Sixth Day War

The Six-Day War is treated in Orientalism as a decisive point in the political and representational history of Arabs and Palestinians. It marks the beginning of Edward W. Said’s own sustained political engagement and reshapes a Princeton class-reunion caricature almost overnight: what had been planned as vaguely Arab costume becomes, after the war, a procession of figures with their hands raised in abject defeat. For Said, that reversal shows how quickly political events are translated into stereotypes—and how those stereotypes can obscure the history and claims of the people they depict.

Background and Political Setting

Said places the war within a longer history of imperial power and the production of knowledge about the Orient. He describes Orientalism as arising from circumstances that are profoundly fractious, not from detached scholarly curiosity alone. In his account, the war’s aftermath remained active decades later: Israel continued to occupy Palestinian territories and the Golan Heights, and the terms of struggle and ideas at stake for his generation of Arabs and Americans persisted.

The conflict also altered the setting in which Arabs and Islam were discussed in the United States. Said identifies the Arab-Israeli struggle and its effects on American Jews, liberal culture, and the wider population as one of three forces that made even basic perceptions of Arabs and Islam highly politicized. The other forces were a history of popular anti-Arab and anti-Islamic prejudice in the West, closely reflected in Orientalism, and the near absence of a cultural position from which people could identify with, or dispassionately discuss, Arabs and Islam. Great Power politics, oil economics, and the stark opposition of a freedom-loving Israel to supposedly evil and terroristic Arabs made a clear view still harder to achieve.

The Princeton Caricature

Said makes the representational shift concrete through a Princeton tenth-reunion costume plan in 1967. The motif had been chosen before the June War and was only crudely suggestive of Arabs: robes, headgear, and sandals. The details did not amount to a developed account of Arab life; they supplied a ready-made costume for a broad stereotype.

After the war, once the Arab motif had become an embarrassment, the reunion plans were changed. The class would wear the originally planned costume but walk in procession with hands held above their heads, a gesture of abject defeat. The change made military defeat the defining image: in Said’s account, the Arab had moved from a faint outline of the camel-riding nomad to a caricature of incompetence and easy defeat. The scene matters not as an account of the war’s military course, which the book does not provide, but as a sharply dated example of how swiftly a political outcome could dictate a public image.

From Defeat to Threat

The image did not remain fixed at defeat. Said contrasts the postwar procession with the representation of Arabs after the 1973 war, when the Arab appeared as a more menacing figure. Cartoons repeatedly placed an Arab sheik behind a gasoline pump, turning the Arab into an emblem of disruption and connecting him to the gasoline shortage.

The caricature’s visual details carried an older prejudice into this newer political moment. The sheik’s sharply hooked nose and evil, mustachioed leer marked him as a Semitic figure, so that popular anti-Semitic animus could be transferred smoothly from a Jewish to an Arab target. For Said, the transition from defeated caricature to threatening caricature is not a move from stereotype to reality. It shows how a negative image can be adapted to different circumstances while retaining its power to make the Arab appear responsible for dangers facing the West.

Palestinian History and the War’s Aftermath

Said argues that the Arab is granted space in Western representation chiefly as a negative value: a disrupter of Israel’s and the West’s existence or, in another formulation, an obstacle to Israel’s creation in 1948. When Arabs are assigned a history, he writes, it is a history given to them—or taken from them—by Orientalist and later Zionist traditions. His discussion traces this denial of historical standing to portrayals of Palestine by Lamartine and early Zionists as an empty desert waiting to bloom, whose inhabitants were treated as inconsequential nomads without a real claim to the land or a cultural and national reality. In the image Said describes, the Arab becomes a shadow that dogs the Jew.

The war also belongs to Said’s own political trajectory. He locates the start of his political engagement after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and connects that engagement to the continuing aftermath of occupation. He describes spending much of the following thirty-five years advocating the Palestinian people’s right to national self-determination. At the same time, he insists that this advocacy attend to the reality of the Jewish people and the persecution and genocide they suffered. The desired end, as he frames it, is equality and coexistence in Palestine and Israel, not renewed suppression or denial. He also argues that Orientalism and modern anti-Semitism have common roots, making it essential for independent intellectuals to offer alternatives to models built on mutual hostility.

Historical Memory and Significance

Said places the war’s political and representational consequences within a longer sequence of imperial intrusion. He challenges the claim that recalling empire’s depredations is simply a way for Arabs and Muslims to evade present responsibility. Such an accusation, he argues, reduces the distortion empire has introduced into the lives of subject peoples across generations and evades the continuing effects on Palestinians, Congolese, Algerians, and Iraqis. His comparison with the enduring transformation of consciousness produced by the Holocaust asks why the effects of imperialism and Orientalism should not likewise be recognized as an epistemic change.

That sequence runs from Napoleon’s entry into Egypt through the rise of Oriental studies and the takeover of North Africa, and onward through later undertakings in Vietnam, Egypt, and Palestine and twentieth-century struggles over oil and strategic control in the Gulf, Iraq, Syria, Palestine, and Afghanistan. Set alongside this imperial history are anticolonial nationalism, brief periods of liberal independence, military coups, insurgency, civil war, religious fanaticism, and violence against successive groups labelled natives. Each phase, Said observes, generates its own distorted knowledge and reductive images. The Six-Day War’s changing caricatures of the Arab therefore exemplify a larger process: political struggle does not merely follow representation but repeatedly supplies the conditions in which inherited representations are revised and renewed.

The book’s response is humanistic critique: a longer sequence of historical analysis meant to open fields of struggle rather than trap debate in short, polemical bursts and antagonistic labels. Said argues that intellectuals who live across Islam and the West have a particular responsibility to dismantle reductive formulas and situate injustice in historical, cultural, and socioeconomic realities. In that framework, the war is significant both for the political engagement it helped initiate and for the way its aftermath exposed the speed with which public imagery could turn a people into a defeated or threatening type. The representation’s force lies precisely in what it excludes: the historical experiences, political claims, and human realities that would complicate the caricature.