The Yom Kippur War enters Edward Said’s argument as a test of who is permitted to represent a people in moments of conflict. Rather than recounting military operations, Said examines the war’s appearance in American media and popular imagery: the Arab side was assigned an American spokesman, while postwar cartoons made the Arab a menacing emblem of the gasoline shortage. The episode exposes how political crisis can reactivate established stereotypes and make representation itself part of the struggle.

The War in Western Media

During the anxious days of the October Arab-Israeli War, the New York Times Magazine commissioned two articles, one representing the Israeli side and one the Arab side. An Israeli lawyer presented the Israeli position; the Arab position was assigned to a former American ambassador to an Arab country, who had no formal training in Oriental studies. Said treats this imbalance as significant, but cautions against reducing it to a simple claim that Arabs were considered incapable of representing themselves. Both Arabs and Jews, he argues, were being made to speak for a Western audience through choices that placed them within an externally managed frame.

The magazine’s pairing thus reveals a distinction between being given a voice and controlling the conditions under which that voice is heard. The Arab perspective entered the publication, but through an American former official rather than an Arab contributor. Said’s point is not that the two cases were identical; it is that both communities could be represented as objects for Western readers, with editorial selection shaping how the conflict became legible.

Changing Images of the Arab

Said places that media example alongside a broader change in popular depictions of Arabs. At Princeton’s tenth-reunion class in 1967, a planned Arab-themed costume—robes, headgear, and sandals—was altered after the June War. The class would instead process with hands raised above their heads, turning the Arab image into a figure of defeat. The war had shifted a crude stereotype of the camel-riding nomad into a caricature of incompetence and easy surrender.

After the 1973 war, the imagery changed again. Cartoons repeatedly showed an Arab sheik beside a gasoline pump, making the Arab a threatening presence amid the oil shortage. The figure’s features also drew on an anti-Semitic visual vocabulary, transferring hostility traditionally directed at Jews onto Arabs. In Said’s account, the change from defeated figure to menacing one did not grant Arabs a complex history or individuality; it assigned them a new negative role in response to Western anxieties.

Representation, History, and Power

The war’s media framing belongs to Said’s wider critique of Orientalism: the production of knowledge and images that make the Orient appear fixed, legible, and available for outside interpretation. In the magazine example, the question is not simply whether a statement about either side is accurate. It is also who is chosen to speak, for whom, and within what framework. Representation can acknowledge a conflict while leaving the people involved with little authority over how their experience is presented.

Said connects such episodes to the longer history of imperial intervention and to the continuing reduction of Arab and Muslim societies to simplified judgments about their political and social condition. He insists that the history of imperial power cannot be dismissed as an excuse for present failures: its consequences continue across generations, while each political phase produces its own reductive images and polemics. The war therefore functions in his argument as a moment when older habits of representation adapt to current events rather than disappear.

Significance

Said’s treatment of the Yom Kippur War is concerned with the consequences of framing, not with a battlefield chronology. The competing images of the Arab—as defeated in one setting and menacing in another—show how readily a group can be assigned a role that changes with political circumstances while remaining defined from outside. The magazine’s choice of an American former ambassador to present the Arab side makes that problem institutional as well as visual.

For Said, a more responsible account of conflict must restore historical context and recognize the capacity of people to describe their own circumstances. His criticism does not call for replacing one fixed image with its opposite. It asks readers to resist the formulas that turn human beings into symbols of defeat, threat, or political inconvenience, and to widen discussion beyond the inherited categories that make such representations seem natural.