Israel's preventive detention of Arabs

Preventive detention of Arabs in Israel is cited by Edward Said as a practice omitted from Bernard Lewis’s discussion of democracy in the Middle East. Its significance in Said’s argument lies not in a detailed account of the detention system, which the cited passage does not provide, but in the omission itself: the contrast between a claim of impartial scholarship and a selective account of political power.

The Omission in Lewis’s Account

Said writes that Lewis discusses the absence of democracy in the Middle East while making an exception for Israel, yet says nothing about the Emergency Defense Regulations used to rule Arabs in Israel or their preventive detention. Said places this silence alongside other omissions concerning Arabs’ human rights, including the right of immigration in former Palestine, and illegal settlements in the militarily occupied West Bank and Gaza. The passage identifies preventive detention as one element in a wider set of conditions left out of Lewis’s account; it does not specify the detention’s legal procedures, duration, or individual cases.

Scholarly Neutrality and Political Framing

The omission matters because Lewis’s writing, as Said presents it, is accompanied by assertions about the objectivity, fairness, and impartiality expected of a real historian. Said argues that this standard is applied asymmetrically: Muslims and Arabs are represented as unable to be objective, while Orientalists writing about them are presumed objective by virtue of their training and Western position. Preventive detention thus functions as a test of what the account makes visible. A discussion of democracy that excludes the coercive regulation of Arabs in Israel, Said contends, cannot sustain its appearance of comprehensive neutrality.

Said connects that selectivity to a broader Orientalist method. In his account, Orientalist knowledge can turn living political realities into material for texts while leaving the interests and power relations behind those texts obscured. The discussion of detention illustrates this argument through absence rather than through a description of the measure itself: the practice is named, but Lewis’s treatment, as Said characterizes it, does not bring it into view.

Relation to the Argument about History and Power

Elsewhere, Said insists that accounts of the Orient must be read within the unequal historical relations that shaped their production. He contrasts the monumental Description de l’Égypte, produced by a corps of scholars backed by a conquering army, with Abdal-Rahman al-Jabarti’s chronicles of the French invasion from the standpoint of the invaded. The contrast does not supply further information about detention in Israel; it clarifies Said’s method of asking whose position an apparently authoritative account represents and whose experience it leaves marginal.

Said’s discussion of detention therefore belongs to his criticism of Orientalism as a system that can conceal historical change and the interests of the observer beneath claims of objective description. The passage does not present detention as an isolated rule or narrate its operation. Instead, it uses the failure to mention it as evidence that accounts of democracy and political life are shaped as much by exclusions as by what they explicitly describe.

Limits and Significance

Said’s reference establishes that he regards preventive detention of Arabs in Israel as a relevant fact omitted from Lewis’s discussion. It does not, in the cited material, explain the practice’s statutory basis, who ordered it, how widely it was used, or its consequences for particular detainees. The article’s significance is consequently evidentiary and argumentative: the measure marks a specific silence through which Said challenges the authority claimed by an account of democracy that, in his view, leaves coercive rule over Arabs unexamined.