Gil Carl Alroy

Gil Carl Alroy appears in Edward Said’s critique as a political scientist whose writing illustrates how claims of expertise can convert selective evidence into fixed judgments about a population. In a February 1974 article in Commentary, Alroy asks whether Arabs want peace and answers by portraying them as collectively hostile, psychologically incapable of peace, and untrustworthy. Said’s concern is not only the article’s conclusions but the authority and method that make those conclusions sound like dispassionate knowledge.

Identity and Public Argument

Said identifies Alroy as a professor of political science and the author of Attitudes Towards Jewish Statehood in the Arab World and Images of Middle East Conflict. The article at issue, “Do the Arabs Want Peace?”, appeared in Commentary’s February 1974 issue. Alroy presents himself as someone who knows the Arabs, and Said characterizes him as an expert in making images of them. The distinction matters: Alroy’s public authority rests on a claim to interpret Arab attitudes, while the people whose intentions are at stake remain the objects of that interpretation.

Said describes Alroy’s argument as predictable in its basic conclusion: Arabs want to destroy Israel. Alroy’s treatment of Egyptian newspaper material supplies an apparent evidentiary basis, but Said objects that he identifies those sources with “Arabs” as a whole. A particular national press is thus made to stand for a much wider and diverse population. In Said’s account, the leap from selected statements to a general claim is not incidental; it is central to how the article constructs its subject.

Claims and Use of Evidence

The argument Said attributes to Alroy depends on a generalized account of Arab character. It casts Arabs as united in a disposition toward bloody vengeance, psychologically incapable of making peace, and bound to a conception of justice that Alroy presents as the opposite of justice. These assertions lead to the conclusion that Arabs cannot be trusted and must be fought indefinitely. Said emphasizes the progression: claims about an undifferentiated collective character become grounds for treating that collective as a continuing danger.

Alroy’s principal supporting authority is Harold W. Glidden’s essay “The Arab World.” Alroy praises Glidden for capturing cultural differences between Western and Arab views, and Said notes that this dependence on Glidden helps clinch the argument. Alroy also draws on psychoanalysis and on quotations attributed to Arab sources, presenting the resulting case as academic, dispassionate, and fair. Said’s analysis exposes the tension between that posture and the article’s sweeping conclusion: evidence presented as coming from Arabs is used to support a claim that Arabs have categorically rejected real peace.

Relationships and Intellectual Context

Said places Alroy within a broader pattern associated with Arabists and Orientalists, naming General Harkabi as another figure whose work centers on the supposed “Arab mind.” In this pattern, the expert claims access to a stable underlying character that can be uncovered by stripping away apparent qualifications. Alroy’s account therefore belongs not simply to a disagreement over policy, but to a mode of knowledge that treats a varied population as a single psychological type.

The power relation is also a relation between writer and subject. Said argues that the Orientalist writes about the Oriental, while the Oriental is assigned passivity and becomes the material to be investigated. The expert occupies the position of observer and source of knowledge; the people described are treated as a source of information whose own accounts are selected, classified, and interpreted by someone else. Applied to Alroy, this structure helps explain how Egyptian newspaper statements can be made to certify a general theory of Arab character without granting Arab speakers equal authority to define their own political intentions.

Narrative and Critical Significance

Alroy’s article serves Said as a concrete example of how Orientalist assertions gain public force through the conjunction of scholarly credentials, selective citation, and confident generalization. The article addresses readers concerned with the Arab-Israeli conflict, but its portrayal of Arabs as inherently incapable of peace also supports the prescription that they must be watched and fought. Said thus draws attention to the political consequence of presenting a hostile stereotype as the finding of neutral expertise.

The example also clarifies Said’s account of representation: Alroy’s authority depends on speaking about Arabs as a collective, while the diversity of the people represented disappears beneath that collective characterization. His article is significant in Said’s argument less as an isolated personal portrait than as an instance of a durable structure in which the expert claims interpretive authority and the represented population is rendered fixed, passive, and in need of explanation.