Summary
In Said’s usage in this book, the West’s long, consistent tradition of representing the Orient, Islam and the Arabs — the tradition Said says he documented in his study of what he called Orientalism — on which Zionism drew for its view of the Palestinians.
Details
- The Orient was a designation made in Europe, representing a special mentality and a set of cultural, political and even racial characteristics, and mainly an indiscriminate generality associated with difference and otherness, vast spaces and undifferentiated masses of mostly colored people (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.24 / printed p.3).
- The entrenched cultural attitude toward Palestinians derives, in Said’s account, from age-old Western prejudices about Islam, the Arabs and the Orient, and from this attitude Zionism in its turn drew for its view of the Palestinians, dehumanising them and reducing them to a nuisance (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.15 / printed p.xiv).
- Between Zionism and the West there is a community of language and ideology depending heavily on this tradition of enmity toward Islam in particular and the Orient in general, culminating today in the fact that practically the only ethnic group about whom in the West racial slurs are tolerated, even encouraged, is the Arabs (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.46-47 / printed p.25-26).
- The expert Orientalist believed that only he could speak, paternally, for the natives and primitive societies he had studied, his presence denoting their absence; in the twentieth century the Westerner turns for evidence about the Orient to the Zionist instead (see Representation) (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.57, p.60 / printed p.36, p.39).
- Sylvain Lévi, the French Orientalist speaking for the Zionist delegation in 1919, is Said’s case of the profession’s importance to the argument (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.41 / printed p.20).
Related pages
The Question of Palestine, Representation, Edward Said, Sylvain Lévi, Zionism