The wars of narratives are, at their core, wars over ideas, beliefs, and visions. They cannot be truly understood — or effectively challenged — without deconstructing them. Beneath the surface of every colonial narrative lie contradictions, myths, and founding legends that shape outcomes that may seem “logical” through the lens of imperialist capitalism, where war is deemed legitimate.
The founding of the so-called State of Israel was not simply the result of direct political events. Rather, it was the culmination of centuries of Orientalist discourse dating back to the 17th century. This Western intellectual project constructed and exported distorted images of the “East,” encompassing India, China, and the Arab-Islamic world.
These depictions denied reason and civilisation to the East, while reserving these qualities exclusively for the West. This epistemic foundation became the backbone of Orientalist thought. As scholars such as Jack Goody have shown in The East in the West, Orientalism was not a neutral study but a political and cultural weapon.
Orientalism’s Focus on Arabs and Muslims
While Orientalism addressed various regions, its most sustained focus was on Arabs and Muslims — and, inevitably, Palestinians — as the “Other” diametrically opposed to the Western self. This dehumanising image became the intellectual framework through which the West, and later Israel, understood the Arab and Islamic worlds.
Israeli leaders, regardless of political affiliation, have embraced this worldview. Benjamin Netanyahu, in the latest edition of his autobiography A Place Under the Sun, reflects it clearly.
In the Orientalist narrative, Palestine was an “empty land” inhabited temporarily by nomadic Bedouin Arabs with no historic or civilisational ties to it — a central trope of pro-Zionist Orientalism in the late 19th century.
From “Knowledge” to Settler-Colonialism
While some early Orientalists claimed they were engaged in a purely academic project, anti-colonial Western intellectuals argued that Orientalism unintentionally produced biased, pre-packaged representations. In reality, these “biases” were deliberate and enduring.
Even after facing academic criticism, Orientalism continued to depict the East — especially Arabs and Muslims — as backward. As Asian powers like China disproved these claims and emerged as global competitors to Western hegemony, Orientalism’s political function remained intact: to justify imperial control.
As Edward Said famously demonstrated in Orientalism (1978), the project was never separate from Western colonialism and monopoly capitalism. The “irrational, barbaric East” was contrasted with a rational, civilised West — a dichotomy used to justify “civilising missions” through occupation and settlement.
Palestine in the Orientalist Imagination
Long before the Balfour Declaration or the First Zionist Congress in Basel (1897), Western writings had constructed a narrative of the Palestinian as rootless and undeserving of the land. Zionist thinkers, borrowing heavily from Orientalism, described Palestine as a “holy land lost” or “sacred land in need of revival,” while portraying Jews as the original and rightful children of Canaan unjustly exiled.
British officer and historian T.E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”) reinforced this division between “East” and “West,” declaring Arabs incapable of self-rule and in need of Western tutelage — an argument that laid ideological groundwork for Balfour’s pledge to establish a Jewish “national home” in Palestine.
In this framing, Israel was imagined not as a religious state — supposedly at odds with Western modernity — but as a European people reclaiming stolen land, embodying rationality and civilisation, unlike the allegedly fragmented, tribal, and nomadic Arabs.
The Birth of Zionist Orientalism
The rise of Zionism made the Arab world — and Palestine in particular — the central subject of Orientalist production. Academic research, think-tank studies, and Western-Israeli collaborations manufactured knowledge to serve Zionist political goals. This Zionist Orientalism functioned as the intellectual wing of settler-colonial expansion.
Edward Said exposed how some Jewish Orientalists adapted Western methods to advance Zionist aims, especially the portrayal of Arabs as an existential threat to the Jewish state. Israeli historians then falsified or invented historical events to construct a Western-Israeli narrative infused with “Orientalist uranium” — depicting Palestinians as inherently violent, extremist, and incapable of modern thought.
Figures like Bernard Lewis and Israel Shahak (despite Shahak’s later critique of Zionism) helped lay the intellectual foundations of this project, which soon became institutionalised in Israeli universities such as the Hebrew University and Tel Aviv University, both deeply linked to the military and intelligence apparatus.
Institutionalising the Narrative
This was not an academic curiosity — it was a state-supported propaganda system. Universities, research centres, and the Israeli military cooperated to shape strategic policies toward Arabs. As critical voices like Ilan Pappé, Noam Chomsky, and Abraham Melzer have noted, the goal was to present Arabs and Muslims as irrational and aggressive, thereby justifying occupation, delegitimising Arab culture, and rewriting Palestinian history as if the land were empty before Zionist arrival.
This process extended to the Judaization of geography — renaming towns, erasing Arab heritage, and embedding the Zionist narrative in Western consciousness. In recent decades, the same propaganda (known as Hasbara) has been directed at both Western elites and segments of the Arab intelligentsia, particularly those enamoured with Western “modernity.”
Zionist Orientalism in Service of War
Zionist Orientalism directly supports Israel’s wars by framing them as civilisational battles. The Israeli soldier is portrayed as a modern crusader “restoring” dignity to neglected holy lands, while Palestinians are cast as terrorists opposed to progress and sacred heritage.
This framing has been reinforced for over a century by Western and Israeli academic and media institutions, making “Middle Eastern Studies” often a euphemism for reproducing the Zionist Orientalist worldview.
The result is a collective memory that resists deconstruction — until events like the First Intifada (1987), the Second Intifada (2000), and most recently Operation Al-Aqsa Flood (2023), which have exposed the brutality behind Israel’s mask of “civilisation.”
From Past Wars to Today’s Aggression
From the wars of 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973; to the bombing of Iraq’s peaceful nuclear reactor in 1981; to the Lebanon wars of 1982 and 2006; to repeated Gaza assaults (2006, 2012, 2014, 2016, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2025); and now the war on Iran (June 2025) and strikes on Damascus (July 2025) — every Israeli war has been accompanied by Orientalist justifications.
In each case, Palestinians and Arabs are depicted as rejecting “civilisation” and “progress,” opposing Israel solely because it represents the West’s modern mission in a “holy land” unjustly taken from Jews.
Conclusion: Deconstructing the Weaponised Narrative
As Said, Abdelwahab El-Messiri, and others have shown, Zionist Orientalism is not neutral knowledge — it is a political weapon, a core part of the settler-colonial war on Arabs and Muslims. It must be dismantled, exposed, and countered through a critical intellectual front that challenges its lies in universities, research, and media across the Muslim world — and among all free thinkers globally.
