Israel Emergency Defense Regulations

The Emergency Defense Regulations are invoked by Edward Said as a concrete example of what Bernard Lewis’s account of democracy in the Middle East leaves unmentioned. In Said’s argument, the omission matters because Lewis treats Israel as the exception to regional nondemocracy without addressing the regulations used to rule Arabs there; the example exposes how scholarly claims to impartiality can coexist with a selective account of political power.

Use in the Critique of Lewis

Said places the regulations within a wider indictment of omissions in Lewis’s treatment of Israel and the Arab–Israeli conflict. Lewis, Said argues, discusses the absence of democracy in the Middle East except in Israel, but says nothing about the Emergency Defense Regulations used to rule Arabs. Said lists this silence alongside Lewis’s failure to discuss preventive detention of Arabs in Israel, illegal settlements in the militarily occupied West Bank and Gaza, and restrictions on Arab immigration and human rights in former Palestine. The regulations therefore appear not as an incidental technical detail, but as evidence relevant to the democratic exception Lewis presents.

Said’s criticism turns on a contrast between the historian’s professed standards and the selectivity of his account. Lewis invokes scholarly objectivity and warns against prejudice, yet Said argues that leaving the regulations out helps sustain a favorable picture of Israel while making Arab political claims appear less credible. The omission, in this reading, is part of a broader pattern in which power and its effects are not evenly examined.

Connection to Orientalism and Colonial Rule

The example fits Said’s larger account of Orientalism as a system that transforms complex political realities into authoritative knowledge while obscuring the interests and relations of power that shape that knowledge. His discussion of the regulations is much narrower than a legal history: the evidence identifies them as a means used to rule Arabs, but does not specify their provisions, dates, or administrative operation. Their documented role here is argumentative. They make visible a subject that Lewis’s comparison of democracy leaves outside the frame.

That critical method echoes Said’s comparison between imperial description and accounts from the position of the invaded. The large, state-backed Description de l’Égypte, he argues, could present Egypt through the categories of European science while displacing Egyptian history; Abdal-Rahman al-Jabarti’s account of the French invasion instead records events from the standpoint of the invaded. In the discussion of Lewis, the regulations function as a similarly concrete counterpoint to a polished generalization: attention to how Arabs are governed complicates the claim that Israel simply stands apart from the region’s political conditions.

Significance and Limits of the Evidence

The regulations’ significance in the passage is inseparable from the question of what a scholarly account includes and excludes. For Said, a claim to impartiality cannot be assessed only by its stated rules; it must also be tested against the histories and institutions omitted from its description. By naming the regulations, he directs attention from abstract comparisons of political systems to the governance of a population under Israeli authority.

The evidence does not provide the regulations’ text, legal scope, chronology, or individual cases of enforcement, and it does not independently establish their full effects. The supported point is therefore specific: Said cites them as an example of Lewis’s silence about the means by which Arabs in Israel were ruled. Their force in the argument comes from that contrast between a broad claim about democracy and an unaddressed instrument of governance.