Pro-Israel writers recast colonial encounter as culture clash to void Palestinian claims

Evidence

For Chesler, Israel/Palestine has always belonged to Jews, ‘the original native Indians of the Middle East,’ a people who inhabited the land for three millennia and who had been dispossessed. When they ‘returned’ from exile to claim Israel in the 19th century, Jews found themselves in the first phase of culture clash. Chesler is careful to note (for the sake of the ‘anti-colonial ideologues’ she often addresses) that this nineteenth-century encounter under the watchful eye of the British may have looked like a standard racial/colonial encounter, but was in fact a cultural one: … When Zionist idealists first returned to Israel-Palestine, what ensued was not merely a clash between white-skinned Europeans and dark-skinned Arabs. The clash that ensued – and that continues still – was also between modernity and a hidebound traditionalism that had not changed for twelve or thirteen centuries; between active doers and passive survivors; between secularists and religionists as well as between followers of different extremist religions; between those who wanted to bring modern medicine, agriculture, industry, government, and jurisprudence to the region and those who rejected such possibilities. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 225

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the earlier chapter’s claim that culture clash functions as a modern terra nullius denying Palestinian land claims.