Summary
Novelist whose To Jerusalem and Back, the most recent of the post-1967 visit accounts Said examines, gets its force from an accepted, legitimated representation of the Arabs through an Israeli expert.
Details
- Bellow, like Stephen Spender, dealt with the Arabs of the occupied territories through an Israeli Arab expert, usually a worldly wise colonial officer or an academic with a background in military intelligence, who represented the Arab reality to him and reassured him about Israeli democracy (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.61-62 / printed p.40-41).
- Said compares the device to sending a white black-affairs officer to tell a visiting Western intellectual what the South African black majority really was, wanted and felt, a misrepresentation that in the South African case would be rejected as incredible (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.62 / printed p.41).