Israel

Israel occupies a central place in Edward Said’s account of how political power and systems of representation reinforce one another. It is discussed not simply as a party to conflict, but as a setting where Orientalist assumptions about Arabs, Jews, and political development acquire institutional force. Said connects the representation of Palestinians to unequal civic and immigration rights, the omission of colonial history from accounts of the conflict, and the difficulty of imagining a humane political alternative grounded in coexistence.

Israel in the Politics of Representation

Said places Israel within a wider struggle over how the Middle East is described and understood. The Arab-Israeli conflict, he argues, helps make discussion of Arabs and Islam intensely politicized, especially in the United States. Popular anti-Arab and anti-Islamic prejudice, the conflict between Arabs and Israeli Zionism, and the lack of a cultural position from which to identify with or dispassionately discuss Arabs or Islam together obstruct clear understanding. In public discourse, the region is often reduced to a stark contrast between a freedom-loving, democratic Israel and Arabs cast as evil, totalitarian, or terroristic. Such a binary substitutes political shorthand for the region’s complex histories and societies.

Said also treats Israel as an example of the way representations can become more powerful when backed by institutions. He identifies a shared Orientalist perspective in European anti-Semitism and in certain depictions of Arabs: both characterize Semitic peoples as naturally lacking qualities attributed to the West. But, he stresses, the two contexts are not equivalent. In the twentieth-century Israeli case he discusses, rhetoric about Arabs had institutional backing, giving the representation consequences in law and state policy rather than leaving it at the level of scholarly or ideological assertion.

Palestinians, Rights, and State Policy

Said describes Palestinians resisting foreign colonial rule as represented either as savage or as politically negligible. He points to a legal distinction under which Jews in Israel have full civic rights and unqualified immigration privileges, while Arabs have lesser rights and cannot immigrate. In the reasoning he criticizes, that inequality is explained by describing Arabs as less developed. For Said, the explanation does not merely report a difference: it turns unequal treatment into evidence for the very hierarchy used to justify it.

He reads the Koenig Report as evidence that Orientalist thinking informs Israeli policy toward Arabs. Within the account he critiques, Arabs are divided into compliant “good” Arabs and disobedient “bad” Arabs, the latter treated as terrorists. The framework also imagines defeated Arabs as remaining obediently behind a fortified line, on the assumption that they have accepted Israeli superiority and will not attack. Said argues that this political picture depends on a broader stereotype of Arab character, rather than attending to the historical and human realities that challenge it.

That representational scheme is reinforced, he says, by institutions. General Yehoshafat Harkabi’s Arab Attitudes to Israel presents Arabs through a language that Said cites as depicting the “Arab mind” as depraved, anti-Semitic, violent, and unbalanced, capable of producing little beyond rhetoric. Said’s point is not only that one myth supports another, but that the presumed Arab character is made to confirm the assumptions that produced it. The pattern becomes difficult to contest when scholarly claims and state institutions converge, allowing descriptions of Arabs to carry the authority of national power.

Historical Omissions and Unequal Standards

Said’s criticism of the historian Bernard Lewis centers on what his account leaves out. Lewis can recount the Arab case against Zionism, Said argues, without acknowledging the Zionist invasion and colonization of Palestine in conflict with its native Arab inhabitants. He can discuss the absence of democracy in the Middle East while omitting the Emergency Defense Regulations used in Israel to govern Arabs, the preventive detention of Arabs, illegal settlements in the militarily occupied West Bank and Gaza, and the denial of human rights, including immigration rights, to Arabs in former Palestine.

For Said, these omissions reveal an unequal standard of scholarly judgment. Lewis invokes objectivity and impartiality while, in Said’s view, allowing his historical account to exclude facts that complicate its political conclusions. Zionism is not examined in parallel with Islam, and imperialism and Zionism are presented through language that Said argues obscures their historical form. The resulting scholarship claims authority over the subject while leaving out the colonial history and policies necessary to understand it.

Said’s larger argument is that such omissions are not neutral gaps when they consistently favor one side’s account. Orientalist representations of Arabs can become part of the state’s institutional authority, while the same authority makes those representations appear self-evident. The circle is consequential: policy is justified through stereotypes, and stereotypes gain force from the policies and institutions that enact them.

Conflict, Coexistence, and Historical Change

Said connects Israel and Palestine to a political history that cannot be reduced to an eternal East–West opposition. He recalls advocating Palestinian national self-determination for thirty-five years while giving full attention to the persecution and genocide suffered by the Jewish people. He argues that the struggle for equality in Palestine and Israel should pursue coexistence, not renewed suppression and denial. He also notes common roots between Orientalism and modern anti-Semitism, insisting on the importance of criticizing dehumanizing frameworks without erasing the distinct histories of the peoples they affect.

The political record he describes includes the prolonged conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, and the beginning of the intifada in late 1987. These events, alongside other confrontations involving Arab and Muslim societies, intensified the pressure on people to identify as either Westerners or Easterners. In Said’s account, that pressure hardened identities and made a historically specific conflict seem like proof of an unchanging civilizational divide.

Against this binary, Said’s argument insists on historical change and the complexity of human societies. He rejects the idea that difference must entail hostility or that Israel and its neighbors can be understood through fixed, opposed essences. Israel matters to his analysis because its representation of Arabs, its policies toward them, and its place in the wider conflict expose the costs of allowing such categories to govern political understanding. A humane alternative requires confronting unequal rights and historical exclusions while making coexistence, rather than suppression, the political aim.