Summary
The most widely read American man of letters of his time, Said’s second case of the liberal West’s identification with Zionism, for his diary of a visit to Israel in Black, Red, Blond and Olive.
Details
- Wilson, as quoted by Said, saw the terrorism by which Israel came into being as the result of Nazi persecutions and British policy, and Israelis as returning to the callous intolerance of the Israelites toward the people they dispossessed, while taking no position on the dispossession itself (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.55 / printed p.34).
- His portrait of the Arabs in Israel, quoted at length by Said, presents a picturesque, pathetically retarded people, the squalor of Acre, Arab family life as abandonment, and the Arab refugees in Jordan as stupidly obstinate in refusing UNRWA resettlement, all framed as a Jewish tendency toward exclusiveness (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.55-56 / printed p.34-35).
- Said: Wilson says nothing of the Emergency Defense Regulations by which Arabs in Israel were governed, and his remarks are a verbatim copy of what Israelis think about Arabs, seen wholly from the Zionist perspective (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.56-58 / printed p.35-37).
Related pages
The Question of Palestine, Reinhold Niebuhr, Sabri Jiryis, Acre, Representation