Israel’s modern self-image depends on depicting Palestine as racially backward past

Evidence

Israel, far from an exception, is a modern racial state knotted with and in constitutive contrast to the prehistory of Palestinian antiquity, of its historicized racial immaturity. Israel represents modernization, progress, industry and industriousness, looking to the bright future, the civilizing mission of the best that has been thought and could be taught. Palestine represents the past, failed effort where effort at all, antique land still tilled by hand and the perennial failure of governance, a place constantly in the grip of its time past and passed. The larger relational condition, a state racially characterizing itself in its founding self-representation, is one in which the state of the latter, materially as much as metaphorically, is fueled by the racially conceived, tinged (one might say singed) imposition of the former. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 568

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: how the ‘civilizing mission’ binary — modernity vs. antique stasis — maps onto racial statecraft in settler-colonial contexts beyond Israel/Palestine.
• DEFINE: Introduces the conceptual apparatus of ‘historicized racial immaturity’ as the basis of racial self-representation in state founding.