Summary
The ethos of a European civilising mission — nineteenth-century, colonialist, racist even, in Said’s words — to which both the British imperialist vision of Balfour and the Zionist vision fundamentally belong.
Details
- Both visions, Said argues, play down and even cancel out the Arabs in Palestine as somehow secondary and negligible, raise the moral importance of their visions far above the mere presence of natives on a piece of immensely significant territory, and belong fundamentally to the ethos of a European mission civilisatrice built on notions about the inequality of men, races and civilizations (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.39-40 / printed p.18-19).
- That inequality allows the most extreme forms of self-aggrandizing projections and the most extreme forms of punitive discipline toward the natives whose existence, paradoxically, was denied (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.40 / printed p.19).
Related pages
The Question of Palestine, Imperialism, Balfour Declaration, Zionism, Orientalism