The establishment of Israel appears in Edward Said’s analysis not as an isolated political event but as a decisive context in which Orientalist and Zionist representations assigned Palestinians a diminished place in history and political life. Said argues that Palestine was imagined as an empty landscape awaiting renewal, while its Arab inhabitants were treated as incidental; later, the Arab was represented as an obstacle to Israel’s creation or as a threatening shadow. His account also examines the limits of sympathetic interpretation: Louis Massignon defended Palestinian refugees and Arab rights, yet often framed the conflict through inherited religious categories rather than the contemporary political transformations that Jacques Berque urged him to recognize.

Palestine as an Imagined Landscape

Said connects the political meaning of Israel’s establishment to a prior representational history. Palestine had been depicted by Alphonse de Lamartine and early Zionists as an empty desert waiting to bloom. The inhabitants who lived there were cast as inconsequential nomads, supposedly without a substantial claim to the land or a cultural and national reality of their own. In this account, the language of emptiness did more than describe a landscape: it made existing people easier to disregard when imagining the territory’s future.

Said places this erasure within a wider Orientalist pattern in which European knowledge claims the authority to define the Orient. In his discussion of Gustave Flaubert’s encounter with Kuchuk Hanem, he emphasizes that Flaubert spoke for her and represented her without her speaking for herself. That example is not an episode in the history of Israel’s establishment, but it clarifies a recurring structure in Said’s analysis: the power to describe another person or people can operate alongside material and political advantage. Applied to Palestine, the inhabitants are not simply omitted from a picture of the land; their capacity to represent their own history and claims is discounted.

From Inconsequence to Obstacle and Threat

Said describes the Arab in representations surrounding Israel as receiving attention chiefly as a negative value. The Arab is cast as a disrupter of Israel’s and the West’s existence, or as an obstacle that could be overcome in creating Israel in 1948. Even when the Arab is assigned a history, Said argues, it is a history supplied or taken away by Orientalist and later Zionist traditions. The result is a figure made legible chiefly through opposition to another people’s national story.

Said develops this imagery through the figure of the Arab as a shadow following the Jew. Because Arabs and Jews are both treated as Oriental Semites in the scheme he analyzes, the Arab becomes a receptacle for inherited Western mistrust of the Orient. At the same time, Said argues, the Jew of pre-Nazi Europe is recast in a heroic image associated with the adventurer, pioneer, and Orientalist. The contrast produces unequal narrative positions: one figure is granted heroic agency, while the other is fixed to a past made for him and to a destiny of reaction and punishment.

This representation also narrows the political meaning of Arab presence. Said notes that the Arab is portrayed as an oil supplier, and that accounts of Arab oil often connect the 1973–1974 oil boycott, which he says principally benefited Western oil companies and a small Arab ruling elite, to claims that Arabs lack the moral qualification to possess such reserves. In this rhetoric, ownership itself becomes suspect and the prospect of invading Arab oil fields is voiced as a solution. These depictions do not supply an account of the establishment of Israel’s chronology or military course; they show how its surrounding political field is narrated through representations that turn Arab claims into a problem or danger.

Sympathy and the Limits of Religious Framing

Louis Massignon offers a complicated counterpoint. Said credits him with assigning the West substantial responsibility for invading and colonizing the East and attacking Islam. Massignon also worked on behalf of Muslim civilization and, especially after 1948, supported Palestinian refugees and the rights of Arab Muslims and Christians in Palestine against Zionism. His criticism of Israeli policy could be forceful, and his advocacy makes him a significant dissenting voice in Said’s account.

Yet Said argues that Massignon’s sympathetic engagement remained constrained by a framework that placed the Islamic Orient in an essentially ancient time and the West in modernity. Massignon continued to regard the Oriental as a Semite rather than a modern person, a category that shaped his understanding of contemporary Arab experience. In a 1960 dialogue with Jacques Berque about the Arabs, the discussion repeatedly turned to whether contemporary Arab problems were fundamentally a Semitic problem. Berque gently proposed that Arabs, like other peoples, had undergone what he called anthropological variation; Massignon rejected that possibility.

Said finds the consequence of this framework particularly visible in Massignon’s treatment of Palestine. Despite sustained attempts to understand and report on the conflict, Massignon did not, in Said’s judgment, move beyond the quarrel of Isaac and Ishmael or, in his dispute with Israel, the tension between Judaism and Christianity. When Arab towns and villages were captured by Zionists, Massignon’s religious sensibilities were offended. His concern was real, but Said’s analysis shows how even an advocate of Palestinian rights could interpret a modern political struggle through inherited religious categories that narrowed its historical and political dimensions.

Historical Power and the Work of Representation

Said’s account distinguishes between recognizing Palestinian claims and granting Palestinians authority over the story told about them. In his discussion of the British politician Arthur James Balfour, he notes that Balfour could acknowledge the native inhabitants of Palestine as having prior presence while denying that they had comparable authority to determine its future. The wishes of 700,000 Arabs, Said reports, counted for little beside the destiny assigned to what he calls an essentially European colonial movement. Recognition of prior residence, in this formulation, did not entail recognition of political agency.

The establishment of Israel thus serves in Said’s discussion as a point around which competing historical claims are represented unequally. His concern is not to offer a complete narrative of the state’s founding, but to show how a people can be made to appear politically marginal through descriptions of land, identity, and history. His broader argument insists that histories are made and rewritten through silences and imposed shapes, and that such representations cannot be separated from relations of power. Read in that context, the figure of the Arab as shadow or obstacle is not a neutral description of a population: it is part of a narrative order that privileges some claims to the future while obscuring others.