in with the of the people in the this the of of that you are I with all the historical the of and apartheid, and the genocidal on the part of the Israeli which has in a a that is now even by and such as the of the not be by any to This is not to any of nor to any war even they are in the context of to and to the ongoing of the and archaeological organizations and their on the moment and the ongoing now by is but not that The are including of in this of but also of us ourselves at the of from even we not because we to the that not on October and that events such as this not in a and political I that many especially the on not to and take a and I would be the one to them for But it is mostly the and in of who were or were the would never that in so they they a colonial archaeology and and the regime of that is the one which will their are the of this regime I am that the of the of scholars will them with as you our work of both and and the archaeology of whiteness (see and an archaeology is the way matters raised by our to me to be of further The raised by Milevski, is the potential of nationalism, a that he connects to the (Greenberg and Hamilakis we discussed that often with is a concept that has been even by to see nationalism, a deeply and as is as also by in the of have in the of national but cannot but be at the same time We in the of and this our of but have to forms of being and that the In the of Palestinian seems to be in and the generations a of for all the to the of and ethnic 2024). 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