Biblical Archaeology and the Politics of Nation-Building

Since the time of the British mandate, Zionist and, later, Israeli politics of nation-building has strongly influenced 'biblical archaeology' and has significantly undermined the integrity of Israeli scholarship. Critiques from Yael Zerubavel and Keith Whitelam to Nadia Abu El-Haj and Raz Kletter have repeatedly pointed out the consistent nationalistic distortions that have infected the field. The efforts of critical scholars to write a history of Palestine independent of biblical perspectives have corrected such distortions since the 1980s and have raised considerable doubt concerning the legitimacy of the Judeo-ethnocentrism which dominates nationalist Israeli claims on the heritage of ancient Palestine and the Bible.